I almost exclusively (On the rare occasion I use paper, mostly as a prop to look professional or not mess up a low tech ambiance, or some other specific use case) use an A5 6 ring binder.
I especially like how you can print 2 pages on a US Letter, cut it in half, punch it(If you don't have a 6 hole punch, use an existing 6 hole sheet as a stencil and punch the marks), and it's close enough to A5 to work.
It's great for working events to have all my setup info in a binder that isn't a 3 ring full size, which I find unpleasantly bulky,just a bit too big for backpacks, and way excessive for the small amounts of paper notes I usually use.
I also like how they have A5 Ziploc sleeve things I can use for index cards and stuff.
It's such a great format I almost wish I enjoyed handwriting enough to do bullet journaling for all my notes, but I prefer Google Keep for most things, extended notes get tiring trying to write something before I forget it, while being distracted by trying to be legible, it's almost like some kind of rhythm game multitasking challenge!
I'd consider A6 instead but real A6 is hard to find, most of them are actually filofax personal in a weird aspect ratio I'm not sure I'd like.
In the US A4 is hard to find. Not impossible, but it is special order while letter is available anywhere. A4 and US letter are very close to the same size, if you don't have a ruler you can't tell by looking.
The ratio is definitely off, but it's within 10% so it's just a minor annoyance, and there's not much of an alternative. Next time I buy paper I'll probably order real A4 but that might be in like, 10 years before I go through a ream.
I think your comment would be easier to understand if you stated your geographical location.
In Europe, I would expect A6 paper to be decently easy to find (although I don't think I've ever bought any, so salt away if you feel like it). A few seconds on the local Amazon surfaced [1], which is 2,000 sheets for SEK 218 (€19 or US $20) which I would not call hard to find nor expensive ...
Those are pretty great for that, but small planners have less visibility to other people and they can't see how bad your handwriting is or how long it takes you to write 2 words....
But the worse is how the pen/pencil writes on it. I easily lost half a grade letter on classes where the examiner provided cheap paper to hand in (my typically good handwriting collapses and I couldn't follow my own work)
Relatable, years after a career change I’m still hoarding nice sketchpads and watercolour paper because anything you do with them has to live up to the material.
you'll never be able to do work that will "live up to the material" if you don't ever use it
it's just raw materials, leaving them sitting in a closet is a worse insult to them than using them for a shitty sketch, at least from the shitty sketch there's something on it and you learnt a little something from the process of doing it
amateur artists often have this problem, pro artists do not fucking care, we will use that expensive paper to take notes on a phone call if that's what's handy, it does admittedly help if you know damn well that the $100 block of ultra-swank watercolor paper is going to end up being used to make multiple pieces that go for 10x the cost of that, but you can't get there without burning a ton of materials
take out every pad and just draw some kind of scribble on every page, now it's ruined, now start filling up those pages with drawings instead of having a stash in the closet that you never touch because it's Too Good
I used to have a similar hangup, I liked getting expensive notebooks and very rarely used them because I was worried I was “wasting” the page by writing banal stuff on it. I ended up fixing it by complete accident. I ran across yet another nice notebook* and to save on shipping I bought three of them. Later on I happened to be in an office supplies shop with a friend and she saw some pens on the shelf that she remembered as being the best pens she’d ever used*. They didn’t have single pens but the box of 12 wasn’t that expensive so I thought sure, why not, and bought a box. When I got home my notebooks had been delivered. So I was standing there with a whole box of nice pens in one hand and a whole stack of nice notebooks in the other hand, both of which I had bought excess of on a whim, and something just clicked in my brain like “these aren’t scarce resources, these are plentiful”, and I’ve never had an issue since.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to buy cheap notebooks (or cheap pens), do what works for you. But if you want to use nice notebooks and find yourself struggling to do it, you could try buying a bunch to teach yourself they’re not so precious and rare.
*: The notebooks are Code and Quill, the pens are Uniball Vision Elite, I still use both to this day. I have a stack of 10 finished notebooks and I’ve lost or given away God knows how many pens, but I’ve never run out of either.
This doesn't work like that in fountain pen users' universe. The good notebooks change the behavior of the pen and the ink a lot, and you want to write things you want to save on these notebooks.
When written, and finished, a notebook written with your favorite inks and fountain pens become an art piece for yourself, and you want to write something you want to return to.
If it was about money, I'd be using a nice rollerball with a nice refill and run of the mill or recycled paper. It's akin to liking vinyls, you want it for the experience, and spend time with it.
I have the same experience with the author. I use my fancy notebooks for diaries and software projects (like lab notebooks). Daily notes go to cheap notebooks with decent papers, and written with the best behaving, easily replaceable inks with easily replaceable pens.
When these notebooks end, they're scanned, converted to PDFs, and then shredded for recycling.
Maybe in your universe, not in mine. I use nice notebooks and nice fountain pens for the most banal shit. I can afford to go through a few $30 journals per year even if they're filled up with nothing but my daily to-do lists.
I don't know what $30 gets there, but I don't mind to use a Rhodia block or notebook for most banal things. Also, while they don't leave the desk much, most of my nicest fountain pens are also in rotation.
However, my hand-bound leather notebooks are reserved for design and journal work only, and written with archival inks most of the time.
My father actually collects fountain pen, he got published many times in fountain pen related magazines and he is no doubt in the top 100 collectors in the world, and top 1-5 for specific brands.
