Journaling: Analog Meets Digital

[dvalliere]

I enjoy journaling with fountain pens on quality paper. I have no intention of deviating from journaling with fountain pens. Nevertheless, I have often thought that it would be nice to include more in my journal than written words (photos, small mementos, etc.) but without creating a bulky, hard-to-write-on mess. And without having to go get photo prints made all the time.

Then I had an idea. What if I create a folder in the cloud (e.g. "Journal") and whenever I have digital media (cell phone photos, video of something) that I'd like to include, I dump that media into the cloud folder in a dated subfolder (e.g. "2019-10-25 - Kid's Band Concert").

Then I make a mark/symbol/indicator in my journal entry for that date indicating that there's associated media.

When I get to the end of the journal, I dump all of the media onto a microSD card and include it with the journal. I can buy the appropriately sized SD card(s) after the journal is done and I know how much storage I need.

Does anyone have any suggestion for improving this or supplementing it?

[Charles Skinner]

Oh ---- MAN !!!!!! ---- You are way, way beyond me,--- poor earthen vessel that I am! ---- I don't even understand all that your wrote! --- Give me a good pen, and good ink, and good paper ----- and close the door, --- and I will write "like God intended" for me to write!!!!!! ----- in what many would call "foolishness" ---- in my journals!!!!! --- Since 1954!!!!! Yes! ----- A long time ago!!!! Many bottles of inks.

 

Smile, and write on into that bright tomorrow! ---- Don't ever drop ink on you wife's new carpet! ---- You may have to start writing down at the public library!!!!

 

C. Skinner

[OCArt]

My parents bought a *wire* recorder in the late 1940's and recorded my older brothers singing and telling stories. We listened to the recordings a few times and then over the years the machine got replaced with other sound systems and the wire reels also disappeared through time. Even if we still had the spools of wire I imagine it would be very difficult to find a player today.

 

I mention this because no one knows how long the technology to read SD cards will be around. I fear that in the future many families will not be able to access the digital photos they took in the past simply because of technology changes, HD crashes, and the possibility of cloud companies going out-of-business. Hard copies of photos survive technology changes. Can you have a matching folder of hard-copies??

[inkstainedruth]

OCArt is right. I have trouble moving files from my old G4 tower to my laptop (and have to save them as .pdf files first -- which means I can't update the files except by completing retyping them: they were originally done in Appleworks, which is no longer supported). And I've only had this laptop for 5 years....

As a result I don't save ANYTHING to the cloud.

​Even updates to apps can screw things up -- I have had a notice for an update to Safari marked on the Apple Store icon -- only when I did, it screwed up stuff in iPages because they were incompatible. I had to UN-install iPages and install an older version. Major PITA, and that included spending HOURS dealing with people in Apple Support (one of whom literally told me "Oh, that's supposed to be like that...." No. No it isn't. It was fine until I did the update to Safari. Oh, and the update to iMovie (installed at the SAME TIME, BTW) is ALSO "incompatible" with the update to Safari....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[clazbill]

Computer guy here - Digital storage is a moving target. The software to access files changes - old versions might not work anymore in unexpected ways. Hardware changes too. Readers for those SD cards might not be around that much longer. It's an older tech, I wouldn't doubt if it wasn't around in 3-5 years. Or it'll be a much smaller market, so readers are harder to find and only work on certain systems. Not even getting into data loss due to corruptions. That's something to keep me up at night.

 

I have a ton of digital photos from the past 10+years. The jpegs I'm not too worried about - the format is still widely used today. But I've opened old photos and ran into problems. Old disk drive was failing and I never knew it until I tried to open a file.

 

If it is a picture I really want to keep, I have multiple copies. Different devices, different locations. If I really want it to be safe it gets printed. Maybe 1 out of 50 gets the printing treatment, mostly because I'm lazy.

 

 

At least if the digital files fail you'll still have the journal entry. I have many memories that I'd forget about without the digital picture to remind me. So you have a real backup on paper talking about the thing - and that is priceless.

[miwishi63]

A decade or more ago, my father scanned all the family photos in his possession (some date back to 1880). He stored them first on CD, then on DVD, then on SD and the Cloud. He's 81. His comment to his kids: it's up to you to keep transferring them to newer storage technologies as they appear. That being said, no storage medium - including paper - is eternal, though it may last thousands of years before it is gone.

[inkstainedruth]

True words, miwishi63 -- I keep thinking of the Shelley poem "Ozymandias":

 

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert....Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculpted well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

 

Last weekend, I went with some people to the Carnegie Museum of History's Hall of Architecture, which has castings made of various sculptures and things like the facades of medieval churches, and one person remarked that the casts are probably in better condition (being only about a hundred years old) than the original works -- some of which may not have survived the ravages of two world wars....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

edited for formatting issues

Edited October 25, 2019 by inkstainedruth

[BaronWulfraed]

OCArt is right. I have trouble moving files from my old G4 tower to my laptop (and have to save them as .pdf files first -- which means I can't update the files except by completing retyping them: they were originally done in Appleworks, which is no longer supported).

 

Unless those PDF files are being generated as page IMAGES, and not scalable PostScript (PDF is a relative of PostScript), there are applications that can extract the text. You might lose the formatting though. Heck -- one can often just cut&paste from Acrobat Reader into a word processor.

 

Calibre https://calibre-ebook.com/download is capable of loading PDF files and exporting as RTF (among other formats)

[El Gordo]

There are many PDF 2 Word converters, also Google Drive facilitates conversion, as well as MS Notes if I remember correctly.

