Re-reading World War II

I recently revisited a piece of my childhood through a book I found at a second-hand store called Life's Picture History of World War II. There had been a copy at my grandmother's house, which had belonged to my grandfather, a veteran of both world wars. When I was growing up, my cousin Bob and I both enjoyed looking at it, together and separately. Published in 1950, a scant five years after that conflict had ended, it presented a visual account of the war through Life magazine's archive of photos and illustrations with a minimal amount of interpretive text. Although not necessarily intended as such, it was a good introduction to the conflict for a young reader. I even used it as a source for a paper I wrote on the Blitzkrieg in ninth grade. When I had it in my possession for that project, I really did not want to give it back.

Toward the end of her life, my grandmother passed many treasured belongings to family members, who would appreciate them. Although I would have enjoyed having that book, it went to Bob. I respect the fact that my grandmother took the time to make carefully considered decisions about her belongings, and I am happy that he has it and will one day pass it down to his son, yet I've long thought that I'd like to find a copy of it for myself. I have often looked for it on the shelves of second hand book stores, but until recently, I haven't even seen another copy.

Having not seen the book in about 40 years, I had forgotten the exact title, which made searching for it a little more difficult; in fact, when I found my copy, I wasn't sure at first that it was the same book, but leafing through it quickly convinced me, even though it had a different cover. The copy I remember from childhood had a red leatherette cover and may have originally come with a paper dust jacket, while the one I bought has a tan, cloth binding with a brown spine and a matching slipcase, but for the two dollars I paid for it, I can't complain; in fact, it is a rather handsome edition. 

Having the exact title, I was able to take a look online to get an idea of how rare this book actually is. Second hand copies are readily available both on eBay and Amazon and prices are all over the place, ranging from about $4 to $75, which makes my $2 investment for the more deluxe slip cased edition a real bargain. When looking for this book, be aware that there is a later and entirely different book called Life Goes to War: A Picture History of World War II, which was published in the 1970s. Interestingly, one version has a cover that could easily be confused for this earlier volume. 

Looking through that coffee table sized volume after so many years, I was struck by a couple of things. One was just how many of the images I vividly remembered from back then, but also how I regard them differently, viewing them through adult eyes. For one thing, the book is definitely a product of its time, making liberal use of terms we would deem offensive today, such as 'Jap', and editorial choices that represent an almost propagandistic mindset, the same that would have existed at Life, or any other American publication, during the war. Any atrocities depicted in the photos were being committed by Germans or Japanese, not Americans or their allies, and any grievously wounded soldiers mangled corpses were always those of the enemy. The few images of wounded G.I.'s depicted them receiving first aid for fairly minor injuries. 

In a broader sense, it is interesting to note that despite the patriotic tone, the book presents a surprisingly unflinching look at the grim realities of war, neither glorifying nor condemning it. That said, one shocking omission from the book is the lack of any mention of the Holocaust or Nazi concentration camps, which would have been common knowledge by the time the book came out. Perhaps that also is a product of its time.

While I am glad to finally have my own copy of Life's Picture History of World War II, even if it is not the one I enjoyed looking at when I was a kid, I'm not sure how often I will be looking through it. My feelings toward war and its destruction are much different today, and I'm not as fascinated by it as I once was. Still, the connection to family history makes it a special addition to my library.

How to easily increase storage on a Chromebook

If you have been reading this blog, you are doubtless aware that I enjoy my Chromebooks for basic productivity tasks, but they do have a few shortcomings, one of which is a meager amount of internal storage. To be fair, Chrome OS is designed to need minimal storage space, as it is designed to make use of cloud storage such as Google Drive to save files, but I also like to save them locally. Both of my Chromebooks came with 64GB and little in the way of upgrade options, save for adding a micro SD card. Fortunately, these are dirt cheap, which made it possible for me to triple the amount of available storage for about the cost of a fast food value meal.

I purchased a 128GB card for each machine for $10 apiece, which provided an instant upgrade as soon as I placed the cards in their slots. The only real problem was that while the card was mounted in the Files app, it was not visible to Linux applications running under the Crostini Linux environment. This is because Crostini is intended primarily as a developer environment, so everything in there is walled off from the rest of Chrome OS. 

