Comment by greenyouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenyouse | Hacker News Reader

Digital archiving of important physical mail is a nice way to go paperless and keep track of documents. Get a good scanner and shredder, then set up a system to track your scanned documents. No more misplacing files and having to stuff cabinets with papers.

Proxy phone number via Twilio or Google Voice for the times when you'd rather not give your real number out.

Audio translations for digital books using espeak + pdftotext + shell scripting. If you didn't know, espeak can output wav files. It's a nice way to read since my commute is 3 hours a day.

Recipe management for putting meals into rotation and generating a shopping list. Check out Gourmet or Krecipes on linux. It could probably be hooked into a grocery delivery service like Prime Pantry or just migrated to one.

General automation with Twilio + serverless cloud functions is pretty good. There's a new Twilio tool for building IVRs (interactive voice response trees, like those phone menus you get when calling a cable company). The super cheap on-demand pricing for cloud functions makes this basically free to run.

I started a personal SMS/Voice service for some of my tasks like what's on [favorite radio station], Bus line directions, shops near me, etc. There's no real point yet but I feel like it could have uses that are actually helpful...

I wish there was a good recipe website where you could press a button to import it and change it / save it. Could make sharing recpies and searching for them centralized and readable instead of the current system of blog posts and images or shudder gifs.

MyFitnessPal does a not-completely-terrible job of parsing pasted or linked recipes. It's a terrible website overall tho, which hasn't been updated once since I started using it in 2012.

Paprika for iOS took me pretty far in this direction. I bought it on a recommendation from a friend so I could strip out the blog posts and index recipes, but the grocery shopping features ended up making it something I used all the time. You still share with the original URL, but I've got friends who are into cooking on it now and it's just as quick for them to save.

I am a heavy Paprika user as well.

Emailing the recipe formats the content into an email body text and doesn't require the recipient to go to the website. It also includes a .paprikarecipe attachment for direct import into the recipients Paprika app.

Ah, I guess I’ve only ever shared as a link over chat apps. Thanks for the tip!

Can you give a basic writeup of your physical archiving to digital? A friend did this and I want to do this now

I am doing this too and using ScanSnap. It turns out to be a really good and fast scanner for documents, not really photos. The included manager app works on Windows and Mac, and I have it set up to save bitmap pdf to a network share then run them thru abbyy ocr (also included.) Then I can search from manager's thumbnail browser, the operating system's search facility, or beagle.

I also use a Fujitsu ScanSnap and have it save to Google Drive automatically. The unit connects directly to WiFi so. I need for a separate device to plug in to.

There wasn't much to the paper archiving. I bought a fancy scanner[0] and already had a shredder.

To store the files on disk I keep directories marked by topic/year/month/day. The topics are stuff like taxes, finances, bills, etc. The important documents are in a couple encrypted HDDs that I use for backups. I've been thinking of doing an offsite storage like Backblaze B2 but it's probably overkill.

After scanning stuff in, everything gets shredded. There usually aren't many things to save but once they've been scanned they're there forever.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-iX500-Duplex-Scanner...

Offsite backup is not an overkill! Your HDDs can be lost in burglary, water or fire. B2 is cheap, go for it, you may regret not having offsite backup one day. And it does not require much effort, tools like Duplicati can automatically encrypt the data and send it to B2.

Won't you ever need an original document? Like something with a signature on it.

I'd love to do this as well but I'm sure at some point in the future I'll hear "sorry this won't do, we need the original".

I use https://openpaper.work/en/ - the direct scanning feature doesn't support duplex (yet) so I additionally made a small wrapper script around SANE's 'scanimage' command to scan, which also directly pipes it into Tesseract 4 (OCR). The result is a pdf file with an invisible text layer.

I then import those pdfs into paperwork in bulk. It has a label system and learns to apply labels correctly, which isn't 100% accurate but rather helpful. It also has rather quick fulltext search, which is nice. All in all, paperwork isn't perfect but it does the job well enough for me.

As a scanner, I got an Epson ES-200 (DS-310 in Europe) from Amazon Warehouse Deals (the packaging was dinged, which apparently justified a 35% discount).

I keep around the originals in a big chronological pile, rotated yearly. If I ever need an original document, I can search for it in my digital archive and find out its date. Then I can binary search for it in the pile.

The annoying part is scanning all your old stuff. Even with a fast feed scanner (mine is about as fast as Tesseract can process it in simplex, and twice as fast as the OCR in duplex, making my CPU -- and not the scanner -- the limiting factor), it just takes a lot of time.

The SMS/Voice service sounds like a lot of fun... do you have a blog post about it or how to get started? I haven't used Twilio yet.

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