May I ask if they are direct paper to screen transfers, or if there are specific features/apps that add extra value? I do a lot of work in (paper) engineering notebooks, and I'm curious about what improvements your workflow has.
I ~exclusively use ZoomNotes, which is very customizable but is quirky and comes with a steep learning curve.
For me the main benefits of the tablet are:
- Copy/paste/drag. Pretty helpful when you manipulate long expressions, or want to condense a bunch of scratch work.
- Relatedly: easy erase. When I used real paper, pencil was too low contrast, and “erasable pen” never worked well. So I used a real pen and just crossed tons of stuff out; ugly.
- Keep a decade of notes with me wherever I go. (And cloud backed up so I won’t lose them.)
- Infinite zoom and no page boundaries. Seems silly, but it’s really nice to write as big as I want without worrying about running out of room on the page.
- Text search of handwritten notes. Works surprisingly well.
- Easily switch to different colors. 99% of the time I only use 2 or 3, but I find it helpful to visual distinguish the main argument/computation from “side commentary”.
Undo is one thing you get used to very quickly. Copy paste, select and move, change colors, erase without a trace... digital handwriting has a lot to offer.
However, the app ecosystem is lacking in terms of interoperability, feature completeness within one app and export/import capabilities, and there is nothing you can do about it in iPadOS. File management is pure pain unless you fully bought into Apple already.
It's very nice for brainstorming and making transient personal illustrations while learning and working through technical problems, but you won't get the feel and certainty of a physical notebook as an institution for persistent notes.
The iPad is way too expensive for what it has to offer, in practice.
That said, without its artificial limitations it would be the last computing device you'll ever need. It could be everything.
Strong agree with the first two paragraphs. I have spent >10 working hours per week for past 4 years with an app I paid $7 for. I wish so much I could pay $7,000 for an improved version.
Disagree on permanence. My notes are useful for much longer when they can be electronically sorted, searched, backed up, and when they take up no additional space in my backpack.
This is a nicely in depth and enjoyable read, especially as a long time software engineer, who's recently become interested in raspberry pi's and microcontrollers.
Since devcontainer.json works fine on docker desktop, I usually use that, but I do use codespaces frequently for review and small patches, as well as exploring new libraries. I'm slowly adding devcontainers to the open source projects I work on. It's much nicer to have a docker compose file and several docker files in this setup than maintaining instructions on setting up test environments.
I've run k8s/k3s with docker-in-docker this way too. Really easy once you get it setup, and great for playing with architecture ideas.
There are multiple GDSs, and AFAIK neither Expedia nor Booking.com use them. The space is way more confused and competitive then your comment implies. The best writeup I've seen on the space is https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/hotel-api/, if you really want to dive into the details.
Turkey also borrowed the "qahwa" (meaning coffee) from Arabic but since there's no "w" in Turkish, it became "kaveh".
Later the word "coffee" spread to European through Turkey to Dutch, then English and the rest of the world now use the word coffee [1]. The strange thing is that now even in Arab world like Saudi, most of the young people use the word "coffee" rather than original "qahwa". This is one of the rare situations where the original loaner now become the borrower. The only saving grace is that the best coffee type is still Arabica.
It's also very interesting to note that the popular and universal English word "cafe" as in cafeteria also derived from the Arabic word "qahwa", perhaps from the summary of the word for coffee house [2].
It doesn't really fit into that setup. When given an article 15, you can demand a trial by court-martial, so it doesn't really have a parallel in the civilian job market. It's usually kinda like house-arrest. So maybe think of it as some combination of a demotion, a fine, and a couple weeks in jail.
If you are interested in physical copies, I highly recommend "The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War" , and others in the Landmark series. I got a lot more out of it with all the maps and explanations. Very well done.
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