[HN Gopher] Thinking with pen and paper
___________________________________________________________________
Thinking with pen and paper
Author : ljvmiranda
Score : 108 points
Date : 2022-08-04 11:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ljvmiranda921.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (ljvmiranda921.github.io)
| Syzygies wrote:
| I can remember rolling my eyes at a writer using a mechanical
| typewriter decades after word processors had taken over. Did they
| thaw out of a glacier?
|
| At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I
| defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking
| whiteboards, imagining that musicians will still play grand
| pianos in a century, and they'll still snicker over Ryan Gosling
| playing a toy piano under the spotlight in that classic movie "La
| La Land".
|
| I've hoarded Hagoromo chalk; I'm the one with the chalk attache
| case in [1]. I've always carried multiple grades of drawing
| paper, and I've worked through many hundreds of artist grade felt
| tip pens, scanning all my math notes for thirty years.
|
| Then, pandemic. Just as World War 2 accelerated women in the
| workplace, the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital
| tools for visual presentation. To teach over Zoom, we needed to
| embrace drawing on a tablet. I understand that the pandemic
| radically accelerated similar trends in architecture.
|
| The algorithmic possibilities of drawing on a tablet are truly
| addictive; returning to paper feels like returning to a
| mechanical typewriter. For my purposes, Concepts offers the most
| involving algorithmic experience; I wrote [2] to support my note
| taking and diagrams for papers. However, Notability offers the
| least friction. I can have the same psychological relationship to
| taking notes on my tablet as I had with phyical paper, with the
| benefits of algorithmic reuse. (Pushing the envelope exposes how
| inconsistently Notability handles implicit layers, but one learns
| to draw around this.)
|
| In a few decades, after all living mathematicians have drawn on
| tablets since birth, math will be far more visual, conveying
| ideas with far more immediacy. Math communication is now still
| largely constrained by its resemblance to typeset prose. Ever
| leave a startup because reading your coworkers' code put you in
| "Just kill me now!" territory? I did. Mathematicians write the
| equivalent of bad code, rarely actually machine-checked, to
| formalize their ideas. Other mathematicians try to decipher this
| code, to reverse-engineer the ideas. We declare people who can
| actually do this as having a gift for mathematics. As I learn to
| teach combinatorics more visually, my classes swell with students
| who share my frustration.
|
| I've come to realize this summer that I pretty much despise
| mathematics. I can't wait for the visual revolution. This
| revolution didn't take hold on physical paper; one needs a
| digital accelerant.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 [2]
| https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards
| Archelaos wrote:
| > I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-
| sucking whiteboards
|
| To this day it is a real mystery to me why people would prefer
| whiteboards over blackboards.
| dijit wrote:
| I am not kidding when I say this although it sounds absurd to
| adult me: I was told when I was a kid it was due to racism.
|
| I suspect actually it was simply more economical, and
| probably something to do with chalk dust. I don't miss chalk
| dust.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > probably something to do with chalk dust. I don't miss
| chalk dust.
|
| However, the chalk dust has been replaced by synthetic
| colours that can ruin any cloth they come in contact with
| and are much harder to remove from the skin than chalk.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > To this day it is a real mystery to me why people would
| prefer whiteboards over blackboards.
|
| I vastly prefer whiteboards over blackboards. It's the
| physical sensation of writing for me.
|
| Using markers is smooth, a bit like writing with a pen on
| paper. Writing with chalk is rough and technically difficult
| - there is a component of pressure one needs to master.
|
| It's not obvious to me how the finished product is any better
| with a blackboard or a whiteboard (although I've heard
| several people try). Or how whiteboards are "soul-sucking".
| People who prefer blackboards seem like those who prefer
| vinyl over CDs, but with even fewer coherent arguments. Which
| is fine - everyone has a hobby - but maybe be a little less
| vitriolic about it?
|
| Whiteboards do have the downside of staining over time, but
| using glass is a foolproof solution to that particular
| problem. It's amazing how inexpensively one can find very
| large, used, glass-covered picture or art frames.
| mt_ wrote:
| This how humans have been taking notes for most of the time. Why
| did the author thought this would be a noteworthy topic for a
| blog post?
| rasengan0 wrote:
| "I remember in my college chemistry classes, we were instructed
| never to tear off or hide any error we made in our lab notebooks.
| Instead, we should mark it with a strikethrough. "
|
| +1 OMG Chemistry notebooks FTW. I was always a pencil person and
| when the professor literally made us cross out our mistakes it
| felt gross to see the wasted space for 'nonsense', so
| inefficient. Only later I come to realize that all creation is
| not for naught. Observations made and recorded for the record are
| invaluable when seen from a different time perspective. If DNA
| can have built in redundancy, then evolution is revealing a good
| lesson to replicate for note taking as well.
|
| People's time horizons are too short when thinking about so
| called 'ultimate' note taking/brainstorming/productivity
| solutions. What system did Grace Hopper use? Feynmann?
|
| I can take a trip to Mom's and fetch that chemistry notebook to
| retrieve that 1980s information. No retro hardware, searching for
| encryption keys, old floppy disk/zip drive media players, no
| defunct internet companies to contact about 'my' data,
| proprietary formats to parse, etc. Open that 40 year old notebook
| and read it.
|
| To be sure, I own the iPads/android tablets, note apps, desktop
| apps, wikis, cloud services and other digital debris that in the
| end is/was wasted friction, $$$ and energy. Too many
| dependencies.
