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Paper is the real 'killer app'

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Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#321

Post by keithpeter »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #165

"Paper" used to mean endless soul-destroying reams of office printout, or before that, typed memos. And thank goodness, that seems to be receding. The new "paper" isn't really the same thing. Like handwriting, woodblock printing, and the making of books from hand-inked parchment, it is receding into a handicraft.

Yes, but in the era before the reams of printout, we had notebooks produced by local stationery printers in styles that varied shop to shop. I miss that local choice and small scale production.

UK: anyone remember the hard backed board notebooks with marbled covers and canvas spines in around 10 by 8 inch format?

Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#322

Post by tambourine_man »

thecupisblue wrote: post #243
tambourine_man wrote: post #77

I hate paper. No searching and highly losable. I'm also way faster on a keyboard than with a pen/pencil. In fact, I had to fax a hand written letter (yeah, don't ask) the other day and realized I'm now almost illiterate with this thing. I could draw very well as a kid, but my handwriting was always pitiful. But after years of neglect, the thing was illegible. I pity the poor person that would have to decifer the hier…

Few weeks ago I was at a party and had a moment of inspiration so I took a pen and paper to write down some poems. Barely I could read them later, let alone anyone else.

I imagine the inebriating substances often consumed at parties probably didn't help either

Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#323

Post by thecupisblue »

tambourine_man wrote: post #322
thecupisblue wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few weeks ago I was at a party and had a moment of inspiration so I took a pen and paper to write down some poems. Barely I could read them later, let alone anyone else.

I imagine the inebriating substances often consumed at parties probably didn't help either

Yup, but I checked and I'm still terrible at handwriting :)

Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#324

Post by pka »

Often, when I need to get familiar with a particularly tricky piece of code, I print it out and start annotating the printout, drawing arrows between dependent functions, visualizing data structures, algorithms and data flow, simplifying fragments in the margins, highlighting important stuff with different colors.

For fragments of code where search is not needed this is just such a superior experience. I dream of some day being able to do the same in a code editor with i.e. diagrams in comments or graphical annotations right there in the code.

The same applies to writing code. Being able to visualize hard-to-describe concepts on a piece of paper makes the overall algorithm as well as early design mistakes and edge cases much more obvious.

When I'm writing just text (todo lists, product ideas, whatever) and being able to easily edit, archive or search through the text a normal editor is a much better choice, but I'm not gonna ditch paper anytime soon.

Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#325

Post by PetitPrince »

zapu wrote: post #319
PetitPrince wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* The correctable pens (fine point) can dry up pretty if uncapped. I had some case where my pen where partly dried and would randomly not write. In some case I had the feeling that a particular area of the notebook wouldn't let me write where in fact it was only a dry pen. You can "undry" the pen - see [1] - but the process is not as smooth and elegant as the video would suggest. I think it's less a problem with medi…

Thank you very much for the answer! So the pens that Whynote sells are just branded Staedtler 305, is that right? Not having to ship the pens from abroad and being able to buy them locally would sell the product for me.

> So the pens that Whynote sells are just branded Staedtler 305

Exactly.

Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#326

Post by deerpig »

freehunter wrote: post #160
KIFulgore wrote: post #124

I recently re-subscribed to a real-life, old-fashioned newspaper. I like the digital edition, but prefer the paper version. The resolution is amazing and you can't beat the loading times, and I never run into browser incompatibility issues. There are still too many ads, but they don't pop up and dance.

I'm the opposite. I hate physical newspaper. Don't get me wrong, I like physically printed sheets, but news paper is the worst quality paper. It tears easily and is partially see-through which means if I'm holding it up against a light (like an open window), it gets hard to read. And if I'm reading next to an open window and a breeze blows by, the chances that my paper will (at best) get blown around or (at worst) to…

>And they're printed once a day, so if an important event happens at noon, I won't get to read about it until tomorrow morning.

I don't like reading printed newspapers any longer either, but the one good thing about them is that they are printed once a day. News is not something that you need to know about instantly. The only things we need to know about in real time are existential threats. That is not news, that is an emergency broadcast or alert, which is not what news is for.

Have you ever noticed that when 24-hour cable news covers things in real time, it's mostly just waiting around and bullshiting until something happens, and then they are forced to provide incomplete information that is more often than not, wrong.

