The Setup: Mike Fogus
mike.fogus.usesthis.com
mike.fogus.usesthis.com
When I was writing my dissertation, I followed this cycle:
+ Morning: Write new material, always by hand on legal pads, with the same pen (a relatively heavy, but thin Lamy ballpoint - good balance and weight, fine but clear ink, never clogged). Edit: I still have a callous on my finger from those two years of writing.
+ Lunch + shoot pool for a few hours (no books, clear head)
+ Afternoon: Type up what I hand wrote in the morning, edit old pages (on a screen or from print outs, that would vary) and take notes on articles and books.
Having time to think is what makes writing by hand so useful I think. It's like the (apocryphal?) Truman Capote response when he heard about Kerouac's automatic writing style: "That's not writing. It's typing." Too much of what we do is just typing rapidly, without thought.
Maybe more disciplined people can work slowly enough at a keyboard, but I find it difficult still. When I really want to think about something, I still start with paper.
just an observation from my own career and not meant as indicative of anything in reality
Managers I have worked for have used: Psion organisers, palm pilots, various laptops including the old style Thinkpad tablets, various smart phones from Blackberry to iPhone, and, latterly, iPads.
I just have a shelf of sketchbooks.
1. It inevitably occupies physical space for as long as it exists.
2. It is trapped in a format that cannot be (reliably) converted to electronic text.
3. As a corollary, it is not searchable by machine, so I'd argue it's not quickly searchable on any large scale.
4. As another corollary, it cannot be made accessible to people who can't read written text (e.g. visually impaired people), at least not without the manual effort of retyping it.
If you're writing just to capture your own thoughts, and the only intended reader is you, and you have the space for it, I suppose I can't object to it without getting into a discussion about individualism versus collectivism. But handwriting has absolutely no attractions for me.
If you're writing just to capture your
own thoughts, and the only intended
reader is you
I believe that writing by hand helps me to think better and write better, precisely because it's slower. (There's probably also something about me liking the specific physical feedback, but I would be the first to admit that's probably idiosyncratic and learned rather than universal.)
As for all the virtues of typed text that you mention, I agree. If you look at my process from above, I typed up what I had handwritten earlier. But even though this means some obvious duplication of effort, the net outcome was worth it for me (and still is).
No doubt people vary and all that, but I think writing by hand is vastly underrated nowadays. I stand by that.
I could literally have written the same answer as someone else and they'd get a 10/10, while I'd get a 8/10 because the teacher would claim to struggle to read what I'd written. (This may or may not be true, but that's beside the point.)
Fuck that.
And there are also the non-textual things you can do with paper. I draw and sketch a lot.
It's a different headspace than churning out writing on an editor.
Things like this really make me wish I could edit HN posts without a time limit.
With me it is a drawing. Diagrams, mind-maps, tables, doodles, phrases floating around distributed spatially by the degree of affinity. I find paper/pen just a lot quicker for that. Nowt posh just Biro and A4 copy paper or a sketchbook. I find the fashionable Moleskine paper to be too thin so I use artists sketchbooks or an Alwych notebook
http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/notes/white-van-driv...
clipboards are important. A local discount art materials shop has A3 clipboards (6mm thick) aimed at sketchers going for £4. Must get.
Don't get me wrong, I read nearly every technical interview on The Setup, but some of it is creepy or bad. Especially the people who claim they are minimalists and then rattle off a long list of expensive, high-end gear.
Ubuntu-phone man, simples.
Investigating org-mode babel as a consequence of your page.
At least I think it would be interesting, it might also just lead to me freaking about because someone is doing it wrong (As Sartre said, hell is seeing other people google).
But one can dream…
> In '87, Huey released this, Fore, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip to be Square", a song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself.
I'm just waiting for the bit where the interviewer gets bashed in the head with an axe, or the interviewee has to cut the interview short to return some video tapes.
PS: how about more of the non-computer ones like the baker and the coffee maker.
http://david.bull.usesthis.com/
Also, feel free to suggest people!
http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/
followed by
http://mark.pilgrim.usesthis.com/
Then it is a toss up between
http://jason.rohrer.usesthis.com/
and
I tend to skip the ones that go straight to 'Apple blah'. Yes, I'm addicted
I organize my whole life with Org-mode. I use it as a todo list, project management tool and agenda. I also use it to write documents and scientific papers and presentations, which I export to .tex.
Not being able to edit my agenda from an iPad is really what prevents me to buy one (I would probably also buy a bluetooth keyboard).
There is mobileorg, but I think it is not maintained any more, at least the iOS version. I could also ssh to a virtual server, but I'm not comfortable having all my agenda files on such a machine, because of security and privacy concerns.
You could encrypt it or SSH into your own machine.
SSH-ing my own machine could be an option, but I don't like the idea of exposing my own machine to the net this way.
Maybe I'm paranoid.
I could also automatically export my agenda to a pdf, which I could read, but not modify, on the iPad, using Dropbox.
Then, I should post-process everything to update my org-mode files.
The other option would be to buy a Windows 8 tablet (like the ThinkPad Helix), which can run Emacs. But Windows ... that would be a sacrifice ;-)
What is the advantage of Mont Blanc? G2 ink smears easily on the Moleskine, so I found them unusable together. (Not that I can justify to myself the premium for Moleskine, but I did buy one once. :) How does Mont Blanc ink fare?
edit grammar
To get high quality results, go through an intermediate format that's designed for publishing. Org mode can export to DocBook XML, then run an XLST on to make any tweaks in the elements used. Then either use your publisher's tools or XSL:FO to typeset it.
Using this technique it's possible to get extremely high quality results.
I've found it a bit of a mixed bag though - setting up minted in one of me .el files and some of it's styling in my .sty file. Not sure if I'm really doing it right, but the output looks OK for now and I assume it will be much easier to tweak it in future.
I like the dishwasher idea but I have neither a M-keyboard nor a dishwasher ;-)
Also I totally get your Model M love, I think it'll always be my preferred keyboard. What a great piece of hardware.
I need to debug the trackpoint on one of them (it's simply not working, might be the cable, might be the driver circuit) and the ujm keys on the other one. I found washing the switches with alcohol worked for a while, but I'm still getting miskeys on m j and u, where m -> m, u->ui, and j->jk.
> various portable drives
I love discovering gems thru reading The Setup