The Hipster PDA (2004) | Hacker News Reader

The Hipster PDA (2004)

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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.

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

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

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That's as relevant as ever, even if many of paper's uses have been superseded today.

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.

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).

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

Yup. I drool over JetPens.com, Field Notes, and Doane Paper.

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!

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.

> 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...

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.

> remember that this was before smartphones

This was pre-phone, but solidly in the Blackberry era of smartphones

Merlin himself actually used the system, so, at least he bought into his own hype.

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.

I’m curious: why the annoyance at Things?

It isn't anything Things did.

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.

That's very resourceful! Your system also comes with a bunch of quotes and advice.

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.

Now this is really making me want to find some of these!

Reminds me of the Pocketmod, which to my surprise is still around:

https://pocketmod.com/

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.

Pocketmods are common in the indie RPG scene: https://itch.io/search?q=pocketmod

I'm a simple man, I see the work of Merlin Mann, I upvote.

I don't think we're supposed to notice him.

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.

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…

I loved using Evernote, but stopped cold when I accidentally deleted a long article draft by hitting a keystroke when I had all text selected. The replaced the text with whatever key I typed.

Maybe I closed out of the window before noticing my mistake...the muscle memory of CTRL + S doesn't apply to cloud document apps. But when I reopened Evernote, all that was left was that keystroke. There was no way to revert to a previous version.

> 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.

Yeah that's the biggest reason I don't use Evernote. A note app has one job...

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 :(

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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)

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)

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.

Maybe you need to attach some ballons to them?

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.

Love it. Back when I was managing development at a large corporate, I kept a box of pencils prominently on my desk.

For about 1/2 the small project requests that came to the department, the best for the task was not a database, not a new app screen, not some expensive workflow system, nothing on the cloud ... it was a pencil and a brain.

Sometimes a computer is a great tool. But many times it is overkill, expensive, and not appropriate.

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.

I well remember digging in to this at the time. A nice idea that didn’t work too great for me, so I dropped it after a while. But I have ever since always kept index cards handy for lists or temporary info.

I’m thankful to the HN citizen who alerted me to thetodaysystem.com - an excellent use of index cards to keep focus on the important tasks of the day.

Hmm, is "Hipster" still a current term?

It feels like hipsters aren't in evidence as much as they used to be before lockdown.

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).

(2004)

Oh yeah, totally, it was just interesting to see how the term was being used back then and reflect that I've not seen it much recently.

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.

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/

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...

Big fan of this site back in the early 2000s. Now I'm Bullet Journaling.

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?

I have a small notebook I carry around sometimes. When it's full my next notebook is going to follow the Bullet Journaling method.

I used it before it was a "thing" and I still use it to this day.

Best PDA. Ever.

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.

At this point, wouldn’t any PDA be a hipster PDA?

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.

That ad for A2hosting is bringing me back!

I basically use vimwiki and a todo list.

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