Link notes to a google Keep Record

At resent, I have several notes about books, my to read, my current reading list, and specific lists of book collections, my construction book list being huge and my Templar book collection not far behind.

I want to now link my personal notes to the list, and have found a way to do this.

So I make a new note and add my comments, thoughts and other items into the note its specific to that book, so I use the book title author and medium, ie paper or Kindle in the title.

Then before I close, I make a copy of the URL

After closing, I go to the specific book list and paste the url on the end of the book list item, see todays photo.

I also add my usual labels, this time adding book comments as the extra label.

For some reason, I find this satisfyingly acceptable, and perhaps a better way to record my thoughts rather than Evernote, ok there is probably a way to do this, but so far its eluded me.

I plan to add this concept to my photos, saved in Google Photos, a specific folder should do the trick, for example my recent flowering Magnolia collection. Although I can also do this to my Moleskin doodles, take a photo and get the link to paste it into one of my notes......... let you know

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Data, Data & more Data

As Technologists, we are being inundated with data, lots of it from almost everything we do. The easy route is to just delete, or make a folder on your hard drive, and dump it in there thinking you'll sort it later.

But there are a few simple tricks that will solve you problem and make it easy to retrieve.

First is Email, I use gmail its still the leading service, despite its age,  I get so much, some important and these get tagged and put into a correct folder, the rest just get marked as read, I never ever delete emails. Important ones that I want to keep out side of Gmail, I send to my Evernote account, via the secret email address they give, more on this later.

Never ever rely on your hard drive to store important things, I have, like so many done this and lost it all when the disk failed, and it will. With the cloud now so easy to access, I store all items in one of two places, first Google Drive, this has to be a no brainer, its easy to set up, easy to use, and you get so much free space, and is so well integrated with gmail, next comes DropBox, a paid for service, well there is a free service and its quite large, but my needs have gone beyond this, and it's here I store almost every working file, most are cad files and project documents we use daily, the beauty of DropBox is the sharing, I share all my business files with my partner, and he sees the updates almost instantly.

Now lets get back to Evernote, a product with a difference, here I store any document, scanned or otherwise, my new printer has such a sweet scanning facility, and used with PDFpen, if I get paper in the post, I scan it, and use the builtin "send to Evernote" function and dump the paper. Evernote has the best search ever, the OCR scans the pdf ready for me to search, I pay for the premier account, so its almost instant, free accounts wait for a while, but its done. Don't forget to add the app to your browser, searching for anything from say Chrome will show whats on the web, but also whats in you private archive in Evernote. Your private archive of data will be the subject of a more detailed blog later.

Books I have a problem with, I buy so many, I am a sucker for a good book, my collection, and I will not pass on any book, sorry, is growing, my construction books in particular I scan, not all of them, but the index, and important pages, these I send to Evernote, ready for search, I'll write a new blog on this very soon as there is more to this than just scanning, Kindle and ebooks spring to mind and my highlights.

Photos and my video's used to be a problem, but now I have four different safeguards, Google Drive, Flickr, dropbox, and iPhoto on my mac, all store any electronic photo I take, its automatic and I just don't ever have to think about it, most of my photos are taken with my mobile, the quality is just fine for most things, it auto syncs with all the above, and best of all, it has lat long embedded so search is so easy, which brings me onto my favourite, which is Google Photo, is was with no question iPhoto, but the service google offers is so much better. so all nicely backed up. In many practices, I used to get stinging emails from the IT department, saying I had yet again filled up the server with photos, not any more.

I still have to keep paper, its a pain, and defies the new search and find I am so used to in computer land, and is hosted in an old filing cupboard in my garage. Most are scanned, but the law seems to say keep, so I do.

With all the above, its hard to say no to data, now its more the better, OCR has opened up search to all the content, learning how to use this now becomes the next holly grail, tagging and to some extent, adding files to folders, although I do this simply to allow sharing specific sets of data.

I write profusely, with this blog and the others I looks after, a service I find invaluable is ifTTT look for it or follow the link, its an automated service thats free, which has rules, if I write a new blog it will copy the blog to Evernote, same goes for a lot of other services like diary events.

Todays photo is a vey old detail I like, neat and so full of design.

Books - Paper, Electronic, all into Evernote

I buy construction books,,,, a lot, from any place, Amazon, Secondhand book stores, Ebay, any city any language, as long as there are pictures.

My collection is growing so much, I have a dedicated shelf to them, but even that is over flowing, so I also use Amazon Kindle, I started using it some time back, but although the reading was great, I just could not get on with the references I wanted to make, the highlighting made a list, but it was not easy to get at, and there was no search.

By contrast, with paper books, I often would add a sticky tab, to remind me of something, but even that got out of control.

Then I found Evernote, and life changed, to the point I scan, photo my links direct into Evernote, the OCR is brilliant, to the point of, what would I do without it. I can be reading a kindle book, and see a reference I want to keep, so I take a screen shot and save the photo to Evernote, the OCR will pick up the points I want, but if I want to make it absolutely clear, I can highlight the text this way I can see the text I want, I tag everything, so searching is made easier, I now scan almost all documents, and my reading is now not littered with yellow tags.

All my blogs get posted to Evernote, via the very Wonderfull ifTTT, a free service to watch this blog and for every new post, it  posts to evernote.

Even my Moleskin gets the Evernote treatment, my writing needs to improve for the OCR to work, but given enought tags, I can find most things.

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