For me pen and paper being beneficial is a strong signal of an interesting project.
A large part of day-job work doesn't deserve the pen and paper - We just need to track TODOs, links and some other bullet points for them. Digital tools are very good at these because it's optimized for them.
On the other hand, if a problem demands the flexibility and the visual capacity of the pen and paper, it's a good sign of the sufficiently large intellectual problem space it contains.
Is Zettelkasten the new Getting Things Done yet? I feel like I'm seeing essays about How I Zettel with the same frequency I used to see essays about How I GTD back when 43folders was pioneering the genre of "productivity influencer".
(edit: amusingly enough, I find this near the end: "I also mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don’t do that anymore–I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring.")
I never went all in on GTD, but some principles stuck with me: key is having a trusted system where I can capture things that will then SHOW me those things when I need to see them.
I used Omnifocus for a while, but eventually migrated to OrgMode as a better fit for my life (even though I'm not really an emacs person overall).
I find it productive, probably because it helps me collect the various ideas and notes from things I've read into a single place, and is a good mindfulness practice.
I've come to the limited experience conclusion that Zettelkasten is a great tool if you are doing detailed non-fiction writing, blogging, or research, and plan to for more than a year. Outside of these scenarios its just storing information that you may/ may not ever refer to or recall.
Nailed it. I've used "Linking Your Thinking" much more successfully for organizing notes in Obsidian when I want to be able to quickly access them. Here's the summary:
Make lots of indexes, or "Maps Of Content".
An index can point to a other pages, including other MOCs. It can also have its own text.
There, that's 95% of it. I have a top-level "Index MOC" page that links to my "Work MOC" (which links to projects I'm working on), "Orders MOC" (that links to a bunch of pages for local restaurants and what my wife likes ordering from them), "Diablo MOC" (because I play a lot of Diablo 3 and keep notes on how to optimize characters), etc.
In short, it's a way to turn a mess of pages into a web of links that I can easily click through if I want to.
I combine both freely. I have a "wiki" part that's mostly starting pages for individual topics, a structure notes part that are a cross between a draft article and an index page. They're concepts I'm trying to work out. A Zettelkasten part with linked "claims" where I put original thoughts. And tons of free form logs and blog post drafts and topic driven writing. It's all linked together and it's a lot of fun. here's the public part: https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Public/INDEX
If you have a notebook / sketchbook / journal and it needs to be held open with an object look for another notebook [1]. It seems trivial but that is a poorly designed notebook.
I think OP touches on it but even with a graphics tablet, there is no way I can create simple drawings and sketches on the computer compared to pen and paper. Even a simple box in powerpoint is:
1) Check if you are on the correct ribbon
2) Click the box icon (unless you have millions of shortcuts setup)
3) Drag and drop it
4) Maybe change the defaults which you don't like (colour, thickness etc)
5) If you are typing text in it, that rarely works out well without clicking other buttons
Even a simple to-do list. Crossing an item off with pen on paper provides a much more satisfying feeling of accomplishment than deleting the task or striking through the text in an app.
I started bullet journaling with pen and paper and it has changed my life. Intentionality -- that's exactly right. When I write I feel intentional.
I've also dove into the world of nice paper and fountain pens. I've always had hand cramps when writing, whether using a cheap Bic or a Pilot G7. With fountain pens, that's all gone, and writing is effortless. You can get started with this cheaply by getting a platinum preppy fine or extra-fine pen ($4), and a bottle of ink ($10). You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper.
Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.
> Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.
Please expand on this. I’m utterly confused as to what you mean and why you’d need it.
idk op's specifics, but some pens use ink cartridges; by sealing the body of the pen, you can fill it with ink, have way more capacity and you can refill it.
Sure, there are some converters that are notably, notoriously small (Namiki Vanishing Point converters are infamous for this), but in those cases it's simple to use carts instead. (In the Namiki case, the carts last weeks and weeks.)
A lot of people just reuse empty cartridges a few times by refilling them with a blunt tip syringe (sold by most online pen/ink shops), using whatever ink they want.
It is far easier to get a blunt nosed syringe for $0.10 (not sharpened for medical use) and use it to quickly and cleanly refill cartridges with whatever ink you want.
For a video visualization of how this works, Brian Goulet (who runs a popular fountain pen YouTube channel) published a tutorial on cartridge cleaning and refills: https://youtu.be/QloRQWHe5Gk?t=301
I mean, how important is the pen as a tool to human history? The pen is one of the most important human inventions and the fountain pen is by far the coolest version of it :P
Most pens either ship with or will work with a piston converter. You don't need to mod a pen just to use inks other than those available in compatible cartridges.
As I said, the only converter of mine that seems to have a capacity problem is the Namiki, but for practical reasons I also almost always run carts in that pen anyway.
I don't need a project, and I'm not super interested in locking a pen into a single mode of operation. The beauty of most pens is that you can go with carts OR with a converter, depending on mood. (Obviously some, like Pelikans and TWSBI, are bottle-fill only, but you know that going in.)
Yeah, I don't do cartridges for the same reason as others: I change the ink often, and the selection with cartridges is almost non-existent (and much more expensive per ml).
For a lot of pens, there is no "locking". You just remove the cartridge/converter, and add silicone, and you're good to go. You can always revert back.
I ran carts only in my Vanishing Point(s) for years, but largely because it was easier for travel and I found the ink color and consistency very pleasant.
Once I stopped traveling so much I started using more bottled ink, which is fun, but then you get to a point where you have a mental matrix about which inks work best with which paper in which nibs…
It allows for more volume. The converters or cartridges take up real estate in the pen with their mechanisms. This alternate approach takes up all that space with ink.
The first thing you have to understand about fountain pens is that the ink basically has the viscosity of water, it isn't like other "ink" in ballpoint pens or gel pens. A fountain pen has to essentially function as a controlled leak to write... while not leaking.
