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this is a true revolution we are seeing – one for the ladies

My wife, whom I dearly love, said to me this morning “I’ve had an idea”. Ordinarily on hearing those words my body is programmed to sit down in a safe place and surround myself with cushions to stop me getting hurt when I fall over. As it happens we were still in bed so I was already in position, so to speak.

She continued: “I think I’m going to get rid of all my recipes and just use the iPad in the kitchen”. She has dozens of folders containing recipes collected over the years. They spill over the shelves in our utility room and are now apparently looking a real mess. Apart from the fact that the utility room will look tidier her point is that most of these recipes are now available online and despite the fact that she has spent hours lovingly filing them into categories – chicken, beef, bread, welsh rarebit – you get my drift – it is still far quicker for her to find the right recipe using the iPad.

I can see the comments coming. “that’s obvious”, “whey didn’t she think of this earlier” etc etc. This may be the case for the savvy internet users amongst you (ie pretty much everyone reading this blog) but there is a section of society that didn’t grow up memorising the html links on the side of the pram.

She does have a laptop but that is rarely used if the iPad is available because of the boot up time and the portability. In fact the laptop serves more as a media server for watching iPlayer on the TV screen (at which we all marvel 🙂 ).

So there you go. The digital revolution has passed another major milestone – 2012 the year the paper recipe disappeared from common usage. I would welcome inputs highlighting similar evidence of societal change from around the world wide web.

PS I realise that I was treading a somewhat fine line with the title “one for the ladies”. However in our house Anne won’t let me do much cooking as I take far too long and make far too much of a mess and likely polish off half a bottle of red wine whilst doing it. Not being very worldly wise I have made the assumption that this is a normal state of affairs. If I am wrong I apologise but the headline stays :).

 

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

9 replies on “this is a true revolution we are seeing – one for the ladies”

The only problem with going Digital-Only is that you confine history and content to EPROM’s / RAM where data could, in the future, all too easily be lost with the passing of a major solar flare (EMP) or some other event like a loss of electricity supply. Sure you could stick it all in the cloud and back it up but eventually something will wipe those too. I suppose even paper is fallible but strangely a well stored bit of paper or book can last for hundreds of years, will the same be true of our digital lives?

Not that future Trefor generations will not those recipies but you never know. One day the written word could be worth its weight in gold.

I have been thinking of backing up my stuff onto hard copy. Not the trefor.net content but the philosopherontap.com posts. The longer I leave it the bigger the job.

I’m offering an anti-digital viewpoint here!

While I love my iPad, I cannot see myself ever succumbing to the temptation to put all of my eggs into one digital basket. I still buy cookery books, and, while I do look for recipes on the internet, I copy them down and put them into my recipe card file. Sad? Perhaps, but I live in fear of the iPad popping its clogs and taking all of my data with it. Paper is infinitely more stable. The fact that I am incredibly clumsy means I wouldn’t dare take my iPad into the kitchen. Finally, I am very fond of my bookshelves and my house would be a sorry sight if I got rid of the reams of paper (and hundreds of CDs, for that matter) that I have amassed over the years!

I like cookery books too. In fact I have lots of books in general and wouldn’t want to replace them with a kindle. However I am fully supportive of the iPad as an alternative to lots of scraps of paper. It does get used in the kitchen a lot and has a protective screen cover to avoid spillage problems. That’s all:)

One additional note in response to Mark. We did actually go to the effort of printing an album with 440 of our best family photos in it. Took me weeks to narrow it down to 440 but at least we now do have a hard copy of those just in case…

Evernote is a great app for iPad particularly for recipes as you take all that paper and scan it to PDF and upload it to Evernote then add tags and categories to it for easy searching. I use it for receipts mainly but it’s also useful for taking a picture of the car wash opening times for example, add a few relevant tags and there you have a visual note of the times. If anything it’s just a bit different! The premium version even has OCR so you can search text within a PDF which is ideal for those “what can I make out of these ingredients” situations..

Just to add my ten pence worth on the digital/non-digital debate, I think the question for everyone is how far do you go to protect your data? Yes you can have hard copies but your house could catch fire, you can make multiple backups to disk but as Mark points out an EMP could wipe them out etc etc etc.. For me I know if I destroy my iPad (despite having a minor nervous breakdown) all the data on it is available on my iPhone or my Mac and if neither of them are available I can go to 1 of the 3/4 hosting providers I use to retrieve the data. So in reality you can only minimise the risk not eradicate it.

Will – we’ve had this discussion on numerous occasions! 🙂 I understand that nothing is failsafe, including having stacks of books, but I’m sure you’ll agree that the likelihood of my house catching fire is far slimmer than the iPad dying for whatever reason. I’m also very familiar with most of my recipe books, and I tend to know which one to go to if I have a specific ingredient that I want to use.

I am often tempted by the idea of a Kindle for the portability of it, and for the fact that the display is a lot less harsh than an iPad, but I still like buying books and I don’t want to have to pay for things twice. If there was something that enabled me to get a digital copy for free having bought the hard copy then I’d definitely get one, but while I have to pay twice then I’ll continue to frequent Strays 🙂

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