Tools

Collecting is one of homo sapiens’ oddest behaviours. We — predominantly, but not exclusively, men — collect stuff, rarely look at it and then die leaving our children to throw it out, or sell it at best.

My mother, for example, used to sneak away from historic sites with a bit of stone she had eased away from the structure. 
I keep thinking the reason the Parthenon and Pyramids look a bit tatty is probably due to the attentions of her and many others like her.

By the time she died, my mother had several hundred such bits on display, the provenance of which was known to her alone. When we were clearing her house, it took my brother to do what I couldn’t bring myself to — throw the lot out. One day, an archaeologist will make a name for himself unearthing historic remains 
from a hundred cultures all in one British suburban garden.

The Internet makes obsessive collecting even easier. In digital form, music and films are infinitely collectable since they don’t require shelf space, and I have been as guilty of pointlessly amassing such material as the nuttiest beer mat, bus ticket or matchbox collector.

I have nearly 10,000 songs in my iTunes library, most of which I haven’t listened to. Yet I get a palpable sense of satisfaction merely from owning items such as that obscure Soft Machine album I meant to listen to in 1972 and still haven’t quite got round to. It now sits in my iTunes library, along with a hundred other such albums, silently awaiting the day I am in a hotel or airport lounge and finally have time to give it my attention.

The likelihood is that I will die with Soft Machine Live At The Paradiso 1968 or The Cardigans’ Emmerdale still unheard, and my children will delete the lot, leaving not even a trace to baffle historians in the future. The latest iTunes software subtly encourages this madness by virtue of its amazing Genius feature.

Genius searches your library, and, as you’re listening to music, gently suggests that you might like to listen to something else, which is similar. The something else is, of course, available with a simple click from the iTunes Store and before you know it, you’ve bought another album to take to the grave unlistened to.

Genius does have another sublime function that doesn’t cost you. When you are listening to a track, you click an icon and the software assembles a playlist of music you already have, which somehow goes perfectly with what you were first listening to. This function has encouraged me to listen to hundreds of tracks I wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with.

With films, the collecting bug is just as bad. Download a free programme called Handbrake from handbrake.fr and you can easily and legally (so long as it’s for your own use and you don’t disseminate it) rip your own DVDs and squash a feature film down in to little more than a Gigabyte in the MP4 format.

The problem is, again, that, even given the huge capacity of modern hard drives, you will soon fill up your computer with movies. I recently found my 250Gb MacBook was completely full due to the 150 films on it, and had slowed up noticeably as a result of this overcrowding.  

The answer was a superb mini external hard drive I bought for £105, the TrekStor DataStation microdisk (trekstor.de). Its 120Gb holds over 100 such ripped films, moved from the overburdened laptop, plus all the documents I have ever written.
So now I travel in the knowledge that I have weeks of entertainment in my pocket — and also, that if I keep the TrekStor in a pocket when I leave a hotel room, if my laptop were stolen, I would still have all its far-more valuable contents in safekeeping. The films, needless to say, remain mostly unwatched.