Going paperless at home

1. Switching to e-statements, saving those locally if needed (or to cloud like OneDrive or Google Drive, if not as concerned about privacy)
2. Use scanner (e.g. http://solutions.ca.fujitsu.com/products/scansnap/ix500/) and/or phone (e.g. http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/office-lens-a-onenote-scanner-for-your-pocket/) to scan:
• paper receipts
• biz cards
• brochures
• manuals
• packaging with instructions, etc. on them
• miscellaneous jots and scribbles
• sections of physical books?
• hard-copy old photos?
3. Use Shredder (e.g. http://m.costco.ca/Royal-Sovereign-RDS-818C7-18-Sheet-Cross-Cut-EcoShredder.product.100090168.html) to shred statements that you can't convert to e-statements
4. Backup to external hard drive or to cloud

Evaluating Surface Pro 3: Introduction

I've skimmed a number of reviews of the Surface Pro 3 prior to purchasing my own, and generally they don't go into depth about how they use the device.  I've used the SP3 for about 40 days now, to varying degrees each day and I keep discovering better ways to make use of this multi-faceted device.  Supposedly it can replace your laptop and I want to suggest at this time that it can also replace your tablet and e-reader (smaller-sized tablet). This won't be one long article but a series that will have the tag SP3. 

Windows file system annoyances

While Windows has come a long way since when file names were restricted to 8 characters, it still has many limitations compared to operating systems like Ubuntu.  For example, the following file can't be opened by Microsoft Excel until the file name is shortened significantly.  The total length of the file path is 234 characters.

Secondly, while generally spaces in a filename are handled by Windows properly, as a developer, if I encounter a strange issue opening a file or writing to a file, I will first eliminate any spaces from filenames I am providing to my application code.