Not to say that I am finished in the other areas yet but last night for a change of pace I started working on going through my digital photos collection to root out the clutter. I am saving a pre-purge backup on my external hard drive but I highly doubt there will be anything that I bother restoring later. I’ve quickly managed to get rid of close to a gigabyte of photos by simply realizing that I had duplicates of folders with identical pictures, in one case copies of the same folder of pictures was in 3 different locations. I am also taking out the blurred and out of focus pictures and the lesser quality ones. As while it makes sense to have 20 pictures taken of you with your girlfriend on a certain day to make sure you get a good one, it does not make sense to save all of them but the best ones of each pose/location. Otherwise the lower quality pictures and just okay ones get in the way of enabling you to be able to enjoy the really good ones. When I started the cleanup my picture folder had 19.4 GB contained in 23,145 files. Not sure how low it will end up but I think it is a given that I can get it below 15 GB without any real sacrifice of material. 1 week ago

Just because you no longer HAVE to delete old files and email to to limited space does not mean that you SHOULD never delete old files and email. Last night into today I’m working through my gmail accounts and my Kindle. Even though I was only using less than .6 GB of my 10.1 GB of storage space the vast majority of it is still clutter. As lets face it if any content was so important I would have copied and pasted it into my journal and or downloaded it. But to be on the safe side I am glancing over most emails from close friends and especially ones with attachments but when I see things like an email from a friend about their “new address” from 2006 where they have since moved two times … that is a sign that things need to go. The main exception that is getting a free pass is my files label which is what I used to email files to myself that I want to have on hand as long term backup. Things like my winning NaNoWriMo draft from a few years ago, images of my family’s coat of arms that I bought and scans of favorite family photographs. I should probably start doing yearly if not quarterly or bimonthly emails of my writing archives as that is something else that falls into the category of one more remote backup copy is not a bad idea.

On my Kindle I’m taking things one step forward and not just deleting them from my device but also deleting them from my actual Kindle library. The vast majority of the books on my Kindle are free which are either older public domain classics (trivial to download again anywhere online when I want to read them) or free at the time through promotions. I have a bad habit going crazy on the sites of links to free kindle books as often they are only free for a day or two before they are no longer free but it has approached the insanity of having over 200 cookbooks on my kindle (filed away into their own section) none of which I have actually made anything out of. The few books (like less than 10 tops) that I have actually bought on my kindle are ones that I read soon after buying them but those I will keep or at least for the moment. 2 months ago

I’ve spend the past few weeks trying out various note talking and personal data management programs with a strong bias toward Free Software (Open Source/GPL) that either stores the data in plain text readable formats (TXT or HTML) or is easily exported as such. After going through numerous ones with mixed results I realized that the bulk of my data was reading notes, sermon manuscripts and journal entries. I since imported my journal into RedNotebook which is an excellent cross platform open source program with wonderful export features and plain text based file storage. What I love most about RedNotebook is that it has features common to blogs like tags and word clouds to make it even easier to find past entries when I want to review them. My sermon manuscript archives have long since been in self sorting plain text archives with date code file names (YYYYMMDD TITLE.txt). I just realized that I can just as easily use the same thing for my book notes which I am in the process of converting to (AUTHOR – TITLE.txt) formats. This book notes folder in and of itself is in a way a crude expanded commonplace book in a way. 2 months ago

Earlier today I went through the programs that were installed on my computer and uninstalled the ones that I no longer use. What was really scary was a number of programs that were installed that I know for a fact that I did not install which I quickly got rid of. One of the programs when I searched on it discovered it is classified as ad-ware that has a large amount of fake product reviews praising it online and is believed to be installed through Facebook. So it goes to show that it is a good idea to check from time to time to make sure that everything on your computer is there because YOU WANT IT ON YOUR COMPUTER and not some NON-PERSON-PERSON (AKA EVIL CORPORATION) WANTS YOU TO HAVE IT TO ON YOUR COMPUTER. 2 months ago

Today my focus has been my Chrome bookmarks which have gotten out of control again. This time around I am going through them in sections and if the material has no value then it gets deleted. If it has value than depending upon what it is it either gets downloaded (if it is an image) or gets clipped and tagged to Evernote (if an article)and then the bookmark gets deleted. A future step will be to organize Evernote to further refine it down. That way the end goal is to have my bookmarks limited to pages that I visit frequently and some type of temp folder to hold links to things that I glanced over and had enough interest to go back and read when I have the time. 3 months ago

The first thing that I will be focusing on is my “to sort” folder on my Windows desktop which currently contains numerous sub-folders a few of which in turn have even more sub-folders. The entire mess was around 2 GB when I first got started today and as of now it is down to 1.5 GB after I deleted obvious useless files and filed away a few things into the proper folders. 4 months ago