[HN Gopher] The Hipster PDA (2004)
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The Hipster PDA (2004)
Author : Tomte
Score : 103 points
Date : 2022-03-30 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.43folders.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.43folders.com)
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| For a long while my PDA was a bulldog binder and a stack of index
| cards. I even used them as business cards for a period.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| > get a bunch of 3"x5" file cards (here's 500 for around 3 bucks)
| https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00094GHRM/ref=nosim...
|
| It's actually $10 now, must've been a successful blog.
| deltille wrote:
| I used one of these for a while, more or less. It was great.
| People didn't understand how I had no phone but never missed an
| appointment nor lost notes.
| captainmuon wrote:
| That was awesome. I'm still not sure what part of it was satire
| and what part was a real countermovement, but the hipster PDA
| made me read up on nice pens and paper. For a while I had an old-
| school Filofax. I even made my own template for calendar pages,
| and had a little foldable public transport map in the back. Every
| now and then I try to get back to a paper organizer, but things
| like online calendar sync are too comfortable.
|
| Also, remember that this was before smartphones, social media and
| the attention stealing craze. I can imagine nowadays there would
| be a lot of people wanting to try out something low tech like
| that.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > Also, remember that this was before smartphones, social media
| and the attention stealing craze.
|
| No, smartphone already existed at that point, they just were
| not from Apple or with Android. More popular at that time were
| PDA and electronic organizers, from Psion, Treo, Blackberry,
| with Windows Mobile... Small optimized Offline-devices with
| sometimes optional network-access. Even the attention-sinks
| already were a thing at that point, but came in form of sms,
| e-mail, WAP-services.
|
| But, not for the general population. Those things were
| expensive, and had limited benefit. So this Hipster PDA was the
| discount-version of those expensive Toys I mean it's even
| directly in the name...
| djrogers wrote:
| > remember that this was before smartphones
|
| This was pre-phone, but solidly in the Blackberry era of
| smartphones
| SllX wrote:
| Not satire at all actually, and to be a counter movement would
| suggest that there was more movement behind PDAs than there
| actually was. The name maybe a little bit of a joke, but this
| was a legitimate system that Merlin Mann came up with and used
| in his job at the time that served functionally the same role
| as a PDA at a fraction of the cost. About the only things it
| wouldn't do is synchronize with your computer or tell you the
| time; but it also didn't run on batteries or depend on an
| idiosyncratic pen input method or tiny keyboard.
| joelesler wrote:
| Merlin himself actually used the system, so, at least he bought
| into his own hype.
| pwenzel wrote:
| Big fan of this site back in the early 2000s. Now I'm Bullet
| Journaling.
| nimajneb wrote:
| I have a small notebook I carry around sometimes. When it's
| full my next notebook is going to follow the Bullet Journaling
| method.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I've been attempting the bullet journal method in the past year
| but each time it has ended in pages of random scribbles.
|
| How do you balance order while also allowing creativity and in
| the moment fleshing out of ideas?
| arvindamirtaa wrote:
| Damn! I read it maybe 10 years ago. Nice to see the site's still
| up. It's sad the wiki was taken down though. That was a world of
| information.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| It's too bad the reference to GTD has a broken link in the page.
| GTD was the perfect method to support the HPDA.
|
| https://gtd.43folders.com/
| SllX wrote:
| I was going to go spelunking into the Internet Archive for a
| working link but it's offline at the moment; so this comment is
| more a reminder to me to check back later.
|
| EDIT: Success!
