It took me a while to get over the fear of destroying/using up nice things. Like enjoying a nice bottle of liquor, or using up a very nice notebook. Eventually I came across the idea that things are meant to be used, and now I'm much more relaxed about damaging/using up the things I own.
I read once a stellar idea to help get over the fear of starting to draw in a notebook (or an art project, or a new software project) is to just start scribbling and drawing. Intentionally starting with a mess makes it much easier to break the cycle of "This thing I'm doing isn't good enough yet for this".
One notebook brand my wife found, that I love very much, is minimalism art. I like the small, softcovers. They aren't too soft, and hold their shape really well. The paper quality is high.
I also just tried out the new "sidekick notepad" from Cortex. Very expensive (overpriced), but I was happy to support their work.
I’ve recently gotten over this sentiment with my electronics. When I was a kid, each device was an irreplaceable gift from a parent or represented the investment of a long time saving. So each device was treated with the absolute care. As a result I spent a lot of time babying hardware. Now I’m a few generations of hardware into being an adult and am retiring perfect condition objects that are just too slow. For what? I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m allowed to use devices exactly how I feel like it. They exist as tools for me to use! Looking back at my chunky MacBook cover in college is funny, now. What’s the point of a fancy surface finish on the hardware if you never get to see it?
I changed to this with electronics when I decided that the midrange and below was more than enough for anything I'm doing and that every movable device should be treated as if it could be dropped on a tile floor or grow legs and walk away at any time.
Automated backups, cloud storage and services, encrypted local storage, remote wipe if feasible, devices that are midrange but still getting security and feature updates. Not quite seamless to move to a new device, but it's not that hard either.
Exactly the same here! My MBP in college had a safety case and everything... and in hindsight its awful and bulky and hides the fancy finish.
One important thing to remember, at least for me, is I just had significantly less disposable income back then. Replacing the MBP would have been financially impossible for me, so I took more care of it. I'm in a much more privileged place now... so replacing something like this would only be a significant inconvenience.
It's not necessarily unreasonable to take some additional steps to protect your essential tools that would be very financially inconvenient to replace. What's "reasonable" of course depends on the details. But that doesn't necessarily mean suffering along with inferior products (computers, cameras) because you're afraid they'll get stolen or damaged (which insurance can mittigate against to some degree).
Honestly those cases would not have helped your mac any. It has a substantial amount of shock protection already from the case, if you open it up you can see how the corners especially have plenty of room to deform before hitting something important, and if you are smacking that computer hard enough to deform the corners the thin plastic case might as well be a piece of paper. Maybe they help prevent scratches which could hurt resale value potentially.
My 2012 macbook pro looks like its been throw out of a moving vehicle at this point. Dinged corners, scratched up bottoms and missing screws and feet. Thats why they make them out of a metal unibody chassis after all, to keep up with being dropped all the time and scratched up.
With the 2012 at least, the first tell for the battery expanding is actually the trackpad. The trackpad will start to no longer click as well because it is still a physical button in this model. It might not even click at all before it finally swells to the point it shatters the trackpad. Luckily the placement of the battery spares the keyboard too; its all in the palm and trackpad area.
I'm on battery number 2 at this point, and the swap takes as long as a dozen phillips heads takes to unscrew then screw. I don't envy the more recent glued battery models and don't look forward to the day when this pretty repairable rig finally bites the dust and I'm forced into one.
I would replace the battery if that was the only part affected. Unfortunately when it expanded just like the last time it bends/warps the top case and keyboard, the metal around the trackpad and the bottom case. I can't just replace the battery and leave everything else bent/warped, the laptop won't sit level, the screen will not close completely. It's really not a cheap or easy task. Not to mention the risk involved in removing a battery that is expanded and could rupture.
This is why my phone looks like I’ve been to war with it. I didn’t pay the price to grip five dollar plastic cases and after my phone has been unbearably slow, no one wants to use it anyway.
> Eventually I came across the idea that things are meant to be used, and now I'm much more relaxed about damaging/using up the things I own.
Its like the people with cabinets full of fine china that nobody eats off of for 50 years. My mother was one of those people. Growing up we had a large cabinet of fine place sets that we were always "saving" for some other time. I finally convinced her to start using it one holiday season, and we were actually using and enjoying it for the last few years of her life.
I'm strongly in the camp that there's no point in having nice things if you never actually use those things.
