Tech and life

You don’t have to scan documents to your PC then save them into Evernote organizer in two stages, you can set up your printer/scanner to scan directly into Evernote. I’ve already posted about scanning directly to Evernote with an Epson Perfection 4180 scanner.

I recently got a Canon MP series multifunction printer with built in scanner (MP280) and had no trouble setting it up to scan directly to Evernote. Here’s what you do.

When you installed your Canon printer drivers and utilities on the CD which came with the printer, you would have installed MP Navigator, the application which, among other things, allows you to scan directly to an application, in our case Evernote. Switch on your printer and place a test sheet on the scanner tray. On your PC desktop click Start, All Programs and navigate to Canon Utilities and click on that and open the MP Navigator folder.

For me it was actually called MP Navigator EX 4.0 but you may have a different version. Then double click the executable file in that folder (again for me it was MP Navigator EX 4.0 as shown above) and that should open Canon MP Navigator. If you intend to scan stuff frequently to Evernote, you could copy a program shortcut to your desktop. To do this, drag that executable to your desktop while pressing the Ctrl key (this makes a copy rather than moving it).  Once MP Navigator is open, click on One-click at the top right and you should see the options below.

Click on Custom and that should open a box like below. If it starts to scan now, just click Cancel.

This is the part where we select Evernote as the program we want to open the scan with. So under the section Application Settings, click Set as shown above, then navigate to your Evernote folder (for me it was C:\Program Files\Evernote\Evernote but it may be different for you. You’re looking for the Evernote executable file as shown below:

Select that file and click Open. Evernote will now appear as the application in the Open with: box on the previous screenshot. Click Apply in the bottom left corner to save Evernote in that box, then click the green Scan button in the bottom right corner and if all goes well the test page should be scanned and Evernote will open to show it.

By the way, now this is set up, in future when you click Custom, everything will happen automatically so make sure you have your page loaded ready for scanning.

There was a time when my printer was an absolute essential in the home office. Back in the early 1990s, my Epson dot matrix printer was regularly printing out letters to mail or fax, or stuff to file in folders. Since then I’ve had a series of inkjets which I’ve also used to print out photos, lists, colour flyers, etc.

But times have changed here. In these days of digital communication, my latest Epson inkjet rarely gets used – brought home to me as I tried to print something out last week and found the nozzles were seriously clogged through lack of use. Haven’t been able to clear it yet – but there’s no rush; nothing pressing for it to do. In hindsight, I should have been printing off a test page or two each week, but these things creep up on you. Besides, why should I have to print out test sheets just to keep the thing serviceable? Waste of paper and ink. Wish there was a way to seal inkjet cartridges and nozzles when not in regular use.

Interestingly, I’ve seen an inverse relationship between the printer and my Epson scanner. Although I don’t have a paperless office here, nothing like it, I do find I’m scanning more and more stuff into notebook apps like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote rather than printing stuff out on paper. I stopped printing out photos years ago. Makes a lot of sense to me to store digitally rather than on paper.

Well that’s what I thought. While I was thinking over this topic, I did a Google search and came across a post The slow demise of the printer by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet. Here’s a short excerpt:

Another indication of how rarely I use my printer is the fact that the last few times I’ve used it, I’ve had to clean the print heads because some of the nozzles had dried out. I change ink cartridges so rarely now that not only do I not know the part numbers, I’d even forgotten what make of printer I had!

…I’m not alone when it comes to using my printer less. It’s a pattern I see all around me. In fact, I’d say that the decreased use of the printer is also responsible for fewer home users/small office users buying and using suites such as Microsoft Office. As people create fewer paper documents (and in my opinion spend less time fussing over formatting, fonts and layout), they also realized they could do without expensive tools to create and format their documents.

While the desktop printer isn’t dead, it sure is en route to retirement.

I broadly agree with his post, but the blog comments were worth reading. There were 91 comments and only about 20 were in agreement with Kingsley-Hughes. Seems that business is still consuming paper at an alarming rate and many others who commented felt that printing and printers are not dead yet.  Some had worries over the risk of digital storage and would like a hard copy, just in case. And as to my problem, looks like I should research a laser printer rather than inkjet next time. I guess I should have some kind of printer in the home office, at least for a while yet.

