Speaking of cool devices, here’s one introduced by Paperless guru Brooks Duncan over at his Documentsnap.com blog: it’s the Terminator, no the Enterprise, no the Transporter:

It is a hardware device that you plug in to your router, and it gives you secure online file accessibility without having your data on third party servers. Everything lives in your home or office.

via Connected Data Transporter: Secure Online-Accessible File Storage | Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog.

I’ve been using Dropbox and exterior hard-drives for my backups, but this looks like it would be an improvement on those 2. If only they (or something like them) were available in Japan.

Tags: @Productivity

Here’s what I’ve been using:

This doesn’t even include my 2 iPods which I use in class sometimes to calm me down play English songs for students.

I also carry this pocket inside the bag I carry into the classroom. It doesn’t include my iPad2, tho.

Then the other day, I saw, on another teacher’s desk,  this A4-sized black mat filled with white iPad cables and other digital stuff. A little tag on the side said GRID-IT.

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2zULNyGhqw’]

I had to get one.  Actually, I got this Grid-it which includes a case for an iPad. Here’s a plain vanilla one on sale at Amazon Japan (I’m an Amazon affiliate). They are just so cool. I think I’ll keep mine in the box and just take it out at night and fill it up with stuff, maybe fire up a little devotional incense stick or two…. Maybe I’ll get me one of these?

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Since coming across Jamie Todd Rubin’s great collection of blog posts on using Evernote to go paperless, I’ve been plowing through his articles and putting many of his workflows into practice, such as automating things with IFTTT, and his brilliant suggestion of creating a digital version of your house.

Well, here’s another one. If you are like Rubin and me (note the subtle association there; next, I’ll be using his first name), and have tons of books, and can’t always remember whether you have a book or not (and if you have, where it is), then this is for you. Tomorrow, I’m packing my digital camera and will get started on creating my virtual bookcase in Evernote.

Some time back, I wrote a Going Paperless post called “Creating a Digital Version of Your House” in which I described how I use tools like Skitch and Penultimate to capture floor plans and measurements around the house that might be useful to have when I am away–say at the hardware store. While I was away on my Internet vacation, it occurred to me, as I was measuring my bookshelves, that it might be equally useful to have a digital version of my bookshelves in Evernote. With something like 1,100 books, I can’t always remember if I happen to have a particular book or not, and it might be useful to have a quick reference.

… I know there are database systems out there for keeping track of books, and I’ve tried many of them but they are too time consuming for me. It occurred to me that, thanks to Evernote’s ability to identify text in images and allow you to search that text, an “image library” of my books might be just the trick.

My process for doing this was pretty simple, and highly dependent on Evernote to do much of the work for me. For those who want to reproduce my results, here’s what to do:

Read more at Going Paperless: My Virtual Bookcases in Evernote | Jamie Todd Rubin.

Related articles

• Going Paperless: How I Title My Notes in Evernote | Jamie Todd Rubin
• Going Paperless: A Closer Look at How I Organize My Notes In Evernote | Jamie Todd Rubin

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Paperless master Jamie Todd Rubin wrote about how he uses TextExpander rather than using Evernote templates. Recently, Brooks Duncan blogged about Evermanic, a tool that allows the user to create “repeatable templates” for Evernote.

There are lots of quick ways to capture notes to Evernote when you are on the go, but the problem is they are usually unstructured.

You can capture the notes quickly, but then later you need to name and possibly tag them.

I was recently contacted by the folks at Cloudmanic about their new tool Evermanic that promises to solve this: you can create repeatable templates for Evernote, and then use them to quickly create named, tagged notes on your mobile device going forward.

The Cloudmanic folks threw me a review copy of Evermanic so that I could check it out.

via Evermanic Creates Repeatable Evernote Note Profiles | Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog.

Tags: @Productivity