When ballpoints came into the picture and steamrolled fountain pens (as the utilitarian writing tool) the methods of creating a vessel to hold ink inside a fountain pen without creating a mess/leaking were pretty primitive/unreliable by todays standards. A common solution was to just fill the hollow body of the pen entirely up with ink and then put silicon grease on the threads where the nib screws in (it could leak out). The easiest way to fill a narrow, light cylinder with ink you REALLY dont want to spill is with an eyedropper type device, hence the name eyedropper.
People still do this with fountain pens, apparently fountain pens are decently popular in india and a lot of indian fountain pens are eyedropper pens.
Most fountain pens these days are what are called "cartridge converter" pens. The name is weird, but the original innovation over crude rubber sacs that you would squeeze to suck up ink (itself an improvement over eyedropper style filling) was to make plastic cartridges that could be filled with ink, sealed with wax and then inserted into the pen.
Another big innovation was piston filler fountain pens that have a piston on the inside of the pen body that can be moved in or out by rotating a knob at the end of the pen. Not only is this an improvement because you can stick the pen directly into the ink and just suck it up through the nib by retracting the piston, ink can be manually advanced out into the nib/feed if the pen was writing dry, and in the opposite sense there is always a bit of suction keeping the ink in that you can adjust. A fountain pen's "feed" is basically a big capillary force engine, and it is nice to have a counterforce with the piston that can be adjusted to either aid or inhibit it.
So then someone took the whole piston filler idea and minituarized it so it could slot into pens designed for cartridges, hence the name "cartridge converter" pens because these self contained piston fillers were called converters.
Eyedroppering pens is something people do for fun still, its an ok way to fill a pen if you dont care about the pen heating up as you hold it, creating a pressure differential and "burping" ink out onto the paper occasionally.... its actually far safer to keep an eyedropper pen mostly full so that there is less of bubble of air to heat up and cause this.
> its actually far safer to keep an eyedropper pen mostly full so that there is less of bubble of air to heat up and cause this.
This tip as well for any fountain pen you’re air-traveling with. Pressurization changes affect the air volume, not the liquid volume, so make the pen pressure-change resistant by having it full of ink.
I am trying to use my tablet for writing down notes while thinking, it kind of works, but I really miss the sound and feeling of writing with a fountain pen. Somehow writing with a fountain pen in a quiet room makes me feel patient, and less stressed by problems.
Uniball vision rollerball pens basically glide on the page, and they're portable unlike fountain pens. They're also significantly cheaper than buying a fountain pen + ink(s). As much as I love writing with my Sailor ProGear Slim F/EF nib fountain pens, inks + traveling = a nice mess waiting to happen.
I had a pelikan souveran r800 that was refillable, but sadly I lost it on one of my return trips. Now I just travel with 3 leuchtturm notebooks (A6-grid, A5-grid, B5-lines-softcover) and a bunch of uniball pens.
Gel pens can arguably be as enjoyable to use as fountain pens, with easier refills and less to no need for maintenance. Gel pens also work on all types of paper, with no concerns about smudging due to drying.
Pentel Energel refills are very smooth, much more so than Pilot G7 cartridges (but not water-resistant). Zebra Sarasa refills are almost as smooth (and are water-resistant, which can be useful if you get caught in the rain).
I use both gel pens and fountain pens, with gel pens for quick notes and writing while on transit. I could comfortably get by with only gel pens—many people have, as I've seen forum posts by former mathematics and physics students who posted photographs of dozens of refills used up over their degrees. I still prefer fountain pens when I'm at a desk, though it's a pleasant luxury for the smoothness—any significant strain when handwriting for many pages went away when upgrading to higher-end gel pens.
> You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper.
It does depend on the ink, too. I have a Parker XF nib that will absolutely bleed through my notebook, which wasn't exactly cheap either. Not sure if it's supposed to be actually "good paper", though (Leichtturm), but I'm quite disappointed.
Diamine ink will take forever to dry on that paper and will be seen from the other side. And it's not even a particularly dark shade of blue. Regular supermarket-bought Parker ink (Quink washable blue) works much better.
I agree, Clairefontaine and Rhodia (even cheap ones) work much better. The Diamine ink still needs some time to dry, but at least it stays on its side.
> Not sure if it's supposed to be actually "good paper", though (Leichtturm), but I'm quite disappointed.
I don’t think I had bleed-through problems w Leichtturm (do recall drying/smudging issues though (Mont Blanc Royal Blue ink)), but my Midori “md notebook” has been treating me well.
Notebooks from Japan usually take FP ink well. Notebooks from American/European companies (usually made in China) usually don't. Clairefontaine/Rhodia is the main exception, though I think the paper is actually made in France.
Interesting how the tool integrates with the mind.
I used to strictly be a pencil and notebook person... to be mentally engaged fully (whether that is thinking, problem solving, planning, recalling, etc.) I had to use pencil and paper.
But improvements in text editors, and their convenience, lead to me using them more and more to capture ideas, lists, etc., and one day I realized I had switched.
Now I need to use sublime text to be mentally fully engaged.
If I could find something better I'd try switching again. Needs top-notch text editing integrated well with something like Apple Pencil. (Apple notes app is subpar when it comes to text, doesn't integrate text and pencil drawing/writing very well, and although I just want basic drawing/writing tools, it doesn't do that very well either.)
On my iPad I use GoodNotes and it's pretty good. I've also tried Notability and it's quite good as well but GoodNotes is what I started with and it's what I'm most efficient in.
One of my kids uses OneNote from Microsoft. Their notebook / section / page metaphor seems too fiddly for me although I know some people like it.
in general, I use my computer for taking notes. But I recently started using pencil and paper for designing quick low-fidelity mockups for things that my team is going to implement and it's wildly better than working on the computer for several reasons:
- pencil/paper is just so much quicker
- if you think it, you can draw it... quickly. It's more flexible.
