Never to be replaced?

I’m not sure if this will end as a lament or an attempt at sharing my all-digital solution for work and research. I’m in the process of purging my technology drawer (less a drawer and more a graveyard, really) and came across the objects essential for my paperless and highly mobile system of ought-four:

That’s a Palm Tungsten T2, a Palm Wireless Keyboard and a C Pen C600 hand held scanner. The technologies that connect them to my computer are all obsolete, yet I miss the functionality this suite provided and don’t have a comparable system in use today.

Here’s how I used them: When I was reading, I had the C Pen at hand and rather than highlighting with a fluorescent maker, I would simply scan the line or lines of text into the scanner. I would also scan the page number that the text appeared. Once I was done reading the article or book, I could attach the C600 to the computer. I would upload these text notes, open them in Word, edit them where typos occurred and then save the document. With that saved, the scanned text became searchable using Copernic Desktop Search—and it was a great system, in part, because all you needed to remember was an idea or concept. Enter that into Copernic and up would pop all the papers and books that they appeared in. Choose a suitable quote, copy and paste it into a document and you were done. In a sense, I could almost forget the specifics of what I had read; just needing to remember that idea and then searching for that. No hunting and pecking through a book. Super time-saver.

I would also be keeping types notes of reflections on the T2—using the keyboard and Documents to Go, I would create a new file for each document and enter thoughts or ideas as I read them. Sync the document to the computer and I had a digital version that was available for searching. I also used the T2 for taking notes in class and at conferences. Again, all digital documents.

Here’s the lament. It’s not the objects that are broken in the system: I can still pop in fresh batteries and these three still work. It’s the software and interface hardware that left me behind. The C Pen connected to my computer via serial port. The serial port has long been replaced by USB (I even purchased a serial to USB adaptor to lengthen the life of the scanner. After a fresh install of XP, the adaptor stopped working because I misplaced the CD-ROM with the drivers). On the software side of things is the fact that from Vista forward, the software that C Pen needed to sync was not compatible. Similar story with the Palm T2. Now, perhaps I could jury-rig a solution involving dual-booting OSes and sussing out proper drivers. But I’m not that interested. And I feel like I shouldn’t have to.

So, in the end, I’m going to send these three off to be recycled. And where am I left now? I can still edit documents using Docs to Go on my iPhone. Sadly, with no external keyboard I’m limited to quick edits. I could start to photograph pages and then have the text recognized by OCR software, but it’s not nearly as fine-grain a solution as line by line scanning.

Long-ish story short, I now have spiral bound notebooks with hand-written reflections & quotes. Not so digital, but they don’t get left behind.