
Paper Notes (2019) - Tomte
https://macwright.org/2019/01/02/paper-notes.html
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lukevp
This is great! I totally agree with the concept of just taking notes in
sequence. Notes are a record of moments in your life. The act of taking notes
quickly, without distraction, and moving on, is so important.

Organizing notes in any other way besides just a sequence (especially
heirarchical folders, which is how most apps organize) gets cumbersome.

It becomes a combination of analysis paralyasis (which category best fits this
note I'm about to take? What if it fits into multiple categories? Too bad, it
can only live in one folder) and a quagmire of trying to keep the data
organized and findable in the future.

It's a lot easier to just keep a log of every note and then add just enough
tagging that you can find it later when you need it.

I was fed up with all the other note apps out there, and created one that
accomplishes all the goals I have personally always wanted. Those goals are -
make note creation front and center, work natively on every major platform,
sync instantly to all my devices, and have a very powerful filtering and full-
text search engine for retrieval.

Please sign up if you are interested, it is currently in alpha.
[https://notebrook.app](https://notebrook.app) (ALPHA2020) gets you started in
the browser right away. Create an account and sync your notes anywhere (native
apps on every platform will be available soon).

Hit us up at hello@notebrook.com to sign up for the mailing list to get more
information on future releases!

~~~
gnur
Looks really nice so far. I've been working on exactly the same thing
actually, but it isn't nearly as polished as notebrook (yet?).

The only problem right now is that I cannot find a save button anywhere and it
also is not autosaving?

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lukevp
gnur,

Thank you for the kind words!

While you are writing a draft note in the editor, the notes are auto saved in
your browser every second. As soon as you submit the note (either by hitting
enter 3 times at the end of the note, or ctrl+enter on desktop) it’s marked up
with metadata and saved in your browser. If you have an account, it will also
sync to the cloud and back down to any other signed in devices (usually within
a second or less). If you’ve taken notes in a browser and forgot to sign in,
you can sign up or sign in at any time and all the notes locally on that
device will get pushed to your account.

Let me know if you have any other questions! We will be adding a “submit”
button as well as walkthrough in the future to make this process clearer.

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danielecook
I have a stack of about 30 Moleskine notebooks I've gone through over the past
10 years. I mostly work at the computer, so I keep the notebook open in front
of me while I work and I usually wind up creating a checklist each day of what
I intend to do, then use the pages to draw out ideas or sketch thoughts.
Sometimes I find myself writing something to try to remember it. I try to look
at the previous day for continuity but otherwise rarely need to look back. I
also use it for meeting notes.

I put a unique sticker on the front of each one so I can sort of associate the
time / topics with the notebook. Otherwise they all look identical.

It's not really that organized, but it helps me keep focused on tasks each day
and sketch out ideas.

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mattalbie
I agree with the spirit of this post but I’ve found large page-count and
portable notebooks that work fine for me. Hobonichi makes nice ones, so does
Midori. I always do a few things:

1) number the pages and date the entries. 2) Place an index at the beginning
of the notebook that I fill out as I go. This way I can flip to the index and
find the pages where I wrote about a thing. 3) The Bullet Journal concept of
moving incomplete tasks forward into collections has really helped me.

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kragen
I go through about one unlined pocket-sized Moleskine per year. Portability
trumps all else. I agree that append-only is the way to go; I put a table of
contents at the end of each notebook and a header line with the date at the
top of each page. (I use the dates rather than page numbers in the table of
contents.) I've been doing this since about 2005. Everything goes into the
same notebook: notes on "virtual virtual memory" (2020-01-28), notes on
foreign exchange rates here in Argentina (2020-01-28), notes on prices of
laptops in the store (2020-01-28), a list of things to fix (toilet, clothing,
remote control) (2020-01-30), designs for flexural dial indicators
(2020-02-01), an explanation of Cantor's diagonalization proof (2020-02-06),
thoughts on multitouch UX design (202-02-06), etc. I don't write anything
private in the notebook, so I can show it to people. (For the same reason, I
write it in Spanish instead of English.)

In order to have space for later commentary, I initially write the notes only
on the right-hand pages — the left-hand pages stay blank, then get more stuff
added to them later, which may be references to other notes I added later,
extensions of the idea, or sometimes just random notes that don't seem to
deserve their own note.

I initially wrote in rollerball, but I have the notebook with me all day every
day; after a few unfortunate incidents with rain and spilled drinks, I
switched to only waterproof markings. I'm using an 0.3mm mechanical pencil,
which is my favorite, but I use plain ballpoint pens when that's all that's
available. Their ink is oil-based, so it resists water, though not dry alcohol
or grease. I can write much smaller with the pencil, so the notebook lasts
longer.

I did try using a local brand here in Argentina that apes the Moleskine,
called BRÜGGE. I greatly regret it. The cover came unstuck from the notebook
after less than a year — apparently the shitheads used a pressure-sensitive
adhesive like the one in Scotch Tape rather than traditional bookbinding
adhesives like wheat paste or hide glue. A few years later, my girlfriend
admired the BRÜGGE notebooks in a store; I warned her, but she wanted one. The
same thing happened to her, so it wasn't just a temporary quality mixup — the
company is really targeting that abysmal level of quality! Unfortunately
BRÜGGE is displacing Moleskine from more and more stationery shops here. (I
got mine from Librería Artística Catalinas for US$16; I think they have
relocated now to Córdoba 746, Capital Federal. That's also where I got the
mechanical pencil, although they didn't have any leads harder than HB.)

Lately I haven't been keeping my address book in the notebook, but when I did,
I used a hash table with separate chaining; I numbered the lines in the
address-book section, and had a "successor" column. At the beginning of the
address book was the hash table itself, a matrix whose rows are groups of
first letters (of the person's name) and whose columns are groups of third
letters; so "María" whoever would end up in row LM, column QR. If she was the
first person in that cell, I'd just write the line number there, but if not, I
would add her as a successor at the end of the chain. Difficult to explain
(especially to non-programmers) but easy to update and search. Insertion is
not worst-case constant time because you can't insert at the beginning of the
chain — the paper is WORM rather than strictly read/write.

Here's a sample page, in Spanish, photographed at 5 megapixels:
[https://is.gd/nbshot](https://is.gd/nbshot)

Notes on my computerized notetaking practices are at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388381)