The whole idea of a newspaper is that it provides some time between an event and when you learn about it. That time is used by the newspaper to collect information, fact check and provide a more complete account of an event. They still get stuff wrong, but it's still far better than twitter, or cable or any real-time firehose.

Learning about something that happened yesterday also gives the reader the distance to contemplate and thing about what happened as well instead of jumping on twitter or facebook and making an ass of yourself before knowing all the facts.

Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#327

Post by Veen »

themodelplumber wrote: post #282
rand_r wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been successfully using journaling to fight insomnia for a few months now. What I do is try to simply capture every thought that comes into my head as fast as I can write. At first, my hand can barely keep up with the torrent of thoughts being produced by my mind, but after maybe 5-10 min it slows right down. At some point I feel like I'm actually waiting for thoughts to come up so I can write. Eventually, my mi…

This helped me, too, when I was suffering from insomnia. 700 to 1,000 words was the "sleep like a baby" target range for me. Also, the sooner I could bring myself to write about the really difficult topics, the better.

I too find writing a helpful way to stop thoughts tumbling round in my head so I can sleep. I think it has something to do with silencing the rehearsal loop.

http://www.cognitiveatlas.org/concept/rehearsal_loop

Focusing on a quiet podcast has a similar effect.

Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#328

Post by olejorgenb »

cableshaft wrote: post #110
mattferderer wrote: post #98

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Does anyone have a workflow for using paper to take notes & then transferring them to an online notebook (OneNote, Evernote, etc)? My current process is read a chapter, then take hand written notes trying to recall what I just read. A day or more later I revisit material by putting notes into a OneNote or Evernote. I've been weighing pros & cons of this vs doing freehand us…

I haven't tried it, but Molekine has an Evernote Sketch book that's designed specifically so you can take a picture of the page and upload it instantly into Evernote, you might find that useful. I also know they have a notebook you can buy that when you're done with it, you can mail it to them (for free, built into the price I think), and they'll digitize it for you, and either send back your paper copy or recycle it…

They don't explain the feature very well. I can take picture of some cheap paper too?

Do the pages have some kind of distinct marker telling evernote where the picture came from?

Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#329

Post by erikbye »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #219
dmoo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I always say, trees for paper are a crop with a long growth cycle. If you don't need the paper who will plant the trees?

What proportion of planting is for paper, I'd expect wood used in construction to be a greater demand?

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), globally around 40 percent of the annual industrial wood harvest is processed for paper and paperboard.

The pulp and paper industry is the fourth largest industrial user of energy, consuming 6.4 EJ in 2005, and a significant emitter of greenhouse gas (source EIA report 2008).

Paper consumption has risen by 400% in the past 40 years. 35% of trees harvested are due to paper manufacture.

6.5+ million trees were cut down to make 16 billion paper cups used by US consumers, only for coffee, in 2006.

Paper waste accounts for up to 40% of total waste in the United States. 71.6 tons per year.

Sources: Wikipedia, WWF, FAO

Re: Paper is the real 'killer app'

#330

Post by joshboles »

futureisbright wrote: post #287
nomel wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the benefit comes from two limitations: - The slow and physical aspect allows you to think about and consider the idea, as you're writing it. - The negative reinforcement, for that slow consideration, caused by from the permanence of your mistakes or a tired hand. But, I don't think paper has to be involved. I see it as an indication of a lack of good stylus input in most devices. I now use a large iPad Pro,…

I, too, possess an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, but I opted for the smaller 9.7" one. It was a mistake, the bigger one would have been better, but I love it anyway. for note-taking. It's a godsend to be able to shuffle text around, resize it, undo my errors etc. I wrote something on paper lately and automatically searched for the undo button when I made a mistake and was frustrated when I realized I have to use my era…

That's interesting. I've got the larger iPad Pro that I take to meetings for notes. My coworker has the 9.7" and his seems more manageable / not as cumbersome. Perhaps it's due to our meetings being in large community rooms without tables, but there's something that's not sitting right with me. The grass is always greener, I guess.

As far as apps, GoodNotes is where I landed. It's handwriting recognition / search is pretty good, and I like the way it handles importing PDFs and Word documents.

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