- key advantage: when non-engineers (or even engineers) see higher fidelity mockups, it's very easy to get caught up on some of the details like where a button goes or how big the font is. With pencil/paper, everyone realizes that it's a rough sketch and that the final product isn't going to look this way.
After I write things up, I scan them with an app to a PDF file and then email that out (or attach to a ticket). Of course, pen/pencil isn't great for final designs... there's no substitute for a high-fidelity mockup of what somethings is supposed to look like. But I find it very useful to start with the UX and then work on things like CSS last.
Some key tools I use:
notepad: $5
pencil: $7 (I really splurged here for the pentel Orenz, my favorite mechanical pencil, but a $1-2 pencil will be 95% as good)
6" ruler: $1.76
1/2" binder (I like to keep my drawings): $4
I've thought about investing in a ReMarkable tablet, but I find it hard to justify the cost since pen/pencil work so well.
You mean paper with a grid of squares on it, right? Because all the DIN A-series paper formats are rectangular, not square (as I first misread your meaning).
I started buying custom printed notebooks from the scientific journal companies. For $10 a journal you can get a very niche hard cover journal, with page numbers (if you like), plain, ruled or grid paper, and embossed with your name (or whatever). It's so satisfying. Combine that with a nice fountain pen and ink and it's quite the experience.
It's my proffered way to take notes, think through problems.
Last year i went in the other direction: analog to digital.
Onenote is my tool of choice - it's basically a really awesome piece of paper:
you can write per hand on your tablet, you can type to text, you can create lists, tables, convert handwriting to text, insert audio, photos, shapes, screenshots, first text, copy text to and from other apps, tag information, hyperlink other pages and notebooks and even pieces of text; you can host in in cloud or locally, the page is unlimited and you can cluster notebooks into sections and notebooks, move and copy pages around and even collaborate with other people in real time. It's on all devices you use, synced.
It's everything your notebook is plus so much more. Hands down best room I've ever used.
People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple. Have you considered how many different kinds of paper/notebooks/slides/cards, kinds of pen/pencil/brush? Soon you'll start fiddling with your pens and papers, as some comments here have already started suggesting their personal favorite, including making your custom "eye dropper" pen.
Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt,
ed note.txt
,
my previous notes
more notes
...
my last notes
a
now just write you new notes down
don't worry about anything
don't even worry about editing previous lines
just write
and done
.
w
q
> People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple.
> Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, <ed session snipped> And that's it.
Surely that's also intentionally making a digital interface simple? I mean, both kinds—all kinds—of interfaces can be made simpler or made more complex depending on the user's tastes. That fact itself doesn't, I think, speak to any virtue or lack thereof on the part of any interface paradigm.
Yeah, I was actually thinking of that too -- and how they should both be rolled up into an alias, for single-command dated notetaking. Dunno if that would work, though: What's the syntax for adding the "EOF" bit after what you type after invoking it?
Yeah, but you had to type "EOF" to get out of the "cat >>" sub-process, didn't you? There's probably no way to automate / hide that away... (?) Sure, it's pretty good the way it is already, but it bugs me that you have to type that bit that isn't what you want to note. (Who, me? What OCD?)
The essence of this tiny "interactive command line utility" is to capture user key strokes and redirect to a sub-process. So there gotta be a way to interrupt and exit the sub-process. "EOF" is just a convention. You can also get out of the sub-process with "Ctrl-D" like in Python shell.
Interactive editors like vi/emacs also need to flush the buffer and save the content to the file, but you have to type something, such as ":w" and "C-x C-s" (or use GUI).
If you want full automation without human input, I/O redirection is the way.
I recommend a separate clip-on book light (or clip-on LED light) that is bright, lightweight, and USB-rechargable.
If the LED is attached to the pen, the weight (of both the battery and light) will be significant and can tire you out for long writing periods. You would also have a better experience for the light to not move too much while writing, which will happen as you move the pen along the paper.
Initial notes are almost always on paper, in a good notebook, written with a fountain pen. I also almost always have a small notebook and pen on my person.
BUT once something becomes a real project I need to track, or if the notes are important enough that I want them searchable later, I transcribe and summarize into the appropriate Orgmode buffer.
I retain things written longhand better, but this act of review & summarization is like a turbocharger for that recollection. (Not for nothing, but one old-school study hack I read about back in the 80s was "type up your class notes". It dated from an era before computers, so it wasn't about search or indexing. It was about the act of review inherent in the transcription.)
Sigh. I really sympathize with this, and I totally think that analog is not dead and will never die. And vinyl records!
Despite that, I find that in own writing, I always think I'm going to initiate it on paper, but then I start writing fragments on the computer, thinking about them, revising, etc. etc. I lay it aside & think about it, and then revise some more. In the end, I think it's about as creative as pen-and-paper.
I hope. I should try the pen again just to make sure.
I've had similar experiences where I didn't need any paper to plan out and write shorter articles. However, screenwriter Thomas Schnauz provided a great example of how handwriting was useful when writing scripts for Better Call Saul. He posted a photo of a cork board with dozens of pinned index cards with handwritten ideas for scenes. It looks like the cards can then be rearranged or substituted out without losing the past drafts: https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz/status/1296912710601306113/ph...
Handwriting has also been useful for taking notes where diagrams and imagery was important, such as when researching what a good user interface could look like, for a web application. You could give it a try if you decide to write an article that analyzes or incorporates a significant amount of imagery, or has a lot of parts, like a lengthy script, fictional story, or in-depth report.
iPad Pro (12.9 inch) + iPencil + GoodNotes (with zip-file backup) gives me best of two worlds. I scribble my notes with iPencil in GoodNotes. GoodNotes does OCR and its search functionality is good. It allows for backups in a form of zip archives (cloud backup option also available). Unlike Notability (subscription), GoodNotes app is one-time-fee.
I can remember rolling my eyes at a writer using a mechanical typewriter decades after word processors had taken over. Did they thaw out of a glacier?