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050926032028/http://wiki.43fol...
|
| See also:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20061018171833/http://www.43fold...
| gregjw wrote:
| I'm a simple man, I see the work of Merlin Mann, I upvote.
| bitdestroyer wrote:
| I don't think we're supposed to notice him.
| SllX wrote:
| You get the attention you earn and the Hipster PDA is still a
| neat thing I like to tell people about. Merlin Mann may not
| like the attention but he did earn it.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| I still remember reading this on the Monday morning after the
| very Friday the post came out.
|
| Wild.
|
| I totally went with it for a while. pretty great stuff.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Hmm, is "Hipster" still a current term?
|
| It feels like hipsters aren't in evidence as much as they used to
| be before lockdown.
| marstall wrote:
| (2004)
| huetius wrote:
| I'd be interested to see a more serious study of this, but my
| hypothesis is that it was always a weakly bonded cohort which
| has by now dissolved into other cohorts. Hipsters generally
| didn't self identify as hipsters, and the internal dynamics of
| that scene tended towards schism (anything liked by too
| many/the wrong people is rejected).
| reaperducer wrote:
| The original "Thinkpad" was an actual pad of paper with the word
| THINK embossed on the cover. Inside the cover is embossed:
| IBMers Value Dedication to every client's success
| Innovation that matters -- for our company and for the world
| Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships
|
| And then the IBM logo embossed on the back.
|
| I have a bunch of these, and use them regularly. I keep one in
| each of my coats and one in the car, and one in my desk, because
| you never know when an idea will present itself, and scribbling a
| note is faster than using a phone, especially for abstract ideas
| involving diagrams and arrows.
|
| You could still buy these as of a few years ago (2019ish) from
| the official IBM swag shop online, but I wasn't able to find it
| just now.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Now this is really making me want to find some of these!
| jszymborski wrote:
| That ad for A2hosting is bringing me back!
| goofist wrote:
| I still do this. I keep a pocket sized card folio and a pen on me
| at all times. I go on daily walks and take my cards with me.
| Ideas pop up and I write them down on a card. Once a note is
| recorded, I insert its card into the back of my folio. Once per
| week (at least, on a schedule) I empty the folio of ideas and
| enter them into a my digital notes system (bespoke, made with
| emacs). From there I can label, associate, file-away, and
| prioritize different ideas.
|
| I find the main benefit to doing all of this is the ritual
| itself. By revisiting ideas a couple of times throughout the
| "card lifecycle", I form associations between disparate thoughts.
|
| For maybe 20% (idk) of the ideas I jot down a smartphone wouldn't
| have been as easy or as useful. Besides, I like to go on walks
| without a phone - when I go to record a idea I am guaranteed not
| to be distracted by some notification or prompt from the rest of
| life.
|
| If you can stand to look like a throwback or hipster or
| wackadoodle, I recommend keeping a small note pad or set of cards
| on you all the time.
|
| another use, less relevant in today's world than in the world of
| a few years ago: When meeting people at a coffee shop or
| restaurant, it was nice to hand everybody a card and a pen and
| ask them to doodle something. This was a nice icebreaker.
| robotburrito wrote:
| I basically use vimwiki and a todo list.
| victorvosk wrote:
| I am more shocked the 2004 amazon link to file cards still works,
| but also sad that the 3 dollar pack is now 11 dollars :(
| donio wrote:
| If you check CCC that particular sku has jumped directly from
| $3-$4 to $9 a while back so it might be have gone out of
| production. A quick Amazon search shows 300 for $2.29 or 1000
| for $8.77. (Compared to the 500 for $3-ish of the original).
| DeadMouseFive wrote:
| I started using a new kind of hipster PDA recently. I got a Holy
| Bible from a hotel room, a pad of post-its, and a felt tip marker
| or ball point pen. Ultimate hipster notebook. Just use the bible
| as a binder and the post-it's like the pages. Reconfigurable,
| rewritable, with a built in index and page numbering system.
| rkallos wrote:
| That's very resourceful! Your system also comes with a bunch of
| quotes and advice.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Haha this was a great idea. It demonstrated that many of the hard
| problems of mobile productivity are "soft" problems in our heads
| and concepts, not hardware or software problems.
|
| I wish the "note taking app" crowd would think harder about that.