|
| I stick with a low-end laptop with plain text on vim and emacs
| -nox and (mobile) self-made paper notebooks and enjoyable
| wonderful fountain pens [1] I'm really trying to look back toward
| memory like the ancients but that is the ultimate practice.[2]
|
| Life is too short to conform to digital tools. Enjoy both! There
| is much forgotten freedom to be rediscovered with the analog
| hand.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/ [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| detaro wrote:
| In chemistry etc the properly-kept lab notebook is also an
| almost chain of evidence thing, both for scientific (integrity)
| and commercial (patents and such) reasons. I.e. never erase,
| only strike-through so previous error is still readable,
| numbered pages, each section dated and signed, properly kept
| index, ... all make it a lot harder to falsify things after the
| fact. (Nowadays there are also digital record-keeping tools
| that do timestamped signatures and such instead)
| GoodbyeMrChips wrote:
| > almost chain of evidence
|
| It is, and _was_ a chain of evidence for me. One that saved
| my arse.
|
| Type up your reports and spreadsheets, but _raw_ data should
| always be kept in a proper hardbound paper lab notebook....
| one that references the filenames of your typed up electronic
| data.
| jmull wrote:
| Interesting how the tool integrates with the mind.
|
| I used to strictly be a pencil and notebook person... to be
| mentally engaged fully (whether that is thinking, problem
| solving, planning, recalling, etc.) I _had_ to use pencil and
| paper.
|
| But improvements in text editors, and their convenience, lead to
| me using them more and more to capture ideas, lists, etc., and
| one day I realized I had switched.
|
| Now I need to use sublime text to be mentally fully engaged.
|
| If I could find something better I'd try switching again. Needs
| top-notch text editing _integrated well_ with something like
| Apple Pencil. (Apple notes app is subpar when it comes to text,
| doesn 't integrate text and pencil drawing/writing very well, and
| although I just want basic drawing/writing tools, it doesn't do
| that very well either.)
| criddell wrote:
| On my iPad I use GoodNotes and it's pretty good. I've also
| tried Notability and it's quite good as well but GoodNotes is
| what I started with and it's what I'm most efficient in.
|
| One of my kids uses OneNote from Microsoft. Their notebook /
| section / page metaphor seems too fiddly for me although I know
| some people like it.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I love pen and paper. I have chronically sweaty hands so an iPad
| + stylus + note app works best for me currently, but its the same
| idea.
| nunodonato wrote:
| Would love to read the author's thoughts after using a Supernote
| for a month
| Tomte wrote:
| Does anyone have a good video for hand position with fountain
| pens?
|
| My handwriting is bad, because my hand doesn't "hover", it's
| firmly planted on the table, and I need to lift it and reposition
| it every few words.
|
| All the videos I've seen make it seem so easy, but when I try to
| emulate those hand positions, my pen's nib doesn't even reach the
| paper. They glide effortlessly with the smallest two fingers
| lightly touching the table. I need to lower my hand so three
| fingers and the wrist are again very much on the table.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Here is a trick for learning how to make your hand "hover" that
| I was taught by the old pros when I joined the animation
| industry.
|
| Take a pencil. A wooden one, not a mechanical one. Sharpen it.
| Then hold it so that the _entire side_ of the exposed cone of
| graphite touches the paper, rather than the tip. Your thumb
| will be on one side of the pencil, with all four fingers in a
| row on the opposite side, rather than sort of clustered around
| the front of the pencil.
|
| Now try to draw some lines. You will get very broad lines and
| probably have little control, because this grip _forces_ you to
| keep your wrist still, and gives you very little room for your
| fingers to move the pencil either. It will feel very weird and
| awkward at first! You'll have to make a bunch of big, broad
| motions because you've probably never tried to make fine
| motions like this with your arm in your entire life. It's okay,
| you'll get better!
|
| A great way to get better: take a piece of paper, and draw a
| circle in the upper left corner, just barely touching the edges
| of the paper. Don't worry about making a nice circle, don't go
| over it multiple times, just make one simple sorta-circular
| gesture. Now move to the right and draw another circle, just
| touching the first one and the tip of the paper. Repeat for a
| whole row, then do another row that just touches the bottom of
| the previous row, until you've filled the whole page.
|
| Your circles will probably look better by the end of the page.
| I did this every morning as a warm-up for one of my first
| animation jobs, and the circles got a _lot_ better, and
| tighter, over the course of not much time.
|
| Once you have learnt this, you can easily transfer this new
| control of your arm motions to tools held in other grips. I
| mostly work digitally, and _have_ to address the tablet with
| the stylus' tip for it to register, but I still move my arm
| with the fluidity learnt from this exercise.
|
| As a bonus this is also a lot better for your arm. Keeping the
| Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Fairy away is _very_ much a thing
| grizzled old animators wanted to teach the new kids coming in,
| they'd seen great careers cut short by injuries.
|
| (You could also probably keep holding the pen in a more
| vertical fashion and use a wrist brace to keep your wrist from
| moving, if this is all too damn weird for you.)
| Tomte wrote:
| Thanks! The circle exercise is still being done with the
| "sideways pencil", right?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Yes!
|
| You could probably do other shapes too, penmanship manuals
| have a lot of swoopy curves to practice if you want to
| develop nice handwriting. I just did circles because
| animators really love roughing stuff out with circles.
| runjake wrote:
| A few gripes about the post:
|
| 1. It appears the author hasn't been doing this long, judging by
| their Twitter feed. I'm more interested when somebody's been at
| something for a year or two. The whole "I've switched to $thing
| and it's changed everything!" is always fun when it was written
| soon after the switch. Even funnier when you visit it a few
| months after and they're back on the old thing. See also
| operating system switch posts.
