Frankly speaking ...

Back in 1999 I decided to go paperless. This was a significant challenge then as many bills were still being sent via post, and few offered digital alternatives. The challenge was doubly hard as I was (and am still) running Linux as my only operating system. These are a few of the things I had to do to make a digital office work and how things have evolved since then. The Early Days The choice of a Linux desktop meant that I had to find tools that were compatible with my operating system. This limited my options, but I was able to find open-source tools that met my needs. I used GIMP for image editing, LibreOffice for document editing, and PDFtk for PDF manipulation. My Canon printer had a built-in scanner, which I used to digitise paper documents. Canon printers and scanners are well supported by Linux. I used XSane for scanning documents. I also used rsync to maintain a continuous backup of my digital files. Saving these scanned documents and bills as PDFs on my computer w...

A friend raised question a question with regard to keeping digital taxation records. Are you sure you can do that? Well, a quick search on our Government's ATO website revealed a positive answer: Electronic records Documents that you are required to keep can be in written or electronic form. If you make paper or electronic copies they must be a true and clear reproduction of the original. We recommend that if you store your records electronically you make a back-up copy to ensure the evidence is easily accessible if the original becomes inaccessible or unreadable (for example, where a hard drive is corrupted). Source: Australian Government, Australian Taxation Office, Keeping your tax records, Electronic records

I've been looking for a simple tool to annotate PDF files.   Since going paperless, I've often wanted to annotate scanned images with additional information.  Well, I finally found a tool that is light weight and simple to use.  It is flpsed .  Some advice on its use: When using "Save As", ensure this is saved with file extension ".ps" so not to get confused.   "Export" the finished annotated document as a PDF. To Do: How to use an external tags file?  I assume this is a PostScript file containing key/value pairs.

This is an update to my last post A Simple Reminder System Scanning the technical news I recently came across: gcalcli . Can this be used with my reminder system? Well, yes it can! Very simply in fact. It took a short Bourne shell script which reads calendar entries forward from today, then post them to Google Calendars. This is the script: #!/bin/sh # Update Google calendar with local calendar. # # $Id: syncgcal.sh 706 2010-10-09 05:28:44Z frank $ echo -n 'Reading calendar events ...' forwardDate=`/bin/date --date="+7 days" "+%Y%m%d"` /usr/bin/calendar -t $forwardDate | while read entry do    /usr/bin/gcalcli quick "$entry" done echo ' done!' exit 0 The trick used here is to check upcoming events for a fixed number of days forward.  If you use  calendar -A  then you'll get events repeated. This is a compromise: checking only a fixed number of days forward and posting items for that date only. What would be better, would be to identify ...

This is a continuation of my post on running a paperless office . Ever faced with the problem of constantly forgetting important events, missing bill payments or forgetting anniversaries? Don't want to publish billing information onto an online calendar? This  simple email reminder system seemed the most versatile. This is how it works: The solution centres upon the calendar(1) command from the bsdmainutils package. It takes a simple formatted text file as input, and displays events within a user specified number of days forward from today. The format is really easy maintain a list of birthdays, or of bills requiring payment. Create a file called ~/.calendar/calendar . The file will contain entries like: #ifndef _calendar_frank_ #define _calendar_frank_ LANG=en_AU #include <calendar.australia><calendar.australia> #include <calendar.birthday><calendar.birthday> #include <calendar.reminder><calendar.reminder> #endif And this is what a th...

This is a continuation of my post on  running a paperless office . Only some PDF documents lend themselves to being edited using  OpenOffice . Those that can be will be discussed in a later blog. Here we are going to describe how to use the Gimp to edit a PDF document. On occasion PDF forms received that need to filled out. The typical way to enter these forms is to print them, add the requested information, then finally, scan or facsimile the document back. What I will describe here is a way to update a form electronically so you can then email or fax directly the completed document. The methods described below were developed over time as part of my initiative to run an paperless office. Suppose you have a multi-page PDF document to be updated. Each page will be separately edited and the final result stitched together. There are two reasons for this: Firstly this reduces the risk of losing the entire document on a mistake. So, you'll be able to recover up to last com...

Sometime ago I made up my mind to try running a paperless office. While there maybe many environmental justifications for doing so, my reasons were far more practical: laziness. A modern life collects an awful lot of related documentation. Documentation that needs to be saved for a few years, forgotten, then found again during those rare Spring cleans, and finally shredded. There certainly is a need to record information, I just couldn’t see the point of maintaining it in paper form. First, there is the storage required. Then what do you keep? And how long do you keep it for? Computer storage is cheap, very cheap. So that is when I decided to fire-up the scanner. Taking action straight away reveals problems early: OK, now I’ve scanned a document, what do I name it? Where should I file it? How long should I keep it for? Much the same issues that you have with paper. It is just easier. Over the past two years I worked out a system that works, for me ... What is recorded? For the most par...