|
| There is a great book about the early age of hype and how it
| failed, called "The Myth of the Paperless Office" [1]. Would be
| great to re-read it and see how it holds up.
|
| By the way, there still is a market for hipster PDA gear and some
| companies seem to make quite a bit of profit with it - here are
| beautiful note taking index cards with additional gear (dividers,
| archival boxes and so on) [2]
|
| [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office
|
| [2] https://www.thejournalshop.com/brands/Foglietto
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I've long enjoyed the Exacompta brand for index cards because
| the paper is uncannily thick and nice to write on. But those
| rounded edges on the Foglietto's look super cool. Going to see
| if I can snag some of those now!
| akavi wrote:
| The Myth of the Paperless Office seems less like a myth and
| more like a premature prediction.
|
| As someone whose career started in 2011, I don't think I've
| ever used a company printer for anything but a convenient way
| to print out personal files. In fact, I don't think I've ever
| interacted with paper in a professional capacity except:
|
| * to sign employment contracts (and even that's gone 100%
| digital in the past 5 years)
|
| * my personal notebook that I use to noodle on ideas
| uniqueuid wrote:
| To be clear, the book is significantly more nuanced than the
| title might suggest.
|
| It's ultimately a study of affordances, thinking about what
| makes paper useful _beyond_ merely storing information.
|
| That's as relevant as ever, even if many of paper's uses have
| been superseded today.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Interesting. I was handed a stack of CVs to review by my boss
| today. They were all printed. So was my employment contract.
|
| On my desk is a stack of paper for note taking, drawing and
| problem solving.
|
| I am sure there are places that have gone entirely digital,
| but the best replacement for notepaper seems to be things
| like the remarkable, and it is a poor replacement. Paper is
| never going to need an update at an inconvinient time, never
| out of power, works with any stylus and is ready to be used
| immediately.
|
| It is great if it works for you, but I think your office is
| an exception to the general rule.
| akavi wrote:
| I've worked at 5 different tech companies across that
| period (2 YC startups, 2 FAANG, 1 mid-size). It might be a
| US coastal tech thing, but it's certainly not a single
| office thing.
| prmoustache wrote:
| With more and more "office" workers working remotely there
| is less reliance on paper. I signed my contract digitally,
| never printed anything.
|
| But I sometime write on my desk to take quick notes (but
| don't bother using paper).
| SllX wrote:
| My accountant's office is entirely paperless and has been
| for about 10 years now. They actually went on a crusade
| against paper around that time and bringing up the idea of
| dropping some paper off instead of emailing documents in is
| enough to visibly stress my accountant out.
|
| It's viable, even in the "paper" pushing businesses and at
| this point is a matter of whether an office has made the
| choice or not. Personally I still have a pad of paper for
| structuring some free form thoughts out before committing
| them to digital form, but I definitely deal a lot more with
| PDFs and web forms than paper because no one I deal with
| wants to deal with paper if they can avoid it (including
| me).
| sidpatil wrote:
| > By the way, there still is a market for hipster PDA gear and
| some companies seem to make quite a bit of profit with it -
| here are beautiful note taking index cards with additional gear
| (dividers, archival boxes and so on) [2]
|
| This can become the same kind of trap that the Hipster PDA was
| trying to save people from -- focusing too much on buying tools
| and not enough on using them.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Oh yes, it's pure indulgence.
|
| Which is not always wrong, I mean, people spend lots of money
| on nice pens and paper, and that is perfectly fine.
|
| It's just that nice pens and paper don't guarantee nice
| thoughts.
| vlark wrote:
| Yup. I drool over JetPens.com, Field Notes, and Doane Paper.
| Finnucane wrote:
| I still use pocket-size paper notebooks--the cheap kind you get
| at the drugstore. For simple lists--shopping lists, things I need
| to remember to do tomorrow--it's still the easiest thing.