|
| 2. "Most" notes systems aren't using Zettelkasten. Most note
| takers don't even know what it is.
|
| 3. I take handwritten notes and drawings all the time. Then I
| scan and OCR them into a PDF with my iPhone that goes into
| Obsidian via Shortcuts automations. This way it's searchable and
| I always have them. I don't have to remember to carry a
| handcrafted Midori/Moleskine around everywhere.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| I think these are fair gripes. Would love to add my
| perspective:
|
| 1. I've been handwriting notes for about 2 years now, after
| typing all my notes before that. I generally agree with the
| author's points. My take on it, which I think they sort of had
| their own spin on, is that "notes" is an unhelpfully broad
| category. You record different things for different reasons. A
| todo is very different from jotting down a novel idea. So I
| have an Obsidian vault and a notebook.
|
| The notebook is for my ephemeral notes. That includes any
| information whose lifespan is less than ~1 week, so usually
| quick thoughts about imminent meetings or todos for the next
| day or so. It also includes any time I'm taking notes strictly
| for my sake when the information can be referenced later. For
| example, my own personal thoughts during a meeting that has
| shared notes. In my opinion handwriting is better for that sort
| of stuff: I think it focuses you, it slows down your thinking a
| little, and it makes you more likely to remember what you
| wrote.
|
| Obsidian is for archival notes. Things I may need to reference
| in the future. That's where I keep any longer running
| todos/projects, as well as any more detailed/complex info that
| I might not remember but want to reference in the future. Not
| infrequently I'll take something I jotted down in my notebook
| and add it to Obsidian if it seems like it might be useful in
| the future.
|
| I find this split to be very effective for me personally. YMMV!
|
| 2. Totally agree. I doubt most people need or benefit from
| actually getting into Zettelkasten.
|
| 3. That seems very reasonable. I think for me personally it
| would be a bit of a hassle given how rarely I have a need to go
| back through my written notes.
|
| So yeah tl;dr would be: I think handwritten notes are the ideal
| way to record information that you're not going to need for
| more than a few days tops, but I'd hate to have to dig through
| my old notebooks looking for something.
| [deleted]
| Snitch-Thursday wrote:
| I was recently reading Steal Like an Artist and one of the
| sections referenced having an analog desk and a digital desk, the
| former for ideation and creativity modes, the latter for editing
| and revising modes, and I found that salient.
|
| I love my fountain pens and paper, but for permanence and
| immediacy reasons. It's really hard to put a file attachment for
| safe-keeping on your hardcover journal.
|
| I love OneNote, but for ease of dumping screenshots, digital ink
| annotations, file attachments, and generally building up context
| around a bit of specific information reasons. It's really hard to
| put your sticker from your family-member's letter on your OneNote
| notebook.
|
| And those are two different tasks, just like the desks example
| above.
| thenoblesquid wrote:
| Even a simple to-do list. Crossing an item off with pen on paper
| provides a much more satisfying feeling of accomplishment than
| deleting the task or striking through the text in an app.
| melling wrote:
| How about adding "Notation as a Tool for Thought" in some form?
|
| https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm
|
| Might be a different notation needed depending on the subject.
| eevilspock wrote:
| I prefer thinking on paper. But I like the compact storage and
| backup, organizability and most importantly _searchability_ of
| digital notes.
|
| What I really need is a great _open source_ OCR and hand diagram
| to SVG tool.
|
| I hunted to no avail. Anyone got good recs?
| YeBanKo wrote:
| Tangentially related question, maybe someone can explain why
| graph/quad/grid ruled notepads are harder to find and way more
| expensive. I can easily get college ruled notepad for $.50-$1
| almost in any department store, but graph ruled are significantly
| more expensive ($4-$5) and less common.
| drekipus wrote:
| Market forces. Grid is in less supply because it's not as
| demanded
| tunesmith wrote:
| Any favorite pens with LEDs attached so you can write in poor
| lighting conditions?
| foldedcornice wrote:
| I recommend a separate clip-on book light (or clip-on LED
| light) that is bright, lightweight, and USB-rechargable.
|
| If the LED is attached to the pen, the weight (of both the
| battery and light) will be significant and can tire you out for
| long writing periods. You would also have a better experience
| for the light to not move too much while writing, which will
| happen as you move the pen along the paper.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Sigh. I really sympathize with this, and I totally think that
| analog is not dead and will never die. And vinyl records!
|
| Despite that, I find that in own writing, I always _think_ I 'm
| going to initiate it on paper, but then I start writing fragments
| on the computer, thinking about them, revising, etc. etc. I lay
| it aside & think about it, and then revise some more. In the end,
| I think it's about as creative as pen-and-paper.
|
| I hope. I should try the pen again just to make sure.
| foldedcornice wrote:
| I've had similar experiences where I didn't need any paper to
| plan out and write shorter articles. However, screenwriter
| Thomas Schnauz provided a great example of how handwriting was
| useful when writing scripts for Better Call Saul. He posted a
| photo of a cork board with dozens of pinned index cards with
| handwritten ideas for scenes. It looks like the cards can then
| be rearranged or substituted out without losing the past
| drafts:
| https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz/status/1296912710601306113/ph...
|
| Handwriting has also been useful for taking notes where
| diagrams and imagery was important, such as when researching
| what a good user interface could look like, for a web
| application. You could give it a try if you decide to write an
| article that analyzes or incorporates a significant amount of
| imagery, or has a lot of parts, like a lengthy script,
| fictional story, or in-depth report.