And that women don't get "used up" because they have sex! Truly delightfully disgusting, that analogy. You'd probably need to own a Ferrari to come up with such nonsense.
When helping clear out a deceased relation's house, we found pretty much every piece of cut glass (wine glasses, whisky glasses, decanters, bowls etc) was chipped. That was a good sign that it had all been used and enjoyed.
Where the fine china situation gets awkward is when parents want to give it to their kids, but it means absolutely nothing to the kids because they never used it.
I took my parents' wedding china and I can probably count the times I've used it on a couple of hands. Though there's more of it than my own stoneware so when I do have a big crowd over, it's been handy a couple of times.
I was watching a video on how to split logs using high quality steel wedges and a point they made really struck me:
"Most people think the high quality wedges should be made out of hard, durable steel. That's actually the opposite of what you want. Hard steel wedges 'throw' chips when hit by a hammer.
You want soft steel that deforms since that's safer. If you are wondering 'But doesn't that mean the wedge wears down over time?', yes it does. That's fine b/c wedges are considered consumables."
The idea of an item being high quality AND consumable for safety/design reasons gave me a new appreciation for things like high quality pencils, paper etc:
yes they are high quality and get used up but that's the point
> I also just tried out the new "sidekick notepad" from Cortex. Very expensive (overpriced), but I was happy to support their work.
The sidekick notepad is a pretty nice idea, but $32 + $12 shipping is a lot for a 60 page pad.
I've been using a Notsu dot-grid landscape notepad (great paper!) but it's 8.5" x 5.5". I just wish it was larger. The Sidekick looks like a pretty nice size...
How hard is it to get custom pads made? I'm guessing non-standard dimensions are a bit of a blocker when you only want to order a dozen or two.
I've had reasonable luck at local print shops. They can do custom sizes in a plastic spiral binding for a reasonable price. I haven't found someone who can do a sewn binding, but I wonder about asking a leatherworker in town if his machine could do 30 pages if I bought a few spare needles.
The Notsu pad that I like has the pages held in by some glue along the edge. I like it better than a spiral and I think I like it better than the tear-away style that the Sidekick is using. The glue seems relatively easy to do, so all I really need is somebody to print me 12" x 7" dot-grid pages.
If you haven't looked at them before, the Rhodia dotPad or Top Wirebound Notepad might be a fit for you and usable in either orientation. Rhodia's "pad" products seem to all have perforated pages (they tear nicely) where the "book" products are non-perforated.
Edit: the wirebound has an A4 size page option, the dotPad has an A4 and a longer-than-A4 option. ~$10-16 depending on color and where you order, Amazon is not the cheapest option out there.
The longer-than-A4 option is intriguing. I’m wondering if a print shop would be able to cut off the top binding and change it to a glue edge along one of the long sides?
I live in the rust belt, where cars only look new for the first 3 years or so. After that, they are 100% guaranteed to have chips in the paint from 18-wheelers throwing rocks, rust on the frame/fenders from the salt, and dings from other people parking 6 inches from your door.
And if you own a prius in the midwest, it's not a matter of IF someone will key it in the parking lot of home depot, it's a matter of WHEN.
> And if you own a prius in the midwest, it's not a matter of IF someone will key it in the parking lot of home depot, it's a matter of WHEN.
I live in Texas, where I'd expect such behavior before I saw it in the midwest; parking lots are awash in Priuses, and no-one seems to bat an eye at it. Maybe it's that I live in a city. Where in the midwest would you expect this?
Probably some rural areas. There was one sparsely populated area in Northern Wisconsin I was told avoid ordering food at non-chain restaurants. They would happily try to kill you or make you sick if you had a food allergy.
Having grown up in Wisconsin, I absolutely believed that. I went to high school with people like that. And they got it from their parents.
My dad heckled me for getting a Prius and buying Apple products.
It makes me really sad because they aren’t representative of the majority of rural people I know.
Reminds me of an old freestyle motorcycling video I saw.
This guy had a new dirt bike and said ”Yeah you’re always a little hesitant with a shiny new bike, afraid you’ll scratch it up. That’s dangerous when doing these big tricks so I like to throw the bike and scratch it up intentionally to get over that fear. Then the tricks go flying”
So he throws the bike and breaks the clutch lever. But they were in the sand dunes in the middle of nowhere to shoot this stunting video and the ride back to civilization wouldn’t come until evening. He did not get to ride that day.