| samatman wrote:
| Mild coincidence! I did an Instructable on making one of these
| from a Moleskine, back when the conceit was popular:
|
| https://www.instructables.com/Moleskine-Hipster-PDA-case/
|
| The mild coincidence being that I remembered this in January and
| made myself another one.
|
| Which... I haven't been using. At least it's there for the next
| time I get annoyed enough at Things to meme myself into thinking
| I'll start writing things down with a pen again.
| SMAAART wrote:
| I used it before it was a "thing" and I still use it to this day.
|
| Best PDA. Ever.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Blast from the past! I remember reading about this a long while
| before life was greatly enhanced and simplified and also terribly
| blighted by the hand-computers.
|
| I was into paper notes for about a year, just at the very
| beginning before phones came and I lost interest in pretty much
| all analog tech.
|
| One thing that was cool about that era was the amount of variety.
| Now that multi device sync exists, notetaking is a very hard
| technical problem, but before that expectations were lower and
| people could invent all sorts of systems that were totally
| practical by the standards of the day.
|
| Of course I greatly prefer the modern system, but the aesthetics
| were pretty cool.
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| At this point, wouldn't any PDA be a hipster PDA?
| gammarator wrote:
| I used one for years! Finally gave it up in 2011 when I got a
| smartphone.
|
| I think I've had more trouble with data loss from Evernote than
| those index cards, ironically...
| adamnew123456 wrote:
| > I think I've had more trouble with data loss from Evernote
| than those index cards, ironically...
|
| Plain text file and a text editor app, assuming rich content
| isn't a requirement. There are a million of them - personally,
| I've never had OldSchool Editor eat my data.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Yeah that's the biggest reason I don't use Evernote. A note app
| has one job...
| norjekudo wrote:
| Never stopped using the old index cards and binder clip. Todo
| lists, notes, GTD systems, brain storming sessions, pseudo code,
| bird lists, scoring baseball games, etc. Still can't sync to
| cloud though.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Maybe you need to attach some ballons to them?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Love this idea, even though I do use a computer for similar
| things. For me, the big mistake was "the fancy computer can do so
| many more fancy things, I should use ALL OF THEM." And over time,
| I realized the better way was thinking -- "99% of what you're
| doing on the computer can be done on paper, let me treat it like
| for the most part, and slowly slowly experiment with the things
| that look like improvements, knowing that most of them will not
| stick."
|
| Turns out they are pretty much all just quicker versions of
| things I would do with paper anyway. Hyperlinks instead of
| rifling through an index; Quick note adding instead of finding
| post-it notes, automatic date-fill in instead of looking at the
| calendar, etc.
|
| (this is through zim-wiki, btw)
| trickjarrett wrote:
| I recently unearthed one of my old Hipster PDAs from college. It
| was buried in the back of a drawer. Quite the bit of nostalgia as
| I leafed through it.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Hipster PDA (2004)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245408 - Aug 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Hipster PDA (2004)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929462 - July 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Hipster PDA (2004)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743224 - Dec 2019 (1
| comment)
|
| _Introducing the Hipster PDA (2004)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429300 - May 2017 (1
| comment)
| adorton wrote:
| Reminds me of the Pocketmod, which to my surprise is still
| around:
|
| https://pocketmod.com/
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Presumably no flash requirement like the old version, but now
| there's a login page before you can use it at all. I liked
| Pocketmods, but I shouldn't need to create an account to make
| them.
| vlark wrote:
| Pocketmods are common in the indie RPG scene:
| https://itch.io/search?q=pocketmod
| mwattsun wrote:
| Larry David did an episode on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" in which he
| lost his small pocket notepad. In it he had written that he
| offered a $500 reward if lost and found. His next door neighbor
| found it in the yard and demanded the money, which Larry's
| character thought was outrageous.
|
| From that I realized I needed to start writing down my ideas
| because I was losing most of them. If it works for Larry David,
| maybe it could work for me.
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