He never has expressed anything about the quality of paper. Actually, he takes his notes on whatever is available, which often means the back of an envelope lying around and otherwise printer paper. I have never seen him use a notebook actually, let alone an expensive one.
You're very lucky. I wish I had a chance to chat with your father. I also collect fountain pens, but not with that laser focus.
He probably has a favorite ink to use with his fountain pens, since inks change both a pen's behavior and their interaction changes from paper to paper.
There's a list of popular, run of the mill inks which work very well with lower quality paper. I also use these inks with my daily driver pens and notebooks, since they're easy to maintain, looks nice, and works with almost any notebook out there.
However I had some notebooks which were not writable unless you use a gel, ballpoint or some rollerballs. Fountain pen ink just stayed as little droplets and never dried on them.
Of course… but I consciously knew that fact - that nice notebooks are practically infinite and it’s just the money to obtain them that’s scarce - for many years while still having a hangup. Knowing that fact never helped me, it wasn’t until circumstances conspired to prove it to my subconscious for the specific case of nice notebooks that I actually began to act like I believed it. Up until that point, writing in nice notebooks always required a conscious effort to overcome the subconscious fear that nice notebooks themselves were scarce.
I think our brains just aren’t very careful or rigorous about what they attach that “scarcity” label to, they will happily attach that label to the product itself instead of the money you paid for it. Consciously presenting our subconscious with disconfirming observations can be an effective tool to update our subconscious labeling.
I am one of the people who can't use nice notebooks (or nice lumber) and always saves the best for last.
It has nothing to do with what I paid, everything to do with how I perceive the quality of the consumable material.
I can, and do, use my best quality tools without any qualms. It's using up "precious" (quality) materials. (It's silly, does not serve me well, and I'm working on it)
I thought this would be about laptops. The laptops I use for work and personal stuff cost around $100 and are effectively disposable. They are not great for intense use, but the vast majority of tasks go just fine. And when developing any serious slowdown shows up right away so my work ends up being usable on low end hardware with janky connections. When one of these laptops got stolen recently I just got another one, provisioned it using some scripts, restored my personal data, and that was that. Total loss was a little over a hundred dollars and a half day of work.
Same reason why I would never go for anything beyond the base model Macs. Losing/damaging the base model (~$1k) is something I can live with, less so to the fully-specced out $4k+ one. Not to mention that those aren't super reliable to begin with and given their anti-repair stance there is no cost-effective way to repair any eventual failures the way you can do on a PC.
I came here expecting the same :) Though I prefer used Thinkpads. There's a plentiful supply of leased machines. Instead of disposable, they are excellent quality & nicely repairable and upgradeable in nearly all aspects. (Screen resolution compared to macs has been annoying me, ....) And I get to be smug about using the more sustainability focused option :)
I’ve recently been trying a bit of an odd setup. I use an iPad on a stand with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and use blink shell to mosh to vultr openbsd hosts. It’s kind of nice in the sense that you have an iPad for when you need really mainstream support for something, and I’m thinking about switching to one with 5G for mobile work. I like the focus of having a terminal style device for hobby stuff.
> A lot of modern software problems stem from developers having a powerfully detached understanding of reality.
The best thing we could do for the internet is have developers at Google, Meta, etc, use a Raspberry Pi 4 or similar "gutless wonder ARM box" for one day a week. So often, I run into things they've written that, for no coherent reason, just run horribly on low end hardware. It was obviously written and toyed with on a Xeon workstation with multiple large 4k monitors, and, who would possibly use less?
The Blogger rewrite rather irritates me, because it went from an old, usable, performant interface that ran totally fine on ancient netbooks to this weird, "mobile first" interface (for a blogging platform) that choked out even on high end hardware when you had a lot of photos in a post. Clearly, nobody who worked on it ever actually loaded it up, or used it on old hardware, and never actually talked to anyone who used it to blog, because it was filled with tons of "modern" UI crap that was objectively worse than the old interface for every conceivable task one might do when writing and editing blog posts.
Kicked me off Blogger and onto my personally hosted Jekyll stuff, though, so I guess working as intended.
If I had to guess, various used laptops from a decade or so ago.
For most practical applications, computing performance plateaued around 2011. Just look at how many people can't/won't use Windows 11 just because their ancient relic otherwise still works perfectly fine.
And if you want a source, anecdata is I'm posting this from an i7 2700K (aka Sandy Bridge) machine.
Look into business laptops by HP/Dell/Lenovo. You can still easily get parts for them (keyboards/batteries/chargers) they are well built, have easy to find driverpacks from the OEM and were more the most part lightly used and only retired because the lease is up or the latest version of windows doesn't officially support it. You can get very good condition 4th/5th gen intel core laptops for around $150.
If you want a source, Steam Hardware Survey[0] somewhat agrees with what you're saying, especially when taking in to account that gamers would have better specs than average.
Chromebooks that are a couple years old seem to run pretty cheap, especially refurbished. Installing Linux is simple enough, although some (all?) have non-standard key layouts which can require some additional setup to get working comfortably.
I've had a few of these over the years that I take to coffee shops/bars to work. It's nice not to feel nervous about a $1000+ investment just because the server is coming around to refresh my water.
My mother often breaks computers, due to how and where she usually uses them (in the kitchen while cooking etc.)