Best thing that happened for my wife and my marriage was the flooring people doing a shitty job before we moved into my house. She shrugs off every scuff I put in the floor with "it's crappy anyways"
I got a new car last August, noticed like two months in that someone lightly scratched/bumped the rear left bumper. Oddly enough it's almost a good thing because now I'm not as scared anymore
An acquaintance claimed to know someone who would use a bat to make the first dent in any new car he purchased. But that could be one of those stories that just travel around.
You're lucky you don't live in a larger city. It's impossible to keep it 100% scratch/dent free unless you 100% of the time park in your own garage. Even if you park your car in underground, private for-profit garages, it'll eventually end up with a scratch/dent somewhere, somehow.
Spent a lot of my childhood getting stickers from the book ordering program, putting the sheets of them in a box, and never doing anything with them again.
Most of them were ruined during my adulthood when my basement flooded.
Now when I get a sticker, I throw it on something even if it's not the perfect destination for that sticker.
I have a drawer containing stickers that arrived with beloved products that I can't bear to commit to putting on anything. Some are decades old.
I have a pair of Technics stickers that I got with my Technics SL-1200 mkIIs in 2002. I think there may still be a rainbow Apple sticker in there. I have stickers for bands whose members have long ago stopped making music and now have boring day jobs and families.
True. Also an A5 size artist's sketchbook - with hard covers, 120g/m^2 off white paper (will take any pen from Sharpie downwards as well as watercolours) and sewn bindings - can be bought almost anywhere in the UK and costs less than two coffees in a nice cafe (£5).
Just keep one with you.
PS: I did think that the linked article was going to be about low specification laptops, and was preparing to extol the virtues of recycled Thinkpads.
I think some products are better designed to wear gracefully than others. The old iPods with the reflective back are a good example. Those things looked nice for about 5 minutes unless you immediately put them in a case.
Conversely, newer Apple products seem to wear out very gracefully. A 4 or 5 year old iPhone may look used, but it doesn't look horrifyingly ugly unless the owner seriously abused it.
For me personally, I like having the caps on pens. Clicky ones tend to stay clicked and dry out the point. I really like the 0.38 uni-ball signo dx :)
I never thought I was the type of person to have strong feelings on a pen... then I decided to see what I was missing out on and there's just so much out there!
I learned this lesson the hard way. I bought a new car after college graduation. Ordered it from the factory, got exactly what I wanted, picked it up with 5 miles on the odometer. I waged that car 4 times in three days.
On the 4th day, my mother backed out of the garage and damaged three panels on the front and side of the car.
This reminds me of getting new sneakers as a kid and trying to keep it clean, only to have a friend deliberately step on it. Was it annoying? Sure. But I gotta admit -- I didn't have to worry about keeping them pristine afterwards.
> I read once a stellar idea to help get over the fear of starting to draw in a notebook (or an art project, or a new software project) is to just start scribbling and drawing. Intentionally starting with a mess makes it much easier to break the cycle of "This thing I'm doing isn't good enough yet for this".
Along these lines, something I have shamelessly stolen from Merlin Mann is to write "The first page is profound" on the first page of every notebook I get.
> One notebook brand my wife found, that I love very much, is minimalism art
Do you know how their paper is with pencil? I've found that a lot of the nicer notebook brands work really well with pen, but the paper doesn't have enough tooth for pencil to write very well.
I have to buy shitty notepads otherwise with the nice Dingbats ones, I cannot start writing naturally because I get paralysed. With a basic notepad, I just go with the flow and don't overthink.
I'm really bad at spotting decent used cars. It has always bitten me. I overpay once for a new car and then drive it into the ground. Never had a new car last me less than 10yrs.