Access can be granted easily enough by right-clicking the micro SD card's icon in the Files app and clicking a menu choice to allow Linux access. Now that the card is recognized by Crostini, one must create a path for direct access in LibreOffice. This is accomplished by choosing the open file command in LibreOffice, then select '+Other Locations' on the left side of the window. The main window will then show an icon labeled 'Computer' Double-click it and scroll down the menu until you find a folder labeled 'mnt' (mount). Open that and then open the folder labeled 'chromeos' and then open the folder labeled 'SD Card', or whatever your SD Card is named, and click 'Add to Bookmarks'. Your SD card will now appear on the left side of the window and you will be able to open and save files directly from LibreOffice. 

The cool part is once you do this for one application, the SD card will be available to others as well. I created a bookmark in LibreOffice and then opened the GIMP photo editing application to discover the SD card was visible there, ready to be accessed. Best of all, the SD card can be removed and replaced with one from another device, such as a digital camera, to access those files, then put back without having to repeat the setup process.

 So now, both of my 64GB Chromebooks have a total of 192GB of storage and readily accessible to both the Linux and Chrome OS partitions. This small addition should serve to make the Chromebooks that much more useful—and useful. Best of all, it did not require using the command line at all, just a few mouse clicks. If you have a Chromebook and your internal drive is feeling a bit claustrophobic, there really is no reason not to expand it using an inexpensive micro SD card.

Ten Good Reasons to Use LibreOffice

 It's hard to believe I've been using LibreOffice and its parent application, OpenOffice, for more than two decades. And you know what? The more I use it, the more I find to like about it. Even though my employer supplies me with M$ Office for free, I still keep LibreOffice on all my computers and use it by default for most of my personal projects. Below are ten reasons (in no particular order) why I use it over M$ Office:

10. It's free—You just can't argue with that price. Why shell out for M$ Office when LibreOffice doesn't cost you a cent?

9. It's a single application—Having a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, drawing application, database, and equation editor in a single application makes for a more streamlined workflow than the M$ approach of several separate, yet loosely linked applications. As a single application with integrated modules for its various main functions, LibreOffice takes up less disk space without redundant code in each application. It is also less hungry for RAM and processor cycles.

8. Its interface is customizable—Users have far more latitude to make LibreOffice their own than they have with M$ Office. A number of different icon sets are available, as are various color schemes. You can even apply themes designed for the Firefox Web browser. Best of all, one can choose between a traditional interface with drop-down menus and a tabbed interface, reminiscent of recent versions of M$ Office. For what it's worth, I prefer the drop-down menus.

7. It's under active development—LibreOffice has version updates coming out on a regular basis and it has continued to evolve beyond its parent application, OpenOffice, which has not seen a major update since 2014. 

6. It's free and open source—The source code for LibreOffice is readily available to all comers and anyone with the requisite programming skills can modify it and create their own version of the software, just as LibreOffice's developers did with OpenOffice, when they forked the project more than a decade ago. Due to differences in licensing, LibreOffice can incorporate any features from OpenOffice, and has done so, but OpenOffice cannot do the same with LibreOffice.

5. Development is done by volunteers—Those who maintain and develop LibreOffice are all volunteers, whose sole motivation is to create the best possible software they can, not to make a profit. If you know how to code, you are free to join in the fun.

4. It opens and saves M$ Office files—You can work in LibreOffice, save your files in the appropriate M$ Office file format, share it with a M$ Office user and they'll be none the wiser. Its filters are that accurate. As a bonus, it also fixes broken files. I have many times tried to open an M$ Office file that Word or Excel or PowerPoint  thinks is corrupt, only to have LibreOffice open it accurately and with ease. After saving the file in LibreOffice, I can open it in the appropriate M$ Office app with equal ease.

3. It's the default office productivity suite in Linux—Major Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Linux Mint were quick to drop OpenOffice for LibreOffice as their included office suite, once it made its debut, and it remains as ubiquitous in the Linux world as M$ Office is on Windows.

2. It's cross-platform compatible—LibreOffice is supported on Windows, Mac OS, and most major Linux distributions. M$ Office is available only on Windows and Mac OS. Android and iOS users can use Collabora Office, which is based on LibreOffice. Chromebook users can also run LibreOffice under the Crostini Linux environment, or run Collabora Office as an Android app, so everybody can play.

1. It's not from Microsoft—Microsoft not only takes your money but also your data. LibreOffice is just one more way to keep more control over both.

What's in the Box?

