Digitizing the family
Em and I are deep in the process of digitizing our life. Well, I am, and Emily is graciously helping out. I think geotagging thousands of Flickr photos is time well spent. Nemo is not very entertained by this. Emily, well, she plays with Nemo so he doesn’t whine so much.
So what is it that I am doing exactly? I want all household information and media available anywhere, anyplace, securely. It’s quite a daunting task, both logically and technically. But I think it’s doable. It’s all a part of Em and my philosophy to shrink our life into something smaller, simpler and easier to manage.
I’d let you know how exactly I am doing this, but because it needs to be secure, I am only going to tell you about a few choice bits. Technology has progressed to a point where just about everything we need is accessible on the go and more useful than was unimaginable 10 years ago.
Over the last two years, we’ve transitioned the home from PC to Mac. I’m able to watch TV shows together with Emily even when I travel thanks to the <a href="http://us.slingmedia.com/page/home" target="
_blank”>Slingbox and Replay TV. Our photo albums are geotagged and on Flickr. I’m in the process of digitizing all our music and photos (only 200 CDs and 300 pictures to go!) and we both have video iPods to take it on the road. We’ve inventoried all our books, DVDs and games through Delicious Monster’s Library. Even our grocery lists are online.
There are some limitations. I still have yet to find a good video service, so our iPods will do. (I was an early YouTube adopter, but it’s too MySpace now.) Our DVDs and games are still on disks, but I think I can move all our movies to a central server within a year. We’re going to start with archiving our raw wedding video footage in high-def. Another item on the list to tackle is document management.
I’ve done all this all on free or very inexpensively. The only expensive item will be the huge drives it will take to store all this data. The wedding footage alone is 500 GB. Add RAID 1 mirroring to that and we’re talking about 2 terabytes to start. Ouch. But hey, when we pick up and leave this place, we won’t have to worry about CDs, DVDs, DVD players, photo albums or other little bits and pieces. We’ll keep you posted on how this all goes.
Posted on October 8, 2006, in Business. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
And what do you plan to do with all the non-digital remnants? In order to not have to move DVDs and CDs, you would need to get rid of them (and thus move them).
Well, at least moving ‘em this last time will mean not having to move ‘em anymore in the future. So, if the Huhs move more than one more time in the future (and, judging by past performance, there’s a good chance of that), then _this_ move’d be worth it just for that alone. But who to leave all that media to?