Saying goodbye to paper

One of my university lecturers (from the early nineties) once said “the paperless office, is about as much use as a paperless toilet”. I’m largely in agreement, but in my quest to remove unnecessary paperwork, I’ve invested in several bits of supporting technology. </p> <p>In summary (with follow up posts as soon as time allows), and in order of anticipated usefulness:</p> <ol><li>a ScanSnap scanner. This is a neat form-feeding duplex scanner, modest desktop footprint and nicely slots into some of the other puzzle pieces, e.g., Paperless, PDFPen, Evernote, Hazel and general handling of images and text. Hardware design is good, the software design is functional, if rather utilitarian and a bit, well, ugly.</li><li>a Livescribe ‘smart’ pen. I got the 2GB echo, which is an excellent gadget, for my use (I’m never far from a computer), I have no need of the four or eight GB editions.</li><li>Dragon Express, which I’m speaking this text with. It’s got a lot of promise, but v1.0 has its limitations, including a bug with Textexpander, and some other ‘error-beep’ bug, I can’t identify yet.</li></ol>