The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Magazines

Magazines - How do you store them ?

How do you store your magasine ?

I got a bunch of mags and right now I do not know if I should keep or throw them away.

I just wonders if there are might be some articles that I need to refer to in a couple of years.

What do you do with your mags ?
do you keep them or lets say you throw them away every 3 years?

FairLight
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Throw them, you won't miss them. Or at least I haven't. Especially technology mags get outdated so fast.

Mike
Saturday, October 11, 2003

I throw them away without even reading them. Most of the time I don't even take the plastic off of 'em -- they go straight into the trash. I don't even recycle them.

.
Saturday, October 11, 2003

In Adobe Acrobat. I find the articles I want, cut them out at the binding with a razor blade, and scan them into Acrobat. It only takes a few minutes per article, and I get to keep what I want with no physical storage space.

Troy King
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Many of my favorite tech magazines regularly release CD-ROM compilations of back issues.

You'll most likely never remember which issue a particular article was in, anyway. Just put the magazines on a shelf for a year or two, then buy the latest compilation CD when it comes out.

Optional next step: try really hard to find a library that's interested in your old magazines, then get frustrated and recycle them or sell them on eBay.

For example, both Doctor Dobb's and Embedded Programming are available on CD at http://store.yahoo.com/ddjcdroms/

Actually, looks like DDJ has recently started a subscription + online access program where you can get access to the entire archive online with a subscription. I might need to look into that.

-Mark

Mark Bessey
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Similar to Troy, I use my digital camera to photograph the pages I'd like to keep, then throw the magazine away or give it to someone else who might be interested. It's quicker than cutting and scanning.

Darren Collins
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Actually, I had to trash all my Wired, Embedded Systems, Circuit Cellar, Scientific American and Technology Review magazines since the piles were collapsing on me. Also, the walk-in closet and bookshelf turned unusable.

Enlarge
Saturday, October 11, 2003

At the risk of stating the obvious, many magazines keep searchable archives of their old articles on their web sites. It's often easier to find an old article through a search engine then by hunting through stacks of old magazines.

Robert Jacobson
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Digitally - I scan in my magazines using a sheet feeding scanner - Put them in one side, and then come back later and scan the other for the stack.

Then I THROW AWAY the original. I'm a packrat by nature, so I have to keep myself on track with this. I store them as images and OCR'ed on a DVD and I'm still working on eactly the best way to organize them.

Unfocused Focused
Sunday, October 12, 2003

It took me a whole night to scan in my first stack once I'd decided on that storage method, but now it's easy to keep up since they just trickle in monthly. That first pile took a while to get in, though.

Troy King
Sunday, October 12, 2003

For those who take pictures of their mags,
this is actually a neat idea.

I got a Sony DSC75, do you think that's good enough
to take a readable picture of the article ?

Once you've taken a shot of the article,
it becomes a .JPG file, ideally what I would love to do
is perform a string search on those
articles.

Is there a way to transorm a .JPG into a .PDF file or a .DOC
file ?

I don't how far software have gone into typesettings recognition when it's embedded in a Jpeg File

FairLight
Sunday, October 12, 2003

Office XP and 2003 both come with an OCR program that should be able to OCR a JPEG file. Although it is a bit lacking in the accuracy department.

Chris
Sunday, October 12, 2003

yup, toss em. now, its all online

pre-internet, I used to have piles and piles of em. I even made an access database with all the topic keywords (optimization, etc) for the main articles in each issue, so I could easily search for and refer back to an article ..

gosh darn, I cant help but laugh when I think about that. I was so into my programming career, its not even funny.

Bella
Sunday, October 12, 2003

But make sure you keep a few of the old ones around. 10 years from now it'll be fun to see how their predictions were true/untrue and how tech's changed since then.

It encourages nostalgia and makes you feel older.

Mickey Petersen
Sunday, October 12, 2003

Well, I'm working my way back to the old ones - I've got a Compute! in the queue at some point.

Anyone know of a demand for Apple IIe basic code listings? :-)

(I still don't know if I'm going to have the heart to destroy my old Amiga RKM's - that IS meorabilia more than information.)

Unfocused Focused
Sunday, October 12, 2003

Toss 'em. Those reporting that they scan or photo them have got to be kidding.

pb
Sunday, October 12, 2003

pb - not kidding at all. I don't scan the whole magazine. I just scan the articles I want. It's usually just one or two articles per mag, and even cheap scanners (I think this one cost $120) scan pretty quickly in full-color mode. The resulting Acrobat files run 2 - 5M on average. They can also be OCRed automatically by Acrobat for content indexing, but I almost never go that far.

Troy King
Sunday, October 12, 2003

PB, not kidding at all. And I scan the whole thing - it's actually easier for me to do that and then go back and trim as I need the parts.

I picked up a refurbished Brother Multifunction printer at Fry's for less than $100 - the printer isn't that great, but the scanner has a 30 sheet feeder that'll take up to about 60 pages in practice. I just slice off the binding (perfect or staple bound, it doesn't matter) drop the mag into the bin, and start it scanning. When it gets finished with that, just do the same for the second side (no duplexing on this model,) interleave the results so it's numbered right and save it out to a B&W class 4 multipage TIFF. Office 2003 will OCR it on the fly when it indexes and I'm good to go on most of it.

I'm still working through my backlog, but it's already cleared out a huge section of my bookcases - and more to come. I can get the information, but I don't have the boxes of paper. Very nice to have that amount of reference material availible on one DVD.

Unfocused Focused
Monday, October 13, 2003

Ancient issues of Byte magazine are the best.

8 inch disks, companies who have long since gone under, etc.

But I have an issue of Byte where there's a multi-page Jameco advertisement in the back, and they are actually still around. ;)

Flamebait Sr.
Monday, October 13, 2003