I bought her a t420, which cost less than $100. All I did was swap in an SSD. But here’s the thing, I bought two t420s, and when one breaks I cannibalize the other for parts, or just swap the SSD into the old machine. I make sure to always have a spare machine, which is not hard because after you cannibalize one machine, and get a replacement, the parts on the cannibalized machine will often suffice for a while until you need to replace the same part again.
For her use cases, and to be honest 90% of people’s use cases, a t420 from 2011 has an excess of power. And the peace of mind knowing that spilling water on the keyboard will be a repair that takes 10 minutes (I could probably repair a t420 blindfolded at this point) and effectively only cost you $10-$20, is wonderful. I’ve been able to walk her through repairs over the phone.
I tend to use old various X220/X230 thinkpad as beaters. Used to be big on the X201, but somehow the X201 has been creeping up in price. Yeah, I use and like my big M1 MacBook for work. It’s nice for what I do at my job. But in my personal life I’m 100% happy with Arch Linux and i3wm on a stack of thinkpads. Having swappable batteries might be my favorite part, other than how well Linux runs.
I've noticed a U shaped price curve for some kinds of recycled computer. Here in the UK, Thinkpad X220/230 are currently in the minimum. As you have noted earlier Thinkpads are beginning to climb I imagine as they get recycled and there are less around.
Why is it assumed that software developer can identify and solve problems only by artificially forced to experience it firsthand and be personally frustrated - why modern software stacks keep getting buried into layers of convenience wrappers and no one cares? What would be the steps to solve it?
I don't think Moore's law is solely to the blame. Incentives are lacking, spoken languages and software development methodologies are still too primitive to describe and define temporal behaviors, and, I suspect there are also disincentives to solve it - slower software seems to be preferred for the mass, and so each times significant speedups are achieved, a correctional force could be emerging and applying over it.
My main laptop used to be a Thinkpad T530 from 2012 that I bought used off of eBay. I ran Linux.
I never worried about it at all. There's holes in the keyboard and through the laptop to deal with liquid spills. The case was a nice hard plastic with enough flex to prevent breaking.
Honestly, if I dropped it on the floor - I'd check the floor first for any damage.
Taking it apart was straightforward, albeit a bit frustrating. I found the MBP mid-2012 unibodys much, much easier to take apart and clean.
I recently decided to upgrade and bought a M1 MBP Pro off of a college kid wanting to get a gaming laptop. It's a huge upgrade and I actually find myself loving MacOS. Everything feels so nice and looks so nice.
But now I am just terrified for this laptop. It has a hard case. I'm meticulous about a clean keyboard and screen (fingerprint magnet). I keep any and all liquids very, very far away. I never place it anywhere where there may be dust.
I sometimes wonder if the stress is worth it. I'm tempted to buy myself an X220 or something else in the X series since the T530 was heavy to lug around.
i've been using an x230 for _years_ for light work and side projects. you can mod an x220 keyboard in it if that's your thing. pretty sure it uses the same dock as the t530
haven't really found a need or desire to upgrade beyond maxing the ram and shoving an ssd in it.
I've had Thinkpads for the last 20 years of my life. I presently have an M1 Air for music production and a used T480 - great combo. I've found the MacBook to be fairly durable in spite of all the horror stories that I've heard over the years about cracked screens and so forth, so my plan is to buy an M3 Pro when they come out and throw Asahi on my M1. Unfortunately new Thinkpads just aren't what they used to be given the compelling value prop of Apple silicon but I'll happily continue buying used ones for $150 a pop.
I have similar feelings whenever I get something that's 'nice, new, shiny'. I feel an urge to protect/preserve it as best as possible, and worry more than I should.
One time, I bought a fancy wallet made of stainless steel (threads, woven into thin sheets, backed by plastic). For MONTHS, I was paranoid about leaving any scratches or blemishes on such a pristine, shiny thing.
Years later, it's still my wallet, and has enough blemishes and scratches for me to not care as much. One new scratch or blemish would be unnoticeable among the others. It still holds itself together just fine, and it still has the 'slippery' in-pocket texture that I like.
Point being, as long as you take decent care of Your Precious, it'll be fine with the exterior wear and tear.
I've also got a $4k-ish ring made with white gold, and it came with a fucking mirror-like polish. Tiny scratches or dings were 'End of the world", until I was able to identify "inside" and "outside" orientation via a small blemish on one side.
I've been using the same briefcase for probably 30 years (bought to hold a laptop yet still fit under an airline seat). It's pretty beat up — but for lawyers a beat-up briefcase is something of a status symbol, kind of like Willie Nelson's guitar "Trigger."
>I never place it anywhere where there may be dust.
If it's any consolation, the Apple M laptops' keyboards aren't the infamous butterfly ones.
More generally, I don't worry too much about pristine keyboards. I wipe them down every week or two with 91% isopropyl alcohol and tissue paper and they're good as new. They're going to get grimy because you need to touch them, so it's not worth the worry.
As for the screen, I just take a swiffer duster to them anytime I notice dust buildup. If I notice any liquid stains, like the keyboards I just take 91% isopropyl alcohol and tissue paper to them. Good as new.
I'm using an M2 macbook pro and our typescript project is slow to start, slow to restart after a code change. It routinely leaves orphaned node processes running at 100% CPU. I shudder to think what it would do to a $100 notebook. It would probably explode hahaha
But for Elixir yes, I could definitely use a cheap laptop.
