Creatrope

I overhead a somewhat sad story this afternoon about a person who was injured and unconscious in a crash. (One of) the initial instincts of the people who can to assist (after summoning help) was to see if there was emergency contact info on or about the person.

They checked the cell phone of the injured person and found the usual list of random contact names – none were labeled obviously to indicate who to contact.

The person talking stated that it was probably a good idea to put a contact labeled ‘emergency’ in the cell phone, and that few people would think of doing that. I concurred it was a good idea and I put a contact labelled ‘emergency’ in the family cell phones shortly thereafter.

Emergency contact info in your wallet or purse is obviously a great idea as well. Putting it in your cell phone is not a substitute for that.

One hint – depending on how the cell phone orders or labels the contact in the directory, you might find the cell phone displays ‘emergency’ for the same name that is one that is often dialed in non-emergencies. While not a huge deal, it’s a bit annoying. You may need to alphabetize the emergency contact with or without a starting special character to avoid this behavior.

I’ve been enamored of free pdf virtual ‘printers’ like cutepdf for some time. It’s only recently that I realized that this tool and ones like it have a spot in a decluttering. This tool create what looks like another printer for your computer. To use it, it’s as simple as just selecting it as the target printer (rather than your normal hardcopy printer).

The main advantage of printing to PDF rather than HTML is that you get a single file with all the resources embedded in it, rather than a bunch of separate files and directories like you get when you save HTML. If the PDF file looks good and complete after ‘printing’ then it will stay that way. With an HTML ‘printout’ you need to be sure you’ve gotten the whole viewable page and are not just looking at data being brought in from the website via a link – which could change or disappear. There are nice ‘web whacking’ tools that can do this, but if I’m not going to actually go back and try to navigate the pages, then printing it out as PDF makes an easier to compile a complete document.

I also like the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) that printing preview of the PDF provides.

Print HTML receipts to PDF files instead of HTML – many websites provide printable receipts. Rather than adding to your clutter, print out the receipts to the PDF printer and keep in an online file entitled ‘receipts’.

Save HTML web pages – Bookmarking doesn’t guarantee that the page will resemble anything like the one you’re seeing now. By saving the page as PDF, you have a permanent archive of what the page looked like at the time.

Save Financial Reports – Your stock-trading website probably produces some nice charts and graphs. You could print them out and compile a notebook from them – or just keep the PDF files you get from printing them in a directory.

Saving manuals as PDFs (most are already in PDF) allows you to throw away the manual, travel tips, travel documents is also handy.

If you’re saving a whole magazine, newspaper or other print material just for one article, rip out the pages (perhaps including the cover), scan it in, then ‘print’ it into PDF.