Do you feel that the home printer is on the way out or will it be around for years to come? Drop a comment below.

The gradual demise of the home printer is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

Evernote is a searchable digital notebook for storing and indexing all your digital info – documents, notes, recipes, music, web pages, pictures, videos, Delicious bookmarks, business cards, scanned pages, data backups – really you’re only limited by your imagination. Called ‘your second brain’ by the developers themselves, Evernote remembers stuff so you don’t have to. Here’s another good description:

As far as I’m concerned, it’s good for anything (or more importantly, everything) you can think of. And that’s sorta how I use it – a big ass digital junk drawer that syncs to the web, indexes the text within my images and works great on my iPhone – Cranking Widgets Blog

I’ve been storing and searching data on my PC for 5 or 6 years now – using an app called InfoMagic Extra which I’ve blogged about before. Although it’s pretty old it worked well – and still works well. Data are stored as RTF files so nothing is locked away that I can’t easily get out. Problem is that technology had overtaken it and modern digital notebooks offer so much more. Evernote is one of these and seems to be gaining a lot of very satisfied followers. There are many blog posts about Evernote out there so I’ll pick out just a few points.

Sync with your laptop, and mobile devices

Perhaps Evernote’s most notable feature is that your data, as well as being stored on your PC or Mac, can be synced to the Evernote servers and on to your other supported devices like laptops, iPhone, Android, etc. So you can have access to your notes everywhere and update them from each of these devices. An Evernote app hasn’t been released for Linux yet but I have heard it works under Wine.

You can also share notebooks with everyone or with select individuals. Among other uses, this will allow collaborating with business partners and clients, and also allow employers to implement a central store for notes and ideas accessible to all project members regardless of their location.

Easy to get data into Evernote

If you have a scanner you can probably scan stuff directly into Evernote. I’ve set up my Epson Perfection scanner and blogged about it. Here’s another link to a post on scanning to Evernote. You can put your digital photos into Evernote and it will try to decipher any text in them and make that searchable. Just make sure to resize your photos first otherwise you could exceed your 40MB monthly limit fairly quickly. And you can add selected text or clip entire webpages into Evernote using their Web Clipper. You can also email info to Evernote and archive your Twitter tweets.

It’s free – if you want it that way

Evernote operate a ‘freemium’ model – the app is free if you upload less than 40MB of data per month to their servers and if you want to sync limited file types – images, audio, ink, PDF. The Premium version has a 500 MB monthly upload allowance, allows syncing of all file types but one single note cannot exceed 25MB. It’s also ad-free and has SSL encryption when uploading data to the servers.

Having said that, if you don’t want to sync your info to different devices but just run Evernote on one device like your PC, or if you’re unhappy about putting your personal data in the ‘cloud’, you can actually operate Evernote completely free – by making all the notebooks Local Notebooks. This way your data will only be stored on your device and not synced anywhere else. You may also want to add your data to a Local Notebook if you’re operating a free account and you’re approaching but don’t want to exceed your monthly data limit. In this case, when you’re creating a notebook, just make it a local notebook until you get into a new month with a full data allowance, then transfer the data to your synced notebooks.

Some useful Evernote resources

There are downloadable pdf format guides for Windows and Mac Evernote versions available here. The Evernote team produce a podcast about once a month, detailing new features, Evernote use cases and answering questions. Worth downloading and listening to for the very latest on Evernote. Here’s the feed or subscribe through iTunes. Here’s a few more useful sites:

Ron’s Evernote Tips

100 different Evernote Uses – Andrew Maxwell

How to Search Evernote – ten mov.es

Evernote Blog

I’ll add more of the best resources as I come across them.

If you haven’t used bookmarklets before, they’re just useful pieces of JavaScript code which you can bookmark and which let you be more productive by simplifying tasks. Installing a bookmarklet is as simple as just dragging the bookmarklet link to your bookmark region or right clicking on the link and bookmarking it. I’ve made a folder for bookmarklets on my browser bar to keep them all together. Here are 15 of the most useful bookmarklets I’ve come across. If you think they may be useful to you, just drag the link at the start of each section across to your bookmark region and try them out.

