Post post post digital

Russell Davies

Russell Davies

— 3 min read
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A print out of a mock To Do list containing items like This is a Fake To Do
The most humble man in the world

Even after all these years I'm still fascinated with how print and digital can work together in interesting and useful ways. At the moment, in my head, I've nicknamed this strand of mucking about 'the Paper CRM'.

The current experiment is; how do I gracefully and appropriately do Data In and Data Out with informal bits of paper, real world handwriting, computers and apps.

To that end I've got two new things next to my desk:

First is an old receipt printer of off ebay.

An old till receipt printer on a desk

It prints my To Do list every morning...

A print out of a mock To Do list containing items like This is a Fake To Do

...which it gets out of my Things app.

A print out of an in app To Do list containing items like This is a Fake To Do

The second is this scanner.camera thing off of shopping which is pointing at a small wooden tray the same size as an index card. If I put a piece of paper in there it scans, reads it and takes appropriate action. For instance, if it sees a bit of paper with EMAIL written on it it sends it to my email. If it's one of my To Do lists it looks to see if anything's been ticked of and then removes that from Things.

A small scanner pointing at a small wooden tray with a printed out To Do list in it

The next obvious move is to make the print out big enough to accommodate new To Dos so it can add them to the list. If I write TO DO on a bit of paper it'll add that to the list so it's not a big leap.

Some things I've learned:

It's computationally expensive and annoying to have a scanner looking at something 24 hours a day and trying to decide if something new has arrived, or a tiny change has been made. Especially if you don't want it isolated from the regular changes of light that happen in a room. (That was my original plan). So I just press a button when I want it to look. It does it for 10 minutes, which is normally plenty of time for me to process the notes and detritus of the day. (There is actually a button on the thing itself but I can't seem to reach inside the firmware to access that so I've made a button on a stream deck.)

Sometimes you want an updated To Do list midway through the day. So I've made another Stream Deck button for that.

It is pleasing and convenient that index cards and thermal printer paper are a similar width. 3 inches ish. Going with the grooves of ancient standards makes some things easier. Lots of things are 3 inches ish and always will be.

Once upon a time I would have had to persuade someone I know to build all this for me. I probably wouldn't have been able so to do. Now, of course, AI.

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