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I've noticed that as well -- no matter how engaged someone is, if there is a screen that they can see but others can't then it is an information imbalance that is disruptive to the normal flow of conversation. It's like hearing half a phone conversation -- your brain works overtime trying to reconstruct the part it can't see. And it makes some sense; when I am talking to a person and they keep glancing at their laptop, phone, or watch it's exceedingly off-putting and they seem disengaged even in cases when other evidence indicates they are paying attention.

I've similarly noticed that interacting with someone wearing a bluetooth headset or smart glasses is off-putting no matter how much they indicate they are paying attention and not watching or listening to something I can't see.

Like you, I prefer to type my notes. I've found that angling the screen down so that I can't see it either and then maintaining normal eye contact with everyone makes the problem mostly go away. Possibly because I'm not constantly breaking eye contact to furtively glance at a glowing screen that they can't see. Or possibly because I wasn't paying as much attention as I felt like I was -- there is some research that indicates that people who can see a screen or TV while they are accomplishing a task often significantly underestimate how much time they spent looking at it and how much it negatively impacted their task performance.

Agreed; that one thing, has actually been made easier with Covid-induced remote work at my project. On Zoom, people don't know I'm typing furiously - I'm a touch typer and can do reasonable amount of formatting/bullet lists without looking down, so I can look at and engage with and react to person maintaining eye contact while my fingers do their own thing :).

I haven't had a chance to use the remarkable 2 in an in-person meeting (covid) but with the stylus/pen and its shape, it's really obvious that it's not a consumption device. If it's flat on the conference room table, everyone in the room with decent eyesight will identify it as a monochromatic screen for note taking (as long as the pen is in the picture). Depending on camera angle, it's also obvious in video chats and easy to screen share using their app. Other thoughts:

* Remarkable's handwriting recognition is some of the best I've seen (but that's a low bar). Works well even on doctor chicken scratch but it's tied to their cloud stuff. The calligraphy pen setting helps with the aesthetics of bad hand writing

* This is why the remarkable has been a game changer for me. The pen selection tool allows me to draw an arbitrary shape and selects all strokes that fall within it. I can then drag or copy/cut/paste the selection, which I use all the time to rearrange my diagrams and copy/paste bits that I draw with a straightedge as a template. The big missing pieces are shape drawing tools and an infinite canvas so you can infinite scroll to the sides to keep drawing but with pinch to zoom, I usually just zoom way into a page when I open a notebook i know is going to be huge. Even zoomed out the resolution on the display makes it really readable (I can barely identify individual "pixels" with a 10x loupe)

* If the process of hand drawing/writing/annotating doesn't appeal to you or help with retention, the remarkable 2 is a really expensive ebook reader... with ssh.

I enjoyed this review of Onyx Note Air by a grad student:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELXnytHZY2c

It seems Note Air has potential but is not priced well. You might think reMarkable 2 is also expensive, but with Note Air you have to buy additional stylus too. The video above shows how Note Air works with reMarkable 2 Marker and Staedtler stylus.

I personally think if latency and price would get solved, Note Air has much more potential than rM2. I couldn't believe they actually put a lot of thought into designing the software that run Note Air, but the guy in the video explains things in detail.

If all you want is an ereader with ssh, a Kobo with Koreader will do that for you. They just run Linux, so it's quite a fun device for hacking around in.

Plus Koreader itself is in Lua and is relatively easy to make changes to.

>My handwriting sucks (I literally can't read my own; I'm 42yo - don't tell me to practice / it'll improve, just don't be that arrogant ignoramus ;).

I am close to 40, 2 - 3 years ago, I re-practiced handwriting with my daughter who wanted to learn (out of school) writing. To my surprise, my handwriting did improve and I was actually surprised by the result (cursive, I am French), hers was miles ahead of mine but really I was damn surprised by how effective it was.

I used to have teachers that refused to correct my copies because of my handwriting, so it's never too late.

Having been at university in France, I know what it means to be judge by handwriting and style rather than content. Ironically, a few points off here and there for handwriting can actually be the cutting line in some cases for admissions in the future. Thy destiny is lying in thy hands.

Similar experience going to a French school for the equivalent of 10th grade, after attending US schools until then. My first math test grade was very low, mostly because I didn't write things in the correct colors. That was quite a shock.

That's so funny- that makes me think: 2007 (or so) a manager asked me not to use a Windows Pen Tablet in a meeting because it wasn't respectful.

2011 Every senior manager brings an iPad to meetings and seem to get distracted.

2015 (Tech co) Everybody brings an MacBook Air or a MacBook pro to every meeting

2018 (Entertainment Co) Any electronic device is considered disrespectful in a meeting, especially phones.

and this is why I love remote work in a tight team. Cameras are really only on for standups / outside of team meetings / coffee breaks. Instead we do whatever we think is appropriate during meetings.

I normally make notes on paper and use the computer to fact check myself and the conversation (where it matters). It makes everything waay faster.

By a certain definition we are cyborgs with augmented reality when working remotely in a way we can't be in-person. It's as though everyone has a HUD with as many monitors as they wish on which they can pull up any program while facing the rest of the team and looking them in the eye (camera) when necessary.

You missed 2014 - Business Partners bring in their BlackBerry Passports :->

still using mine.

I think there is a spectrum.

  |Disengaged <----------------> Engaged|
  |Phone          Laptop       Pen/Paper|

So even though your phone had a keyboard, it still looked like you were texting instead of paying attention. A small laptop would have probably had a better reception. But I agree, nothing beats taking notes on paper as far as giving the impression of being engaged and attentive.

