sealed abstract class drew {}

1. Make sure Evernote is set up to export to your documents directory (File->Print->PDF->Save PDF as…)
2. Make sure you don’t have anything important that would match “\d+.pdf” in ~/Documents
3. Launch evernote, highlight the notebook, highlight the first note
4. Run the applescript below
5. Tell it how many notes are in the notebook

set workingPath to (path to documents folder as Unicode text)
set dialogResult to display dialog ¬
	¬
		"How many times to loop?" default answer "1"
set sTimes to text returned of dialogResult
repeat with i from 1 to sTimes
	set filename to ((workingPath & i as text) & ".pdf")
	tell application "Finder"
		if exists file filename then delete filename
	end tell
end repeat

tell application "Evernote"
	activate
end tell

delay 1
repeat with i from 1 to sTimes
	tell application "System Events"
		keystroke "p" using command down
		repeat until window "Print" of process "Evernote" exists
		end repeat
		tell process "Evernote" to click menu button "PDF" of window "Print"
		tell process "Evernote" to click menu item "Save as PDF…" of menu "PDF" of menu button "PDF" of window "Print"
		repeat until window "Save" of process "Evernote" exists
		end repeat
		keystroke i as text
		keystroke (ASCII character 3)
		repeat while window "Save" of process "Evernote" exists
		end repeat
		tell application "Evernote" to activate
		keystroke (ASCII character 31)
	end tell
end repeat
set outputName to POSIX path of (workingPath & "export.pdf")
set command to "python '/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py' -o " & outputName

repeat with i from 1 to sTimes
	set sPath to ((workingPath & i as text) & ".pdf")
	set command to command & " " & POSIX path of sPath
end repeat
--return command
do shell script command
repeat with i from 1 to sTimes
	set filename to ((workingPath & i as text) & ".pdf")
	tell application "Finder"
		if exists file filename then delete filename
	end tell
end repeat

My last article on book scanning did so well that I think it’s time to expand it to a whole series on Lifehacking.  What do I do to cut through the madness and get things done?

Dropbox is a cloud service that keeps all my files in sync across all my computers.  It exposes itself as a folder on my filesystem, and the folder contents are synced to the Dropbox cloud and pushed to all my computers.  It’s thoroughly cross-platform (Win, Mac, Nix).  Here’s how I use Dropbox:

• Git repositories.  All my code for all my projects is in Dropbox.  I can be working on some feature, walk out the door, and have everything with me: no commits to do, no git pushes to do, everything exactly in sync.  My working directory over here is exactly my working directory over there.  I don’t have to do meaningless commits just to move code between machines.
• Flash drive replacement.  90% of the flash drive use cases are “take this PDF to the lab and print it”.  With Dropbox, I just put the PDF in there somewhere, and download it with the web interface on a lab computer.  This has saved my behind on several occasions when I’ve realized “Holy crap, I don’t have that paper…”  Dropbox is 30 seconds away.
• Poor man’s backup.  I back up my entire music library with Dropbox.  As a bonus, it syncs to all my machines.
• Poor man’s web hosting.  By dragging a file to the “Public” folder, it automagically is hosted via a publicly-accessible URL.  This is great for one-shot e-mail attachments that probably won’t fit on the recipient’s server.  I’ve got a really cool hack involving KavaTunes that hosts my entire music library over Dropbox via a sweet web interface:

KavaTunes + Dropbox = win

• Revision control.  Every file in Dropbox is revisioned.  With a few clicks, I can revert a file or folder to a previous snapshot:

• I can even restore deleted files (going back pretty much indefinitely)
• Collaboration – multiple users can share folders and the changes are synced instantly.  This is great for collaboration on school projects, etc.  I’ve even used Dropbox as a central source control repo on occasion, when I needed something super lightweight.  Things *can* get a little hairy if your client software (Powerpoint, I’m looking at you) doesn’t notice a change somebody else wrote to the disk, but Dropbox’s revision system insures that if something does go wrong, no data is ever lost.
• Awesome diff system:  Dropbox’s syncs are so efficient you’d never believe it.  It is *very* good about only syncing the deltas.  If you change 3kb on a 1GB file, it will cost you 3kb in bandwidth.  Every time.
• Impossibly fast syncing.  On the backend, your files are divided into ~64kb chunks, which are hashed.  If somebody has already uploaded that 64kb chunk, you don’t have to.  This means that if you drag in an Ubuntu disk image, or something that’s already in somebody else’s Dropbox, it uploads instantly.  There are tons of posts in the forums from new users going “WTF!  That file was 1GB!  Why didn’t it upload!” when it’s perfectly safe and sound, because somebody else beat you to the punch.
• Local caching: If you delete and re-add files, or move lots of things around, Dropbox will simply replay the shell commands on your other machines.  Deleted files are cached locally for awhile, so you can re-add them without any bandwidth cost.