 I've always loved CD boxed sets. They're a great way to take a deep dive into an artist's or band's catalog—more than one would get from a 'greatest hits' CD—without having to buy every album. Most also come with a booklet that goes much more in depth than an album's liner notes, along with other occasional bits of memorabilia. Some box sets, such as the Who's Thirty Years of Maximum R&B, provide a mix of singles, album tracks and rarities, while others like Citizen Steely Dan, comprise the entire contents of all their studio albums. 

I recently acquired a nine-disc boxed set from Pink Floyd called Shine On that presents repackaged and remastered versions of their popular albums—A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), Meddle (1972), The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979), and A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1988), along with a bonus disc of early singles, a collection of postcards of the album cover graphics, and a 112-page hardback book.

I remember when this set arrived in record stores in 1992. It was frightfully expensive at around $200. I paid less than a third of that for my copy and felt like I got a good value for the money, considering I only had two of those titles already in my CD collection. The titles included in Shine On bring together Pink Floyd's most commercially successful albums, offering a solid collection of 'must-haves'. 

For some buyers, it might well represent just about everything by Pink Floyd they're familiar with, but there's more Floyd to be experienced, especially their early material, which is given somewhat short shrift in this collection, especially the contributions of founding member Syd Barrett. His work is most heavily represented in their first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), which is not part of the set. Barrett's presence in Shine on is limited to a couple of tracks on A Saucerful of Secrets and the bonus disc.

Shine On omits most of Pink Floyd's output from the 1969 through 1972, including More (1969), Ummagumma (1969), Atom Heart Mother (1970), and Obscured by Clouds (1972). The next few albums after Saucerful are considered by many to represent an extended transition period from the Syd Barrett period to their classic progressive/stadium rock era. More and Obscured by Clouds are both movie soundtracks, created to fit the themes of their respective films, while Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother are both interesting experimental efforts, but for whatever reason, they were not well liked by the band's members. Also, Ummagumma is part studio album and part live album (one disc of each), The live portion revisits Barrett-era material, while the studio portion is essentially a collection of solo efforts by the four principal members. This combined dynamic may have technically disqualified it from consideration as a studio album.

The other conundrum is the omission of The Final Cut (1983). A follow-up and thematic extension to The Wall, it was bassist/vocalist Roger Waters' final album with Pink Floyd and the band's only album without keyboardist/vocalist/arranger Richard Wright, who had left the band after The Wall tour, but would return for its later projects, initially as a session player, but eventually as a full member. Wright and the remaining band members, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, may have concluded The Final Cut was essentially more of a Roger Waters solo album and thus disqualified it on those grounds.

All that said, the inclusion of A Momentary Lapse of Reason might seem as an odd a choice as the exclusion of its predecessor, being as as it is the sole representation of the post-Waters Pink Floyd. Then again, it was their only post-Waters studio album at the time. Although Waters was angered that his former band mates chose to continue Pink Floyd without him, instead of ceasing as a band as he would have preferred them do, Gilmour, Mason, and eventually Wright, saw it as a continuation of what had come before, just as the band had continued without Wright on The Final Cut. 

What also has continued is box sets. After Shine On, Pink Floyd put out two additional box sets, both consisting of all 14 remastered studio albums, called Oh, By the Way (2007) and Discovery (2011). But having Shine on in my collection, I don't feel the need to own either of those larger sets; instead, I may just grab a copy of Atom Heart Mother at some point down the road and call it a day. 

UPDATE--As it turned out, I ended up acquiring all of the remaining Pink Floyd albums I was missing, and now have the complete Pink Floyd discography in my collection.

E15's Unexpected Surprise

 It is almost ironic that in this day and age, where our society is supposedly moving away from internal combustion engines and toward battery electric vehicles, there is now a baffling array of gasoline grades available. Since the late 1980s, when leaded gasoline was completely phased out, most stations have offered three grades: regular (87 octane), mid-grade (89 octane) and premium (93 octane), but several new options have appeared in recent years like E85 (up to 85 percent ethanol) and E15 (15 percent ethanol), as well as non-ethanol formulations on the other end of the spectrum. This all begs the question of which is best for your car. The answer, of course, is 'that depends'. Different formulations are optimized for different types of vehicles.

To fully understand the differences among these fuel grades, not including diesel, we first need to understand what octane is and what it measures. Many people mistakenly believe octane is a measure of the fuel's potential power and that higher octane fuel will deliver higher performance, but it's a little more nuanced than that. Octane is a measure of gasoline's ability not to detonate under pressure. Higher performance engines often require higher octane fuel because they have a higher compression ratio, which delivers a bigger bang, if you will, when the fuel is detonated. For this reason, higher compression engines, including those that use superchargers or turbochargers, will not run properly on regular fuel, but the opposite is not true for more conventional engines. While higher octane fuel is not an issue for them, there is no real benefit, either. 