To add to that, with a laptop (tactile keyboard), it's also easier to type notes while maintaining eye contact. That goes a long way to show respect and look engaged.

On a side-note, I do this on video calls too, keeping the window near where the camera is located so that there is still eye contact.

I wonder if something like old school Graffiti (from Palm OS) would work for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)

I did use Palm devices extensively, and found Graffiti shockingly intuitive - it took me no time at all to be fully fluent in it. All the way up to Palm Treo, I loved them and couldn't figure out why people went Gaga over iPhone when it came out - I felt that I mostly had that same thing for years already (I recognize there are important differences in retrospective, not the least that iPhone was fashionable and cool to use;)

I would definitely work better with Graffiti-style input rather than full writing recognition; but:

a) I am a dorky minority - pretty much always a negative focus group for these things :P

b) even for me it's not ideal and modern lightweight laptops are a better solution -- I type at speed of speech these days; I don't think I could ever write / squiggle that fast.

Does anything modern support this? Does the remarkable? Because this would be killer for me. I have terrible hand writing and being able to type without hauling out a keyboard would be great for notes.

There is an Android keyboard called Graffiti Pro that does exactly that.

I don't think there is anything equivalent on the Remarkable, I think the idea is handwriting then if you need you can OCR it.

I’ve found the disorganization of writing is actually a benefit. I have a remarkable and I put almost everything in a single organizational notebook. There’s no pressure to do things right, no fretting about space or making clean shapes, just thought dumps and open notes.. which I condense down later on a computer if I ever decide I actually want to “go forward” with an idea. Works for me given I feel a friction with long term cleanly organized notes that sometimes inhibits the process altogether.

Could tap strap[^1] be a viable solution to this? It does have some learning curve but I didn't found it too bad (was able to memorize all alphabets in a weekend). Though being as fast and accurate as keyboard will take some time and effort. With 10mins per day, after 15 days I'm at 28WPM with 98.5% accuracy (they have a training app)

[^1] - https://www.tapwithus.com/

I’m a poor typist, for some reason I can touch type with my left hand, but I have a tendency to “hunt & peck” with my right hand. This is probably because I have to use a lot of GUI-intensive, mouse-based design software for work (constantly taking my right hand off the keyboard).

After reading your comment, I decided what the heck and my TapStrap2 arrived Thursday. I know I should just take those 15 minutes a day and improve my typing skills, but where’s the fun in that?

In any case, I’ve got the alphabet memorized, and now (at the end of Sunday) I can consistently get 18 WPM. For extra challenge, I decided to learn on my non-dominant (left) hand. I’m pretty impressed with how quickly basic proficiency can be achieved. I haven’t explored the mousing features, or macros, but I can definitely see myself using this in meetings in the future— if for no other reason than some sweet show-off value.

This looks really cool! Do they allow customizing gestures / "key bindings"? (Some of them don't look too comfortable and give me RSI just from looking at them.)

I also wish they allowed using two of these things at the same time (on both hands) so that one could type on a "virtual" QWERTY keyboard instead of having to resort to weird multi-finger gestures.

Have you tried typing the notes while keeping direct eye contact with the person speaking?

You can even half-close the lid to make it completely obvious the only thing you could be doing is typing notes.

The notes might come out a bit messy, but you can clean them up later.

My handwriting sucks too, and much of it is nearly illegible, but I find that I have much better retention if I keep written notes rather than typing.

Even if some of my notes are difficult (or even impossible) to read, it's still sufficient to help remember what I felt so notable that I wrote it down.

I realize that everyone's not the same, but studies have shown that writing leads to better conceptual recall (but typing tends to record more information)

My wife's version of a shopping list is a bunch of lines of "running writing Ws". The typed approximation being

Wwwwwwwww

...etc

At the shops, I have no idea but she knows what she wrote.

I’m familiar with that language.

I think it’s intentional.

We’re being tested somehow...

(I particularly like, when I’m sent to the store, reading “Wwwwwwwww” followed by a legible “etc.”)

ProTip: always bring home some flowers; it seems to distract them.

It'd be interesting to try hooking up some basic storage to a keyboard and just touch type without having a screen handy

And make sure the keyboard is a chording one, so you don't have to look while touch-typing, and you get: https://www.friedmanarchives.com/dataegg/

That is cool; it was discussed on HN, submitted by the creator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26790486

I think that is like wearable computing input devices such as the Twiddler keyboard: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=twiddler2&iax=images&ia=ima... and the DataEgg was intended to hold notes inside it and be a standalone device.

Related, the classic MicroWriter AgendA which was a PDA with chording and normal keyboards from the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MicroWriter,_AgendA,_and_...

I think it should be possible to build that pattern into a multitouch web page on a tablet and take chording notes on a flat screen.

There is one device that allows you to take digital notes and appear to be paying attention.

How do you feel about learning stenography?

The pen and paper kind of steno or the digital kind? What device is this?

AFAIK digital steno depends on steno keyboards (which are very cool), and I haven't seen any portable device with one. I would love to have a laptop with an ortholinear n-key rollover keyboard (it's easy to adapt an ortholinear keyboard to steno mode and switch between modes).

Also I have not seen any software supporting analog steno, but that would be awesome.

Sorry I was talking about digital. I didn't even know about the pen and paper kind.

There are portable devices https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Supported-Ha...