Tag: paper

Putting my New Year’s energy to good use

tasks I’m not really a fan of New Year’s resolutions, though like many people I often feel re-energized at the start of a new year. Instead of putting that energy into a list of year-long tasks or goals that would inevitably be abandoned, I decided this year that I’d try to capitalize on that energy to accomplish a few things I often put off. I settled on three things: passwords, backups, and bills.

I feel pretty good about my strategy for passwords, with one exception – I don’t change my passwords often enough. Sometimes I get lazy and use an existing password when I sign up for a new site, but the important sites all have unique, randomly generated, strong passwords (well as strong as they can be…I still can’t believe that banks don’t allow special characters and long lengths). It’s good security practice to change passwords regularly, but that never seems to happen. Over the last week, I’ve changed all my passwords. I started with the list of sites and services that I use regularly, and changed everything else as it came up. I’m sure there are a few that I’ve missed, and I’ll change them the next time I need to login. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be actually!

The second thing I tackled was backups. Despite having pretty good systems in place to backup Paramagnus stuff, I don’t have a good process for my personal stuff. I still don’t, but I did manage to accomplish a few things. First, I bought a new hard drive and copied everything from my existing data drive onto it. I’ll store the old one somewhere safe now. Second, I backed up a bunch of stuff to Amazon S3. It’s inexpensive, fast, and easy. Lately I’ve been using CloudBerry Explorer, it’s a great app! I’m going to try to back up important data more regularly, but that’ll be an ongoing thing.

The final thing I did? I turned off paper bills. I logged into every site that I currently receive something in the mail for and found that almost all of them have a “go paperless” button buried somewhere in the interface (some call it “change notification options” or something similar). I typically shred bills as soon as they arrive anyway, so why receive them at all? I do everything online, and I have no need for the physical copies. Now it’ll really be a unique experience to receive something in the mail!

I’ve got a number of things on the go that require time and energy of course, but these were my “New Year’s tasks” if you want to call them that. Anyone else shun resolutions in favor of accomplishing something right away?

Ticking time bomb for archived data?

Post ImageI took a class at the University last year called Literary Computing (ENGL 304) which examined “the applications and implications of computing technology to the three pilars of literary studies: reading, researching, and writing.” One of the things we talked about at length was information preservation. If I remember correctly, the class was split right down the middle with half thinking that our digital world was bad for preservation and the other half feeling the opposite was true. As you might expect, I was in the latter group.

I was reminded of the class today when I read this article in BBC News:

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a “ticking time bomb”, the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.

The National Archives, which holds 900 years of written material, has more than 580 terabytes of data – the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopaedias – in older file formats that are no longer commercially available.

I fail to see the issue. Is it not the job of the National Archives to ensure that documents and historical information are preserved? And that the public can access such information? Of course it is. Instead of complaining every couple of years about the pace of technological change, why not do something about it? There’s only a “ticking time bomb” if you sit back and do nothing.

Part of the problem is the way archivers look at digital media versus paper:

Ms Ceeney said: “If you put paper on shelves, it’s pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years. If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago, you’d have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it.”

That’s true, as long as you store the paper properly. And that position fails to take into account the advantages of digital media over paper: searching, indexing, encrypting, etc. That’s the trade-off. If archivers were really interested solely in preservation, why not just print everything out on to paper and store that? Clearly more is desired. As with most everything, to get more out, you have to put more in. In this case, that means more effort to take advantage of better functionality.

I don’t understand how the National Archives (and other similar organizations around the world) can claim that some digital documents have been lost forever because programs which can read them no longer exist. Has Microsoft disappeared? Is it impossible to install Windows 3.1 on a computer to open documents? Heck, why not just hire some programmers to write new conversion tools? USB floppy drives can be purchased for around $15. Older drives that read 5.25″ floppy disks haven’t vanished from the face of the earth. It’s simply a matter of effort and determination (and money). This “we give up” attitude makes me sick.

If you shred a piece of paper, or douse it in water, it’s damn near impossible to recover. Have a digital file in a really old format? It might be difficult to recover, but it’s certainly not impossible. It’s all zeros and ones, after all.

That is why I took the position I did in my ENGL 304 class, and why I still haven’t changed my mind.

Read: BBC News

Xerox is working to reduce, reuse, and recycle

Post ImageI suspect that for most people, the term “xerox” conjures up images of paper thanks to the American document management company of the same name. Xerox (the company) is more than just photocopiers and printers though – the company has a long history of research and development. And they are at it again, this time trying to apply the Three R’s to paper:

[Brinda Dalal’s] research is part of a three-year-old technology development effort to design an add-on system for an office copier to produce “transient documents” that can be easily reused. The researchers now have a prototype system that will produce documents on a specially coated paper with a light yellow tint. Currently, the process works without toner and produces a low-resolution document that appears to be printed with purple ink.

The printed information on the document “disappears” within 16 hours. The documents can be reused more quickly by simply placing them in the copier paper tray. The researchers said that individual pieces of paper had been printed on up to 50 times, and the only current limit in the process appears to be paper life.

The idea makes sense to me. Companies have already reduced the amount of paper they need to use, so Xerox sees an opportunity to help them reuse and recycle it too. The end goal is to try to reduce the amount of paper that companies actually use.

Those of you who know me fairly well are probably confused because normally I am championing the death of paper, not reading about ways to extend its lifetime. As much as I would like to have everything stored and presented digitally, I realize we’re not there yet. And, as the article points out, a complete change to bits and bytes isn’t likely to happen anytime soon:

“People really like paper,” said Eric Shrader, a computer scientist who is area manager for printing systems at the Hardware Systems Laboratory of the research center, which is known as PARC. “They like the way it feels.”

Until e-paper is perfected, this paper erasing technology Xerox is working on might work quite well indeed.

Read: CNET News.com

Waterproof Paper

Post ImageSounds like a pipe dream right? Waterproof paper? Well a nanotechnology start-up called Ecology Coatings stumbled across a spray-on coating that makes it a reality. Like some of the greatest inventions and discoveries, this one was made by accident:

Sally Ramsey, founder of Ecology Coatings, jerry-rigged an apparatus in her lab to show a chemical company representative how rapidly one of Ecology’s coatings dries when exposed to ultraviolet light. To avoid making a mess, she put a piece of paper underneath the object she wanted to spray.

When cleaning up, Ramsey exposed the paper to UV light to dry it and make it easier to throw away. On a whim, she checked to see if the coating, which was enhanced with nanoparticles, made the paper impervious to pencils or ink.

“For a minute, I was really disappointed. I could write on it all over the place,” she said. “Then something clicked.”

Pretty cool stuff! Just think of the possibilities. You could make so many different objects waterproof, where it just wasn’t before possible! Ah scientific progress…

Read: CNET News.com