At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking whiteboards, imagining that musicians will still play grand pianos in a century, and they'll still snicker over Ryan Gosling playing a toy piano under the spotlight in that classic movie "La La Land".
I've hoarded Hagoromo chalk; I'm the one with the chalk attaché case in [1]. I've always carried multiple grades of drawing paper, and I've worked through many hundreds of artist grade felt tip pens, scanning all my math notes for thirty years.
Then, pandemic. Just as World War 2 accelerated women in the workplace, the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital tools for visual presentation. To teach over Zoom, we needed to embrace drawing on a tablet. I understand that the pandemic radically accelerated similar trends in architecture.
The algorithmic possibilities of drawing on a tablet are truly addictive; returning to paper feels like returning to a mechanical typewriter. For my purposes, Concepts offers the most involving algorithmic experience; I wrote [2] to support my note taking and diagrams for papers. However, Notability offers the least friction. I can have the same psychological relationship to taking notes on my tablet as I had with phyical paper, with the benefits of algorithmic reuse. (Pushing the envelope exposes how inconsistently Notability handles implicit layers, but one learns to draw around this.)
In a few decades, after all living mathematicians have drawn on tablets since birth, math will be far more visual, conveying ideas with far more immediacy. Math communication is now still largely constrained by its resemblance to typeset prose. Ever leave a startup because reading your coworkers' code put you in "Just kill me now!" territory? I did. Mathematicians write the equivalent of bad code, rarely actually machine-checked, to formalize their ideas. Other mathematicians try to decipher this code, to reverse-engineer the ideas. We declare people who can actually do this as having a gift for mathematics. As I learn to teach combinatorics more visually, my classes swell with students who share my frustration.
I've come to realize this summer that I pretty much despise mathematics. I can't wait for the visual revolution. This revolution didn't take hold on physical paper; one needs a digital accelerant.
> probably something to do with chalk dust. I don’t miss chalk dust.
However, the chalk dust has been replaced by synthetic colours that can ruin any cloth they come in contact with and are much harder to remove from the skin than chalk.
> To this day it is a real mystery to me why people would prefer whiteboards over blackboards.
I vastly prefer whiteboards over blackboards. It's the physical sensation of writing for me.
Using markers is smooth, a bit like writing with a pen on paper. Writing with chalk is rough and technically difficult - there is a component of pressure one needs to master.
It's not obvious to me how the finished product is any better with a blackboard or a whiteboard (although I've heard several people try). Or how whiteboards are "soul-sucking". People who prefer blackboards seem like those who prefer vinyl over CDs, but with even fewer coherent arguments. Which is fine - everyone has a hobby - but maybe be a little less vitriolic about it?
Whiteboards do have the downside of staining over time, but using glass is a foolproof solution to that particular problem. It's amazing how inexpensively one can find very large, used, glass-covered picture or art frames.
> Using markers is smooth, a bit like writing with a pen on paper.
What I personally like least about whiteboards is that I cannot use the whiteboard markers sideways like a chalk, which is the best writing position to avoid contact with the board. When I write with a pen on paper, I can put my arm on the paper, but this is not advisable with a whiteboard. The pointed ends of the markers lead to a very uncomfortable position where the hand needs to be turned as far out as possible to bring the tip of the pen as perpenticular as possible onto the board. In this position it is quite difficult to achieve good quality handwriting. I myself know only one person whose whiteboard writing is genuinely visually appealing. However, I also agree with other commentators here: You need a good blackboard and good chalk to really have fun writing on it.
For me, the tactile sensation of chalk on a blackboard is deeply irritating. Something about the noise it makes, the dust and vibration it just repulses me. A whiteboard has none of these drawbacks and it also requires less effort to make a mark on the board.
Most of the objections to blackboards or whiteboards can be mitigated by carrying one's own tools. For blackboards, I bring my own Hagoromo chalk [1,2] which has a wonderful touch and is radically less dusty, and several Korean microfiber auto detailing cloths [3]. I use a damp cloth to wipe the board before and after teaching, and a dry cloth as an erasor while teaching. Every month or so, I do a laundry load of all my cloths. I see colleagues in stages I've passed through, such as carrying a sponge, pail, and squeegee, and I've learned to say nothing. If there's a stage I haven't reached yet, however, I'm all ears.
Blackboards themselves also vary in quality; some ceramic surfaces can rival traditional slate. One can't really judge the experience starting with a cheap, dirty board and using institutional chalk and erasers.
I've enjoyed whiteboards in well-funded companies. In academics, it is profoundly embarrassing how often a speaker will have traveled for a lecture, only to find a dirty whiteboard and the local markers dried out. This is why speakers would rather lip-sync to PowerPoint slides. Were I using a whiteboard, I'd also bring my own tools.
Pad and paper is certainly easy, but artists brave serious messes to produce oil pastels for sale. In my case, students are carrying student loans half their lives. I prefer chalk over slides because it forces a live performance. I then share my Notability drawn notes, because they're better.
* Isopropyl alcohol is one of the most effective cleaners along with being readily available almost everywhere, and very inexpensive.
* If you want to erase permanent marker from a white board, it sometimes works to color over it with dry erase marker, and then erase it like normal. Often you need multiple passes for the full effect.
- writing left-handed, whiteboards are somewhat easier to write on legibly without both erasing some of what you wrote and covering yourself with residue (which then transfers less to your clothing).
- The sound and feeling of chalk on a chalkboard makes my skin crawl.
I've wondered why I hear so much about chalk but not about mechanical pencil leads. I'm so picky about mine that whenever I find some I really like, I lay up a hoard in case it gets discontinued.
If you have no special requirement in mind, the Pentel lead that is available practically everywhere is nothing to sneeze at. I probably use more of Pentel than anything else. The benefit in choosing other brands mainly comes when you want a particular effect or want to optimize for a particular situation.