With that bit of knowledge in hand, let's look at the various gasoline grades and what vehicles they're best for:

Regular (87 octane)—More often than not, this is the fuel you need. It works in most cars, unless they have a high-performance, high-compression engine. If your car specifies "Unleaded Fuel Only", regular gas will work just fine. It will also work in flex fuel vehicles, but more on that later.

Mid-Grade/Plus (89 octane)—This is often the forgotten 'middle child' at the gas pump. This is the same octane rating as leaded regular gas, which has not been available in the U.S. since about 1988, and is best suited for older cars that ran on leaded regular. It will deliver slightly improved performance and fuel economy in some other cars, but the ever-widening price spread between it and regular often makes it somewhat of a false economy.

Premium (93 octane)—As mentioned earlier, this is the specified fuel for higher compression and forced induction engines. In most cases, a car requiring premium fuel will spark knock on regular, a result of premature detonation, although there are some exceptions, such as Cadillac's NorthStar V8, which would automatically adjust itself to run on regular, albeit with a modest loss of performance and fuel economy.

Non-Ethanol (90 octane)—Up until about a decade ago, most gasoline did not contain ethanol (corn alcohol), but today's gasoline is typically an E10 (ten percent ethanol) blend. Most cars run fine on E10, but some do not. If you have a car with carburetor, especially an old muscle car from the '60s, this might be a viable option, but for most applications the benefits are marginal at best, especially at a premium of around a dollar a gallon over regular.

E85—As the acronym suggests, this as an up to 85 percent ethanol blend, or more accurately, 51-85 percent. Regardless of the exact ratio of gasoline to alcohol, this fuel should only be used in flex fuel vehicles that are designed for it. The best way to tell if you have such a vehicle is to look for 'Flex Fuel' badging on it and a yellow factory supplied gas cap. I owned a flex fuel vehicle, a 2011 Chevy Impala, for a few years, but I never put E85 in it because the owner's manual stated due to the lower energy contained in ethanol. it would yield reduced fuel economy and performance. The few times I saw it at a gas station, the price was so close to that of regular gas, that running it seemed to present a false economy; that is, the lower fuel economy negated the cost savings. That said, ethanol does burn cleaner than gasoline and it is American made, so those might be significant feel good points for some people.

E15 (88 octane)—This fuel is designed to run in any 2001 model or newer passenger car or light duty truck, flex fuel or not. It has a slightly higher ethanol level than conventional gasoline, which gives it a slightly higher octane rating. Still, many drivers are skeptical of E15 because of the conventional wisdom that non-flex fuel vehicles can only tolerate up to 10 percent ethanol, and this was why I always ignored it, despite it being a bit cheaper than regular.  

That price spread suddenly opened into a chasm last week, when a local station ran a promo, knocking the price of E15 down to $1.35 below that of regular 87 octane. After some online research to assure myself that it was safe to run in my car, I topped up my tank ahead of a 200-mile road trip. The results were, to say the least, unexpected. I figured that if fuel economy were off even by as much as 5 mpg, I would still be coming out ahead, but instead, I actually got better gas mileage than on regular 87 octane fuel. While I usually average 32-34 mpg on that trip, my round trip average was 36.3 mpg. I was astonished enough that I refilled the next day with more E15 (still at the bargain price of $1.91 a gallon) to test it out on regular, in-town driving. So far, in-town mileage is comparable, so I'm declaring this experiment a success, in that E15 fuel has proven itself an economical alternative, at least in my car. While I may not use it exclusively, I will consider it a cost-effective alternative and will use it when appropriate. Late fall and early winter are when I see the best fuel economy, but it will be interesting to see how it holds up in the warmer months, when I am using the air conditioning and the summer's heat is putting an additional strain on the engine.

Check back for periodic updates...

SPEAKING OF UPDATES--It's been about eight months since I discovered E15 and I have continued to use it at least as often as I use regular gas. Although no longer as deeply discounted as it was, it's still a good 30 cents cheaper, and these days, every little bit helps. My long-term observations are that there is no noticeable difference in performance, but a slight dip in fuel economy, about 2-3 mpg on average, especially in hot weather. The difference during cooler weather, where the air conditioning is not needed, is almost nonexistent. 

