David Lubkin writes:
>
> That explains my recent mental sluggishness a lot...I'm up to about 35,000
> volumes. Eugene spent "several $100 just for shipping" last time he moved;
Lucky you, I'm only in 2-3 k range. I stopped just in time ;)
> I spent $700 or so just for the boxes to put the books in. (After each move
> I keep the boxes for the next move; there's a 10-foot stack of flattened
> boxes in a back room.)
I left essentially all my library but the core 60 kg or so of my books
in a former pig sty in Bavaria the last time I moved. I hope the mice
have not been too hungry for literature...
> While there's definite utility to on-line storage -- grepping through
> my library! -- paper still wins out for a lot of purposes.
Apparently, xpdf has a pdf2txt in it somewhere, allowing one to use
htdig and consorts. I don't know what to do with .ps.gz, probably
ps2txt should do. After I do a total reinstall of my Linux box (some
new hardware to integrate) I'm seriously thinking about full-text
indexing the entire /home's.
> Chief is the hedonistic, materialistic pleasure of going downstairs and
> being surrounded by *my* *own* library. (Okay, I'm shallow. At least I
> own up to it.)
I do like the smell and texture, but information is what counts. Imo
the feel of a book is certainly abstractable from the presentation,
though I insist on high quality fonts ;)
> OTOH, I had a flood last year, and lost 1000+ books. OTOOH, I have
> replacement cost insurance. I figure I'll move on-line gradually,
> as the technology gets there. Starting with journals, which are often
> already available on-line but more expensive than my typical acquisition
> costs.
I'm already purchasing my IT journals (c't, iX) with a (bi)annual
CD-ROM with the full text in HTML, as the dead tree is virtually
useless without a search function, and Science, luckily, allows one to
download all articles in .pdf. We definitely need a Science/Nature
.pdf warez swap channel...
> I'm more eager to migrate the 3000 videotapes to digital format. While
> paper has some advantages over bits, tape has none. VHS tapes make
> lossy copies, take up enormous space, have a short shelf-life, and there
> are no good storage solutions for large collections.
Then MPEG-4 is your friend. You can compress a DVD to ~0.6 GBytes, VHS
with their lousy quality should take half that much. I think you
should invest in some of the 70 GByte RAID, it is not all that
expensive anymore. I would do it with soft RAID and Linux (because I'm
cheap) and leave the box on the house network, when you migrate
content (right now I do it with only drives -- not even with a
true backup).
> Basically, I'm an information junkie. I would read 300+ newsgroups a day
> if I had the time. Even pruned to my bare minimum, I still get 1 MB of
> email a day.
What? Just 1 MByte? ;)
> Extrapolating current trends, when I get to be a Jupiter-sized brain, I
> imagine I'll need a star cluster just to store all the crap I've
> accumulated. Not even counting my collection of Keith Hensons....
Will they measure up to my limited-edition Anders Sandbergs? ;)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:37:59 MDT