BigTweet: Lets you share links on Twitter with your followers without leaving the webpage. It automatically shortens the link in the process and captures the title and any highlighted text. Of course you do have to log into your Twitter account through BigTweet to allow it to tweet your link but I’ve had no problem here in the year I’ve been using it. This is possibly the bookmarklet I use the most.

TwitterKeys: A pop-up box gives you symbols which you can copy and paste into your tweets.

Pagezipper: If you’ve ever come across articles split across multiple webpages, this bookmarklet combines them into one long scrollable page. Saves a lot of time clicking and waiting for the next page to load.

Clippable: Reduces all the clutter from a webpage and makes it easier to read. Adverts, sidebars, etc are all removed and you are left with the text and images. There are other bookmarklets which are very similar like Readability.

Printliminator: Lets you select what you want to keep on a webpage before printing the page – you could of course print to a pdf using say doPDF which I’ve blogged about before.

Clip to Evernote: Use this bookmarklet to save a webpage to Evernote, the popular notebook app. I know Evernote has a Webclipper to clip text from webpages or entire webpages, but I find this bookmarklet useful in combination with Clippable mentioned above to just clip the text and images to Evernote and leave the rest of the clutter behind.

Read Later: Save a webpage to your Instapaper account to read later. You have to register with Instapaper to use this.

Save webpage as pdf: Sends a webpage to pdfdownload which converts it to a PDF. You can then download the PDF.

Subscribe with GReader: Quickly subscribe to a blog in Google Reader with this bookmarklet.

Show RSS Feed: Try this bookmarklet if your web browser has trouble detecting the RSS feed associated with a site. It will show you the full contents of that feed and also give you options to subscribe in your favourite newsreader.

Delicious Talk: See how many people have saved a particular page on Delicious and what tags they have used to describe the page.

Map that address: Highlight an address on a webpage and get a map showing its location.

List all Links: Lists all links on a page in a pop-up window.

Translate: Uses Google Translate to display the content of the page in English.

Youtubian: Go to a video on YouTube and click this bookmarklet. The page will reload with the video, a search box on the right, related videos below, and download links for Flash, MPEG, and mobile versions of the video also on the right. Click on the Expand link at the top of the page to revert back to the original YouTube page.

If you want to search for more bookmarklets, there’s a directory at marklets.com and here’s a site with over 100 useful bookmarklets for better productivity.

Hope you find some of these useful. Drop a comment on any I’ve missed that you like.

I’ve just finished our annual mailing of Christmas cards – after tracking down our old address lists and address books to find all those addresses I need. In the past, I have used a card list stored on the PC and printed out but always had to go back to address books for the details and any address changes. I’ve decided to make things easier next year. All the contact details from this year’s list will go into a note in Evernote (tagged Xmas) so that they’ll all be easily found in one place next year. I’ll update any address changes there too, and add new friends and also email details where I have them so I can respond with eCards to some.

Yet another great use for Evernote.

Image credit: Kibondo

It’s possible to scan notes and documents directly to Evernote, the popular note-taking application, using Epson scanners. Here’s a quick walk-through for an Epson Perfection 4180 scanner and using Epson Scan v3.04E software.

First launch Epson Smart Panel and choose Scan to Application under Photo Project

Then scan your document/s or note/s in the usual way. I’m going to scan in a business card for this example. I found these settings were fine:

Preview, locate the image and scan it. Carry on scanning further documents and notes if you have them then close the above window. The View Images window will then appear showing all the images you have just scanned

You can actually go back and scan more notes at this stage by clicking the button in the bottom left corner. I’ve renamed my scanned image with a more useful name which will help searching in Evernote – but Evernote will pick up the text in the scanned image anyway and make that searchable. Once you click Next, you will see the applications which the scanner can already scan to. Evernote is probably not on this yet.

So we have to add Evernote to these applications. Click on the settings button (with the tool symbols) at the bottom left and then click Register at the bottom left of the Settings menu

Now you have to enter details so the scanner software can find Evernote on your PC

I’m using Evernote 3.5 beta but you may still be using the older version. In the Location panel, just click Browse and navigate until you find the Evernote.exe program (it’ll have the familiar elephant icon on green background) and click on it. Select the icon you want to use to display Evernote as in the Applications panel below. I scanned the business card as a jpg file so I have still to change the Format in the bottom panel. When you click OK you should now see Evernote registered as an application as in the screen below and you won’t have to do this registration part again – unless any subsequent Evernote upgrade changes the name of the Evernote folder! Then you would have to redefine the location of Evernote in the Location panel above.

