Keeping Records The 21st Century Way

(And how some of us did it in the 20th.)

When Did We Buy It, What Did It Cost?

The other day I couldn't remember when I'd gone to the garden centre last to get some bark chip mulch. I've become pretty reliant on the "little plastic brain in my pocket" and so I guess I've outsourced some memory to that device. It's inevitable. 

The Industrial Revolution ushered in an era during which mechanical devices eased mechanical workloads on workers and so (for a completely random thing that just occurred to me) workers at abattoirs needed less muscle mass once machines took over the transport of carcasses along the line. Clank-clank-clank took over from yo!-heave!-ho!

But due to circumstances I've had to move three raised garden beds (okay okay okay, the Shire has required the landlord to move our front fence back by a metre because they're upgrading the footpath outside) and that means also the spaces between the beds will need new mulch. That mulch came from the garden centre almost two years ago, but I can't remember the date so I'll try to work out what cost we'll need to be dealing with. I'll be looking at Google Photos to see the earliest photos I have of the mulch down, then work backwards from there on Google Maps Timeline until I find a trip to the garden centre, and that'll pinpoint a date and time to look at the bank statement. Five minute job. 

Records Are Records

Since I live at this fortuitous time when the above heading doesn't make most of you think about my vinyl LP collection anymore, we know that I mean Records, not records. We may not like that so many companies track us online and physically, but instead of flat-out hating on it, use it. As I said just before, it'll be less than five minutes I'll know the exact day and time - and so the garden centre can also look at their dockets for that day and we can work out what it was that we bought so we can (hopefully) re-buy it again. 

Over fifteen years ago, I was already advocating for using it rather than being archaic and antiquated. This blog article I wrote points it out. I'd read some article like "7 ways to recognise opportunity" and I sort of remember the OP suggesting you keep a camera on you to take pictures, a notebook and pencils to record stuff, and half a dozen other "things to focus you" or some such. And as I wrote in my article, keeping in contact with people, carting half a backpack's worth of paraphernalia and a spare kitchen sink with me at all times just seemed outdated even back then.

You're reading this article now, written by the guy that a mere three years earlier (2004) tried to interest several companies in developing a phone app that used the inbuilt GPS, camera(s), and other capabilities of your phone, as well as using a global database of photographs taken by others, which could then compare a photo you took (and your phone's GPS and attitude sensor data) to work out which object, building, or natural feature was in the shot you were taking and then provide you with a list of information about it. 

True story - at that time several companies were using public images, lots of code, and image manipulation software to create accurate 3D models of famous (or at least, often-photographed) objects from the various images available online, and of course there was already heaps of text and audio data tagged to many of those objects, meaning a point and shootfully asutomatic  Atlas Obscura was possible, so why not be among the first to bring it to market? 

And nope - I'm not an obscenely wealthy techbro now so you can guess how those pitches went. I still think back to those things and just have to wonder at how bad at pitching I must have been.,

Horses For Courses

But back to the point. Even back then my basic Nokia had a phone, a notepad, a camera, and a voice recorder. I was able to move all that data between my phone and my PC/laptop using a USB cable, and had my list of contacts and a basic calendar as well. It had reasonable battery life. It answered most of the points raised by the OP.

With the advent of so many connected devices - like your phone, a tablet, a laptop, or PC - and the fact that most of that data can live on the cloud and so be accessible from all those devices - it's easier than ever to combine things. Google Docs / Google Drive gives me documents I can access on my phone anywhere. 

The Calendar has a shared calendar with my wife where we note down important appointments so we don't double-book ourselves. Contacts has numbers, email addresses, bios, photos, notes - and I can link to a document or folder of documents so that before I call the handyman I can see what jobs may need to be done. I can't see the point of carrying a large notebook with me when all of that's available.

Once upon a time I'd have taken a decent camera with me to get an opportunistic reportage photo but my A23 has cameras that beat the pixels off my old old OLD Epson (I think!) digital and my Samsung point'n'shoot I carried around for years. But there are times . . .

Sorry, I had only a few minutes to throw together this overlay of an AI generated steampunk horse with a jet age silver horse, I may replace this image if I can find a bit more time to add my own art to it.

Yep. My bad impression of a "horses for courses" image.

