Paperless - closer than you think

I don't suppose we'll ever be completely paperless. At least not in the near future. But the opportunities to reduce our dependency on pulverised wood are there. Wherever possible I do all my transactions online, and hardly see a paper bill these days. E-books mean that bulky books are fewer, although I have to say I like to read a real book rather than an e-book. If I see anything online I want to make a note of, I capture the screen or web page, or just a part of it to Evernote, one of my favourite apps with a couple of clicks and it's there and available for posterity, across all my devices - my desktop iMac, my Macbook, my iPad and my iPhone, or indeed online from any internet connected computer.

It's the little scraps of paper that are annoying, or those old photos. However, there is a solution. I've been using a Doxie One  from Doxie for a year or so and I love it. It's a small portable scanner, mains or battery powered that enables you to scan in sheets up to A4 size to an SD card and then import them to, well, wherever you want to using the desktop Doxie application. It's brilliant, and I've cleaned out all but the most important of documents (birth certificates etc) from my "filing". I've never had less paper. Anything that does come on paper now that I need to keep gets "Doxied" and then shredded.

Not only is the hardware great, their customer service is exceptional. A few months after getting my Doxie One, I emailed them to mention that although the scanner was working fine, occasionally the scanner wasn't always being recognised when I connected it to the Mac via the usb cable (not a major problem as I nearly always use the SD card to transfer the files, but slightly irritating nonetheless). They emailed me back with a few suggestions that didn't work. Then they said don't worry we'll just send you a new one - and they did. No questions, no hassle, just "here, have a new one". They said keep the old one (even though it was still working fine apart from that one occasional gripe).

I'm so impressed that I've just upgrade to their latest version - the Doxie Go wireless. Like it's little brother but wireless so I can now transfer files from it's inbuilt memory without any cables or SD card swapping. The photo below shows how diminutive this is - a CD is provided only for scale comparison, not to say anything about my taste in music. If you like gadgets and have a bunch of paper and old photos lying around you want to scan, I'd recommend this little marvel, or indeed any of it's siblings.

Doxie Go Wireless