Tech and life

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.

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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.