Goodbye Nokia, Hello Android and Nexus S

These are my thoughts as I'm waiting for my shiny new Nexus S, which I ordered from US a few days ago, to land in Israel.

I've been a Nokia kind of guy for many years now, since my first mobile phone. Nokia phones had a simple button layout, consistent user interface and menus which made it easy to use whatever model you had. When I looked for my first smartphone a couple of years ago - I eagerly waited for the Nokia 5800. It's a great phone which served me well despite a few quirks, but now is showing its age and not in a way that some next model can fix.

What I mean is that as years went by, smartphones became more and more our mobile personal computers, where most important are not just the original hardware and software but the apps you install later. And the Symbian OS Nokia uses is rather old and hard to develop for, so almost none of the apps developed in the last year or two that I wanted could be installed on my phone. And even though I don't know much about Meego, the mobile OS Nokia will using for future smartphones - I think it will be too late. All apps today are developed for iPhone and Android first due to their market share, and it's hard for me to imagine what technical advantages might the Linux-based Meego have over Andorid, which is undergoing such fast development and improvement.

My parents are still using the simpler Nokia "feature-phones", since they are much more comfortable with the ordinary keys rather than a touchscreen, and there Nokia might hold its dominance for some time. This is a low margin market which addresses the much larger world population that can't afford the luxury of a smartphone. Yet as all technology goes, this will also get cheaper in a very short period, and soon enough I think there will be cheap Android based smartphones available for this large market.

So I say goodbye to Nokia and hello to Android. What would you suggest for the eager owner of a fresh Android phone? What are the must-have apps or settings I should start with?

Photo storage on the go

I love travelling, and when I do - I always take a camera with me, capturing the places I've seen and moments I want to remember. For the past two and a half years I've had the 400D Canon DSLR and its counter is getting close to the 20,000 photos mark. Those are a lot of great memories, but also quite a bit of storage space, especially since I always shoot in RAW format to have the flexibility for future editing. I some cases, I actually shoot RAW+JPEG, so that I can easily browse and share photos during the trip using the JPEGs, and the RAW files are for later storage and editing when I get back home. And when the trips get longer, there's the question of how to store all those photos on go.

The simple choice at first is just having more and bigger memory cards. I got to carrying 3 cards with 4Gb each, and this would usually be sufficient for my normal two-week trips. But there's a limit, and when I was preparing for my 7 months long trip to South East Asia last year, I had think of another way. 

First of all, just buying more and more memory cards is expensive, hard to carry and manage, and I wouldn't want to store too much on a single card. A common solution is to have a portable hard drive - it's easy to use, has plenty of storage space, reliable, relatively inexpensive and useful in itself in daily life even after the trip. However, since I wasn't carrying a laptop this meant relying on external computers, which isn't trivial on a trip to SE Asia. Internet Cafes are usually not hard to find on the beaten track of trekkers, but the quality of computers varies greatly and many of them are infected with myriad viruses transmitted by different USB devices. So finding a reasonable computer, scanning it for viruses and using it to copy the photos from the card to the hard drive it a rather long and annoying procedure.  A bigger problem was the longer treks, such as the Annapurna Circuit, which take several weeks with no computer access.

My solution was a portable hard drive with a twist, in a metal case with an internal battery and a built-in card reader - Nexto ND2700. The main advantage of this device is that is can directly copy photos from the memory card, without the need for a computer or even electricity. The charge is sufficient to copy some 80Gb of photos, which gives you more than enough travel time between recharges. The device itself is basically a sturdy metal case with a laptop hard-drive inside - it's even easy to open the case and replace it. And besides travelling, it is useful as a regular portable hard drive with a USB connection. I've had it for a year and a half now, and the only disadvantages I can think of are that it's a little more cumbersome to use than a regular portable drive, since it has it's own power button; and the price - when I bought it, the 250Gb model cost about twice as much as simple hard drive with the same capacity.

So who would I recommend such a device for? It is mostly useful if you take lots of photos, usually RAW on a DSLR (since JPEGs from compact cameras take much less space) and might travel for several weeks at least with no laptop or reliable access to computers. Otherwise, a regular portable hard drive would probably suffice.

Shopping and Shipping from US to Israel

It is often when purchasing something, especially electronics, that I would much prefer to buy in the US than in Israel. It's usually because the price difference is so large (a Canon lens I just bought costs 440$ in US and 670$ in Israel) or because some products are sold in US only (like the Nook eReader). In any case, shipping is a problem, either because a direct UPS delivery to Israel is quite expensive, but more often because the stores would only ship inside the US.

