Organizing Documents

There was some nice color in the sunrise this morning, but that was the high point weather-wise. Overcast skies this morning turned to heavier clouds with increasing winds and rain. By this evening it was quite windy and wet. On the plus side, temperatures are in the low 40s, so the mess of ice and slush should melt off pretty fast. It wasn’t an inspiring day for getting out, and as it turned out, I got distracted with computer stuff.

This morning I was notified (via one of my RSS feeds) of FreeFileSync, a software utility for keeping files synchronized. It’s an I come back to from time to time, as I’ve collected many different documents across two or three computers as well as additional external hard drives (659 documents in one folder called “SitkaAreaArticles”). I’ve taken a bit of the ‘backup by multiple copies’ route, but without any particular systematic organization, it’s not especially helpful for actually referring to the documents and/or remembering that I even have them. So I ended up wandering down the path of what tools are available for organized and maybe actually going through all those documents I’ve collected, getting rid of the ones which are not of interest, and having the others well-organized in a single location that can then be systematically backed up.

Along the way I just about convinced myself to get a Kindle Touch – though so far I’ve resisted (in the long run, I think it would be easier to read many of these documents with an e-reader or tablet rather than on a notebook/laptop or desktop screen. In the process of researching the Kindle Touch I learned about Calibre e-book management software. It appears to be a reasonably easy to use program with some power for organizing/tagging e-books and other documents. I installed it on my desktop and started moving some documents into it without any trouble. My intention at this point is to import my collection of documents, then go through them all. Hopefully there will be an easy way to export the information about documents that are relevant to natural history in Southeast Alaska, as I would like to add those to the reference section of the Natural History Wiki.

On a completely unrelated note, I also happened to notice Stellarium – a bit of software that looks pretty interesting and helpful for learning the stars and such. Now we just need have some clear skies with temperatures a bit warmer than the single digits of last month, so I could actually spend a little time looking at the stars (and maybe some northern lights as well).

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