| lr1970 wrote:
| iPad Pro (12.9 inch) + iPencil + GoodNotes (with zip-file backup)
| gives me best of two worlds. I scribble my notes with iPencil in
| GoodNotes. GoodNotes does OCR and its search functionality is
| good. It allows for backups in a form of zip archives (cloud
| backup option also available). Unlike Notability (subscription),
| GoodNotes app is one-time-fee.
| mikeholler wrote:
| I started bullet journaling with pen and paper and it has changed
| my life. Intentionality -- that's exactly right. When I write I
| feel intentional.
|
| I've also dove into the world of nice paper and fountain pens.
| I've always had hand cramps when writing, whether using a cheap
| Bic or a Pilot G7. With fountain pens, that's all gone, and
| writing is effortless. You can get started with this cheaply by
| getting a platinum preppy fine or extra-fine pen ($4), and a
| bottle of ink ($10). You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because
| anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or
| extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper.
|
| Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little
| bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll
| rarely need to refill it.
| foldedcornice wrote:
| Gel pens can arguably be as enjoyable to use as fountain pens,
| with easier refills and less to no need for maintenance. Gel
| pens also work on all types of paper, with no concerns about
| smudging due to drying.
|
| Pentel Energel refills are very smooth, much more so than Pilot
| G7 cartridges (but not water-resistant). Zebra Sarasa refills
| are almost as smooth (and are water-resistant, which can be
| useful if you get caught in the rain).
|
| I use both gel pens and fountain pens, with gel pens for quick
| notes and writing while on transit. I could comfortably get by
| with only gel pens--many people have, as I've seen forum posts
| by former mathematics and physics students who posted
| photographs of dozens of refills used up over their degrees. I
| still prefer fountain pens when I'm at a desk, though it's a
| pleasant luxury for the smoothness--any significant strain when
| handwriting for many pages went away when upgrading to higher-
| end gel pens.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will
| feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works
| just fine on cheap paper.
|
| It does depend on the ink, too. I have a Parker XF nib that
| will absolutely bleed through my notebook, which wasn't exactly
| cheap either. Not sure if it's supposed to be actually "good
| paper", though (Leichtturm), but I'm quite disappointed.
|
| Diamine ink will take forever to dry on that paper and _will_
| be seen from the other side. And it 's not even a particularly
| dark shade of blue. Regular supermarket-bought Parker ink
| (Quink washable blue) works much better.
| bch wrote:
| > Not sure if it's supposed to be actually "good paper",
| though (Leichtturm), but I'm quite disappointed.
|
| I don't think I had bleed-through problems w Leichtturm (do
| recall drying/smudging issues though (Mont Blanc Royal Blue
| ink)), but my Midori "md notebook" has been treating me well.
| rkallos wrote:
| I, too, was disappointed using Leightturm notebooks with
| fountain pens. They're nice notebooks, but you're right; the
| paper isn't very good.
|
| I'm no expert, but my understanding is that more denser of
| paper (80 g/m^2 and up) take much better to fountain pen
| inks.
|
| I swear by Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks and paper.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| This particular notebook pretends it's 80 gm/m^2.
|
| I agree, Clairefontaine and Rhodia (even cheap ones) work
| much better. The Diamine ink still needs some time to dry,
| but at least it stays on its side.
| huimang wrote:
| Uniball vision rollerball pens basically glide on the page, and
| they're portable unlike fountain pens. They're also
| significantly cheaper than buying a fountain pen + ink(s). As
| much as I love writing with my Sailor ProGear Slim F/EF nib
| fountain pens, inks + traveling = a nice mess waiting to
| happen.
|
| I had a pelikan souveran r800 that was refillable, but sadly I
| lost it on one of my return trips. Now I just travel with 3
| leuchtturm notebooks (A6-grid, A5-grid, B5-lines-softcover) and
| a bunch of uniball pens.
| tartoran wrote:
| > Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a
| little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and
| you'll rarely need to refill it.
|
| Please expand on this. I'm utterly confused as to what you mean
| and why you'd need it.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| It allows for more volume. The converters or cartridges take
| up real estate in the pen with their mechanisms. This
| alternate approach takes up all that space with ink.
| bbonamici wrote:
| idk op's specifics, but some pens use ink cartridges; by
| sealing the body of the pen, you can fill it with ink, have
| way more capacity and you can refill it.
| ljvmiranda wrote:
| My daily driver (Lamy 2000) has a piston converter and I
| find its capacity quite large, i.e., I need to refill it
| every week or so.
|
| Cartridges are great too, but I seem stuck with a few
| options. Lany cartridges are great but it's the only decent
| one I can find here.
| bch wrote:
| > has a piston converter
|
| The 2000 is natively a piston filler as far as I know.
| When you say "converter", are you saying you've modified
| your 2000?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Why tho?
|
| Sure, there are some converters that are notably,
| notoriously small (Namiki Vanishing Point converters are
| infamous for this), but in those cases it's simple to use
| carts instead. (In the Namiki case, the carts last weeks
| and weeks.)
| soogwoog wrote:
| So you can use different inks other than compatible
| carts?
| dwringer wrote:
| A lot of people just reuse empty cartridges a few times
| by refilling them with a blunt tip syringe (sold by most
| online pen/ink shops), using whatever ink they want.
| dakr wrote:
| I use a syringe to refill cartridges from whatever bottle
| of ink I want to use. The cartridges can be reused many
| many times.
|
| edit: lol, if I had reloaded the page before commenting,
| I would have seen all of these people saying the same
| thing!
| dwringer wrote:
| > edit: [...]
|
| Every time fountain pens come up on HN I'm amazed how
| active the discussion gets.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| It is far easier to get a blunt nosed syringe for $0.10
| (not sharpened for medical use) and use it to quickly and
| cleanly refill cartridges with whatever ink you want.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Isn't it even EASIER to get a converter?
| foldedcornice wrote:
| For a video visualization of how this works, Brian Goulet
| (who runs a popular fountain pen YouTube channel)
| published a tutorial on cartridge cleaning and refills:
| https://youtu.be/QloRQWHe5Gk?t=301
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Most pens either ship with or will work with a piston
| converter. You don't need to mod a pen just to use inks
| other than those available in compatible cartridges.
|
| E.g.,
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=fountain+pen+piston+conv
| ert...