Almost there now. Highlight Evernote and click the Settings (Tools) button at the bottom left again to check the settings you will use to save the file to Evernote:

Finally when you are happy with the settings click OK, then click Launch on the next screen and you will see the following prompt:

Click No to have the image files go directly to Evernote. Launch Evernote from your taskbar or system tray and the new note should be there. Tag it with suitable tags and drag it to the correct notebook.

Hope that’s helped in setting up your Epson scanner for Evernote. If you’re using a different version of the Epson Scan software and the procedure is different, let us know in the comments.

If you’ve had a PC for any length of time, you’ll have probably experienced the trial and error approach to getting things done. Whether it’s achieving a particular effect in Photoshop, converting files to different formats, exporting or importing data into different applications, setting up preferences for applications or plugins the way you want them, reinstalling applications, or setting up hardware, often you have to methodically change different parameters until you get things to work or get the right result. You may have had to search the web to track down the answer. You may even have to resort to a workaround which achieves the right result – but it’s quite rewarding when you finally crack it and master a procedure.

Problem is, when you go back a few months later to do the same thing, you’ve probably forgotten how you did it first time round so you have to reinvent the wheel. Enter Evernote your ‘second brain’. Start a new notebook in Evernote called say ‘How-to’ and immediately you crack a difficult procedure, save the steps you used to achieve your result as a new note. Tag it with the app name or whatever best describes the action you’ve mastered. So when you need to recall that same procedure later, it’s safely tucked away in Evernote ready to be recalled when you search that tag in the How-to notebook. And if you think it’s a really good how-to, you could even share the notebook with everyone or with individuals.

If you haven’t tried Evernote, make a point of checking it out.

Have you ever needed to annotate pdfs with your own notes, highlights, comments or corrections? Perhaps you’ve been asked by your boss for your comments on a document or to collaborate on corrections before releasing a final version. Perhaps you’re a student wanting a way to highlight important sections of your pdf or make notes in the margin. Or you’re at home, have read a great pdf and want to highlight important points or insert sticky notes before archiving it away in a notebook organizer such as Evernote. Well I’ve found just the app.

I have to collaborate on marking up and correcting pdfs at the moment. I was initially asked to compile a list of pdf corrections in a separate Word document detailing page number, column number, paragraph number and the correction. There had to be an easier and more productive way and I found it – PDF-XChange Viewer. There are paid versions for creation of pdfs but I found the free version is fine for my needs. Installation was simple – just watch the prompts during installation; you may not want it to be your default pdf viewer until you’re happy with it, so uncheck that box.

Annotating the pages just couldn’t be simpler. The Comment and Markup Tools menu is shown below to illustrate the tools available

You can highlight text in the colour of your choice, strikethrough or underline it, insert sticky notes, text callouts and text boxes, draw arrows and other symbols, draw with a pencil tool and erase the pencil annotation. The app is intuitive and quite easily set up the way you want it. For example, to change default annotation styles, just use the fly-out menus in the Tools menu shown above. If you want to change any style, just click on Show Comments Styles Pallet. Click the default style and modify it, or clone the style and modify it if you want to go back to the default style at some point. So, for example, you can set up a number of highlight colours for different purposes. You may want to change the default text size in text callouts and sticky notes. If you want to change the default text size, type the text in the font size you want , then right click on the text and choose Text Formatting and then Set Current Text Formatting as Default – or right click in the box and choose Set Current Appearance as Default.

Here’s an example of a pdf where I’ve insert a variety of sample annotations. No annotation has been added subsequently in the screenshot program.

You can show a comments list in the left margin and move through the comments and mark up that way. You can also export comments as an fdf file. Double clicking on this loads the comments and the original pdf in your default pdf reader. I haven’t tried it but presume that if you have to return corrections  or comments to someone, if they already have the pdf, all you have to do is email the (much smaller) fdf with the comments rather than a saved pdf. If they open the fdf they will be able to see your comments and corrections, make further changes and save the file.