For a few years now there exists a company that solves just this problem - Mustop (they have merged with a similar company called Usonestop). The idea is simple - you register, and get your own unique address in the US, which is where you ship you purchase (they have warehouses in New Jersey). More often than not, the stores will also have free shipping to a US address. It's also recommended that you forward to Mustop your purchase receipt email. They receive your package and forward it to your Israeli address using DHL. 

The shipping price is very reasonable, and for larger purchases is quite worth it - there's a 15$ handling fee, plus a shipping price based on the package weight and volume (details here). They recommend you contact the store and ask for as compact a package as possible. You still have to consider the customs and VAT costs in Israel of course, but it is often much cheaper than to buy in Israel (and there are no customs for photographic equipment for example).

So - happy shopping everybody!

Recycling Electronics

Cleaning up recently I had a lot of old electronic stuff to throw away - broken CD drive and power supply, batteries, a couple of speakers that no longer work, etc. Before tossing it all to garbage, I took a look if there is something more useful that can be done - perhaps some of those parts and the metal in them can be salvaged and reused. That got me to this list of locations (.doc) all around the country (via this site) where electronic waste can be disposed of safely, which I did. So take a look next time, there's probably a collection facility just nearby.

Corporate Spam

When receiving corporate email, it often includes a signature with the senders position, contact info, and possibly a company logo or some other small branding element, which I think is appropriate. Recently however I received a work related email which had in it, embedded around the mail content, four corporate ad images on the side, a large banner on top and the following signature at the bottom. 

I could not imagine how hijacking any outbound company email and "enriching" it with company ads in such a manner could contribute to the company's image, not to talk about the signature ad for the external service doing this, which mostly reminds me of the crappy "sent by hotmail" sigs.

However, after a second glance the bottom "do not enrich" link gave me hope that I might still unsubscribe. Clicking on it, I was asked for confirmation and then presented with the following message:

So now, someone should decide in person if I am deemed worthy enough to not receive those ads in my inbound emails from that company... And knowing the company, this request of mine was probably forwarded to whatever in-person version of /dev/null they have.

Listen...

This post is about something I "discovered" for myself some seven years ago, and have been doing ever since - listening to audiobooks. This manner of storytelling existed long before the invention of print - whether sharing some experience near a camp fire, or a father passing knowledge to son. And although print allowed us a much more efficient and durable way to transfer knowledge, listening to a story is a profoundly different, and better experience. 

When told by a narrator, the plot becomes much more personal, and the characters become alive compared to just reading the "dry text" of the story. And yet, unlike movies, which seem to provide you with even richer experience, audiobooks do not take away your freedom to imagine and create your own world from the words to the writer. Because after seeing the movies Lord Of The Rings or Harry Potter for example, those images will be fixed in my mind when I reread the books, which looses some of the richness of possibilities in the world created by the author. Furthermore, listening to a narration requires you to slow down and pay attention, whereas my ability to read fast may sometimes cause me to skim through sections, and thus loose some of the detail and feel of the story.

Besides being a great way to read a book, audiobooks are very practical - they can be listened to almost anywhere and are an excellent way to use any "dead time" you might have. I've finished some four or five audiobooks just this month, and that's without much dedicated "reading" time - I've been listening in my car while commuting to work, when going to a store to buy groceries or when running on a treadmill in the gym.  I actually went running instead of swimming some time lately just because I had to get to the end of the plot... And listening to audiobooks in the car has a very interesting side effect - I am not impatient or annoyed when being stuck in traffic, because this is no longer "wasted time". There were even several times when I parked at home and then just kept sitting in the car for a couple more minutes, just to finish listening to some interesting part of the story.

For shorter periods of time, when you might not want to listen to just a small part of a long story, I would recommend listening to podcasts. There are thousands of great programs that can be subscribed to and downloaded, for every possible taste, and those are usually shorter recordings. A friend of mine recently recommended me a wonderful Israeli podcast called Making History - those are about 30 mins programs about a variety of subjects, often connected to science but not only. This is a great program to listen to in the morning, on the way to work - subscribe to it here.

I hoped I convinced to you try it out if you haven't yet, and if you want - I have a hard drive full of things to listen to...

Wikipedia and Education

As I've been helping my younger brother with homework, I was thinking about how the world around us changes whereas the education system has a hard time to catch up and adapt.