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Why tho?
|
| Just to expand on the time before refills. Most
| converters are under 1 ml. Having, say, 3-4 ml in your
| pen means you fill it a lot less frequently.
|
| The thing keeping me away from eyedropping my pen is the
| inevitable burps.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| As I said, the only converter of mine that seems to have
| a capacity problem is the Namiki, but for practical
| reasons I also almost always run carts in that pen
| anyway.
|
| I don't need a project, and I'm not super interested in
| locking a pen into a single mode of operation. The beauty
| of most pens is that you can go with carts OR with a
| converter, depending on mood. (Obviously some, like
| Pelikans and TWSBI, are bottle-fill only, but you know
| that going in.)
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yeah, I don't do cartridges for the same reason as
| others: I change the ink often, and the selection with
| cartridges is almost non-existent (and much more
| expensive per ml).
|
| For a lot of pens, there is no "locking". You just remove
| the cartridge/converter, and add silicone, and you're
| good to go. You can always revert back.
| tarentel wrote:
| On fountain pens you can seal the pen body with silicon
| grease and then instead of putting ink in a container like
| cartridge or converter you just put it directly in the body
| of the pen. https://www.jetpens.com/blog/How-to-Do-an-
| Eyedropper-Pen-Con...
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| The first thing you have to understand about fountain pens is
| that the ink basically has the viscosity of water, it isn't
| like other "ink" in ballpoint pens or gel pens. A fountain
| pen has to essentially function as a controlled leak to
| write... while not leaking.
|
| When ballpoints came into the picture and steamrolled
| fountain pens (as the utilitarian writing tool) the methods
| of creating a vessel to hold ink inside a fountain pen
| without creating a mess/leaking were pretty
| primitive/unreliable by todays standards. A common solution
| was to just fill the hollow body of the pen entirely up with
| ink and then put silicon grease on the threads where the nib
| screws in (it could leak out). The easiest way to fill a
| narrow, light cylinder with ink you REALLY dont want to spill
| is with an eyedropper type device, hence the name eyedropper.
|
| People still do this with fountain pens, apparently fountain
| pens are decently popular in india and a lot of indian
| fountain pens are eyedropper pens.
|
| Most fountain pens these days are what are called "cartridge
| converter" pens. The name is weird, but the original
| innovation over crude rubber sacs that you would squeeze to
| suck up ink (itself an improvement over eyedropper style
| filling) was to make plastic cartridges that could be filled
| with ink, sealed with wax and then inserted into the pen.
|
| Another big innovation was piston filler fountain pens that
| have a piston on the inside of the pen body that can be moved
| in or out by rotating a knob at the end of the pen. Not only
| is this an improvement because you can stick the pen directly
| into the ink and just suck it up through the nib by
| retracting the piston, ink can be manually advanced out into
| the nib/feed if the pen was writing dry, and in the opposite
| sense there is always a bit of suction keeping the ink in
| that you can adjust. A fountain pen's "feed" is basically a
| big capillary force engine, and it is nice to have a
| counterforce with the piston that can be adjusted to either
| aid or inhibit it.
|
| So then someone took the whole piston filler idea and
| minituarized it so it could slot into pens designed for
| cartridges, hence the name "cartridge converter" pens because
| these self contained piston fillers were called converters.
|
| Eyedroppering pens is something people do for fun still, its
| an ok way to fill a pen if you dont care about the pen
| heating up as you hold it, creating a pressure differential
| and "burping" ink out onto the paper occasionally.... its
| actually far safer to keep an eyedropper pen mostly full so
| that there is less of bubble of air to heat up and cause
| this.
| bch wrote:
| > its actually far safer to keep an eyedropper pen mostly
| full so that there is less of bubble of air to heat up and
| cause this.
|
| This tip as well for any fountain pen you're air-traveling
| with. Pressurization changes affect the air volume, not the
| liquid volume, so make the pen pressure-change resistant by
| having it full of ink.
| pca006132 wrote:
| I am trying to use my tablet for writing down notes while
| thinking, it kind of works, but I really miss the sound and
| feeling of writing with a fountain pen. Somehow writing with a
| fountain pen in a quiet room makes me feel patient, and less
| stressed by problems.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Walmart sells wirebound grid paper notebooks for cheap. I love
| them. I use them as my development notebook.
| lancesells wrote:
| If you have a notebook / sketchbook / journal and it needs to be
| held open with an object look for another notebook [1]. It seems
| trivial but that is a poorly designed notebook.
|
| 1. https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/assets/png/pen-and-
| paper/bla...
| emadabdulrahim wrote:
| My Midori notebooks lie flat. Not sure what's going on in that
| picture
| coldblues wrote:
| For me, what feels like quicksand, is writing on paper. I type
| very fast on my keyboard 120+ WPM. I want to get my thoughts out
| of my head as soon as possible, and shape them fast with
| immediate feedback. My notes are very random and they're all over
| the place, yet all easily interconnected and searchable because
| of backlinks and some minimal organization. If I were taking
| physical notes, I would not have as many notes as I have now, and
| would be less motivated. The computer is an extension of myself
| at this point, and it feels more natural than writing on paper.