For quick notes at my desk or around the house (i.e., TODOs), I use the backside of opened mail envelopes (i.e., mostly junk mail). They are the ultimate in not having to worry about wasting paper, etc.
They are fold for pocket friendly, magnet to fridge, etc. Obviously not for long form (e.g., meetings' notes) but great for random thoughts, etc.
I've bought Moleskins and Field Notes, but for some reason, I have a hard time bringing myself to use them. Heck, even a 99-cent composition book from Staples needs a real purpose for me to actually write in one.
Like the author, I prefer legal pads. Mostly for working on. And then, at work we have stacks and stacks of the notepads with a grid printed on them (and the company logo). I love those.
I’ve come to prefer cheap sketchbooks with the spiral binding across the top for my note-taking. Or sometimes a Rhodia wirebound notebook with dot grid paper if I’m feeling fancy. These are both similar to a legal pad as I can have it open and ready for notes at all times. Printed lines seem like unnecessary visual noise to me.
I've suffered from this dilemma. I've kept an A5 (large?) softcover Moleskine as my main notebook for several years, but I always had this subtle fear about 'committing' something to a perfect-bound notebook, because I knew I wouldn't want to start ripping pages out. On the other hand, a cheap glue-bound or even spiral-bound notepad felt almost TOO disposable - I like to keep archives of notes and sketches in some sort of chronological order.
They feel disposable enough (partly the fact they are refillable makes me feel I'm not thinning down the notebook when I rip several pages out at once) but the way you can open the rings and transfer pages means that it's a great system for keeping notes together several years down the line - or even in a more permanent-feeling ring-bound binder. It's an absolute revelation for someone who has obsessed about notebooks!
I use the Traveler's company notebook. It's just a leather shell and it allows you to put inserts in. You can mix and match up to three or four different types of inserts. The fact I can always put in new inserts allowed me to feel more comfortable writing whatever in the notebook and not feel afraid of wasting it.
Came here to say this. If you want a notebook, this is the way.
For people doing long writing projects, either buy notebooks/inserts with tearaway pages or do as much of your writing as possible on a refill pad, then store and organise it using an expanding plastic filing box or similar. Even if you are a plotter rather than a pantser, it is highly unlikely you are going to write that entire novel from start to finish linerarly in one go - you are much more likely to write snippets out of order and then assemble it into a whole at a later date. This is far easier to do if your pages are not stuck in a book.
For capturing ideas on the move, I normally use my phone but I always carry an index card holder and some index cards in case my phone dies. It's also handy in case you need to give somebody some information for whatever reason.
I've had a Supernote A5X for several months now and have really loved it. I have way too many half filled paper notebooks floating around the house. I also tend to do a lot of scratch notes for work as I think through a problem and I love being able to do that in a way that doesn't end up filling up a physical notebook with stuff I won't care about in a month.
I go a different route with my Todo journal. I make my own paper out of recycled paper I get from junk mail. I cut them to my preferred size and then I do a quick binding with thread from a sewing kit. I then back it with a spine of duck tape (based off another hacker news post). I like making deeply personal objects and doing it this way makes me excited to use them.
I’ve also recently started to make linoleum stamps to mark the cover of each notebook
For my materials it's pretty much what the video shows. I'd recommend starting slowly. Don't try to buy everything all at once. I built up what I had slowly and worked around what I didn't have. Thankfully a lot of these materials you already probably have around the house!
Have you written about your process for making these notebooks? The end product looks great and I'd love to know more about what's involved and how much effort is required.
Updated my post with more details. I can usually make around 15 pages a day with my current set up. That's all I really have space for. But since each page gets folded in the notebook that ends up being quite a few pages. If I start early it takes about 24 hours between making the paper with the mould and deckle, squeezing out the water, and hanging them to dry.
The actually paper making process is pretty quick. I usually just put in some noise cancelling earbuds and just listen to some music while I work!
It's interesting you make this assertion without naming any examples.
Mainly, though, I'm replying to push back on the "set for life" aspect of your comment. Paper mills change, and so do notebook makers. Moleskine used to be fine, but they started using cheaper paper a long while ago and my usual combo of Vanishing Point + Pilot cartridge ink started bleeding really badly.
The point is that eventually, someone at $notebook_company is going to change things up, and the odds are that change will make things worse. So you kinda always have to be looking.
I’m with you. Although I recently started writing a lot more than usual. I ended up buying a used wire binding machine. I’ve been making notebooks with nice printer paper and cardboard from cereal boxes recently. It’s worked surprisingly well, although I may get a better source of cover cardboard soon. The nice part is that I can make notebooks of any size and any paper (like watercolor paper for sketchbooks) with lots of pages. Much simpler than sewing the binding.
This is a great example of the thing that happens a lot: There's the hobby or primary activity (in this case: writing on nice paper) -- and then the all-consuming DIY-hacker-ethos activity of needing to build or modify everything associated with the activity.
I'm glad YOU are happy, and I absolutely understand that you aren't doing this, but a super common thing is that someone mentions a hobby -- pens and notebooks; home espresso; motorcycles -- and is then deluged with instructions about how they should do a bunch of stuff that's really part of the second order hobby (the DIY stuff) and not about the main activity.
I just want to make coffee, or ride my motorcycle, or have good pen and paper options. I don't need to
- Hack a chinese grinder instead of buying a turnkey device; or
- Modify a bunch of stuff on my motorcycle when it works just fine as it is; or
- Make my own notebooks
But if you're happy doing these things, bully for you!
