[HN Gopher] Notes on paper (2023)
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       Notes on paper (2023)
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2024-02-25 20:14 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (voussoir.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (voussoir.net)
        
       | voussoir wrote:
       | Hi, this is my article and your post came into my RSS feed. I'm
       | surprised my website has visitors! Let me know if you have any
       | questions. Thanks
        
         | alexpotato wrote:
         | How do you store the individual paper over time?
         | 
         | e.g. do you have a special binder with clear sleeves etc?
        
           | voussoir wrote:
           | I actually can't remember that well, but I don't think I used
           | anything special. There might have been a few courses where I
           | just used a paper folder with simple pockets inside, and some
           | courses where I used a three-ring binder with section
           | dividers for the courses. I would set the paper in between
           | the dividers and it would stay there well enough by friction
           | without any help.
           | 
           | The total number of pages for each course was never very high
           | because we were on quarters instead of semesters. If there
           | were a lot of pages I'd probably add some sleeves to secure
           | the pages -- but I would be fine with putting several pages
           | in each sleeve rather than one page each.
           | 
           | After the course was over I put the pages into 9x12 clasped
           | folders and that's where they piled up until I did this scan.
           | 
           | Thanks!
        
         | rambambram wrote:
         | You have interesting articles. You might want to set up an RSS
         | feed for your 'writing' page, because I definitely want to keep
         | updated on new posts.
        
           | voussoir wrote:
           | Thanks! Here's the link, it's at the bottom of the article
           | list but I suppose it doesn't stand out well enough.
           | 
           | https://voussoir.net/writing/writing.atom
        
       | velcrovan wrote:
       | Handwritten notes can be very useful in the short term. But there
       | is often this impulse to implement some kind of
       | digitization/archival system for them as well. I wonder how many
       | people who have done this have found real value in the digitized
       | notes?
        
         | sph wrote:
         | Digitized notes are a good idea in theory, in practice most
         | notes are write-only and are never read back ever again. Add
         | the fact that writing a note by hand is proven to be a much
         | better memory aid than storing it in a computer.
         | 
         | I suffer from terrible memory retention because of ADHD, so I
         | need to rely to external storage more than most people--yet
         | after obsessing about note taking for a while I reached
         | productivity enlightenment: I really do not need to remember
         | and categorise most of my thoughts and notes. I produce
         | millions of ideas every day, and I have, hopefully, other 50
         | years ahead of me of potentially interesting thoughts I might
         | feel I want to remember, only to collapse under this ever-
         | increasing weight of nonsense, of things that seemed important
         | one day, and really were not in the grand scheme of things.
         | 
         | No, these days I write, seldomly, on a paper notebook. I
         | embrace my terrible memory and use it as a tool, to
         | aggressively cull every extraneous thought du jour. If it's
         | important, it'll come up again. If it's truly important, it'll
         | keep me awake at night. That is the real problem of digital
         | notes: they never fade away.
         | 
         | The only things I keep in Org Mode are memories from decades
         | ago I am sure I will want to reminisce about when I am 80. Like
         | my family tree, the list of video games I loved as a kid, the
         | important dates of my life.
        
         | crestfallen wrote:
         | In my experience (FWIW) there is value in archiving and
         | preserving notes and other documents. Typically that value is
         | _realized_ when you actually go back to them. That 's the hard
         | part. If you can make that a habit, you're off to the races.
        
         | voussoir wrote:
         | I agree that I will probably never use these notes to go back
         | and actually learn anything. I did this scanning project
         | because I wanted to shred the paper and be rid of it, but I
         | felt I should keep it digitally because it's so cheap and easy
         | to. It seems sad to just discard work, even though the actual
         | knowledge is still contained in the textbooks and, hopefully,
         | my brain. But the doodles are worth more than the lecture notes
         | from a nostalgia perspective.
        
         | mixedmath wrote:
         | I've found digitizing notes is not useful to me. I digitized
         | all my notes from grad school and they're sort of a wash now.
         | 
         | I still take lots of paper notes. One thing that had been very
         | useful is to make (short, simple) indices in my paper notes and
         | to digitize just the indices.
         | 
         | It takes almost no time. The result is that when I want to look
         | at old noted I can look up where in my digital indices, and
         | then walk over to a shelf and pick out my notes. I've used this
         | *a lot* and it's surprisingly helpful.
         | 
         | Caveat: I'm a mathematician, so I have a lot of paper notes and
         | half-baked ideas. So my paper notes often look more like a set
         | of laboratory notebooks and not idle learning notebooks. I
         | essentoally never look back on noted I take while learning some
         | new subject.
        
       | kushan2020 wrote:
       | What good quality pen do you recommend ?
        
         | twojacobtwo wrote:
         | Having gone through a pen collecting phase, i think you need to
         | give some details.
         | 
         | 1. A budget. 2. Writing preferences and handedness. 3.
         | Preferred writing surface/media. 4. Body type
         | 
         | For 2, that would include:
         | 
         | a) tip type - rollerball, ballpoint, fountain, or 'marker'.
         | 
         | b) tip size/diameter (essentially contact surface area) e.g.
         | 0.17mm-1.0+mm
         | 
         | c) 'ink' type - gel etc.
         | 
         | Handedness matters mostly because left handers typically want
         | the fastest drying ink.
         | 
         | Writing surface (paper) is important because it can drastically
         | change how a pen writes (especially for fountain pens).
         | 
         | The body type might include approx. thickness (compared to an
         | average pencil maybe), body material (metal, plastic, wood),
         | contoured grip (yes/no, material?), and retractability.
         | 
         | If you don't know any of those, I would say just try to define
         | what quality would mean to you.
        
         | ryba1967 wrote:
         | Try going through this list to see if anything clicks with you
        
           | ryba1967 wrote:
           | https://www.penaddict.com/top-5-pens
        
         | voussoir wrote:
         | My favorite pen is the Uniball Vision Micro. Not the "Elite"
         | model, but the base model sometimes called the "Eye" in some
         | regions.
         | 
         | I've been using these for maybe 14 years? And I've got three
         | dozen more in my desk cause you never know when something you
         | like is gonna get discontinued.
        
       | dailyplanet wrote:
       | What scanner and scanning method did you use?
        
         | voussoir wrote:
         | They're big Ricoh brand scanners at my workplace and I used the
         | top document feeder which was able to handle big stacks at
         | once. 600 DPI, 1-bit tiff.
         | 
         | We have a scanner at home but it's only got a glass bed, that's
         | why I hadn't gotten around to doing this for so long.
        
       | stettberger wrote:
       | You would not believe it, but I just created (this week) a Latex
       | TikZ library that helps me to create templates / journal inserts
       | for the use case of handwritten notes. Although I believe in DIN
       | A5 paper, it might be useful for someone:
       | 
       | https://github.com/stettberger/notebook
        
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