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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how researchers feel about spending over a grand on it, but an iPad pro lets you write in free form, draw diagrams, etc. You can take pictures with it too. You can even connect it to Google Jamboard and then all your stuff is online and shareable.

I'd definitely have preferred to have one while I was studying.

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An ipad would never survive a lab environment from falls alone, and thats not even mentioning liquids. they only last a few years under the best conditions before the non-removable batteries crap out anyway. Plus total lack of repair options, no keyboard, and being overpriced makes them a hard sell. We wouldn't buy an inferior power supply or particle detector for double what its competitors cost, so i can't imagine blowing that money on a lab ipad. Many people i know use the used thinkpad x220 around the lab for computing, but there is always a proper lab notebook. If experiments from 20 years ago had stored their only lab notebook copy in a file, it's a practical gaurentee that it would be lost by now. Things are even more complicated and brittle in 2020. God help you if you rely on cloud storage for essential information unless you're prepared to watch like a hawk for the company's innevitable demise and 30 day deletion notice. There is still no realistic substitute for a shelf or cabinet with old lab books on it. Keeping physical lab books can also be a requirement of the grant.

Lab books typically don't do well liquids either. At least with an iPad your data should be safe if it gets destroyed.

Also, iPad batteries and screens are replaceable by Apple and you can definitely attach keyboards to them. Even if they did only last a few years, that's only a few dollars per day. Your lab probably spends more than that on coffee and tea for you.

Must be nice. I've never worked in a lab where coffee and tea were provided.

My lab books from the 1980s are still in fine form, because lab books are precious so people look after them. (Also, I was scared of losing something, so I photocopied them a month at a time, and stored the copies in a different location.)

Since I put a table of contents at the start of each book, with a small set of keywords listed by every title, I can find things pretty well.

A lot of people on this thread have stressed the importance of immutability, and that is really significant. When I found an error, I would make a new entry (on another page, maybe in another book) that corrected the error, and added information about this to a changelog.

Oh, and I entered the table-of-contents line into a plain-text computer file for each entry, so I could search for things by phrase or keyword (grep is your friend).

With a notebook with high-quality paper and a pen with good ink (I used India ink a lot, which is waterproof), the notes will easily last 100 years, maybe 1000 years. Do I think Apple's ipad format will last that long, or that Apple itself will? Not so much.

I have tried iPad Pro a few time and I find myself just cannot use it. I still prefer my trusty notebook + fountain pen.

Personally, I also maintain a Big Text File as my digital note. So I put the index to my physical notebook in it. That way, I could do digital search in my digital note, and refer to my physical note if required.

My daughter started at university this fall and she needed a computer. She could have picked anything (within reason) but what she wanted was a big iPad Pro with the keyboard. She's in a life sciences program and so far it's worked perfectly for her.

Which note taking app do people use on the iPad?

I like the idea of writing notes with the Apple Pencil and converting some of them to text for readability. The converted text also allows me to fit more on a page.

Anything allow embedded Latex?

Notability is pretty good. It's not too fancy, but it's very fast and Ginger Labs has continually added new features.

My daughter uses GoodNotes. You can convert selections to text, but I don't think there's an easy way to bulk convert. Behind the scenes it's doing it because search works on all handwritten notes.

Some of the apps allow for infinite scrollable pages so maybe that would decrease your need to convert everything to text?

What problem does embedded Latex solve?

I believe the bundled Pages app from Apple can handle Latex.

I can confirm that Pages works with LaTeX, but Pages is not really a good alternative to Notability or GoodNotes.

Latex is a nicer way to write equations.

You can use a sigma character, for example, and move characters around to create equations, but it’s cumbersome.

Plus, it’s a nice little language for formulas. Someone else might give you the Latex and you could copy and paste that into your notes.

I can see that if you are typing your notes, but when using something like an Apple Pencil, you can just draw a sigma or whatever symbol you want.

yes, and in the past that’s what i have done:

https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/blob/master/s...

My point is that when you want to make your notes look neater, replacing your handwriting with Latex equations would look much nicer.

I tried for a while with a convertible laptop and a stylus that goes with it. In the end it was too bulky and when i spill i might kill it. I am back to the paper notebook for bench work. All data and documentation of results goes into Confluence. This hybrid served me well lately.

An issue in academic labs is that the funding agencies forbid spending grant money on computers. So the academic workers pay for their own computers out of pocket, and are quite unhappy about it.

They buy the cheapest computer that will do the job. Now, to make full use of the university computer network, their computer has to be "set up" by the department IT person, resulting in a significant degradation of performance, possibly installation of software that you don't want, and the inability to do your own maintenance. Often the computer is too old to support the latest OS, so it can't be "set up" anyway.

So they typically connect to the campus guest wi-fi network and use things like Dropbox to save data.

Now you can buy a computer with grant money, if it's purchased with a piece of scientific equipment. So the spectrometer in daily use, well, it was purchased 20 years ago, it only runs Windows NT, and can't be connected to the network for fear of breaking it.

The data have to be accessible on a different computer at home. They can't take the same iPad home because it might be radioactive.

Nobody's going to buy an iPad for the lab.

I've known plenty of labs buying computers for students and staff with grant money. I don't think there is a ban, at least in my field (biology). It's a tool like any other, and they aren't full of bloatware unless you mean access to the university intranet if applicable.

It may depend on the specific funding agency. I know that my spouse has to provide her own computer.

I missed the edit window, and of course I was remiss in not looking this up. It was something that I've heard from multiple people, but never verified. Here's one reference:

https://resources.finance.duke.edu/research/documents/eTutor...

Are the file formats either open or exportable to something that is open? If they're not, you're in the exact same place as the author.

It depends on the app you use to take notes. The one I use (notability) can export files as pdf.

thinking about an e-ink tablet to avoid long-term eye damage like supernote, onyx, remarkable

What kind of eye damage are you talking about?

blue light and front light strain

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