For example, Pentel leads run a bit harder than other Japanese brands. This makes them a bit more brittle. For a 0.3 mm pencil without a sliding sleeve to support the extended lead, I would choose a Pilot or Mitsubishi lead to reduce breakage.
Sometimes you want to make really bold and dark lines, so you go for a 0.7 or 0.9 mm with the darkest lead you can find. Those sizes are only made as soft as 2B, but the Pilot Neox Graphite 0.7 & 0.9 mm 2B is actually more like a 4B. It's the darkest lead currently on the market in those sizes. (I have some long-discontinued 6B that I use sparingly.)
When I'm writing on index cards, I usually want a harder than usual lead, writing with a sharp edge to make clean lines that won't smudge. I like Faber-Castell HB in 0.9 mm for this because their harder leads don't feel as gritty as other brands.
I have a variety of other graphite leads that I use for specific situations.
Getting into color, for its variety of hues, the Mitsubishi Uni Nano Dia Color in 0.7 mm is usually my first choice. It makes bolder lines than the same brand in 0.5 mm, because the greater thickness allows a lower percentage of structural polymer in the mix.
A big problem with the Nano Dia, though, is that it's not lightfast. Most of the colors will fade away after a month on the bulletin board. The most lightfast colored lead is the Staedtler 0.5 mm in red/green/blue. It is extremely brittle, though, so you need to use it with a sliding-sleeve pencil like the Pentel Orenz. (https://www.jetpens.com/Pentel-Orenz-Mechanical-Pencil-0.5-m...)
Aside from situation, people have different preferences in how the tip feels on the paper. Pentel feels rather slick, Pilot has a more chalky feel, and Mitsubishi to me feels rather gritty. I like a chalky feel when writing on really smooth paper and doing math, but the slicker Pentel suits me better when writing longhand on cheap office paper.
Wood-cased pencils have lead that is darker and less smudgy than MP lead, because wood-cased use a graphite+clay mix while MPs use graphite+polymer. Some people even prefer the feel of wood-cased pencils in hand, but I personally prefer the convenience of MPs.
The all-round best line of wood-cased pencils is the Mitsubishi Hi-Uni. The Tombow Mono 100 series was a consistent second, but I heard quality changed after moving production out of Japan. Some people like the Faber-Castell 9000 series because its hardest grades are smoother than other brands. The Staedtler Mars Lumograph series is known to give a particularly rich black with the softest grades. That may not be relevant to you if you just want them for writing, because I find it practically impossible to write with a wood-cased softer than 4B.
Some fanatics claim that the discontinued Sanford Blackwing 602 was the greatest pencil ever. The lead hardness was about 4B and was unusual for including wax with the graphite and clay. The point wore down quickly, but the lead was particularly resistant to crumbling and it was very slippery on the paper. The line on paper was not as dark as you would expect from a 4B. I would say that the best current pencils give a better line but aren't as slippery. There have been a couple attempts at reproducing the Blackwing, but I've heard mixed reports of how successful they were.
My philosophy of buying pencils is that since there is so little absolute difference in cost between the best and the mediocre, there is no sense in trying to economize there.
This is all fascinating! I have been using Faber-Castell 1320 HB for my D&D games, and they've been great. They're not exactly rich in colour, but a single sharpen is more than enough for a whole day's session. I don't have anything to compare them to though.
I'm going to have to research what you mean by grades.
You mentioned preferring mechanical, but didn't say what kind you like. I've always heard that Rotring's are the grail there, but never looked into it.
If you have never tried using different hardness grades, just find an art supply shop with a display of drawing pencils and try a little scribble with each grade. Note that since every brand is a bit different, you can't use your experience with one to exactly predict the quality of another, even more so when comparing wood-cased with mechanical pencil leads.
As for MPs, if you really get into it, you could end up with many different ones for different situations, sort of like with paint brushes or golf clubs. Even cheap ones can be comfortable and durable. Some people like the Rotring because of the heft, but they are a bit sharp and the weight can get tiring, rather like with using metal polyhedral dice.
167 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadA large part of day-job work doesn't deserve the pen and paper - We just need to track TODOs, links and some other bullet points for them. Digital tools are very good at these because it's optimized for them.
On the other hand, if a problem demands the flexibility and the visual capacity of the pen and paper, it's a good sign of the sufficiently large intellectual problem space it contains.
(edit: amusingly enough, I find this near the end: "I also mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don’t do that anymore–I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring.")
I never went all in on GTD, but some principles stuck with me: key is having a trusted system where I can capture things that will then SHOW me those things when I need to see them.
I used Omnifocus for a while, but eventually migrated to OrgMode as a better fit for my life (even though I'm not really an emacs person overall).
The related principle that sticks with me is, your mind is more for processing/doing things than for simply storing them.
I find it productive, probably because it helps me collect the various ideas and notes from things I've read into a single place, and is a good mindfulness practice.
Make lots of indexes, or "Maps Of Content".
An index can point to a other pages, including other MOCs. It can also have its own text.
There, that's 95% of it. I have a top-level "Index MOC" page that links to my "Work MOC" (which links to projects I'm working on), "Orders MOC" (that links to a bunch of pages for local restaurants and what my wife likes ordering from them), "Diablo MOC" (because I play a lot of Diablo 3 and keep notes on how to optimize characters), etc.
In short, it's a way to turn a mess of pages into a web of links that I can easily click through if I want to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32227826
Basically, over 90% of people invoking Zettelkasten do not know what it is. It's definitely not a tool suitable for most folks.
1. https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/assets/png/pen-and-paper/bla...
1) Check if you are on the correct ribbon 2) Click the box icon (unless you have millions of shortcuts setup) 3) Drag and drop it 4) Maybe change the defaults which you don't like (colour, thickness etc) 5) If you are typing text in it, that rarely works out well without clicking other buttons
On paper: draw box and write text - simples.