|
| I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-
| taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the
| particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system. Which is
| fair, but it might do him a disservice if he ends up impatient
| with the system he is building now. There is a reason, after all,
| that so many people switched to digital. Even if the author
| prefers the romanticized way of old note-taking, it is
| undoubtedly inefficient. It's an experience akin to using
| ${Editor} over Vim.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| It depends what you're optimizing for. I'm not sure I'd
| consider volume of notes to be a positive metric. I'm not
| convinced motivation is either.
|
| When I handwrite I absolutely write less. It's harder and
| slower. But for the types of things I use handwriting for I
| think that's a plus. I tend to put more thought into what I'm
| recording. In my personal experience the outcomes are better.
|
| I type notes as well, very frequently, but for archival
| content. Things I want to be able to reference in the future.
| emadabdulrahim wrote:
| Efficiency is good but not the most important thing when it
| comes to thinking, idea generation, journaling, etc.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I do the same thing -- TO START.
|
| Initial notes are almost always on paper, in a good notebook,
| written with a fountain pen. I also almost always have a small
| notebook and pen on my person.
|
| BUT once something becomes a real project I need to track, or if
| the notes are important enough that I want them searchable later,
| I transcribe and summarize into the appropriate Orgmode buffer.
|
| I retain things written longhand better, but this act of review &
| summarization is like a turbocharger for that recollection. (Not
| for nothing, but one old-school study hack I read about back in
| the 80s was "type up your class notes". It dated from an era
| before computers, so it wasn't about search or indexing. It was
| about the act of review inherent in the transcription.)
| flakiness wrote:
| For me pen and paper being beneficial is a strong signal of an
| interesting project.
|
| A large part of day-job work doesn't deserve the pen and paper -
| We just need to track TODOs, links and some other bullet points
| for them. Digital tools are very good at these because it's
| optimized for them.
|
| On the other hand, if a problem demands the flexibility and the
| visual capacity of the pen and paper, it's a good sign of the
| sufficiently large intellectual problem space it contains.
| waspight wrote:
| Anyone using any e-ink tablet tool for taking notes instead of
| pen and paper? Is there any good solutions there yet?
| goerz wrote:
| The Remarkable tablet is pretty good (although I prefer the
| iPad, except for in direct sunlight)
| user00012-ab wrote:
| I would love to see a site where people posted stuff they have
| been doing for over a year and it still works for them.
|
| Seems like all these blog posts are, "I Started doing this
| yesterday, and I'm going to do it for the rest of my life... or
| tomorrow when I blog my next big thing I'm going to do forever."
|
| I'm more interested in stuff people have stuck with and actually
| works for them when the novelty of the medium wears off.
|
| I'm not saying pen and paper isn't great, but I'm more interested
| in the system that evolves if you actually use something over a
| long period of time.
| codazoda wrote:
| I've been writing stray thoughts in a pocketbook for about 18
| months. That also lead me to keep a modified Scanners Daybook
| (similar to this post). I'm on my second such notebook and have
| been doing so for nearly a year.
|
| Finally, I keep a third notebook for travel. The idea being
| that I don't want to lose my original, but I probably don't
| want to lose my travel one anymore either, so...
|
| Anyway, this can be a successful long term thing.
| larve wrote:
| I have been keeping sketchbooks since 2010, where I decided
| "this is something I'm going to do forever". I have started
| another "I'm doing this forever"-project where I started
| writing daily in 2020, my obsidian vault linked below is the
| result. Ask me again in 10 years.
|
| I do a lot of digital notetaking currently, along with more
| analog index card and sketchbook notetaking. I stopped drawing
| in 2018 due to work burnout, but hope to pick it back up soon!
|
| https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/ZK/Sketchbooks
|
| https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Public/My+Obsidian+workfl...
| larve wrote:
| Digital notes are much more useful for getting long term
| value out of them, I found. Paper notes are fun, and it's
| much easier to sketch things freely and just doodle on them.
|
| Paper sketchbooks are also really useful as temporal
| artifacts. Looking back at them, I know where I was, I
| discover things I have forgotten, they have different
| formats, they mix life with work with hobby. I don't think
| the digital notes will have the same nostalgia factor.
| wcarss wrote:
| +1 to sketchbooks. I started using them in ~2014 and have
| never stopped. The tricks for me were to fold each page in
| half to get more columns and restrict my wandering
| handwriting/doodles, to find cheap books (which still have
| hard covers) at a local art store that serves students, and
| to make sure I always write the date/time down when I start a
| new train of thought, with a heading.
|
| Every few years I go through the last 12-20 notebooks and
| take pictures, then get rid of them. I don't go back through
| them that much, really, beyond things more than ~6 months
| old, but when I do I feel like it's a goldmine.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > I would love to see a site where people posted stuff they
| have been doing for over a year and it still works for them.
|
| Here's the one thing that's stuck with me:
|
| I started carrying earplugs with me in 2002. I was forced into
| it by the Army, but I've kept it up all these years because of
| how great it is. They completely disappear into the pocket, and
| when you want them, you *really* want them.
|
| But they're great, even when most people wouldn't think they
| "need" them. Here's some examples:
|
| * Using power tools like a blender, mixer, or lawn mower. *
| Sleeping during the day, in a strange place, or around other
| people (e.g. on an airplane). * Working in a public space like
| the library, a coffee shop, a bus, or an airplane.
|
| If you like going to shows or dancing, they're great to have in
| case you need them.