Certainly when my parents were growing up, and to some degree when I was in school, just finding information for, say, a history project, was quite an undertaking. You had to search and read through books in your school library, and then perhaps find some specific books in a larger regional library, and work to assemble those pieces into some body of work. Perhaps you even interviewed an older member of the family or a friend if he/she had some relation to the events. An those skills of gathering information were indeed quite relevant in the world.

Nowadays, give a class an assignment on, say, The Declaration of Independence, and many of the works you get back might be different variations of the same Wikipedia article. One the one hand, this is quite understandably frustrating to the teacher, who sees how little effort and thought was put into the work. One the other, I don't think the pupils are to blame here. 

The world has changed - the internet brings us a wealth of sources and information on any topic we wish to research, and students should be taught different skills - not of gathering anew information which is already out there but of filtering the relevant findings and analyzing them for insights or distilling the essence of an idea. 

Here is an approximate assignment from a while ago (in Geography class) that I think was an excellent example - "Image you are a travel agent and a client (a family, an elderly couple, a single traveler, etc...) comes and asks you to suggest a trip plan. Choose a destination and tailor a few days' trip to the client." This both gives the pupil freedom of choice as well as requires independent thought - you have to think what kind of trip plan you are preparing (walking outside vs going to museums...), research the country for attractions as well as distances and reduce all the possibilities to some logical plan that combines interesting locations and is achievable in the chosen time frame.

It will however take some time for this change to take place more widely. First, because it is much easier  for teachers to continue teaching the same way they are used to. And second, once each assignment is individual per student - there is no standardized answer sheet, like in a multiple choice exam, where the answers can be checked quickly. Rather the teacher has to evaluate each work on it's own, which takes more effort and dedication on his part.

Google Quicksearch Gibberish Auto-translate

Since I'm writing daily in two languages (Hebrew and English) and constantly switching between the two, it is quite often that I want to search in one language but type in another by mistake, so the result is gibberish.

Here a cool thing I noticed just recently - the correct search result (in the intended language) is suggested. And it works both ways - both Hebrew to English and back, although not in every case of course.

My guess is that this translation was learned based on user search histories, since after such a mistake the user immediately searches again for the correct word. Anyway, another cool idea that just "works" - it took me some time to notice that the (correct) suggestions were actually given for a search term typed in the wrong language. 

Getting Things That Matter Done

A friend made a survey recently about productivity, and wrote a post with some more ideas and how it worked for him. An interesting read, take a look.

When thinking about it, I might imagine two "me"s sitting on my shoulders, battling each other. There is something I need, or want to do, but I somehow waste the time, procrastinate, or get distracted by other things. So I make some task list to stay focused, put my headphones on, maybe even work from home.

But at home there's the danger of just watching TV, or responding to IM or email. So - I actually decided not to own a TV, which saves me a ton of time. And, grudgingly, I close Gmail. And actually working late at night has been quite productive for me. Not only am I more concentrated at night (not much of a morning person, check the time this was published...), but there's less distractions, nowhere to hurry to, just a quiet time when the world is at peace.

And yet, even when I'm in the state of mind when I know I should work, I sometime veer to doing something else which I also should do, but is not as urgent or important. Having an exam or a big assignment was often a great incentive to put a few solid hours of work on cleaning up the apartment, washing dishes, tagging my photo library or even writing a custom script to clean-up the ID3 tags in my music collection. Call it "constructive procrastination".

There is another "trick" that may help with such a case - working on a couple of projects at once. So that when you're tired or stuck on one of them, you can let it go for a while, work on the second one, and come back when you feel you are ready to start again.

However, there was a different idea I mentioned in that survey - "pair programming", in the more general sense. And for me the emphasis was not the better quality of work that results, but the fact that working together improves your focus, and reduces the chance for distraction. I'm not going to check email or blogs when working with someone. And if one gets tired or loses focus - the other can pick up, and so you just push each other to work more productively.

Which leads to what I actually wanted to write about, and that is motivation to do not just the daily tasks and chores, but also bigger things which matter to you, that you want to do or you know you should do, but you delay or avoid them, because of some fear or discomfort.

I'll give an example - I did a bunjy jump in Nepal last year, the third highest in the world. Scary stuff. By the time you get to the jump, you've discussed it with friends, paid for it, took a long bus drive there, got organized, waited for some before you to jump, and now you are standing on the step on the bridge above a 160m high gorge, scared out of your wits. But by that point, you are also already committed. You are too far into it to back off. So you look down, then decide it's a better idea to just look at the horizon - and jump. Then climb the 160m back to the bridge - and do the second jump :).