You can rotate pages, or insert a number of different stamps over the document. You can search for text in the pdf using the standard Ctrl-F keyboard shortcut to put the cursor in the search box at the top. You can search for phrases and you can make the search case-sensitive. A nice feature is that if you have a number of pdfs open in tabs, when you hover over each tab you get a thumbnail view of each document. Another nice touch is that there’s a button to attach the active pdf directly to an email message. There’s also a function at the bottom right corner of the screen to open your default pdf viewer with the current pdf loaded.

All in all, a nice utility if you have to annotate your pdfs and well worth checking out. It would actually make a pretty good default free pdf reader.

Disclaimer – I haven’t been asked to write a review of this app and have not been paid for this post. I do not do paid reviews, but just like to find and blog about great apps, preferably free!

It happens to us all at some time. We’ve read an interesting web page, bookmarked it and tagged it but when we go back to look for that page in our bookmarks sometime later, we just can’t find that exact page again no matter how hard we try. I hate losing things in the real world and get just as mad when I do the same in the digital world. Still, at least in the digital world we have tools at our disposal to make tracking down web pages easier.

Some people would say that bookmarking on a site like Delicious is an old fashioned way of doing things anyway. Better to just do a search on Google or Twitter. They may be right. I just feel that it’s still helpful to bookmark a useful web page and add it to your info archive of great pages so you can call upon it again to refresh your memory of what was said, for example, to use it as a tutorial for a task or to help write a blog post. The other really important aspect is that many web pages aren’t static and can be altered or deleted at a later date. Adding important web pages to a disk archive can get around this.

I thought I’d go through some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned about bookmarking and managing bookmarks which might help. I’ve bookmarked close to 12000 web pages in the 2 years I’ve been using Delicious, the online bookmarking tool, so I have to have an effective way of searching through them otherwise it’s all pointless. You wouldn’t throw paper willy nilly into a filing cabinet and expect to find a page again quickly. You have to file it in such a way that you know how to retrieve it again. So let’s look at how to try and avoid losing bookmarks.

Vital web pages which you just don’t want to lose… ever!

Web pages can get deleted, updated or otherwise removed from the internet. For example, the recent demise of Yahoo’s Geocities will lead to the deletion of 7.5 million web pages. Bookmarks can also be lost if your bookmarking service suffers a data loss as happened to ma.gnolia back in January this year. For vital pages which you must have a copy of, there are a few things you can do to keep a permanent copy:

1) Clip the web page directly from your browser into an organizer like say Evernote or bookmark the page with a research tool like Diigo which bookmarks the entire web page, unlike Delicious. More about that later. It will now be fully searchable within these apps.

2) Save the web page as a pdf and download it to your hard drive, then make sure to back it up. There are a few ways to do this. First, you could copy the URL of the web page to loopApps (choose add URL and paste the URL). Then click the disk image icon to the left of the pdf name and download it to your PC. The second way would be to install a print-to-pdf utility like doPDF which I’ve talked about before. From within your browser, choose Print from the File menu, then, rather than print to a printer, print to a pdf file. You may want to use a bookmarklet like Printliminator or PrintWhatYouLike to extract just the elements of the web page you want before printing to a pdf. If your web page is in fact split over a number of pages where you have to click ‘Next’ to read the full story, you could use a bookmarklet like PageZipper which automatically merges all the ‘Next’ pages into one page before creating the pdf. Once you have downloaded the pdf of the web page, it’s searchable from within a pdf reader like Foxit Reader, it’s searchable using a desktop search utility like Copernic Desktop Search, or again just add the pdf of the web page to Evernote where it will also be searchable there.

3) Saving a web page as a pdf doesn’t always preserve all the formatting, however saving as an mht file will. Then archive it on your hard disk. Rich Menga of PCMech has explained how to archive web pages using MHT files very clearly together with a video.

4) Use a service like backupURL to save a copy of the website online.

They give you a link to the backed-up website, which you could save in your Delicious bookmarks. I noticed that even if you elect to save a particular web page, it saves the whole website as the links away from that page are still active. Not sure about their claim that the link will last forever though. If it’s really important, I’d still back it up as well using methods just mentioned above.