Open paint software -> use stylus to draw square.
I've also dove into the world of nice paper and fountain pens. I've always had hand cramps when writing, whether using a cheap Bic or a Pilot G7. With fountain pens, that's all gone, and writing is effortless. You can get started with this cheaply by getting a platinum preppy fine or extra-fine pen ($4), and a bottle of ink ($10). You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper.
Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.
Please expand on this. I’m utterly confused as to what you mean and why you’d need it.
Sure, there are some converters that are notably, notoriously small (Namiki Vanishing Point converters are infamous for this), but in those cases it's simple to use carts instead. (In the Namiki case, the carts last weeks and weeks.)
edit: lol, if I had reloaded the page before commenting, I would have seen all of these people saying the same thing!
Every time fountain pens come up on HN I'm amazed how active the discussion gets.
* Fountain pens * Mechanical watches * Cars with clutches
E.g.,
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=fountain+pen+piston+convert...
Just to expand on the time before refills. Most converters are under 1 ml. Having, say, 3-4 ml in your pen means you fill it a lot less frequently.
The thing keeping me away from eyedropping my pen is the inevitable burps.
I don't need a project, and I'm not super interested in locking a pen into a single mode of operation. The beauty of most pens is that you can go with carts OR with a converter, depending on mood. (Obviously some, like Pelikans and TWSBI, are bottle-fill only, but you know that going in.)
For a lot of pens, there is no "locking". You just remove the cartridge/converter, and add silicone, and you're good to go. You can always revert back.
I ran carts only in my Vanishing Point(s) for years, but largely because it was easier for travel and I found the ink color and consistency very pleasant.
Once I stopped traveling so much I started using more bottled ink, which is fun, but then you get to a point where you have a mental matrix about which inks work best with which paper in which nibs…
Cartridges are great too, but I seem stuck with a few options. Lany cartridges are great but it's the only decent one I can find here.
The 2000 is natively a piston filler as far as I know. When you say “converter”, are you saying you’ve modified your 2000?
When ballpoints came into the picture and steamrolled fountain pens (as the utilitarian writing tool) the methods of creating a vessel to hold ink inside a fountain pen without creating a mess/leaking were pretty primitive/unreliable by todays standards. A common solution was to just fill the hollow body of the pen entirely up with ink and then put silicon grease on the threads where the nib screws in (it could leak out). The easiest way to fill a narrow, light cylinder with ink you REALLY dont want to spill is with an eyedropper type device, hence the name eyedropper.
People still do this with fountain pens, apparently fountain pens are decently popular in india and a lot of indian fountain pens are eyedropper pens.
Most fountain pens these days are what are called "cartridge converter" pens. The name is weird, but the original innovation over crude rubber sacs that you would squeeze to suck up ink (itself an improvement over eyedropper style filling) was to make plastic cartridges that could be filled with ink, sealed with wax and then inserted into the pen.
Another big innovation was piston filler fountain pens that have a piston on the inside of the pen body that can be moved in or out by rotating a knob at the end of the pen. Not only is this an improvement because you can stick the pen directly into the ink and just suck it up through the nib by retracting the piston, ink can be manually advanced out into the nib/feed if the pen was writing dry, and in the opposite sense there is always a bit of suction keeping the ink in that you can adjust. A fountain pen's "feed" is basically a big capillary force engine, and it is nice to have a counterforce with the piston that can be adjusted to either aid or inhibit it.
So then someone took the whole piston filler idea and minituarized it so it could slot into pens designed for cartridges, hence the name "cartridge converter" pens because these self contained piston fillers were called converters.
Eyedroppering pens is something people do for fun still, its an ok way to fill a pen if you dont care about the pen heating up as you hold it, creating a pressure differential and "burping" ink out onto the paper occasionally.... its actually far safer to keep an eyedropper pen mostly full so that there is less of bubble of air to heat up and cause this.
This tip as well for any fountain pen you’re air-traveling with. Pressurization changes affect the air volume, not the liquid volume, so make the pen pressure-change resistant by having it full of ink.
I had a pelikan souveran r800 that was refillable, but sadly I lost it on one of my return trips. Now I just travel with 3 leuchtturm notebooks (A6-grid, A5-grid, B5-lines-softcover) and a bunch of uniball pens.
Pentel Energel refills are very smooth, much more so than Pilot G7 cartridges (but not water-resistant). Zebra Sarasa refills are almost as smooth (and are water-resistant, which can be useful if you get caught in the rain).
I use both gel pens and fountain pens, with gel pens for quick notes and writing while on transit. I could comfortably get by with only gel pens—many people have, as I've seen forum posts by former mathematics and physics students who posted photographs of dozens of refills used up over their degrees. I still prefer fountain pens when I'm at a desk, though it's a pleasant luxury for the smoothness—any significant strain when handwriting for many pages went away when upgrading to higher-end gel pens.
It does depend on the ink, too. I have a Parker XF nib that will absolutely bleed through my notebook, which wasn't exactly cheap either. Not sure if it's supposed to be actually "good paper", though (Leichtturm), but I'm quite disappointed.
Diamine ink will take forever to dry on that paper and will be seen from the other side. And it's not even a particularly dark shade of blue. Regular supermarket-bought Parker ink (Quink washable blue) works much better.
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that more denser of paper (80 g/m^2 and up) take much better to fountain pen inks.
I swear by Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks and paper.
I agree, Clairefontaine and Rhodia (even cheap ones) work much better. The Diamine ink still needs some time to dry, but at least it stays on its side.
I don’t think I had bleed-through problems w Leichtturm (do recall drying/smudging issues though (Mont Blanc Royal Blue ink)), but my Midori “md notebook” has been treating me well.
It's a real shame
https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm
Might be a different notation needed depending on the subject.
I used to strictly be a pencil and notebook person... to be mentally engaged fully (whether that is thinking, problem solving, planning, recalling, etc.) I had to use pencil and paper.
