I’m done with keeping stupid game boxes around. Done with keeping books around. Done with keeping DVD’s around.
I want my media to be digital. Residing either in the cloud, or on my server/NAS or preferably, both.
I’ve thrown out all my retail copies of my PC games, and either backed up the media on my NAS or repurchased from digital services like Steam, GOG.com, Impulse or Direct2Drive.
I’ve given away all my books, save a few textbooks (and those will be gone as soon as Amazon offers a nice selection digitally), and a couple of books not available digitally (and those will be gone soon too - if the publishers don’t make them available digitally I will find a way to get them by nefarious means if necessary, and pay up once finally made available legitimately in the future).
I’ve ripped all my DVD’s and Blu-rays to my NAS. These suckers still take up space, mostly because I don’t want to essentially just pirate these by giving away the discs, but they’re in a bin high up in closet somewhere where I (hopefully) won’t ever need to go ever again.
I’m done with keeping all these silly, space wasting, dust magnets around my home. All my entertainment is available to me through a number of devices, on command, some of it even through the internet.
My SO, on the other hand, has decided that they’ll take her paper books from her cold dead hands. Hers are the only DVD’s not in the NAS also. Drives me nuts.
I’m getting there. Movies are memory hogs so I keep my hardcopies at hand and rip Netflix DVDs to a hard drive (I usually delete them after viewing, is that piracy?). Music CDs are in a box up high in a disused corner of my closet and their original content is available on iTunes which is available to the home network. The living room TV is connected to the PC so it’s the movie screen for streamed, stored and DVD movies and cable.
I have a cheap flipper phone but I use it for the calendar, phone, addresses, alarm clock. I don’t see the need for internet/email service because the screen is too small for such functions to be anything better than a novelty. I still prefer to read out of paper books, but that’s probably because I haven’t exposed myself to a Kindle.
I’m getting there, also. I’ve got about half our movies and TV show DVDs ripped to a Windows Home Server, all our music, and all our photos. I don’t think I could part with my books, though. While I’ve downloaded some public domain works onto my iPad, the thought of spending $10-15 for a new book in digital form when I can get the hard copy for the same or a little more - e-books will have to get a lot cheaper before I’m willing to give up the tactile experience of reading a book.
Hell no. I have no faith in the durability and permanent availability for my purposes of “the cloud.” As far as I’m concerned, if I don’t have physical media in my possession, I don’t really have the information for the long term.
Also, the physical experience of a well-made book is unrivaled by any electronic alternative.
If any other Doper had posted this, I might not have the same mind picture right now…
To answer the OP, not really, but I’m grudgingly getting there. We bought a new hi-def tv this year, hooked up our digital cable, and are thinking about getting hi-def tv. We also bought a blu-ray player (very nice, I have to say - the picture quality really is special). I have a cellphone that lives in my purse, and an MP3 player that I use almost every day. I might think about getting a Kindle.
I’ve always been about 5 years behind the curve. I have a phone now that apparently holds a whole whack of songs, but I haven’t put any on it. That’s because I have never ripped any of my CDs yet. I have helped my kids get stuff on iTunes, but haven’t bothered for me yet.
The thing is, this all takes time and effort. If I find myself with a couple of spare hours, the last thing in the world I want to do is sit down at a PC and try to figure out all this stuff. Too time consuming.
I’m part of the way there, but not in a hurry to go much further.
All CD’s are ripped to a hard drive and hard copies in a box in the attic. Pre-2001 photos are in hard copy in albums; thereafter they’re on a hard drive. I just recently obtained my first smart phone, and it keeps proving how much smarter than me it is.
However, I still read hard copy books and magazines, and the occasional newspaper. I don’t know that I’ll ever give those up until they’re discontinued. I like the idea of a Kindle/Nook/whatever, but I know I’d dislike it in practice. Netflix movies go into the DVD player, watched and returned; no need to rip them. I have my own hard copy collection of DVDs (and a few VHS!) which I don’t see a need to get rid of.
My son keeps discs, or whatever hard copy came in, as proof that what he’s got on the computer isn’t pirated. I pretty much keep things in the state they came in because I’m lazy and like bookshelves.
My music CD’s are all ripped to MP3 format; it’s been several years since I actually played music straight from a CD. nonetheless, all are prominently displayed in a rack in the living room, providing a splash of decorative color.
Books? Wife got a Kindle for Christmas (not from me). I’ve enjoyed some of the free word games on it, but I don’t see myself reading many books on it. I like seeing books on a shelf (when I’m done reading them), and I like holding them in my hands. Moreover, the DRM policies on Kindle files is kind of disturbing: you can only install the file X number of times, where X is an unknown number determined (but not explicitly stated) by each publisher.
