Small victory for the Paperless Project

While Ray Kurzweil is making billions from his advanced grasp of technology, moi is revelling in a minory victory from my own, rather less sophisticated home-brew tech. A while ago I chronicled the Paperless Project, a personal attempt to take control of these little (and not so little) stacks of paper that keep growing around here.

Anyway, yesterday when I was writing about the relative economics of repairing vs. replacing my Pentax Optio X camera, I wondered how much the first repair cost. It was some months ago, I have since repaired a Panasonic Lumix that managed to accompany Linda on a tumble down a treacherous hillside, and I couldn’t remember which repair cost what.

So I moved over to the G4 Mini with its ever-waiting Fujitsu SnapScan, fired up the Yep PDF browser and typed in ‘Pentax’: immediately 4 documents appeared, including the invoice for the $92.73 repair. So I smugly typed ‘So I will probably send Optio off for yet another repair’ into the post below, having gone straight to the source.

I note that the invoice was one of those computer-generated things that included a shipping label, and it had ben folded, stapled, spindled, mutilated and otherwise abused in transit to gulker.com in a clear plastic stick-on envelope on the outside of a UPS box. The word ‘Pentax’ appears in large pink letters (or screened-back red) as an underprint to the invoice details, terms of sale, limited warranty etc. etc. Despite the physical damage et al., Acrobat 7’s OCR deftly plucked ‘Pentax’, from the scanned bitmap, thus making this document findable, which was the whole point of ‘Paperless’ in the first place. Acrobat 8 Pro has a new, state of the art OCR engine… it features a Universal Binary installer, so time to upgrade the G4 Mini…