steve-myers wrote:I, personally, find PDF manuals to be of limited use to read on a PC.
I read PDFs on my PC all the time. I find them extremely useful. Occasionally if I'm doing a lot of page work, I'll turn my monitor 90 degrees and run it in portrait mode (both the monitor and the card support it), but most of the time I view stuff in landscape. If I'm writing letters then it's useful to see the document as it would look on paper but otherwise I don't bother turning it.
steve-myers wrote:They do print quite nicely, but the nature of my handicap
Whatever you've got, I've got it worse. I'm blind in one eye, have carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand making it impossible to bend my wrist (to prevent pain if I shake hands I use my left hand), and both my knees are non-load bearing so I'm in a power wheelchair. Plus I'm 6'2" and weigh about 450 pounds. You wanna trade excuses, I've got lots of them!
steve-myers wrote:makes dealing with paper quite difficult.
Paper? What is that?
Outside of the occasional incoming e-mail I need to have a copy because I have to reference it off-line (like an invitation to a conference that has an address or a reservation number) I do almost everything on-line (on the computer, not necessarily on the Internet). I have two scanners, a $30 Epson color inkjet that is light enough to pick up and take with me, that will scan 8 1/2x11 and might do 8 1/2 x 14 (haven't tried it), and a $100 HP all-in-one color print/scan/fax I got as a Christmas present two years ago that has a document feeder that will handle up to 30 pages at a time.
I'm trying something new this month. Take bank statements, credit card statements and instead of letting paper pile up or filing it, scan it into my computer and let the images pile up! Take the originals and throw them away. (Most of them I don't have to do anything with, I bury them in the recycling and most don't include account numbers (my credit union only prints the last four digits of my account number on my statement). If they do include anything I go over it with a magic marker which is cheaper than buying a shredder.)
My intent is to stop letting paper pile up so that every month or so a bunch of mail of routine items and junk mail doesn't turn into 5 pounds of paper I have to go through, sort, then dump in recycling, essentially I want to take junk mail, trash it immediately if it's not interesting, process it if it is, or scan it if I might need it. Same thing for important mail like credit cards and bank statements, and then trash those after I've scanned them. Handle a piece of paper once and either scan and trash important papers, file if I have to save it (like the agreement documents for credit cards and documents valuable in and of themselves like corporate charters, social security and medicare cards, notary public commissions and birth certificates), or trash it without saving if I don't.
Handle an incoming paper document once and get rid of it. Scan and trash, file, or trash.
Although I'm not sure what to do when I run out of disk space. Buy more I guess. I currently have 9 terabytes of disk space here, and I'm down to my last 7 1/2 available. I have a 1 TB Buffalo NAS with "only" 350 GB free where I basically store almost all my documents and everything I download, a few working documents get stored on my personal computer which has its own internal 1 TB drive. I have another computer that used to have Windows XP on it, the OS failed and I'm not sure if I want to bother rebuilding it. It has a 2 TB drive; I'm probably going to convert it to Linux, there's a distribution called AV Linux which is supposed to have really good video editing tools; I currently run it with a Live CD install on a 16 GB SD card in a $2 converter that turns it into a USB jump drive. Connected to the machine I am using is a 3 TB USB drive that i backed up the files on the 2TB and the Buffalo NAS and anything on this machine that's important, it has 1.78 TB free.
I also own a Macintosh OS X desktop, a 32-bit PowerPC I got for $100 plus shipping so I could get my feet wet with OS X 10 for not a lot of money. I was able to download the USB drivers for a $9 Tenda wireless adapter and install Firefox and VLC on it, plus a few other things, so it sits out in the living room, and the only two things plugged into it were a power cord and the network adapter. When I need to use it I either connect to the Apache web server running on it or I connect to its desktop using VLC over my network. I later got a really good deal on ebay on an external hard drive, since it "only" has a 50 GB drive, I have a 2TB USB plugged into it. So now it has 3 things. I did have to buy a(n expensive $30) monitor cord so I could set it up, but now it runs fine with no mouse, keyboard or monitor, I do everything through a VLC window on my Windows desktop.
steve-myers wrote:In any event, who wants to print reams of paper?
Print reams of paper? I think I run about 5 pages a month not including envelopes. I do almost everything electronically. I have to mail about 6 envelopes a month, so I print nice personalized ones.
steve-myers wrote:The
IBM Manuals link provided by Prino mostly has Bookie reader manuals
I think the electronic manuals IBM issued are called "Book Reader." Isn't Bookie Reader what you do when you're decoding betting slips?
steve-myers wrote:accessed through a web server that are much more usable than PDF to read online, though there are some annoying ommisions. The last I checked, for example, z/OS V2R1 manuals aren't there.
z/OS V2R1 information center (September 2013):
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v2r1/index.jsp and I believe the manuals there are accessible through a web interface in "tree" form. (Tree as in "drill down" not as in "the dead items paper is made from.")