It's all about the brand and previous owners. Personally, I only buy used from Honda and Toyota. They have a reputation to uphold for reliability. Buy a carfax. $20 well spent to know the history of ownership. It's not foolproof, but generally good enough. Check with your friend group and extended relationships to see if they are selling cars. If they know you, even through a friend, hopefully they have enough shame to not try and screw you on a lemon.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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 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 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'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’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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 start every day/week/quarter laying out what my objectives/goals are, both tactical and strategic in a notebook. I also have the full set of electronic assets (evernote, statushero/etc..) - but something about the physicality of a notebook and my trusty Pilot G2 07 just grounds my day. I usually go through 2-3 notebooks a year, and I've had five or six different brands until about 10 or so years ago I finally standardized on the Miquelrius A5 Wirebound, 6x8 Graph lined.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009E6WIWY/
Pricing is pretty variable (best deal I've ever done is $10.99) - it goes up to as much as $20 shipping in, so whenever I see a price lower than my lowest one, I just buy another 6. I think I've got about 24 of these stocked in my closet currently that should hopefully take me forward another 12 years.
People go on about pens - and my gateway drug to good pens was the Pilot G2 07 - I spent years and far too much money looking for the "Perfect" pen - until I realized that, ironically, my very first decent pen was my favorite and, wonder of wonders, is also one of the cheapest "good" pens out there. Essentially free. I marvel at how often in life you have to "pay for quality" - Not with the Pilot G2 07.
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.
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....
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'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!
The best notebooks I have found that meet both constraints of being cheap but good quality so as to not become frustrating are Muji's notebooks. They have several options in size and also styles between blank, lined, and graph lined and looseleaf or notebooks. They even have these tiny passport sized notebooks that I am trying to get into the habit of keeping with me to write down whatever I need in the moment. The paper quality is actually excellent, and their pens are all I use now as well.
Can confirm, MUJI notebooks are of a decent quality and they can handle fountain pens as well.
In addition to that, I gradually switched to their 0.38 pens of different colors. With fountain pen it was more stylish but impractical for multiple semantic(*) colours. With cheap, light, yet nice quality pens of different colours I can not only carry multiple ones, but have the same set at multiple places.
(Dark blue is body text/drawing, light blue is comment/secondary annotation, orange is action/process/message passing, green is data/metadata flow, …)
I’m a fan of the blank wire-bound Mujis for writing — especially the fine stuff I need to do at 0.30. They look classy and they love the rollerball.
Only downside I’ve found is the paper is thin enough that it’s not a great notebook to have at a bar, where you might get condensation dripping on it, nor for the gym where your hands might be sweaty. For the same reason it’s not much of a sketchbook, but for writing it’s my go-to these days.
I like the pens well enough to keep some around, and I appreciate all the color refill options, but I don’t think they’re “better” in the same way the notebooks are.
From https://www.muji.com/us/feature/whatismuji/: MUJI’s goal is to give customers a rational satisfaction, expressed not with, “This is what I really want” but with “This will do.”
I think half the time I go to a Muji store it's really because the entire space gives me a sense of calm. Making a brand that's inexpensive but still projects a quiet feeling of quality and attention to detail is rare, at least in America.
I love legal pads instead of bound notebooks because you can tear off and rearrange pages so they can be with other relevant notes, also the top spiral makes it easy to put in my backpack.
Do yourself a favor though, and time stamp each page down to the minute when you start writing (eg: 20230310T1029).
You can:
- Link between notes. Also enables you to specify the previous or next page in your notes which is useful if they get shuffled.
- Save a stack of relevant notes by making a list of their links on a separate page before filing the notes away chronologically -- you can link to the list itself if you want to link to the group of notes.
- Have a TODO list for a certain date? Link to it from your calendar.
- You can save time by writing only the significant digits (eg: if the note page you're writing on and the page you're linking to share the same year and month, only write the day and time in the link).
- You can add line numbers or paragraph numbers if the situation demands it, and append, say, "LN23," or "¶5" to the timestamp to get specific.
It's a simple system but enables a lot of complex patterns in your note taking system.
This is reminiscent of the zettelkasten system with the links between notes and topics, though ZK takes it a bit further and does away with the chronological sorting files by topic. Indexes have links to individual topics and topics can link among themselves. It tickles that part of my brain that is unsatisfied with top-down/chronological notebooks and the like and replaces it with www-like hyperlinks.
I have to confess I was partly inspired by ZK to start doing this, but by doing it for transitory notes and putting it into my day-to-day habits I feel like I've gained super powers. It's less effort to use a timestamp as a UUID for everything and I don't have to think about how to organize them until natural patterns emerge which I can sort by with lists, or refine into a more focused note. I can also remember roughly when I was thinking of something, even years later, and zero in on the note based off of that if I can't find it through links or lists.
