My Life 3.0 - Scene 2

I have given much thought to how to be most able to travel and maintain access to information, photos, and products. Rhonda got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas, this is a promising bit of technology, the ability to buy and stores books online, and download and carry many books at once. Amazon Unbox Video allows us to buy a video and download and watch it at any time. And S3 allows us to securely store data files. Google Documents allows us to store text and spreadsheet documents from any web browser. I am a big fan of the ability to edit and view from anywhere without installing software.

Currently we own dozens of shelves of books. This does not lend itself well to either fitting into a smaller condo nor to traveling. I see two issues here, first knowing what books we had read, this is useful for reference and information retrieval. If I recall that I had read something, simply looking at an inventory list of book can aid in recall of the material. This challenge can be solved by LibraryThing.com. Using a CueCat barcode scanner I can capture the ISBN numbers of the books I currently own. This book inventory will also help me in deciding what books to part with. We are somewhat determined to purchase new books in either the Kindle or MobiPocket formats. No, we are not completely sold on digital books over the overall experience of paper. But, a digital book can be accessed from wherever we might be living.

For audiobooks, I purchase from Audible.com. Audible requires the installation of a download manager to load books to a computer. It also offers the permanent storage of purchased books.

For digital music in the past we has used iTunes for music purchases. Moving forward we will be using Amazon MP3 since it is higher quality and not copy protected. This means less hassles getting content onto current and future devices.

Photograph storage is still a bit of a problem. After years of travel and skydiving with a camera, I have amassed boxes of printed photographs. I have the negatives stored in a single fireproof safe. Someday, I'd like to have these scanned and stored digitally. The sum storage of all this film stored digitally would be minimal when compared to the storage of photos taken digitally. Currently these total 150GB. If I store these onto Amazon S3 at a cost of $0.15 per GB per month, these will cost $22.50 monthly. Hopefully by the time we are ready to travel there will be cheaper options. Of course as pixel counts continue to increase this storage challenge.

We currently have 2 common digital picture frames. These are nice as they display many images in the space of a single frame. It seems the most promising option is to gather the best pictures taken, and storing copies into another folder. These collections are ones we will use for upload to photo sharing sites or pictures frames.