Here's another one - I just returned from a trek to the Alps, Tour de Mont Blanc, after of which I also climbed the Mont Blanc peak itself. I did plenty of treks before, yet this one was different - my first technical climb, walking on rocks and snow, through some dangerous sections and steep slopes, a hard hike up to the summit at night and back all the way down. But I did it with a friend, and we had a guide with us. Besides the assurance it gives - you are much more committed to each other (if one has to descend - you both do), support each other, and will not back down unless it's for serious reason. And it was a great sense of achievement getting to the top, knowing that this is something you can do.

The point is that stating your goal publicly or doing it with a friend gives you that extra commitment and motivation, besides you own will, that may be the push you need to get over your apprehensions and do whatever it is you want to accomplish.

An example I thought of as I was writing this - Matt Cutts (head of webspam team at google). He sets himself a 30-day challenge every month, blogs about it (and it's a very high traffic blog) and reports on the results. Things like trying meditation, biking into work every day, no caffeine, etc. And I think that stating it publicly on his blog makes it harder to just abandon something midway, because he has already committed himself.

How do I use it in daily life?

I think I did it when searching for my latest job, quite consciously. I didn't choose the exact area in which I already have experience, but a role that will challenge me both technically and personally with situations new to me, which I have to deal with, learn, and get better at. And this is a course I committed myself to by taking the position.

Here's the latest example - Since I enrolled in a nice fitness center, I thought I should start swimming more. Easy to think, but eventually it's slips away, and you start coming less often. So? There's a non-competitive 3.5 km swim across the Kineret every year that a friend goes to. And this year I told him - "sure, I'll come too", and registered myself. And I'm telling about it to all of you as well (all three of you.. :) ). So now I better actually do it, and if I want to finish it - I should better keep training, don't I?

I see you

I've read a short post a few days ago about a new gadget - a small videocamera that looks like an earpiece of a mobile phone, records continuously, can store a few hours of video and with a press of a button will save a clip of the last 30 seconds if you saw something interesting.

It's nothing revolutionary - just another gadget as electronics gets smarter and smaller, but it's being inconspicuous and the "always recording" mode made me think about the future that's almost here already.

It made me think of the "no cameras" signs we see here and there, like in airports or museums, where it's OK to see something with our own eyes but not to record, often for security reasons. It's quite useless even today, since any real "bad guys" would have no problems to conceal equipment and take a photo or video. But as such gadgets become small, cheap, and ubiquitous I think it may become quite common to just record everything happening around you during the day and then save the interesting bits for later. And preventing the general public from doing so will be difficult.

And I also thought of our expectation of privacy during our everyday life. We become more and more used to being photographed and filmed, either directly by someone we know, or just by chance, being in someones frame or perhaps just being caught in an embarrassing moment by a Google Street View car... And the younger generation will be accustomed to the notion of possibly being recorded at any moment, just as they live a much more publicly open life on the social networks, even if we have difficulties accepting this idea today, as you can read in this story (the motorcyclist was acquitted).

What do you think?

Email Goodies

In my last post, I talked about some problems with the current email clients. In this post I want to share a few improvements I read about recently, as well as some ways I manage my mail that help me to stay productive.

One cool browser add-on is Rapportive (via ReadWriteWeb), which displays a sidebar with additional information about the person you’re conversing with - his picture and info from various social networks. Here’s an example:

The limitation is that only the public info form social networks is shown (even if you’re “friends”), and also it’s less convenient when the correspondence includes several people.

Another interesting Chrome extension is Graph Your Inbox (via Google Operating System), which works with Gmail and gives you stats and insight into your emails usage patterns. Using Gmail search operators you can slice and dice your email history and visualize it.

Here’s an example of the amount of Buzz posts (from me and people I follow) this year:

A more interesting graph is my count of Facebook notifications, which shows a sharp increase in usage in summer 2009:

A recent article talks about many start-ups working in this area, so there are many improvements expected to come.

As far as managing my email, I receive enough email that reading it as it comes would be quite distracting. A few tools in Gmail are very useful to separate those that should be read and acted upon immediately, and those for later.

The first one is Labels and Filters - I have some 30 filters (rules) which label incoming email, and move most of it out of inbox. I label mails from social networks, financial institutions, university and work into a folder hierarchy for easy search later.