~~~
wrp
John Locke was famous in his day for his method of indexing journals.[1] It
has been discussed here before.[2]

[1] [https://fs.blog/2014/07/john-locke-common-place-
book/](https://fs.blog/2014/07/john-locke-common-place-book/)

[2][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21143497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21143497)

~~~
kragen
That's very similar to my address-book approach! It seems like he was
allocating his linked-list nodes in page granularity, thus substantially
improving locality of reference — I should probably try that the next time I
do an address-book in this style, though maybe for an address-book a quarter-
page or so would be a better granularity. Thank you for the reference!

I find that for notes that often grow to multiple pages, the table of contents
at the end serves well enough to find them; I might have some 256 items in
there at the end of a notebook, and I often remember more or less what date I
wrote about something, allowing me to find it fairly quickly in the table of
contents. I also include a little icon next to each one, about the size of two
letters, which helps somewhat.

It's interesting to note in [https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-
lockes-method...](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-
method-for-common-place-books-1685) that not only didn't Locke have separate
entries for I/J and U/V/W (which were two letters at the time rather than
five) but also omitted K and Y. (Also, he seems to have listed all the page
numbers in the table rather than just the first one — perhaps he wasn't making
a linked list at all? Perhaps with linking he could have gotten some advantage
out of my two-dimensional approach.)

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nicbou
I still take most of my notes in Google Keep. I can type faster than I can
write. My notes are always on the cloud, searchable and editable from any
device.

I also created Markdown Notes a few years ago, but haven't used it much after
university.

I still use paper for disorganised thoughts, doodles and short-lived notes,
but digital notes are hard to beat for everything else.

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WalterBright
I take notes serially on those $.79 spiral notebooks from the drugstore. When
full, I scan them, and toss them.

~~~
kragen
How do you keep the spiral from getting crushed in your pocket? That's a big
factor that keeps me using notebooks with sewn bindings instead of spirals.

~~~
WalterBright
I don't put it in my pocket, I use them at my desk. For my pocket, I use any
of a number of pads of various forms, usually one I got for free for this or
that reason.

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wrp
The author notes an improvement in convenience going from Moleskine to Field
Notes. I found it even better to use A7 size notebooks (from Japan). They are
a bit cramped to write in, but fit better in a shirt pocket.

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alexandra_cgg
I don't really like small notebooks, I've been using artist sketchbooks
recently which have worked out pretty well. When I'm done with them, I slice
through it and scan the sheets

~~~
JKCalhoun
Yes, I am finding when I go to a larger notebook I feel more free to write
full, longer sentences, etc. Maybe there is some sort of landscape Field Notes
notebook I would prefer....

He's quite right about passing on the Moleskine and other top-dollar
notebooks.

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asdff
Writing notes is nice, but typing on a laptop is too convenient with all the
editing tools. Great for class and meetings, but for project notes and other
things where I will actually have to reference the material pretty repeatedly,
can't beat rewriting your notes into a running text file and grep.

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yoloswagins
Looks about 80% of the way to a zettelkasten.

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slynn12
Paper notes...the ultimate way of not being hacked. Different set of risks, of
course, but it's a certain sense of security if you know what I mean.

