Pathetic as it is, this Saturday evening was spent, by me at least, cleaning up old and new paper. And that’s the kind of trees I’m talking about.
Indeed, since I now have a self-employed activity I need to have a paper trail of all the invoices sent and received, of all the contracts, of all the shipment bills and so on. While I prefer being paperless for handling, and thus I scan everything I get (invoices, contracts, shipment bills, …) I have to keep the paper trail for my accountant, at least for now. This also means printing the stuff that otherwise I wouldn’t be printing (!) like Apple’s invoices. I was hoping to avoid that, but it turns out that my accountant wants the paper.
Interestingly enough, printing from within Firefox here on Linux is a bit of a problem: it sets itself to use Letter, even though my /etc/papersize is set properly to a4 and LC_PAPER is set to it_IT (which is, obviously, A4). It really baffles me because it starts already to be a nuisance that you have to have libpaper, when the locale settings already would have the support for discerning between different paper sizes, but the fact that Firefox also defaults to Letter (which is basically only used in US for what I know of) without having an option to change (yeah I did so already with about:config, no change) is definitely stupid.
Luckily, most of the references I’ve been using lately are available in PDF, and thanks to the Sony Reader I don’t have to print them out. What I decided to cut lately, as well, is on CDs: most stuff I can get easily on Apple’s iTunes Store(yes I know it’s not available on Linux, but the music is not DRM’d, it’s in a good format, and it’s not overly expensive); too bad that they don’t have a (more expensive even) ALAC store, or I would be buying also my Metal music (AAC does no good to metal).
Games aren’t as easy: I don’t have space on the PS3 already, and I bought just a couple from the Play Station Network store, nor I have space on the PSP, and additionally, downloaded games with an Italian account are twice the price that I can get from Amazon. Sony, if you’re reading, this is the time to fix this issue! Especially with the PSP Go! coming, I don’t think it’s going to sell well among game enthusiasts, and I’m quite sure that those who will get it will probably hate the extra-high prices.
Anyway, since I’m avoiding buying CDs and rather going with the iTunes Store, and I cannot accept direct donations any longer, you can now also consider their gift cards, they are certainly accepted…