Hey, howdy, hallo,
It’s mostly spring here, so it’s time for Spring Cleaning (I don’t know if that’s a thing outside the US). At least here, you’re supposed to go through your stuff and get rid of what you don’t use or need anymore. I finally made it to my dreaded accordion folder of paperwork, and after years of procrastination, I figured it was time to do something with it.
Before we get into it—in case you want to see things I randomly post throughout the month—I’m on Mastodon and Bluesky.
The days are long gone when you need a dedicated device to scan documents (granted, it will do a better job and capture it at a higher resolution). I tested out the app OSS Document-Scanner, and it worked surprisingly well! It will auto-detect the corners of a document, snap the photo once it’s in focus, run OCR on it, and save it as a PDF.
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, which is a process that analyzes the scanned image of a document and converts the visual text into machine-readable text. This allows the resulting PDF to be searched or lets you copy and paste text from it. The app is open source, and the description box on the GitHub page I linked above has multiple ways you can download it.
The great part of scanning everything is that you can be a digital hoarder! Instead of debating whether you need to save that piece of paper, scan it anyway and then get rid of it.
When you’re done going through your paperwork, shred it. You want to make sure you dispose of it securely, just in case it blows out of your trash or someone goes dumpster diving.
Paper documents are a privacy risk. They contain your personal information, your habits—information you don’t want accessible to the world. By digitizing your documents, you increase your physical privacy, and it also gives you a solid backup. If someone breaks into your home or there’s a natural disaster and you lose everything, those important documents are still safe.
And the icing on the cake is that you now have less physical clutter. You might be hoarding scans, but at least those don’t pile up on your desk.
I hope you had a great April, and I’ll see you in May!
-Josh
The internet needs more websites like this.
🎧 Steve Wozniak — From his childhood fascination with electronics to co-founding Apple Computer and helping ignite the personal computing revolution. A story of quiet genius, loyalty, and a lasting legacy in technology.
🎧 Bill Gates — From Harvard dropout to tech titan, Bill Gates helped ignite the personal computing revolution and built Microsoft into a global powerhouse.
This month I switched from Finamp to Symfonium to stream my self-hosted music library.
Tangentially related, I also set up Navidrome to host my music library instead of using Jellyfin. Jellyfin worked fine, but Navidrome is specifically made for music.
🟡 Most platforms host your feed on their domain. If they disappear or terminate your account, your audience disappears too. Yellowball lets you own your feed at your domain—so your show stays yours.
No BS. No tracking. No forced branding. No personal info required. Just a fast, private, creator-first platform with unlimited downloads and crypto payment support.
I host my show In the Shell on it—and if you’re thinking of starting your own, check out Yellowball or just reply to this email. Happy to help.
“In a world of memes, be an essay.” - I saw it in a random post online.
I don’t track or analyze these emails, so I have no way of knowing if anyone reads them. If you enjoyed this email, feel free to reply with a ⛈️ and if you didn’t, write back one sentence on what you would change.