ZK, to me, requires a lot more focus and energy. It's not very well suited for, say, taking notes while you're on the phone or in teleconference. They aren't mutually exclusive, they just have different uses (I also have a ZK).
Not notebooks but my Dad never let us kids use his guitars because they were too nice. So we never learned guitar. I picked it up later in life and now leave them out for my kids to mess with. Sure, they'll be out of tune and the pick will go missing, but I feel it's more important that they get used as much as possible for everyone. No point in leaving stuff stored away.
I'd love to get into using notebooks more, but I just don't think it's for me. I buy a stack of cheap legal pads (although I get A4 sized) and a box of cheap Bic pens that I think I got about 10 years ago. I tear pages off of the legal pad and staple or join them with a paper clip to keep them organized, but they end up being recycled when they're done. For long term stuff that I want to search, I `notes` directory with some text files and a `:date 2023-03-10` at the top has served me well.
I still really love seeing what people do with their notebooks, I guess I'm just not one of those people though.
Have you tried not buying the cheap stuff? Maybe that's the issue.
I switched to thicker paper and nicer pens and I write a lot more now. I find writing by hand gets information to bed in a lot better than typing it too.
I don't even mean break the bank, I use Amazon Basics notebooks (until they shrinkflate the paper quality) and the pilot g-2 07 pen. Nothing too fancy.
Each to their own of course but if someone said they hated running because their running shoes were cheap and uncomfortable I imagine most people would come up with the same solution.
I always think I want to use notebooks, but end up just using the Notes app on my iPhone because I have it with me nearly 100% of the time and it syncs to my laptop and tablet. Any effort at using notebooks falls apart the first time I don't have one with me—out, or just in another room of the house—and need to take a note.
[EDIT] There's also the fact that, at this point, I write maybe a couple hundred words per year by hand, tops, not counting signing things, and am starting to get really bad at writing by hand, after a decade-plus like that. Like 50% of all the writing a do in a given year these days is probably filling in forms for doctors or whatever, and I don't do that much of that, and it barely counts as writing, really (name, address, that stuff)
All those hours perusing for the perfect notebook on JetPens - it's stupid how much I covet writing instruments. I too use a lot of legal pads, no cover, always flushed with the writing surface, tear off for a new beginning. I always thought, cynically perhaps, that those awesome looking BuJos were made to be Instagramable and not for the use of the writer himself. I will add something in the same philosophical vein as "use cheap notebooks". I was once obsessed with getting the right "planning system" in place for my Get-Things-Done lists, one calendar, one brainstorming notebook, grooming and curation schedule, and the proper icons and markers. Once I accepted that there could be many places for my To-Do list, many places for my priorities-of-the-day, multiple lists in my life, it was easier to get things done. I don't live in one place: the office, the car, my home office, my phone, my workshop - it's fine to duplicate lists and items, the important thing is to have one in front of me when I'm executing on a project. Once I "allowed" myself to have an imperfect planning system, things can get done, instead of me going back for the 5th time tweak the meta-work planning.
I have begun to use cheaper-and-cheaper notebooks. I started with Leuchtturm1917 notebooks, and... they're still great (I still buy on occasion as my "primary notebook").
But for cost-efficiency, I have other notebooks. Just composition books and wire-bound college notebooks for $1 or $2 at grocery stores and/or pharmacies. Just whatever cheap 70-page crap is around.
Numbered pages are excellent: they allow you to write "Notes continued on page 45". And have page 46, 47, 48 on a different sub-subject as needed. I think of page-numbering as a "FAT32-like filesystem", with a linked-list connecting notes together. (Ex: when I'm done with a notebook, a single thought may go from page 4, 5, 10, 25, 30. I always work from the book beginning to end, but my natural life causes me to revisit ideas at different times, irregularly).
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I suggest buying pre-numbered notebooks (like Leuchtturm1917) to "learn" how to use page numbers as a note system. Later, if you really like the methodology, buy an automatic numbering machine and just make the page numbers yourself.
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I'd say that maybe 50% of what I write, I revisit later. You want to get into a habit of writing everything that's useful (meaning you're writing down + saving many things that are non-useful). Later, you can make pages that summarize earlier thoughts (ex: page 50 may have a summary of pages 10, 15, 20, 21, 22, and 23, and guide you back to earlier notes).
But this is only effective if the pages were numbered.
