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I bought my first CD in 1983.\u00a0 Since then I have purchased hundreds of CDs.\u00a0 Even though CDs are suppose to be “permanent” recordings, I have had a few\u00a0that were\u00a0destroyed in accidents.\u00a0 For this reason, I digitize all my music and store the originals in a safe (cool and dry) location.\u00a0 My car plays digitized music (MP3 and WMA).\u00a0 I also listen to music on a portable player and on my computer connected to a surround sound system.<\/p>\n
I have a database for all my music.\u00a0 It makes it easy to find anything I own.\u00a0 I have a separate database for my DVD collection.\u00a0 I take the DVD out of the original case and store the disks in a\u00a0disk notebook.\u00a0 The original cases go into my attack storage.\u00a0 All the disks fit in a thick folder right under the TV.\u00a0 I numbered the slots in the folder and use the slots as identifiers in the database.\u00a0 If you want to watch Back To The Future<\/a>, it is in slot 93.\u00a0 I keep these databases online accessible via the house Intranet.\u00a0 I can find one of my songs or movies in a few seconds.<\/p>\n All of my pictures are in digital format.\u00a0 All my documents are also digitized.\u00a0 My calendar is web-based.\u00a0 My contact directory (addresses and phone numbers) of colleagues, friends and family is computer based.<\/p>\n Every time I burn data to a disk (CD or DVD) I have a program that records all the file names on the disk and saves them to a database. In the future, if I need a file from an archive disk, I can search the database and find the number of the disk holding that file.<\/p>\n I decided to digitize everything years ago.\u00a0 Having all this information in digital format makes it easy to store, locate and copy.<\/p>\n Here is an interesting thought from Charlie Stross.<\/p>\n \u201c10 Tb is an interesting number. That\u2019s a megabit for every second in a year \u2014 there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That\u2019s enough to store a live DivX video stream \u2014 compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution \u2014 of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry \u2014 a heart monitor, say, a running GPS\/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send \u2014 onto that chip, while I\u2019m awake \u2026 Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it\u2019s all indexed and searchable. \u2018What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?\u2019 Think of it as Google for real life.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n All of this will work because the data\u00a0will be in digital format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I bought my first CD in 1983.\u00a0 Since then I have purchased hundreds of CDs.\u00a0 Even though CDs are suppose to be “permanent” recordings, I have had a few\u00a0that were\u00a0destroyed in accidents.\u00a0 For this reason, I digitize all my music … Continue reading