Friday, November 19, 2010

Going digital


I started a project to convert all the old family slides to digital photos.  It's just the start of a winter-long project to reduce various things I use to digital form.

The slides will be a slow project as I will pick and choose which ones to keep and which ones to skip.  Those slides are from the days when you had to get the film developed and for whatever reason, we kept every single shot -- good or bad.  But I'll be more selective.  I find I need to do a little color correction, too, due to the age of the photos.  The little converter I bought is cheap and doesn't do a very good job with any shots that contain a lot of white.  I'll set those aside and find another method of converting them -- may have a photo shop do them for me.  Once done, I can just store the slides themselves until I feel ready to throw them out, and I can get rid of all those reels that hold them now.

Another project is to convert CDs and vinyl to MP3 which will allow me to build play lists and to play through an iPod dock station, making my music more accessible and convenient.  Putting CDs in and out of a multi-disk player is slow.  Isn't that funny to think of that as slow?  I bought a USB turntable that will allow me to move some of my favorite old vinyl to MP3 as well.

Then there's that huge collection of CD's I hauled over from the ex's house after he died.  Most of them I don't want, but there's enough value in all of that to make it worthwhile to catalog and sell on eBay or some other way.  So that I will do as well.

Perfect jobs for cold winter nights when we just want to stay in.  The first really big winter storm is predicted for this weekend.  I'll get photos I'm sure.  Happily, I had Alberto and the guys here this week to clean up all the leaves.  As usual, they left my yard looking like a million bucks, cut down all the dead plants, raked the mulch, even cleaned the rain gutters and the street gutters.  All I need to do is cover the patio furniture now.

I feel prepared for winter this year.  Tonight I'll do all the shopping for Thanksgiving week in case I find myself really snowbound over the weekend.  And then I can sit in my cozy house and work on my projects and watch movies to my heart's content.

2 comments:

JBinford-Bell said...

I hope with all this work planned that you have a good backup system(s). I don't know that I will ever trust just one way ever again.

Once you have all the photos digital it will be easy to share with the others in them. Nice.

Bekkieann said...

I do backup important files on CD but even that is vulnerable. I am diligent about work backups but those are on company servers. My home files are not that important and I don't worry as much with one backup.