All that said, I convinced a friend to try a tank of E15 in her 2001 Pontiac minivan, and the results were less than stellar, with a check engine light and hesitation occurring shortly after the fill-up. The problem went away once there was enough room in the tank to add a few gallons of regular gas.

Have I Developed a Love/Hate Relationship with Apple Products?

 I've owned and used Apple products for more than 30 years, beginning with an Apple Mac Classic and monochrome StyleWriter ink jet printer I acquired shortly after I started graduate school in 1991. I've been through a string of Macs since then, and use a rather aged MacBook Pro as my daily driver at home. Along the way, I've had about three iPads and am on my second iPhone (never looked back at Android after getting the first one in 2016). I also had some fun a few years ago, refurbishing and upgrading old iPods, but my more recent technology acquisitions have been decidedly non-Apple. I wonder why that is.

I am no fan of Microsoft, so I do my best to stay away from Windows (I wish my employer felt the same way), but that's not to say I'm not open to new things. My latest laptop is a Chromebook, and for a tablet these days, I'm using an Amazon Fire 10 HD. For home automation, I also seem to be all in on Google Assistant instead of Apple Home.

The common denominator in those choices seems to be price. While iPads start at around $400, I got the Amazon Fire tablet on sale for well under $100. I got the Chromebook for a couple hundred dollars when I needed something to get me through until I could find what I really wanted, but the Chromebook ended up being something I could live with for the price. It's a fine secondary laptop, but will never achieve daily driver status.

The choice of Google Assistant happened more because of a freebie than anything else. I had not even considered home automation beyond a couple of KASA smart plugs when I got an offer for a free Google Nest Home Mini smart speaker from Sirius-XM. In addition to being able to listen to music, I could now control certain lamps, connected to the aforementioned smart plugs, with my voice. 

All of this might lead a casual observer to conclude that, over time, I've been gradually turning my back on Apple and its products, but that simply isn't true. It's more a matter of matching functionality to cost. Some Apple products, such as iPhones, are totally worth the price, while iPads, given the limited uses I have for a tablet are less so, especially considering that much less expensive alternatives are available that do everything I need a tablet to do. The same holds true of my Google Nest devices. My needs were essentially non-existent and were thus easily filled by a free device. 

Where the equation gets more complicated is with laptops. My Chromebook was amazingly inexpensive, but that low price came with its own costs. It does what it does reasonably well, but there's simply a lot it can't do. Realistically, a Chromebook can satisfy about 65 percent of my computing needs, and that's pretty good for the price, but it doesn't make that remaining 35 percent go away. I've also tried inexpensive Windows laptops, but those aren't exactly satisfactory, either. That's why I have an almost decade-old MacBook Pro for daily use. Surprisingly, other than degraded battery life, and the fact that it's no longer receiving operating system updates, it's pretty sprightly for its age. One thing's for certain; factoring longevity into the equation makes a Mac more affordable than it would first appear. The trick, I've found, is not to cheap out, but to buy absolutely the most Mac you can afford, as upgrading later is going to be more expensive and perhaps even impossible.

Two other parts of the Apple ecosystem I haven't explored are Apple TV and the Apple watch. As with Apple Home, streaming with Apple TV never made it to my radar. My first foray into streaming was with an Internet-enabled Panasonic Blu-Ray player, capable of streaming Netflix and Hulu. Within a couple of years, I had transitioned to Roku boxes, which are cheap and adequately serve my needs. 

I have, at times, been intrigued by Apple Watches, but not enough to lay down a few hundred dollars for one. If they were to incorporate a glucometer function into the health monitoring functions, I might consider it. For now, I will continue to check my sugar levels on my iPhone, using Freestyle Libre sensors.

The bottom line is that while I don't lock myself into the Apple ecosystem, neither am I abandoning it. I use it where it makes sense and look for alternatives where it doesn't. 

UPDATE: In the fall of 2023, I made an impulse purchase of a seller-refurbished Dell Latitude 7490 notebook computer, running Linux Mint in lieu of Windows, ostensibly as a replacement for my Chromebook, with which I had become increasingly dissatisfied, as covered in other posts on this site. What I wasn't expecting was that this computer would prove so satisfactory that it also replaced my now twelve-year-old MacBook Pro. I kept both machines running side-by-side for a few months, while actively using the Dell. Eventually, I shut the MacBook Pro down and have only fired it back up a couple of times since, mainly to transfer files to the Dell via a Web app called Snapdrop. I keep telling myself that I may someday get another MacBook, but to date "someday" has yet to arrive.