When your "cheap notebook" fills up at 70-pages, you can rewrite the important information into the more permanent books, and throw away the cheap notebook. It will be 50% filled with useless crap anyway, so a revision pass is expected and necessary. "Writing to throw away" is a good habit IMO.
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.
Expensive notebooks have the opposite effect on me. When I pick one up, I appreciate the effort that went into making it and the fact that it was designed counter to a bottom-barrel cheap philosophy. This puts me in a mindset to do higher quality work. Its cost never crosses my mind. Sure, moleskine-like notebooks are more expensive than run-of-the-mill Staples ones, but in absolute values, they don't really cost much.
For me, this means slowing down my writing and trying to make it more legible, not editing what I put down. I still write in fragments, manage whitespace poorly, draw terrible diagrams, and repeat myself (sometimes on the same page).
That said, I consciously recognized and appreciate the difference between brainstorming and editing. Sometimes I use my notebook for both, sometimes just for brainstorming, and I'll copy it to Notes or Pages for a sharable version.
I do keep around post-it notes and a legal pad for truly insignificant things. Notes about appointments, bills, phone calls, etc that have zero long-term value.
I liked this enough to save it almost 5 years ago when Merlin Mann said it on Back To Work #339 (~10 minutes from the end):
On the first page of every notebook, write "The first page is profound." Now you've started writing in it, it's no longer a new notebook, and you're past the "I don't want to start a notebook unless I'm writing something worthwhile" stage. All sorts of other quick reference things you could put on the first page depending on how you use notebooks, e.g. bullet journal rules if you use that.
Possibly also from the same show, things to write in the notebook for every day:
* What am I thinking about? What's on my mind, one sentence
* What am I worried about?
* What one thing do I have to do today?
* What one thing do I want to do today?
* (bonus) What am I grateful for or
what nice thing can I do for someone today?
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.
At work, I frequently receive a large amount of paper that I choose to reuse. I hole punch each sheet and place it onto a clipboard, creating a refillable legal pad. When I finish a stack of pages for the day, I archive them in a large three-hole binder. This approach enables me to concentrate on the content of my notes and writing, rather than spending time on making them visually appealing or neat.
Lately I've been using Vela Sciences lab notebooks for my general software engineering usage.
A few years ago I started an experiment to see if inexpensive fountain pens with refillable ink would be both cheaper and have less waste. I got a Pilot Metropolitan and a Lamy Safari for around $20 each. I also bought a Pentel mechanical pencil with a plastic barrel (but everything else metal) for around $15 from an art store.
So far, the experiment has been very successful and I'm still on the original bottle of ink and container of pencil leads. But the downside with the pens is that I need at least a minimum paper quality for the pens (the pencil works with anything, of course) to avoid ink bleeding/blotting. I've tried a few Moleskin notebooks and while the paper is of sufficient quality I don't really like the way they feel when writing (personal preference). The good news is that I can get a pretty good sense just by feeling the paper in person, and the notebooks don't necessarily have to be super expensive. But they're never cheap.
I found my favorite combination of notebook and pen. I really like the paper of the Clairfontaine A5 notebooks. They are cheap and available everywhere here. They paper feel very smooth, not grainy but still give a good friction when writing. Speaking of friction, I love the erasable Frixion pens from pilot. I hardly ever use the eraser but I love the feeling of writing with it. The 'clicker' variant of the pen fits nicely in the spine of the notebook.
I had one huge downside with this pen though, the ink disappears with heat. When I accidentally but my treasured dream journal on a hot radiator I lost over a year of dreams.
Also I always loved writing on the right page (I am right handed) but dreaded having to write on the back of the page on the left, no idea how to hold my hand to make the spine not be in the way. Recently I just flip the notebook upside down so the page is always on the right.
I really liked Clairefontain Agedbag notebook. But they went cheap from clothbound to bond a decade ago. Currently I am using Clairefontaine My Essential notebook as it is still thread bound (but price is double than age bag).
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.
Just wondering, do people write on both sides of the paper? I don't, not because I don't want to, but because of ink bleeds (I know, I should get better pen and paper).
I personally use a stack of printer paper, then punch 3 holes and put them in binders. That way, I can save the ones I want, recycle stuff that I don't want.
I write on both sides. I used to not for fear of ink bleed, or seeing the other side. Ink doesn't really bleed through and what I can see on the other side is faint, so it doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would.