But improvements in text editors, and their convenience, lead to me using them more and more to capture ideas, lists, etc., and one day I realized I had switched.
Now I need to use sublime text to be mentally fully engaged.
If I could find something better I'd try switching again. Needs top-notch text editing integrated well with something like Apple Pencil. (Apple notes app is subpar when it comes to text, doesn't integrate text and pencil drawing/writing very well, and although I just want basic drawing/writing tools, it doesn't do that very well either.)
One of my kids uses OneNote from Microsoft. Their notebook / section / page metaphor seems too fiddly for me although I know some people like it.
- pencil/paper is just so much quicker
- if you think it, you can draw it... quickly. It's more flexible.
- key advantage: when non-engineers (or even engineers) see higher fidelity mockups, it's very easy to get caught up on some of the details like where a button goes or how big the font is. With pencil/paper, everyone realizes that it's a rough sketch and that the final product isn't going to look this way.
After I write things up, I scan them with an app to a PDF file and then email that out (or attach to a ticket). Of course, pen/pencil isn't great for final designs... there's no substitute for a high-fidelity mockup of what somethings is supposed to look like. But I find it very useful to start with the UX and then work on things like CSS last.
Some key tools I use:
notepad: $5
pencil: $7 (I really splurged here for the pentel Orenz, my favorite mechanical pencil, but a $1-2 pencil will be 95% as good)
6" ruler: $1.76
1/2" binder (I like to keep my drawings): $4
I've thought about investing in a ReMarkable tablet, but I find it hard to justify the cost since pen/pencil work so well.
You mean paper with a grid of squares on it, right? Because all the DIN A-series paper formats are rectangular, not square (as I first misread your meaning).
It's my proffered way to take notes, think through problems.
Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt,
And that's it.> Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, <ed session snipped> And that's it.
Surely that's also intentionally making a digital interface simple? I mean, both kinds—all kinds—of interfaces can be made simpler or made more complex depending on the user's tastes. That fact itself doesn't, I think, speak to any virtue or lack thereof on the part of any interface paradigm.
…
EOF
Interactive editors like vi/emacs also need to flush the buffer and save the content to the file, but you have to type something, such as ":w" and "C-x C-s" (or use GUI).
If you want full automation without human input, I/O redirection is the way.
If the LED is attached to the pen, the weight (of both the battery and light) will be significant and can tire you out for long writing periods. You would also have a better experience for the light to not move too much while writing, which will happen as you move the pen along the paper.
Initial notes are almost always on paper, in a good notebook, written with a fountain pen. I also almost always have a small notebook and pen on my person.
BUT once something becomes a real project I need to track, or if the notes are important enough that I want them searchable later, I transcribe and summarize into the appropriate Orgmode buffer.
I retain things written longhand better, but this act of review & summarization is like a turbocharger for that recollection. (Not for nothing, but one old-school study hack I read about back in the 80s was "type up your class notes". It dated from an era before computers, so it wasn't about search or indexing. It was about the act of review inherent in the transcription.)
Despite that, I find that in own writing, I always think I'm going to initiate it on paper, but then I start writing fragments on the computer, thinking about them, revising, etc. etc. I lay it aside & think about it, and then revise some more. In the end, I think it's about as creative as pen-and-paper.
I hope. I should try the pen again just to make sure.
Handwriting has also been useful for taking notes where diagrams and imagery was important, such as when researching what a good user interface could look like, for a web application. You could give it a try if you decide to write an article that analyzes or incorporates a significant amount of imagery, or has a lot of parts, like a lengthy script, fictional story, or in-depth report.
At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking whiteboards, imagining that musicians will still play grand pianos in a century, and they'll still snicker over Ryan Gosling playing a toy piano under the spotlight in that classic movie "La La Land".
I've hoarded Hagoromo chalk; I'm the one with the chalk attaché case in [1]. I've always carried multiple grades of drawing paper, and I've worked through many hundreds of artist grade felt tip pens, scanning all my math notes for thirty years.
Then, pandemic. Just as World War 2 accelerated women in the workplace, the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital tools for visual presentation. To teach over Zoom, we needed to embrace drawing on a tablet. I understand that the pandemic radically accelerated similar trends in architecture.
The algorithmic possibilities of drawing on a tablet are truly addictive; returning to paper feels like returning to a mechanical typewriter. For my purposes, Concepts offers the most involving algorithmic experience; I wrote [2] to support my note taking and diagrams for papers. However, Notability offers the least friction. I can have the same psychological relationship to taking notes on my tablet as I had with phyical paper, with the benefits of algorithmic reuse. (Pushing the envelope exposes how inconsistently Notability handles implicit layers, but one learns to draw around this.)
In a few decades, after all living mathematicians have drawn on tablets since birth, math will be far more visual, conveying ideas with far more immediacy. Math communication is now still largely constrained by its resemblance to typeset prose. Ever leave a startup because reading your coworkers' code put you in "Just kill me now!" territory? I did. Mathematicians write the equivalent of bad code, rarely actually machine-checked, to formalize their ideas. Other mathematicians try to decipher this code, to reverse-engineer the ideas. We declare people who can actually do this as having a gift for mathematics. As I learn to teach combinatorics more visually, my classes swell with students who share my frustration.
I've come to realize this summer that I pretty much despise mathematics. I can't wait for the visual revolution. This revolution didn't take hold on physical paper; one needs a digital accelerant.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 [2] https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards
To this day it is a real mystery to me why people would prefer whiteboards over blackboards.
I suspect actually it was simply more economical, and probably something to do with chalk dust. I don’t miss chalk dust.
However, the chalk dust has been replaced by synthetic colours that can ruin any cloth they come in contact with and are much harder to remove from the skin than chalk.
I vastly prefer whiteboards over blackboards. It's the physical sensation of writing for me.