Your vital web page is no longer online

If you’ve bookmarked a page and it’s no longer online and you hadn’t followed the procedures above to save it or backupURL hasn’t worked for some reason, you may possibly be able to retrieve the page at the Wayback Machine. Using this, you can often find pages that have been removed or deleted from the live web years ago. If you find it, save it using the steps I outlined above.

Save web pages to read later

If you’re in a hurry, have found a great site but haven’t got time to read it straight away and you don’t want to lose it, you could save it to read later using the Firefox extension Read it Later or the Read Later bookmarklet. Once you have time to read the web page, you can then follow the other tips I’ve listed to bookmark it, tag it, clip to Evernote or Diigo or save it as a pdf or mht file.

Using tags effectively to classify and group your bookmarks

Giving your web page a really specific tag can go a long way to tracking down that page again. If I can’t find a web page straight away, at least if I can narrow it down to a specific tag category, I can look through those and hopefully find it. When I first started using Delicious, I assigned pages into really broad categories, eg software, internet, computer, windows, backup, making it really hard to track down specific pages with any of these tags. More recently, I’ve been using hyphenated tag phrases to give pages more specific categories. Using the backup tag as the first example down my Delicious tag list, here’s a screenshot of those tags:

Notice that it’s helpful to put the common word first (backup) then the modifier (eg browser) rather than the other way round. This keeps them all adjacent in the alphabetical tag listing in Delicious. I notice that further down the list I have a category driver-backup which I should change to backup-drivers. Obviously, if you have been using both alternatives interchangeably (eg gmail-backup and backup-gmail), this will surely decrease your chance of quickly finding that elusive missing web page. It’s quite straightforward to sort this out by renaming a tag in Delicious. Go to Tag Options at the top right corner and clicking Rename under Edit Tags, fill in the old tag name and the new tag name and then click Save. Everything with the old tag will be given the new tag.

Another possibility for more effective tagging is to use Facette, a Firefox plugin, to force you to be more specific about how you want to categorize each bookmark. Facette is an enhanced version of the Delicious tagging tool and creates a number of additional tags in your Delicious library.

Searching your bookmarks

You can obviously search your bookmarks in Delicious for lost web pages, but remember that this actually only searches the bookmark title, tags and any notes you inserted in the notes field when you saved the bookmark. However, it may be that the vital things you remember about the page aren’t in the title tags and notes but contained within the content of the web page itself. I heard it put very well on an Evernote podcast as tip of the tongue syndrome – where any one of the little hooks or memories you have in your brain about the web page will hopefully be just enough to track down that lost web page. So to find lost bookmarks, it would be much more useful if you could search the content of the bookmarked web page as well. There are a few services which offer this: first Deligoo, but unfortunately, this Firefox extension is not compatible with the latest versions of Firefox; second Delizzy – but I can’t recommend this as it seems a little buggy – it can take ages to log into your Delicious account and read all your bookmarks. As an alternative, you could export your bookmarks from Delicious to Evernote but unless you’ve actually clipped the pages into Evernote, it will just search the headings of the bookmarks and not the content – at least that’s what I’ve found. If I’m wrong, please let me know and I’ll update this.

Another possibility is bookmarking the web page with Diigo which makes the entire page searchable. David Pierce has written a great post on Diigo at MakeUseOf. As with Evernote you can import all your Delicious bookmarks into Diigo.

Another choice is to build a custom search engine to search the full content of your bookmarks. There’s a great post by Sarah Perez at Read Write Web on building a custom search engine to search your Delicious bookmarks. This involves exporting all your Delicious bookmarks as an html file and importing them to a Posterous blog, then linking a Google Custom Search Engine to this to search the content of your bookmarks. Sarah’s post explains the method very clearly. I’ve tried it and it works well. The only real problem is that it’s a little cumbersome constantly updating the list of bookmarks on your Posterous blog.

So to summarize, the best ways to search the full content of your bookmarks for a lost web page is either with a custom search engine or with Diigo. So far I’m pretty impressed with Diigo.

Hope you’ve found these tips useful in managing your bookmarks and tracking down lost ones. Of course if you have other ways of avoiding lost bookmarks and keeping track of your info archive, please drop a comment. I’d love to hear how you deal with this.