Unfortunately, Gmail doesn’t allow using filter rules based on Groups in contacts, so I had to manually construct a query string which matches each of the addressed in the “Friends” group, and label them as such - and those are mails I know come from people I correspond with, rather than some automated service.

Finally, here’s a simple but a useful rule to filter out much of the “funny” email I still receive from some friends and relatives - any email that was forwarded twice is usually junk, and it is moved into a “Fun” folder which I check on once a week:

Matches: subject:("Fw: Fw" OR "Fwd: Fw")

Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label "Personal_Fun"

The last, but not least is the recent “Priority Inbox” that was introduced in Gmail. You should check it out - it’s a great idea, which I use to show three sections in my Inbox: Important mails I haven’t read yet, Starred emails which for me means TODO+Important, and other unarchived mail in Inbox which is basically TODO but not very important.

It takes a little while to train Gmail which mail should be marked as important or not - but it allows me to manage my tasks better as well as ignore unread mail which is not urgent, and that is a great way to reduce distractions.

That’s all for now, you are welcomed to share any interesting ideas about better using your email.

Email From Strangers

I received a curious email today - an internal correspondence between a manager and some employees of a large Israeli travel agency, discussing a problem with billing some clients - including a screenshot from the internal ordering system, with the full details of a couple of credit cards, expiration dates, CVC numbers, personal details, etc. After the initial surprise, I guessed it was a typo error when filling the To: field in an email, and my name was autocompleted by mistake. I dealt with this agency once, about three (!) years ago, and so apparently was in the contacts list of the manager.

I responded with a somewhat cynical response informing about the mistake, and hoping that such a serious company would be more careful with my financial details as a customer. I received a quick response with an apology and an assurance my details are "out of reach of the systems' users". Oh, and the response began with - "Honorable DR,"...

Besides the humorous aspect, and the personal mistake made by the sender, such mistakes are inevitable, and are symptoms of the problem with the system, not the user. People will always make mistakes, and the design of the current email apps and the contacts autocompletion is that it is very easy to enter the wrong recipient - and hard to notice the error, especially when two people may have the same or similar names. Thus it is quite easy to sent some personal or sensitive internal communication to the outside world - and it's a mistake that might be impossible to undo. And in the specific case described above - I wonder why would my email even be in the autocompletion list, after a short communication three years ago?

Some solutions exists, but aren't sufficient or widespread at the moment.

One is to completely separate internal and external networks - to reduce the chance for information leak. This is used in security related organizations, but is very difficult to justify in most situations as internet access is critical in today's workspace. And it still does not prevent from sending an email to the wrong person in the organization (I remember quite a few such cases from my own service, ranging from highly classified information to very intimate conversations being misdirected).

A much more productive direction is for the system to give the sender a lot more information about the intended recipient, making spotting a mistake very easy at a glance - a thumbnail picture (like when sending a message in Facebook, also possible for internal organizational users), his/hers role or company name, and perhaps an infographic of how frequently are you communicating with that person.

I don't remember at the moment, but I read of some start-ups who have a product that enriches the email interface with lots of useful information about the recipients. And there's a Google Labs experiment called "Got the wrong Bob?" that tries to warn you if you choose a wrong recipient based on your usage patterns.

If you know of any existing solutions for this being employed, or have similar stories - you are welcomed to share...

Setting up - IKEA, Contacts and Tomato

I've been busy for the last few days. The non-computer related part was buying and assembling a bunch of IKEA furniture - surprisingly all my fingers are still intact and the things didn't fall apart yet...

I also found a little time to do one of those things that you know you should, bet never get to - I got all my contacts from the phones, gmail, facebook, linked-in, etc., merged them, cleaned up the phones and email info and put them in Google Contacts. This guide was quite helpful in the process. My only annoyance now is that I'm used to manage people on the phone by their Hebrew names, but on Contacts it's all in English, and I haven't thought of a good way to sync them.

I also finally set-up a WiFi network at the new appartment, so I can have internet without relying on the kindness of strangers with public wifi. Since my wifi router is a bit away from the computer, behind a couple of walls (I'll be splitting a neighbors internet connection) I wanted to make sure the signal is strong. This can be done by installing a custom firmware on the router called Tomato which gives you a lot of control over how your router works including transmission power. It also has a better GUI, nice graphs, and a bunch of tools and settings to play around with, such as prioritizing traffic by application (for example - giving VOIP traffic higher priority than p2p).

That's all for now, will be playing with some more stuff in the near future.

Email is for old people...