|
| I think the benefit of earplugs has decreased for the average
| person since noise cancelling earbuds are so widely available,
| but in my experience earplugs both block more sound and they
| block different things. Of course the downside is, you can't
| listen to audio with them in. But the upside is you never have
| to worry about charging them.
|
| In my experience, the reusable flange style earplugs are fine
| for light use, but they can sometimes be painful with extended
| wear (6+ hrs per day for months at a time). I went out and got
| a bulk pack of foamies, which I assume will last me the rest of
| my life. The only downside to the foam earplugs is, if you get
| them wet, you can reuse them.
|
| I suspect they've worked particularly well for me because I
| think being bored for some amount of time during the day is
| healthy, and I find I get distracted by listening to music or
| podcasts.
|
| The benefit:weight, volume, and price is absolutely amazing.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| You can't reuse them you mean
| nordsieck wrote:
| > You can't reuse them you mean
|
| You mean foam earplugs? You absolutely can reuse them.
|
| You can't reuse them if they get wet (they don't stay
| compressed when you roll them up - a necessary step before
| inserting them). And I throw them out if they get too
| dirty.
|
| But I generally get 7-15 uses out of a set of foam plugs
| before I chuck them. It depends on how much I sweat when
| I'm using them, and how dirty my ears are.
| tenkabuto wrote:
| I'm also really interested in hearing more about processes that
| people have been maintaining or making subtle improvements on
| over a long period of time.
|
| I think that there's an issue of people being less likely to
| talk about their long running projects or processes because
| over time they forget the what and why behind it and/or their
| enthusiasm for it fades away. Accordingly, maybe we should pre-
| register our thoughts about a process or project at the outset
| and not publish it until later on, when we can retrospectively
| talk about our success with it.
| bsima wrote:
| I have roughly ten years of notebooks in a box under my desk.
| They are all some kind of "bullet journal" method: date at the
| top of the page, items below, index in the back.
| tevrede wrote:
| Do you ever refer back to them?
| ozzydave wrote:
| For me, only occasionally, but when I do it's often a huge
| help - can save an immense amount of time not re-doing that
| work. Most of the value is in helping align my thoughts as
| I go though.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Same here. I wrote about my experiences here:
| https://honeypot.net/post/digital-notes-are-better-than-pape...
|
| In summary, I kept reading about people who prefer paper, or
| why paper is _better_ than digital, but I just can 't get into
| it. I've _tried_ , with nice tools and a daily commitment to
| using them, but it just doesn't work _for me_.
|
| The best compromise I've found is a nice size Rocketbook that I
| can easily OCR into a notes app later.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I've went through just about every app and I'm back to pencil
| and journals.
|
| I do use apple notes for just about everything when I have my
| phone and no pencil/journal nearby.
|
| I think most note taking systems being pushed by "productivity
| gurus" is compelling at first but then comes a realization
| that's not how we actually think.
|
| There's merit to things like "building a second brain", but I
| think it has to start with analog notes.
| ljvmiranda wrote:
| Hi there, author here! Been using pen and paper (for knowledge
| work) since 2017. Hope that helps
| user00012-ab wrote:
| that does help, thanks!
| powersnail wrote:
| The tool doesn't matter. What works, is to actually do the
| stuff consistently.
|
| One of the most productive people I know, took her lecture
| notes in the comment panel of PowerPoint in college, simply
| because _it's there_ when she open a lecture note. UI wise,
| it's probably worse than any note taking system that has ever
| showed up on HN. Nevertheless, she was a straight A student
| juggling 2 majors, 1 minor, and a lot of social life.
|
| This is what I observed in hyper productive people: some of
| them have a unique, novel system of organizing their knowledge,
| but many of them don't. So, having such a system is probably
| not that important.
|
| And even though I'm not a hyper productive person, this applies
| to what I'm good at doing as well. You can take away my
| favorite text editors/plugins/command line tools, and I can
| still competently write programs. I can code in notepad.exe if
| I have to. It won't be as convenient, but I can absolutely be
| productive.
|
| It's the same for writing/reading/thinking. If you can already
| write, it's fine to try to perfect your workflow. If you can't
| write, it's not because you have the wrong pen.
| s0rce wrote:
| I've used pen and paper for years (since my PhD 15 years ago).
| Writing it down helps it go into my head, I don't go back and
| look at the notes.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Writing it down helps it go into my head
|
| This is what I've found as well.
|
| In high school, a gym teacher forced us to copy his slides
| for sex ed. At the time I thought it was completely stupid.
| But come test time, it was amazing how much I remembered.
| Like you, I've never felt the need to re-read my notes - just
| writing down the information has been enough.
|
| I've carried the habit with me, and it's continued to work
| well for me.
|
| Something about hand writing is just much more effective than
| typing. I wish it weren't so.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I started buying custom printed notebooks from the scientific
| journal companies. For $10 a journal you can get a very niche
| hard cover journal, with page numbers (if you like), plain, ruled
| or grid paper, and embossed with your name (or whatever). It's so
| satisfying. Combine that with a nice fountain pen and ink and
| it's quite the experience.
|
| It's my proffered way to take notes, think through problems.
| megamix wrote:
| Great write up! I use pen and paper to off load my mind
| douglaswlance wrote:
| How do you ingest the data for inspection over time?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Is Zettelkasten the new Getting Things Done yet? I feel like I'm
| seeing essays about How I Zettel with the same frequency I used
| to see essays about How I GTD back when 43folders was pioneering
| the genre of "productivity influencer".
|
| (edit: amusingly enough, I find this near the end: "I also
| mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don't do
| that anymore-I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring.")