Writing with a fountain pen was expected of me from about age 8, although the enforcement decreased significantly from age 14 or so.
The notebooks / exercise books the school supplied could hardly be considered expensive, so you may just need to shop around. Or maybe downgrade to use cheap ink on a cheap notebook?
Paper compatibility with pens is really a multivariable problem of paper x pen nib x ink choice, BUT I think you may also underestimate how crappy mass-market paper is in the US.
Fountain pens are exclusively hobbyist items. Children are never taught with them, and that kind of penmanship hasn't been a normal part of childhood education in the US at any point in my lifetime.
If everyone is using a ballpoint with paste ink, the paper can get progressively crappier and crappier for a long time before anyone notices.
When I buy notebooks in the UK, though, I find that lower-end notebooks tend to be nicer than their apparent equivalents in the US.
As I noted elsewhere, it's really a question of paper x pen nib x ink, because some combos work great and some won't.
The paper in my Barton Fig journal is fine for, say, my Vanishing Point pens with stock Pilot/Namiki ink, but my Aurora with Birmingham Pen ink bleeds intolerably there. (This is one reason pen people tend to have multiple pens inked at once...)
Anyway, at my desk, I'm using currently a Rhodia Goalbook blank journal. It takes anything I throw at it.
If you can find it, Tahmoe River paper is really great for almost any combo, but they recently changed the mill and I understand the new version isn't as great. Finding it is always a bit of a Thing since they don't make journals; you just have to find a company that's making books with their paper.
I used Moleskine for years, but at some point a while back (a LONG while back), their paper changed and my go-to combo (the Vanishing Points + cartridge ink, because for years I flew all the time and this made it easy) stopped working well on that paper. I moved on to Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks, and they were more like the old Moleskines, but I moved off of them when I started using a wider array of pens and inks because while the L. paper was fine for the VP, it didn't handle fancier/wetter pens as well.
L. now also makes a heavier paper variant, and I have one I haven't started using yet, but I hear good things.
I like my Leuchtturms, and I've tried the Muji ones. Muji just has so few pages my Leuchtturms dotted medium size (A5) lasts me about 3-4 months (2.7~ pages a day) it's about 28CAD. Not bad burn rate when you consider even a Netflix subscription. Additionally, it's actually cost effective when you consider that most of my time is spent on thinking and writing down what I thought, therefore "splurging" a bit on myself makes me feel good which ultimately improves the ability to think.
Pens I'm agnostic on brand (although I do like uni-ball). It has to just have enough quality not to leak all the time, and 0.7-0.75 seems to be the sweet spot in terms of comfort, speed and writing accuracy. I do have a bunch of Muji pens (5 different colours) in the .38 range, when I really need to insane diagramming and get the super accuracy. Speed is less of a concern then.
If you're already shopping at Muji, may I recommend their Passport memo book? It's the same size and dimensions as a passport (and by default comes in Japanese passport red), which makes it the perfect size for a (male) jean pocket. I always carry one and an astronaut pen.
281 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadI especially like how you can print 2 pages on a US Letter, cut it in half, punch it(If you don't have a 6 hole punch, use an existing 6 hole sheet as a stencil and punch the marks), and it's close enough to A5 to work.
It's great for working events to have all my setup info in a binder that isn't a 3 ring full size, which I find unpleasantly bulky,just a bit too big for backpacks, and way excessive for the small amounts of paper notes I usually use.
I also like how they have A5 Ziploc sleeve things I can use for index cards and stuff.
It's such a great format I almost wish I enjoyed handwriting enough to do bullet journaling for all my notes, but I prefer Google Keep for most things, extended notes get tiring trying to write something before I forget it, while being distracted by trying to be legible, it's almost like some kind of rhythm game multitasking challenge!
I'd consider A6 instead but real A6 is hard to find, most of them are actually filofax personal in a weird aspect ratio I'm not sure I'd like.
I spot US letter-sized paper because it looks fatter/shorter than I'm used to.
Possibly it's easier to spot this outside North America, since the 1:√2 ratio is so widespread.
In Europe, I would expect A6 paper to be decently easy to find (although I don't think I've ever bought any, so salt away if you feel like it). A few seconds on the local Amazon surfaced [1], which is 2,000 sheets for SEK 218 (€19 or US $20) which I would not call hard to find nor expensive ...
Edit: forgot the link! :)
[1]: https://www.amazon.se/Copier-Paper-2000BL-A6-vit/dp/B004G6Q3...
Filofax personal and A5 are in the $10 to $15 range, which is about right for something that's only getting used a few times a month.
Plus I like how A5 is big enough for RPG character sheets, scripts, and the like, so I can kind of standardize and use A5 for almost everything
Yellow legal writing pads were good for that, back in the day.