Because chatting with my twin soul spouse just before, I realised that I do use technology as a way to take pressure off myself. I couldn't tell you off hand when we ordered and got that mulch without referring to Google. And I know that even Alphabet may not be around one day to keep it going. But for the moment it's what we have and it works and is far less intrusive than pulling out an A4 bullet journal in a howling gale at the beach and trying to hold it down to record my thoughts. Just take a damn video already Ted.

And yet I do have a small notepad and pencil stump in my everyday carry, and a notepad and pencil in the kitchen where I don't necessarily want to spread cooking oil or gravy on my phone just to note down that I need soy sauce, garlic, tinned red beans, and dried mushrooms. Sometimes, that's a more appropriate tool for the job.

The Big PS:

PS: Using my patented record searching technique, it took me about 2 minutes to find the earliest picture I had of the bark mulch laid down in the garden (1 Feb 2021) and then under a minute to find 20 Jan 2021 13:23hrs and just enough time to get a trailer load of bark mulch on the Maps timeline and another minute to find the right bank statement to show me that it cost $43. 

That has to be worth a share, link, subscription, or donation... 

Why I don't Have A Patreon

I know that most makers, bloggers, and creators use Patreon. I also knew after creating two test accounts on there several years ago that I couldn't bring myself to like it. 

I did try to like it. Back then it was pretty much the only game in town, any other similar sites had quite low profiles. But on closer inspection, there weren't many things I could actually *do* with the big P to win over patrons. (Yep, no "e" patrons.) 

There's also really not anything tangible I can offer in return for patronage. What I do the most of is blogging. About sustainability, recycling, the state of the planet, and my slow progress towards being able to develop machines and methods for recycling plastics, cardboard, textiles, food, and thin metals using inexpensive gear. Almost all my favourite activities are included in that - making small machines or adapting existing ones using metal and wood working and 3D printing, making useful products, and gardening and cooking.

That's a lot of topics, and so I have a lot of blogs to keep each topic (sort of...) separate. No point inflicting someone with sustainable / renewable / fossil fuel free articles when all they want is a recipe for green tomato chutney. But it's also a lot of work, entailing several articles a week, each of which can be hours or days to conceive, research, prepare, and do some artwork for. (Yeah I don't make good art, it's just a way to fill up white space on the blog while fitting in with the topic, but I find the processes relaxing.)

So there are a lot of costs involved in these things, and I'm not well off. So as I said above, I began to look for some way to cover some of those costs, and I'm glad I didn't use Patreon now. I do have my donations/patronage account on Ko-Fi though.

And there are quite a few dollar costs. Even my best way to keep people up to date on what I'm writing, my newsletter, is going to start costing. ("Starting February 1, 2024, Free Plans will no longer be supported on the MailerLite Classic platform.") And yes there's a way to stay free - but it involves moving everything to a different server. With no guarantee that the whole cycle won't repeat in a year, or six months, or six weeks...

I used a whole complicated structure of online apps to automate the posting of links to the articles on social media but once again if one link breaks, no link gets posted on any of half a dozen social sites so I do this manually too because I can't afford to upgrade to a scheduling site. 

But you can help with that. Share the hell out of my posts, make a one-time or monthly donation, chat with me on Mastodon or comment here.

As Tom points out on his article, Patreon over-reached with their funding rounds and are now losing the race to stay fundable. Their efforts are going into how to make money off the creators and the supporters, and when that starts to happen it's a short race to the bottom from there. Yes it was a good platform in its heyday but by the time I took an interest the "enshittification" was already well advanced.

I'm a great believer in the saying that "information wants to be free" - and also in Open Source anything - so I really didn't think about the donation patronage model. But the sheer amount of time I'm putting into this and the costs I'm already trying to bear (and more that I really need to start paying to give me back some of my time for more useful work) forced me to try monetising, to any little degree. 

I started with using affiliate links but while people read my articles about things I've made and built, they didn't seem to use the affiliate links. And since the links themselves were costing me a lot of time to gather and code (again, for a few lousy bucks I could have probably had an app that would automate the affiliate linking process) and so I stopped that experiment. 

I tried making any kind of useful monetisation with Patreon but the hoops, the regulation, the already-apparent graspiness - I just closed the tab after my 20th or 50th or 100th time trying to make something you'd enjoy and I'd be able to live with - and that was the last time I used the account. 

Anyway - please share the link to this article, maybe use the Ko-Fi or Paypal donation buttons. It would really help.