Rach Smith's Notes & Nuggets

I'm in a paperless trap of my own making

note : computering Added May 4, 2024

We've been running a paperless house for years now. Any paper that crosses the threshold is either scanned and filed (if important) or put in the bin. It's due to a trauma response on my part1, but it actually makes general life admin a lot easier, and keeps the house free of clutter. I've felt pretty smug about it all until recently.

We use Evernote to store all our documents. You can store thousands of PDFs and then Search within those PDFs (because OCR is built in to the product). The search is pretty fast and you can do it from any computer or phone. This reason alone is why I still pay for Evernote. In terms of actual note authoring, I think Obsidian is much better, and would probably even choose Notion before Evernote. But (as far as I can tell) other services can't let me scan, save and search PDFs as well as Evernote can, so I was fine with the subscription.

Our yearly Evernote subscription just went from $89.99 AUD/year to $159.99 AUD/year. Now I'm more than happy to [[Paying for software subscriptions is my passion|pay for software]], but a 70+% increase in a single year is taking the piss. Considering the price hike coincides with the addition of AI Features, I can't help but wonder if I'm just subsidising power users overdosing on OpenAI credits.

The price change was a reality check. Oops! I've put all of the important documents from the last 10 years in to a corporate entity's software offering and now they can charge whatever they want for me to use it!

If you know of any good cross-platform (Andy is a Windows user) software that can do the search in PDfs thing, please let me know!

This has been post no. 4 for #WeblogPoMo2024 and it is what I was interested in today.

Footnotes

  1. My mum died young, without a will. It took my sister and I months of sorting through random bits of paperwork in the house and making phone calls, before we could piece together her full financial situation. If you have dependants of any kind and you don't have a will in place, PLEASE get it sorted ASAP. ↩︎

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to share your thoughts you can reply by email or hit me up on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Comments

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  • Pawel Grzybek

    Hi Rach!

    A few thoughts, mostly random and not about this post 🤦‍♂️

    1. I absolutely love your blog, the design and fancy cursor.
    2. Good to see a comments section on your blog! I am experimenting with WebMentions on my blog, but nothing feels as good to me as good old comments section.
    3. Fuck this AI hype, this is insane. Recently software for my Logitech mouse got an update and now I have AI prompt builder assigned to a single button on my mouse - absolutely insane!
    4. Thanks for the advice and reminder about creating a will. Now I am a proud father of 7 months little angel, I appreciate your tip a lot.

  • Tao

    I have this in my starred GitHub repo: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx, but I haven't tried it yet.

  • Jane Doe

    I am very happy with Paperless-ngx :)

  • Andrew

    I was going to say DevonThink, but that is for Mac. However, perhaps you could try the server edition?

  • Lou Plummer

    You can make Obsidian work with PDFs and have them searchable via plugins. Just don't try to do a lot of that searching via mobile in the current state of the program. They promise they are working on it. (I''m an Evernote to Obsidian convert)

  • Niklas

    If you like hosting stuff, I can recommend paperless-ngx

  • Versun

    You can check out this website which lists all the note taking software that can search pdfs https://noteapps.info/features?feature=125