But the worse is how the pen/pencil writes on it. I easily lost half a grade letter on classes where the examiner provided cheap paper to hand in (my typically good handwriting collapses and I couldn't follow my own work)
Both things are OK, blogging and not blogging, specially if it's in your/their personal blog/site. Let people enjoy things (like cheap notebooks) :)
Of course, I did think the topic was going to be about laptops, but shrug still was a nice read.
fill them up with shitty studies and sketches
you'll never be able to do work that will "live up to the material" if you don't ever use it
it's just raw materials, leaving them sitting in a closet is a worse insult to them than using them for a shitty sketch, at least from the shitty sketch there's something on it and you learnt a little something from the process of doing it
amateur artists often have this problem, pro artists do not fucking care, we will use that expensive paper to take notes on a phone call if that's what's handy, it does admittedly help if you know damn well that the $100 block of ultra-swank watercolor paper is going to end up being used to make multiple pieces that go for 10x the cost of that, but you can't get there without burning a ton of materials
take out every pad and just draw some kind of scribble on every page, now it's ruined, now start filling up those pages with drawings instead of having a stash in the closet that you never touch because it's Too Good
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to buy cheap notebooks (or cheap pens), do what works for you. But if you want to use nice notebooks and find yourself struggling to do it, you could try buying a bunch to teach yourself they’re not so precious and rare.
*: The notebooks are Code and Quill, the pens are Uniball Vision Elite, I still use both to this day. I have a stack of 10 finished notebooks and I’ve lost or given away God knows how many pens, but I’ve never run out of either.
I don't think people are afraid of wasting good paper, they're afraid of wasting paper that they paid a lot for.
When written, and finished, a notebook written with your favorite inks and fountain pens become an art piece for yourself, and you want to write something you want to return to.
If it was about money, I'd be using a nice rollerball with a nice refill and run of the mill or recycled paper. It's akin to liking vinyls, you want it for the experience, and spend time with it.
I have the same experience with the author. I use my fancy notebooks for diaries and software projects (like lab notebooks). Daily notes go to cheap notebooks with decent papers, and written with the best behaving, easily replaceable inks with easily replaceable pens.
When these notebooks end, they're scanned, converted to PDFs, and then shredded for recycling.
Whatever works though.
However, my hand-bound leather notebooks are reserved for design and journal work only, and written with archival inks most of the time.
He never has expressed anything about the quality of paper. Actually, he takes his notes on whatever is available, which often means the back of an envelope lying around and otherwise printer paper. I have never seen him use a notebook actually, let alone an expensive one.
He probably has a favorite ink to use with his fountain pens, since inks change both a pen's behavior and their interaction changes from paper to paper.
There's a list of popular, run of the mill inks which work very well with lower quality paper. I also use these inks with my daily driver pens and notebooks, since they're easy to maintain, looks nice, and works with almost any notebook out there.
However I had some notebooks which were not writable unless you use a gel, ballpoint or some rollerballs. Fountain pen ink just stayed as little droplets and never dried on them.
I think our brains just aren’t very careful or rigorous about what they attach that “scarcity” label to, they will happily attach that label to the product itself instead of the money you paid for it. Consciously presenting our subconscious with disconfirming observations can be an effective tool to update our subconscious labeling.
It has nothing to do with what I paid, everything to do with how I perceive the quality of the consumable material.
I can, and do, use my best quality tools without any qualms. It's using up "precious" (quality) materials. (It's silly, does not serve me well, and I'm working on it)
A lot of modern software problems stem from developers having a powerfully detached understanding of reality.
If I can make this work (fast) on a Raspberry Pi 3 or on older hardware, will work nicely on production systems.
The best thing we could do for the internet is have developers at Google, Meta, etc, use a Raspberry Pi 4 or similar "gutless wonder ARM box" for one day a week. So often, I run into things they've written that, for no coherent reason, just run horribly on low end hardware. It was obviously written and toyed with on a Xeon workstation with multiple large 4k monitors, and, who would possibly use less?
The Blogger rewrite rather irritates me, because it went from an old, usable, performant interface that ran totally fine on ancient netbooks to this weird, "mobile first" interface (for a blogging platform) that choked out even on high end hardware when you had a lot of photos in a post. Clearly, nobody who worked on it ever actually loaded it up, or used it on old hardware, and never actually talked to anyone who used it to blog, because it was filled with tons of "modern" UI crap that was objectively worse than the old interface for every conceivable task one might do when writing and editing blog posts.
Kicked me off Blogger and onto my personally hosted Jekyll stuff, though, so I guess working as intended.
For most practical applications, computing performance plateaued around 2011. Just look at how many people can't/won't use Windows 11 just because their ancient relic otherwise still works perfectly fine.
And if you want a source, anecdata is I'm posting this from an i7 2700K (aka Sandy Bridge) machine.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I've had a few of these over the years that I take to coffee shops/bars to work. It's nice not to feel nervous about a $1000+ investment just because the server is coming around to refresh my water.
I bought her a t420, which cost less than $100. All I did was swap in an SSD. But here’s the thing, I bought two t420s, and when one breaks I cannibalize the other for parts, or just swap the SSD into the old machine. I make sure to always have a spare machine, which is not hard because after you cannibalize one machine, and get a replacement, the parts on the cannibalized machine will often suffice for a while until you need to replace the same part again.
For her use cases, and to be honest 90% of people’s use cases, a t420 from 2011 has an excess of power. And the peace of mind knowing that spilling water on the keyboard will be a repair that takes 10 minutes (I could probably repair a t420 blindfolded at this point) and effectively only cost you $10-$20, is wonderful. I’ve been able to walk her through repairs over the phone.
I tend to use old various X220/X230 thinkpad as beaters. Used to be big on the X201, but somehow the X201 has been creeping up in price. Yeah, I use and like my big M1 MacBook for work. It’s nice for what I do at my job. But in my personal life I’m 100% happy with Arch Linux and i3wm on a stack of thinkpads. Having swappable batteries might be my favorite part, other than how well Linux runs.