I've been chatting on Facebook with a distant cousin of mine who said she still didn't receive some link I was meant to send her. She was quite surprised when I told her I emailed it a week ago. "Email? You should have told me! That's for old people..." was more or less her reply.

When I think about it, my 12 years old brother doesn't use email much or at all, and most of his online communication is via facebook and chatting. Maybe as they get into university or corporate environment they will start using email, or mayble the world is changing and I'm now an old guy using email...

What are your experiences on this?

The Nook - Updates & Answers

This is a short update after playing around with the Nook for a while, and some answers to the comments on the previous post.

In general, I can say the Nook is a fun device, and serves its main purpose, reading books, quite well. It's very light and portable, simple to operate, and it's you can change the font size and style for easier reading. I even played a few games of chess on it (it has chess and sudoku apps) to pass the time and it was fun. It does feels somewhat sluggish or even stuck once in a while, and I had to turn it off and on a few times after it became unresponsive.

I also do not expect to use its WiFi connectivity much, given other options for internet access such as a mobile phone. Browsing is not a very fun activity (you can only interact with the site through the narrow touch screen on the bottom, and the eInk display is slow to redraw and not well suited for interactive display).

Also, you can't buy books from the device using the Barnes & Noble online store, since it will only sell a book if you have an US IP address due to distribution agreements with regional book publishers. The solution to that problem is to go through a proxy or VPN on the computer to access the B&N store, and then transfer the downloaded books to the Nook using a USB cable.

The next thing I tried was to load some documents on the Nook, both scans and regular PDF documents. They are resized to fit the screen and cannot be zoomed in, but 10pt font was just legible, so the Nook fits the purpose well enough and I'll be copying my documents to the Nook as well. To my surprise, it also correctly displayed the content of PDF files created from Hebrew documents, although Hebrew filenames were not correctly displayed.

Finally, when you'll have an eReader of your own, remember to download Calibre - a great open source ebook management software.

Going Paperless - The Next Generation

Continuing the previous post about my transition from paper to digital, today it's all about books.

As I've been traveling for more than half a year, I always carried a couple of books with me and would swap them with other travelers or in used-book stores. This way I've read many books without them taking much space or weight. Books do not become any less interesting with usage, and I usually have little value for the book itself standing on my shelf after I've read it, except perhaps it's availability in case I wish to read it again.

I've been thinking about this since I've returned, and so, as of this week I am the happy owner of the Nook eReader, made by Barnes & Noble (similar to Amazon's Kindle).

It uses the eInk technology to display a B&W screen for reading which requires very little power, and has an additional color touch screen below for navigation and keyboard. The Nook is light and portable, easy to read (the eyes do not get tired like when reading from a computer screen), has enough power for over a week of reading and can store thousands of books. It supports all common eBook formats, allows for microSD card for extra storage and even includes WiFi and a web browser (with a little hacking, it is even possible to use it's 3G connectivity in Israel).

This is now my own portable library, and the chances I'll be buying physical books in the futures are getting smaller. There is a huge variety of public and freely downloadable eBooks, while most new books in eBook format are sold for no more than 10$.

There are some nice extras - the Nook also displays images, PDFs (all my important documents are already scanned into PDFs) and plays audio files - which is great, since I love listening to audiobooks and they are a great way to pass the time when you're driving or on a long bus ride. And so, this little gadget will be my paper replacement for the future.

Going Paperless

I've been away for a while, on a long trip abroad. Having returned and finding a lot of free time on my hands I got into the once-in-a-decade "lets organize all my stuff" mood. In the process, I was stumbling onto piles of papers from everywhere I looked - bills and receipts, old paychecks and lecture summaries, diplomas and brochures... So, after throwing away mountains of useless old documents, I've decided to take the next step to avoid this problem in the future.

First - I scanned the remaining important documents and saved them as PDF files. So now I have some 150 scanned docs nicely organized on my computer, and I can go over them quickly and find what I need without rummaging through the papers themselves, which are neatly stacked in some faraway corner. And of course, I have all my important files backed up online - don't we all?

The second step was to stop getting all those papers in the first place. So I visited the websites of those companies who were filling my mailbox, such as the bank and credit card company, and changed the settings to receive all reports and bills online. Gladly, they all offered such an option, as this is clearly a saving for them as well.

Interestingly, soon you might not even have to keep the original documents stacked somewhere, as this proposal by the Justice Department (in Hebrew) will declare copies and scans of documents just as legally valid.