Using markers is smooth, a bit like writing with a pen on paper. Writing with chalk is rough and technically difficult - there is a component of pressure one needs to master.
It's not obvious to me how the finished product is any better with a blackboard or a whiteboard (although I've heard several people try). Or how whiteboards are "soul-sucking". People who prefer blackboards seem like those who prefer vinyl over CDs, but with even fewer coherent arguments. Which is fine - everyone has a hobby - but maybe be a little less vitriolic about it?
Whiteboards do have the downside of staining over time, but using glass is a foolproof solution to that particular problem. It's amazing how inexpensively one can find very large, used, glass-covered picture or art frames.
What I personally like least about whiteboards is that I cannot use the whiteboard markers sideways like a chalk, which is the best writing position to avoid contact with the board. When I write with a pen on paper, I can put my arm on the paper, but this is not advisable with a whiteboard. The pointed ends of the markers lead to a very uncomfortable position where the hand needs to be turned as far out as possible to bring the tip of the pen as perpenticular as possible onto the board. In this position it is quite difficult to achieve good quality handwriting. I myself know only one person whose whiteboard writing is genuinely visually appealing. However, I also agree with other commentators here: You need a good blackboard and good chalk to really have fun writing on it.
Blackboards themselves also vary in quality; some ceramic surfaces can rival traditional slate. One can't really judge the experience starting with a cheap, dirty board and using institutional chalk and erasers.
I've enjoyed whiteboards in well-funded companies. In academics, it is profoundly embarrassing how often a speaker will have traveled for a lecture, only to find a dirty whiteboard and the local markers dried out. This is why speakers would rather lip-sync to PowerPoint slides. Were I using a whiteboard, I'd also bring my own tools.
Pad and paper is certainly easy, but artists brave serious messes to produce oil pastels for sale. In my case, students are carrying student loans half their lives. I prefer chalk over slides because it forces a live performance. I then share my Notability drawn notes, because they're better.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/HAGOROMO-Fulltouch-Color-Chalk-White/...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hagoromo-Fulltouch-72pieces-Yellow-Or...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GXRG64I/
* If you want to erase permanent marker from a white board, it sometimes works to color over it with dry erase marker, and then erase it like normal. Often you need multiple passes for the full effect.
* Always bring an emergency pen with you.
- writing left-handed, whiteboards are somewhat easier to write on legibly without both erasing some of what you wrote and covering yourself with residue (which then transfers less to your clothing).
- The sound and feeling of chalk on a chalkboard makes my skin crawl.
For example, Pentel leads run a bit harder than other Japanese brands. This makes them a bit more brittle. For a 0.3 mm pencil without a sliding sleeve to support the extended lead, I would choose a Pilot or Mitsubishi lead to reduce breakage.
Sometimes you want to make really bold and dark lines, so you go for a 0.7 or 0.9 mm with the darkest lead you can find. Those sizes are only made as soft as 2B, but the Pilot Neox Graphite 0.7 & 0.9 mm 2B is actually more like a 4B. It's the darkest lead currently on the market in those sizes. (I have some long-discontinued 6B that I use sparingly.)
When I'm writing on index cards, I usually want a harder than usual lead, writing with a sharp edge to make clean lines that won't smudge. I like Faber-Castell HB in 0.9 mm for this because their harder leads don't feel as gritty as other brands.
I have a variety of other graphite leads that I use for specific situations.
Getting into color, for its variety of hues, the Mitsubishi Uni Nano Dia Color in 0.7 mm is usually my first choice. It makes bolder lines than the same brand in 0.5 mm, because the greater thickness allows a lower percentage of structural polymer in the mix.
A big problem with the Nano Dia, though, is that it's not lightfast. Most of the colors will fade away after a month on the bulletin board. The most lightfast colored lead is the Staedtler 0.5 mm in red/green/blue. It is extremely brittle, though, so you need to use it with a sliding-sleeve pencil like the Pentel Orenz. (https://www.jetpens.com/Pentel-Orenz-Mechanical-Pencil-0.5-m...)
Aside from situation, people have different preferences in how the tip feels on the paper. Pentel feels rather slick, Pilot has a more chalky feel, and Mitsubishi to me feels rather gritty. I like a chalky feel when writing on really smooth paper and doing math, but the slicker Pentel suits me better when writing longhand on cheap office paper.
I'll bet you have favourite pencil/s as well?
The all-round best line of wood-cased pencils is the Mitsubishi Hi-Uni. The Tombow Mono 100 series was a consistent second, but I heard quality changed after moving production out of Japan. Some people like the Faber-Castell 9000 series because its hardest grades are smoother than other brands. The Staedtler Mars Lumograph series is known to give a particularly rich black with the softest grades. That may not be relevant to you if you just want them for writing, because I find it practically impossible to write with a wood-cased softer than 4B.
Some fanatics claim that the discontinued Sanford Blackwing 602 was the greatest pencil ever. The lead hardness was about 4B and was unusual for including wax with the graphite and clay. The point wore down quickly, but the lead was particularly resistant to crumbling and it was very slippery on the paper. The line on paper was not as dark as you would expect from a 4B. I would say that the best current pencils give a better line but aren't as slippery. There have been a couple attempts at reproducing the Blackwing, but I've heard mixed reports of how successful they were.
My philosophy of buying pencils is that since there is so little absolute difference in cost between the best and the mediocre, there is no sense in trying to economize there.
I'm going to have to research what you mean by grades.
You mentioned preferring mechanical, but didn't say what kind you like. I've always heard that Rotring's are the grail there, but never looked into it.
As for MPs, if you really get into it, you could end up with many different ones for different situations, sort of like with paint brushes or golf clubs. Even cheap ones can be comfortable and durable. Some people like the Rotring because of the heft, but they are a bit sharp and the weight can get tiring, rather like with using metal polyhedral dice.
What I really need is a great open source OCR and hand diagram to SVG tool.
I hunted to no avail. Anyone got good recs?