(Way off topic for this thread so apologies)
I don't think Moore's law is solely to the blame. Incentives are lacking, spoken languages and software development methodologies are still too primitive to describe and define temporal behaviors, and, I suspect there are also disincentives to solve it - slower software seems to be preferred for the mass, and so each times significant speedups are achieved, a correctional force could be emerging and applying over it.
I never worried about it at all. There's holes in the keyboard and through the laptop to deal with liquid spills. The case was a nice hard plastic with enough flex to prevent breaking.
Honestly, if I dropped it on the floor - I'd check the floor first for any damage.
Taking it apart was straightforward, albeit a bit frustrating. I found the MBP mid-2012 unibodys much, much easier to take apart and clean.
I recently decided to upgrade and bought a M1 MBP Pro off of a college kid wanting to get a gaming laptop. It's a huge upgrade and I actually find myself loving MacOS. Everything feels so nice and looks so nice.
But now I am just terrified for this laptop. It has a hard case. I'm meticulous about a clean keyboard and screen (fingerprint magnet). I keep any and all liquids very, very far away. I never place it anywhere where there may be dust.
I sometimes wonder if the stress is worth it. I'm tempted to buy myself an X220 or something else in the X series since the T530 was heavy to lug around.
haven't really found a need or desire to upgrade beyond maxing the ram and shoving an ssd in it.
One time, I bought a fancy wallet made of stainless steel (threads, woven into thin sheets, backed by plastic). For MONTHS, I was paranoid about leaving any scratches or blemishes on such a pristine, shiny thing.
Years later, it's still my wallet, and has enough blemishes and scratches for me to not care as much. One new scratch or blemish would be unnoticeable among the others. It still holds itself together just fine, and it still has the 'slippery' in-pocket texture that I like.
Point being, as long as you take decent care of Your Precious, it'll be fine with the exterior wear and tear.
I've also got a $4k-ish ring made with white gold, and it came with a fucking mirror-like polish. Tiny scratches or dings were 'End of the world", until I was able to identify "inside" and "outside" orientation via a small blemish on one side.
I've been using the same briefcase for probably 30 years (bought to hold a laptop yet still fit under an airline seat). It's pretty beat up — but for lawyers a beat-up briefcase is something of a status symbol, kind of like Willie Nelson's guitar "Trigger."
https://guitar.com/features/interviews/story-of-willie-nelso...
If it's any consolation, the Apple M laptops' keyboards aren't the infamous butterfly ones.
More generally, I don't worry too much about pristine keyboards. I wipe them down every week or two with 91% isopropyl alcohol and tissue paper and they're good as new. They're going to get grimy because you need to touch them, so it's not worth the worry.
As for the screen, I just take a swiffer duster to them anytime I notice dust buildup. If I notice any liquid stains, like the keyboards I just take 91% isopropyl alcohol and tissue paper to them. Good as new.
But for Elixir yes, I could definitely use a cheap laptop.
https://www.amazon.com/Leather-Journal-Composition-Notebooks...
They are fold for pocket friendly, magnet to fridge, etc. Obviously not for long form (e.g., meetings' notes) but great for random thoughts, etc.
Like the author, I prefer legal pads. Mostly for working on. And then, at work we have stacks and stacks of the notepads with a grid printed on them (and the company logo). I love those.
Pair it with my fave pen: https://www.jetpens.com/Zebra-Sarasa-Clip-Gel-Pen-0.7-mm-Blu...
https://www.muji.eu/product/recycling-paper-notebook-dark-gr...
https://www.muji.eu/product/gel-ink-ballpoint-pen-0-7mm-1104...
Get through a notepad once a month or so and a refill every 3 months.
Recently I found my holy grail which is Muji's system of ring-bound, refillable notebooks and paper refills - https://www.muji.eu/uk/product/cover-for-loose-leaf-paper-a5...
They feel disposable enough (partly the fact they are refillable makes me feel I'm not thinning down the notebook when I rip several pages out at once) but the way you can open the rings and transfer pages means that it's a great system for keeping notes together several years down the line - or even in a more permanent-feeling ring-bound binder. It's an absolute revelation for someone who has obsessed about notebooks!
For people doing long writing projects, either buy notebooks/inserts with tearaway pages or do as much of your writing as possible on a refill pad, then store and organise it using an expanding plastic filing box or similar. Even if you are a plotter rather than a pantser, it is highly unlikely you are going to write that entire novel from start to finish linerarly in one go - you are much more likely to write snippets out of order and then assemble it into a whole at a later date. This is far easier to do if your pages are not stuck in a book.
For capturing ideas on the move, I normally use my phone but I always carry an index card holder and some index cards in case my phone dies. It's also handy in case you need to give somebody some information for whatever reason.
I’m skeptical it’s “better” for the environment since electronics are a lot more intense to manufacture and a lot worse to recycle.
I’ve also recently started to make linoleum stamps to mark the cover of each notebook
Here is the one I’m using now https://imgur.com/a/4axd3lC
*EDIT*
For those that are curious, I make paper similar to the process outlined here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xrWrKIVBgo
For my materials it's pretty much what the video shows. I'd recommend starting slowly. Don't try to buy everything all at once. I built up what I had slowly and worked around what I didn't have. Thankfully a lot of these materials you already probably have around the house!