Putting it All Down on Paper

With the ubiquity of smart phones, a paper datebook may seem to many a bit of an anachronism, a reminder of how things were done way back when, yet many people, myself included, still use them. Despite my affinity for most things digital, I still like them. A few years ago, at the suggestion of a life coach, I acquired a portable sized Day-Timer and liked it fairly well; however, the Day-Timer page refills were very expensive and the binder could hold only about three months' worth of pages at any given time, so I always kept the previous month, the present month, and the next month to come in my binder. It wasn't ideal, but it worked. As it was explained to me by my life coach, I could write dates further in the future on the monthly planner pages and then transfer them to the daily planner pages whenever a new month was inserted. The process of transferring them would also help cement them in my mind.

The expense and complexity of the Day-Timer system eventually sent me searching for a better solution. For several years, I settled for employer-supplied date books, but they continued arriving later and later, so I decided the time had come to return my Day-Timer to service. I just had to find a more affordable alternative to the Day-Timer brand refill pages.

What I found, for a small fraction of the price of genuine Day-Timer inserts, was the At-A-Glance 'My Week' insert packs from ACCO Brands. They are the same page size, but unlike the Day-Timer pages, which show two days on facing pages, the At-A-Glance pages show a whole week on two facing pages, albeit in a little more cramped view, with hourly appointment slots instead of 15-minute slots on the Day-Timer pages. After using them for three or four years, I have found that the At-A-Glance page format has not, in any way, cramped my style, in fact, I prefer the At-A-Glance format to the Day-Timer format because I only have to change out the pages once a year, instead of once a month. 

A datebook is intended to be a productivity tool, but recording too much detail can have the opposite effect. The Day-Timer approach is simply too granular for my needs. Honestly, I feel that if I were to document my life in the way the Day-Timer's layout suggests—filling in as many spaces as possible on as many pages as possible, I would never get anything else accomplished. In addition, my sometimes random though processes occasionally require a certain amount of free text area on which to jot down thoughts and document additional details that wouldn't fit on a line in the weekly calendar. Having the freedom to write a page of notes and put them in the datebook adjacent to the relevant date is often far more useful than some of the pre-printed Day-Timer pages I have had. Of course, sticky notes—2 x 2 inches of smaller—are a viable option as well.

The Day-Timer starter pack that came with my binder provided a small pad of about twenty sheets of lined note paper, but refills for those are so frightfully expensive that I find myself excessively husbanding those pages as a scarce resource, to the point of avoiding using the few sheets I have, and even writing on them in pencil so I can erase and reuse them later. The At-A-Glance refill packs do not include lined paper at all, although ACCO does sell small packages of those sheets as a separate—and absurdly expensive—product. Fortunately, I found a generous supply of lined paper in the proper 6.75-inch-by-3.75-inch, six-hole punched size on eBay that was cheap enough that I won't have to worry about 'wasting' a sheet again for the foreseeable future. 

One of the great advantages of a refillable, binder style date book is its flexibility—put what you need in and leave the rest out. These days, I find myself systematically removing pages that do not serve my needs to make room for more lined note paper. I find a paper datebook, properly configured with what I need and will actually use, provides an excellent overview of one's working life, and that writing things down by hand seems to better cement them into my consciousness. Besides, a paper datebook requires no batteries. It's just a simple, efficient, and practical solution for keeping my life straight. Looking at the pages in my Day-Timer, there are sections that I use and those that I do not. If I am realistic about my usage patterns, I could remove the unnecessary ones to make it more useful. Here's what I use and what I don't:

• Month-at a glance calendar—I use it to plan ahead, but I primarily use the Week-at-a-glance pages instead.
• Week-at-a-glance calendar—This is the primary feature I use. I consider it to be indispensable and the very reason I by a new set of refills each year.
• Contact list—I prefer the contact list on my iPhone and never use the one in my Day-Timer. These pages could easily be eliminated. 
• Vehicle mileage/expense log—Another set of pages I never use and could eliminate without missing them.
• Ruled note pages—Perhaps the most flexible section that I have not been using for fear of running out. Now that I have plenty of these pages, I intend to use them much more liberally.
• Reference pages—The starter pack came with a few pages of reference material, such as a list of telephone area codes, a map of U.S. time zones, metric conversion chart, etc. I seldom use, but handy when needed and they take up little space, so they're worth keeping.