| vavooom wrote:
| I've come to the limited experience conclusion that
| Zettelkasten is a great tool if you are doing detailed non-
| fiction writing, blogging, or research, and plan to for more
| than a year. Outside of these scenarios its just storing
| information that you may/ may not ever refer to or recall.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Nailed it. I've used "Linking Your Thinking" much more
| successfully for organizing notes in Obsidian when I want to
| be able to quickly access them. Here's the summary:
|
| Make lots of indexes, or "Maps Of Content".
|
| An index can point to a other pages, including other MOCs. It
| can also have its own text.
|
| There, that's 95% of it. I have a top-level "Index MOC" page
| that links to my "Work MOC" (which links to projects I'm
| working on), "Orders MOC" (that links to a bunch of pages for
| local restaurants and what my wife likes ordering from them),
| "Diablo MOC" (because I play a lot of Diablo 3 and keep notes
| on how to optimize characters), etc.
|
| In short, it's a way to turn a mess of pages into a web of
| links that I can easily click through if I want to.
| BeetleB wrote:
| A comment from a few days ago.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32227826
|
| Basically, over 90% of people invoking Zettelkasten do not know
| what it is. It's definitely not a tool suitable for most folks.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yeah, I think it is.
|
| I never went all in on GTD, but some principles stuck with me:
| key is having a trusted system where I can capture things that
| will then SHOW me those things when I need to see them.
|
| I used Omnifocus for a while, but eventually migrated to
| OrgMode as a better fit for my life (even though I'm not really
| an emacs person overall).
| ticviking wrote:
| It seems to me that it is.
|
| I find it productive, probably because it helps me collect the
| various ideas and notes from things I've read into a single
| place, and is a good mindfulness practice.
| chadash wrote:
| in general, I use my computer for taking notes. But I recently
| started using pencil and paper for designing quick low-fidelity
| mockups for things that my team is going to implement and it's
| wildly better than working on the computer for several reasons:
|
| - pencil/paper is just so much quicker
|
| - if you think it, you can draw it... quickly. It's more
| flexible.
|
| - key advantage: when non-engineers (or even engineers) see
| higher fidelity mockups, it's very easy to get caught up on some
| of the details like where a button goes or how big the font is.
| With pencil/paper, everyone realizes that it's a rough sketch and
| that the final product isn't going to look this way.
|
| After I write things up, I scan them with an app to a PDF file
| and then email that out (or attach to a ticket). Of course,
| pen/pencil isn't great for final designs... there's no substitute
| for a high-fidelity mockup of what somethings is supposed to look
| like. But I find it very useful to start with the UX and then
| work on things like CSS last.
|
| Some key tools I use:
|
| notepad: $5
|
| pencil: $7 (I really splurged here for the pentel Orenz, my
| favorite mechanical pencil, but a $1-2 pencil will be 95% as
| good)
|
| 6" ruler: $1.76
|
| 1/2" binder (I like to keep my drawings): $4
|
| I've thought about investing in a ReMarkable tablet, but I find
| it hard to justify the cost since pen/pencil work so well.
| iammjm wrote:
| Last year i went in the other direction: analog to digital.
| Onenote is my tool of choice - it's basically a really awesome
| piece of paper: you can write per hand on your tablet, you can
| type to text, you can create lists, tables, convert handwriting
| to text, insert audio, photos, shapes, screenshots, first text,
| copy text to and from other apps, tag information, hyperlink
| other pages and notebooks and even pieces of text; you can host
| in in cloud or locally, the page is unlimited and you can cluster
| notebooks into sections and notebooks, move and copy pages around
| and even collaborate with other people in real time. It's on all
| devices you use, synced. It's everything your notebook is plus so
| much more. Hands down best room I've ever used.
| lbriner wrote:
| I think OP touches on it but even with a graphics tablet, there
| is no way I can create simple drawings and sketches on the
| computer compared to pen and paper. Even a simple box in
| powerpoint is:
|
| 1) Check if you are on the correct ribbon 2) Click the box icon
| (unless you have millions of shortcuts setup) 3) Drag and drop it
| 4) Maybe change the defaults which you don't like (colour,
| thickness etc) 5) If you are typing text in it, that rarely works
| out well without clicking other buttons
|
| On paper: draw box and write text - simples.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I am not sure why it needs to be this complicated for a
| graphics tablet.
|
| Open paint software -> use stylus to draw square.
| account-5 wrote:
| Pencil, for me a pencil is much better than any pen. Pencil and
| paper, square paper A4 or A5.
| jxy wrote:
| People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made
| it simple. Have you considered how many different kinds of
| paper/notebooks/slides/cards, kinds of pen/pencil/brush? Soon
| you'll start fiddling with your pens and papers, as some comments
| here have already started suggesting their personal favorite,
| including making your custom "eye dropper" pen.
|
| Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is
| extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text
| files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt,
| ed note.txt , my previous notes more notes
| ... my last notes a now just write you new
| notes down don't worry about anything don't even
| worry about editing previous lines just write and
| done . w q
|
| And that's it.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally
| made it simple.
|
| > Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface
| is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system:
| text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, <ed
| session snipped> And that's it.
|
| Surely that's also intentionally making a digital interface
| simple? I mean, both kinds--all kinds--of interfaces can be
| made simpler or made more complex depending on the user's
| tastes. That fact itself doesn't, I think, speak to any virtue
| or lack thereof on the part of any interface paradigm.
| ontouchstart wrote:
| cat > note.txt <<EOF
|
| ...
|
| EOF
| wainstead wrote:
| Line editors for the win.
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