1. Mold and Deckle. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mold+and+deckle&i=arts-crafts&cri...
2. A big sponge. I use the automotive ones https://www.amazon.com/Carrand-40102-Giant-x4-75-Sponge/dp/B...
3. A blender
4. A paper shredder
5. A plastic Tub
6. Wooden clothes pins https://www.amazon.com/Honey-Can-Do-DRY-01376-Clothespins-10...
7. Cheap yarn from my wife's kit to hang the drying paper
8. Some felt to couch (cooch) the paper onto https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07YBNZ6WN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
For the stamps I use...
1. These Linoleum blocks https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07V5D4JSC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
2. This Linoleum cutter https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0017D8W5E/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
3. Some ink https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0017D92TO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
To squeeze out the water from the couched paper I used to use two pieces of wood I'd pinch with some https://www.amazon.com/IRWIN-QUICK-GRIP-1964758-One-Handed-C... (This is something I made for an unrelated pressed flower project)
But now that I've gotten more experience I've moved on to an actual press kristiandupont ↗ Very nice! How do you make paper? Decabytes ↗ I updated my post with more details! kldavis4 ↗ Have you written about your process for making these notebooks? The end product looks great and I'd love to know more about what's involved and how much effort is required. Decabytes ↗ Updated my post with more details. I can usually make around 15 pages a day with my current set up. That's all I really have space for. But since each page gets folded in the notebook that ends up being quite a few pages. If I start early it takes about 24 hours between making the paper with the mould and deckle, squeezing out the water, and hanging them to dry.
The actually paper making process is pretty quick. I usually just put in some noise cancelling earbuds and just listen to some music while I work!
You just have to experiment with some and once you find a lineup supported by a good company, you are set for life.
Mainly, though, I'm replying to push back on the "set for life" aspect of your comment. Paper mills change, and so do notebook makers. Moleskine used to be fine, but they started using cheaper paper a long while ago and my usual combo of Vanishing Point + Pilot cartridge ink started bleeding really badly.
The point is that eventually, someone at $notebook_company is going to change things up, and the odds are that change will make things worse. So you kinda always have to be looking.
I'm glad YOU are happy, and I absolutely understand that you aren't doing this, but a super common thing is that someone mentions a hobby -- pens and notebooks; home espresso; motorcycles -- and is then deluged with instructions about how they should do a bunch of stuff that's really part of the second order hobby (the DIY stuff) and not about the main activity.
I just want to make coffee, or ride my motorcycle, or have good pen and paper options. I don't need to
- Hack a chinese grinder instead of buying a turnkey device; or - Modify a bunch of stuff on my motorcycle when it works just fine as it is; or - Make my own notebooks
But if you're happy doing these things, bully for you!
The notebooks / exercise books the school supplied could hardly be considered expensive, so you may just need to shop around. Or maybe downgrade to use cheap ink on a cheap notebook?
Fountain pens are exclusively hobbyist items. Children are never taught with them, and that kind of penmanship hasn't been a normal part of childhood education in the US at any point in my lifetime.
If everyone is using a ballpoint with paste ink, the paper can get progressively crappier and crappier for a long time before anyone notices.
When I buy notebooks in the UK, though, I find that lower-end notebooks tend to be nicer than their apparent equivalents in the US.
The paper in my Barton Fig journal is fine for, say, my Vanishing Point pens with stock Pilot/Namiki ink, but my Aurora with Birmingham Pen ink bleeds intolerably there. (This is one reason pen people tend to have multiple pens inked at once...)
Anyway, at my desk, I'm using currently a Rhodia Goalbook blank journal. It takes anything I throw at it.
If you can find it, Tahmoe River paper is really great for almost any combo, but they recently changed the mill and I understand the new version isn't as great. Finding it is always a bit of a Thing since they don't make journals; you just have to find a company that's making books with their paper.
I used Moleskine for years, but at some point a while back (a LONG while back), their paper changed and my go-to combo (the Vanishing Points + cartridge ink, because for years I flew all the time and this made it easy) stopped working well on that paper. I moved on to Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks, and they were more like the old Moleskines, but I moved off of them when I started using a wider array of pens and inks because while the L. paper was fine for the VP, it didn't handle fancier/wetter pens as well.
L. now also makes a heavier paper variant, and I have one I haven't started using yet, but I hear good things.
Pens I'm agnostic on brand (although I do like uni-ball). It has to just have enough quality not to leak all the time, and 0.7-0.75 seems to be the sweet spot in terms of comfort, speed and writing accuracy. I do have a bunch of Muji pens (5 different colours) in the .38 range, when I really need to insane diagramming and get the super accuracy. Speed is less of a concern then.
https://www.muji.us/products/passport-memo-9s62?variant=4001...
> "you'd be surprised how many cheap notebooks have decent paper"
Absolutely. I have come across many cheap notebooks that handle F or EF nib fountain pens gracefully.
I also liked writing in expensive notebooks. But it didn't feel like a sustainable habit for the price points.
What I did instead was buying (very) expensive refillable leather notebooks of standard sizes: A4, A5, A6.
And I fill them up with cheap yet very nice refills available locally or in Amazon.
I have freed myself from the dread of writing perfect things and I write in style.
I have done this for many years now.
I am a person who likes the comfort that comes with using things for many years.