 

But for the original question, I think there are two main options:

- also include your journal written parts to the cloud (scanning), then putting all input in the correct order and printing, eventually binding, everything in a combined notebook. OK not the real stuff on the writing part, but you have everything in one paper version that avoids the digital storage dilemma.

- you can try to find somebody that improves on the (apparently dead) idea of having a small mobile printer like announced by zuta labs (some five years ago). I like the idea of being able to print complex graphs directly in (laboratory) notebooks, but it should work for pictures as well, but I think the proposed solution from zuta labs is doomed to fail for technical reasons.

[Studio97]

I dont trust the technology for "permanent" storage of photos. I print a photo for my journals to illustrate an entry. An extra photo may be printed for the portfolio. I also add drawings in my journals. And I dont care how secure a digital system is claimed to be, some 12 y.o. will hack into it.

[BaronWulfraed]

Are you using archival photostock with pigmented ink? If not, those photos may fade just as fast as bit-rot sets in on the computer archives.

[Studio97]

Are you using archival photostock with pigmented ink? If not, those photos may fade just as fast as bit-rot sets in on the computer archives.

Well, I print at retail shops and receive really gorgeous prints. Archival? Who knows. Sure, I have old color prints from 50 years ago that are not so good and color slides from the 70s which are pristine beautiful. But my current color prints for my journals will assuredly outlast me and may last decades beyond me. That's good enough. (I have old photos 100 years old which still have a useful image.)

And for computer archives...I dont own a computer. No one can hack the computer that's not there. The business of living almost requires at least a,smart phone. So FPN and the comic strips on-line are a plus. And from a retro, vintage dinosaur that I am ,,,HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

[dvalliere]

As I've been mulling on this (especially as I close in on completing my current journal and prepare to start a new one), it strikes me that:

 

With regards to photos, printing photos (perhaps via app as I go) or via a cloud reserve from time to time) is probably the best bet to avoid them becoming archaic and inaccessible over time.

 

With regards to video, I think my original solution stands. There is not format I know of that won't go obsolete in time. In digital format, they could be (batch?) converted from time to time to newer file types to before the old one because truly inaccessible.

[WalterC]

I've read science fiction for over 60 years. So far, the least believable piece of technology I've read of in SF: the hero takes a 50 year old bit of computer media plugs it into a new computer and reads it with no problem.

[BaronWulfraed]

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/why-the-future-of-data-storage-is-still-magnetic-tape

 

Pity I can't figure out a Google search for something that used to be sold in the mid-80s... Basically something about the size of a makeup compact, with a magnetic sensitive compound inside. It could, supposedly, be used to "read" magnetic tapes of the time (modern tapes probably pack too densely to visually see the bits).

[Tom Kellie]

I've read science fiction for over 60 years. So far, the least believable piece of technology I've read of in SF: the hero takes a 50 year old bit of computer media plugs it into a new computer and reads it with no problem.

 

~ WalterC:

 

I laughed out loud when I read your comment.

Very true!

Thank you.

Tom K.

[Charles Skinner]

I really wish I knew and understood what all you are talking about! ---- C. S.

[inkstainedruth]

I spent most of Sunday afternoon last weekend dealing (repeatedly) with people in Apple Support in an attempt to resurrect the custom screensaver files I had made. Apparently a lot of the images were originally saved as .pdfs, and I can no longer add them to the screensavers in system preferences (one of those little changes that Apple decided *they* knew best about, rather than the users). It was a nightmare; I dealt with eight DIFFERENT people -- with the last guy *alone* I was in the chat window with around hours, because I had to have him walk me through what one of the PREVIOUS Senior Advisors had borked on me so it could be fixed -- including one guy who had had me set up an admin test user -- which lost me both the chat window, and, later with the last guy, screen sharing. I had to reinstall the images as screenshots after going back to the website where I had gotten them to start with (which was actually an old thread here on FPN), then save the screenshots in an alias file (which is why I thought the the images were still there).

I still have to see if I can find the photos from the Museum of Flight in Seattle, which should still be on my old computer. And in the process, discovered that the connection is loose on my backup device (yes, the one they gave me as a sop after telling me that a 16 GB flash drive would hold everything when they wiped my hard drive a few years ago...). Which I may or may not be able to salvage the contents thereof.... So there hasn't actually been a backup since *OCTOBER* instead of a week and a half ago the way I thought....

I've also gotten grief from Apple Support because I don't want to save stuff to the Cloud -- because I don't want to have to PAY for extra storage there (I've given Apple quite enough of my money over the years...).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[maclink]

There's a lot of software available that one can journal with.  There's software actually designed for journalling and some with which you can do journaling among other things.  

 

The problem, as mentioned before is the longevity factor.  The more long-lasting the proposed solution, the more tedious it will be since it will be less proprietary with more open formats etc. possible.

 

With that said, one could adopt software that stores its data in an open format that can be accessed long into the future. 

 

With that said as well, the sure way to preserve it without the format/access headache is to do it analog.  The downside is that you cannot enjoy the benefits of cloud storage of your memories.  In the past, and present, people use/d safety deposit boxes for really valuable memorabilia/papers.  Digitalising and cloud storage is interesting, but it needs maintenance, not only from an access perspective, but also from a format perspective.  Not easy either way.  It's what you and your potential recipients are comfortable with.  I would go analog still since very few are savvy enough to preserve electronic data that's accessible, for generations.

[Karmachanic]

On 1/1/2020 at 2:22 AM, Studio97 said:

I dont own a computer

 

Use your abacus to access and read FPN?