OTOH…Newspapers? Gads, what a waste. I watch some news on TV, read some articles on the web, and that’s enough.
Photos? In '99 I bought a flatbed scanner and scanned all my old photos. Continued to do so for another couple of years until I bought my first digital camera.
I will not trust my digital life to others. I haven’t got a backup drive on my computer, but for years now I’ve been making periodic backup DVD’s of my data (photos, MP3’s, other computer data files) and storing them off-site. It’s been a while since I backed up my MP3’s, but of course I still have all the original music CD’s, so that’s not such a big issue. Photos get backed up every six months, other more active data (email, Word docs, spreadsheets, etc.) gets backed up once a month.
It’s fairly safe to expose yourself to a kindle - no camera.
To the OP:
We’re getting there. Long ago we moved our DVD collection out of their boxes into binders that hold 250 discs each. We have 8. Now they’re not completely full and we kept the 2nd disc for those movies that had it but it’s still well over 1000 movies so our solution is to rip the movies as we want to rewatch them. I figure eventually we’ll just decide that if we haven’t wanted to see it in that long there’s no point in keeping it and they’ll rot in a closet somewhere.
I prefer online download for software purchases, and all our music has been on NAS for a couple of years.
Books are a little more complicated. I have a really hard time giving up books - every wall in my house has at least one bookshelf on it and some walls are corner to corner bookshelves. Okay, not the bathrooms but even those have a small shelf of books I don’t care if I happen to drop it in the tub and get wet. I’ve had the Ipad for 7 months now and I haven’t bought a new physical book in all that time but I can’t imagine rebuying my collection in digital format.
The “digital age” has really helped me sort out what’s really important in my life and, believe it or not, nealy everything digital is not.
I rarely watch TV or movies on TV, and if I do, plain old low-def if fine. I haven’t purchased music in any form for myself in so many years that it was probably on cassettes. Instead we go to movies in theaters or to live performances. I saw Christopher Lloyd in “Death of a Saleman” this fall and an evening with Garrison Keillor. Those aren’t even available on any media. . .
Games? hah! My daughter has a DS, but most of the games played in my family recently have been real. live games–Monopoly, Life, Uno, Apples to Apples, Cootie, chinese checkers, we even played Chutes and Ladders and CandyLand the other night, just for old-times sake.
We have shelves of books in our house. Stacks of real paper magazines that the mailman brings us once a month. And both my daughter and I have loved all the times I pulled down one of my own childhood books and have read to her the stories or poems that my mother read to me from that very same book.
I think the Internet is a wonder. I read tons of online stuff, watch short video clips, participate on a few forums, mostly hobby-related.
Other than for work or web-surfing, I don’t much need digital stuff at all.
I fight the new digital world every step of the way.
I have a cell phone, but not one of the smart phones. I won’t get one until I can no longer find the flip-top ones. I didn’t get a flip-top phone until I couldn’t buy the block ones with the pull-out antennas. I also have a computer that I use instead of a TV.
No Kindle (I may get one at some point just for travel, but if you try to take my real books, you’ll pull back a nub), No MP3 player, no I Pod, no I Pad, no anything else and no intention of getting any of it.
Music: I have more than 1400 CDs. Many of them were hard to find when I bought them, so I’m kind of proud of my collection. Though I’m sure I could find it all online these days if I had to. I’ve got my entire collection ripped to my hard drive, though.
One thing about this, though, is with a lot of the music I listen too, many of the tracks on a CD segue together, so when I rip my CDs I do so in a way to get a full piece of music. Like, if tracks 1-5 all form one piece of music, I rip them as a single MP3. As an example, from Dark Side of the Moon, “Speak To Me/Breathe/On the Run” is a single MP3, so is “Brain Damage/Eclipse.” With everything I’ve ever seen online, if I were to download the CD I’d get each track as a separate MP3. It would make me nuts to have my music playing on random and have “songs” cut off in the middle all the time. So I will continue to have my CD collection.
Books: I’d like to get a Kindle one of these days, but I don’t see myself throwing away my books. I have a lot of sci-fi and fantasy novels I bought in hardback, many of them 20 or 30 years old; at the time, I thought they might be worth something someday, though now I’m not so sure. I’ve got almost all of Raymond E. Feist’s stuff, all of the Wheel of Time books, and a bunch of other stuff in hardback; I just couldn’t bring myself to get rid of these, even if they’re worthless. Pride again, I suppose…
Computer Games: Same thing. I’ve still got all of the original Ultima series (except the first, I’ve got the '86 re-release of that one) proudly displayed on a shelf. Ditto the Might and Magic and AD&D Gold Box games. No way I’m getting rid of these!