And best of all, Dropbox is free!  You get a 2GB Dropbox folder on all your machines for nothing.  Paid plans are available for 50GB and 100GB folders.  And you can always shoot them an e-mail if you’re crazy  like me and need more disk space.

If you’re anything like me, you read a lot. A lot. I’ve got a collection of around three thousand books. I’ve given up all hope of taking them with me when I move (semi-nomadic student; they don’t even fit in my car). I’ve got a smaller subset of my favorites that follow me around wherever I go–but we’re talking thousands of pounds of paper.

When I was younger, I used to read whole books at a time, but I find that now I primarily use them for reference. Being well-read and having a large supply of material to draw from lets me churn out thoughtful papers in record time. But most of my books aren’t really in the “reference” genre–I might remember a quote by Mark Twain, but who knows which of his twenty or so books I might have to read through before I find it.

Sure, I could bite the bullet and get a Kindle (or just use the iPhone app), but I’m no fan of DRM.  I want to be able to grep and parse my books; I want to read them from various computers I have lying around the house, and I want the images and technical drawings to render well.  I read a lot of old, obscure books that Amazon and Co. will never get around to digitizing.  Plus, I’m a poor college student, who doesn’t want to re-buy every book he already owns in digital format.

So, with a little trepidation, I decided to embark on a quest to scan and digitize every book I own. I’ve been at this in my spare time for several months now, and I’ve got it down to a science. It’s really not as bad as you might think once you know the pitfalls to avoid.

Step 1: Get the cover off. This is often the trickiest part of the entire enterprise. Paperbacks covers can be carefully peeled off (I’ve torn a few). Hardbacks will require you to slice through the cover lining.

Step 2:

Take the bound pages to a printshop and get them to cut it into loose-leaf pages. Most printshops will cut a book for about a quarter; I found an on-campus bookshop that does it for free.

Step 3: Scan. I found an awesome scanner for my mac, the ScanSnap S510M (no, I am not getting paid):

This thing has the smallest footprint I have ever seen, and it burns through my textbooks faster than can be described. I can burn through a small paperback in 5-6 minutes, and large reference works like von Mises’ thousand-page Human Action over the evening news. I got it for a mere $350 refurbed on NewEgg, and it’s the best $350 I’ve ever spent.  Don’t let its cute appearance fool you, this scanner is SERIOUS.

4. OCR. OCR software for Mac is notoriously bad. The stuff that comes with the ScanSnap is actually quite decent, although rather slow. Fortunately it requires no interaction of any kind, so you can just let it run and come back later. For text-and-illustration kinds of things, I leave it on “text and images only.” There’s another option that embeds the text in an invisible layer under the page image, which creates much larger files, but you have the original page to refer to, which works well for complex diagrams and such. I’ve also looked at both ReadIris and OmniPage, and have been rather unimpressed.

5. Binding: For awhile, this was the slowest part; I would add ten pages or so and apply some glue, wait a few hours to dry, repeat. Then I discovered gorilla glue. This stuff (not the wood glue crap, the real glue) is seriously strong–strong enough to bind everything with just one or two layers. I stack all the pages in between two phone books, clamp them with some c-clamps, and apply a layer of Gorilla Glue:

In an hour or so, my book is bound more firmly than it was the day it was printed. Another dab of glue puts the spine on, and that’s about it! Finished result:

Grepping through Harry Potter:

Reading on my iPod with Stanza:

Spotlighting for “Narnia” in my (still-incomplete) library:

Did C.S. Lewis ever say anything about the Snow White Disney movie?

Let’s hand my phone to a friend so he can see what books are on my shelf:

I should be on track to digitize EVERYTHING by this summer.  What I’ve learned:

• Having my whole library on my iPhone vastly changed my definition of “reading time.”  Now, I can catch a paragraph while I’m waiting at the checkout line.  It’s one tap to bring up the last book I was reading with the correct page.
• I find myself reading–really reading–more than I’ve ever done since childhood
• Spotlighting a personal library is ridiculously powerful.  You feel almost giddy.  ”I don’t know the frequency of EM fields, but I did scan this electricity textbook…”  BAM, there’s the answer.
• You start doing random searches, and the results are scary.  How many books reference the wood chuck chuck question?  Let’s graph my books by publishing date.  Can we use a bayesian network to classify my books by genre?  Can we write a script to rip cover art from Amazon.com?  The possibilities are endless.