I use Leuchtturm notebooks and I really like how the paper feels under a fountain pen (nothing fancy, just a Lamy Safari). I don't think I can use cheap notebooks now since I can tell right away that the paper doesn't feel as good when I write.
It might not be worth it to you, but you might try a slightly better quality printer paper. I’m using a generic store brand premium laser/inkjet paper (24 lb/90 gsm), and I’m not getting any bleed through or feathering. It costs more than normal printer paper, but handles ink well and goes on sale often.
This is precisely why I recently settled on using midori md notebooks. They have nice size options, and they are a little bit of a step up from composition notebooks without being so fancy you're afraid to blemish them with ink.
Whatever works I guess. I use nice notebooks with sparkly covers fashioned after lavish 18th-century bindings because I feel like a wizard when I write in them, and that's fun. I have a few nice fountain pens I use for this and most of what I write is the most banal shit imaginable, just to-do lists and whatnot with the occasional longer-form entry reflecting on my day, or a dream log or whatever.
If you have a hoard of nice notebooks you'll never use then either get over this fear of having to use them for Serious Meaningful Things, or find a broke friend who does not have this fear and pass them on.
Muji notepads (if you're close to a Muji) have the distinction of being both reasonably priced and nice to look at IMHO. They also have a lovely selection of writing instruments of all types.
I used to purchase notebooks for journaling but had a similar hangup to some other posts on this thread. I just though that it was a hard sell to continually have to shell out a bunch of cash for the sexy notebooks when all the materials for a passable alternative are essentially free if you can tap into the waste of a typical pre-pandemic office space with a comercial printer. (For a while there was a thing that would happen with the network printer where it would suddenly begin to print gibberish, usually only one or two lines per page, uncontrollably for reams and reams of paper. This was the source of my first roll your own notebook pages.)
At some point I heard about the Midori system and then realized that if you had a reusable Traveler's notebook you could print the style of paper that you wanted to use, fold it, and have an A5 sized folio (?) insert that you could staple with a specialized stapler to make the paper inserts.
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.
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.
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.
Same problem here, also the A5 ones are actually quite heavy to carry around.
I find the A6 Leuchtturm ones to be in most practical use right now, they fit into pants pockets (or for me, dress pockets) and they also come in bright yet simple colors which is somewhat inspiring for me. I need relatively long time to fill them so while the price is high they are not a big regular cost factor.
I need something to scribble, macOS notes doesn’t always do it in terms of putting thoughts somewhere and any electronic UI tends to be too distracting.
I use a fair different number types of notebooks depending on the depending on.
I have spiral top ones for notes of me thinking/remembering/wanting to reenforce for later type notepad with a constant pen that go lots of places with me. And graph paper-y notepads/notebooks to help me work on my penmanship and handwriting my thoughts. And rough papered oversized ones that I like to doodle on with sloppy pens.
I think cheap ones can be great. But cheap doesn't need to be everything.
I recently switched from using physical notebooks to entirely digital. I can't see myself ever going back.
I'm lefty, so my hand cramps when I write. I now get to type all day with my lovely Moonlander ZSA keyboard.
I'm forever flipping back and forth pages to try and find notes. Now I search by tags and links, using Obsidian. Every journal entry has a list of links to my notes I made that day, so I know when I wrote everything.
I can put pictures in my notes! I could do that before, but I'd have an awkward bit of paper stuffed in there, and by notebook completion it'd be stuffed with loose paper.
I would always carry a pocket notepad with me. It'd be in bits by the end of the month. Now, I can carry every note I've ever taken on the phone in my pocket.
I always felt a little guilty about all the paper. I'm minimalist by nature. Now, it's all stored on a NAS and Cloud storage. I brought all my stored notes to a place for scanning, then proceeded to dump them. It was so liberating.
I had 2 boxes that I carried from place to place with all my notes. Now they can fit on a thumb drive. I could fit almost everything I own in the back of my Peugeot 207.
Don't get me wrong, I know it's not as effective for memorization, but the benefits have so far vastly outweighed the cons.
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'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 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 went thru something similar in my MechE bachelors…
Around my sophomore year I finally found green engineering pads. I believe they were TOPS brand. At $4-$5 a piece, they were definitely much more than my k-12 $0.10 on-sale spiral notebooks & stolen printer paper. I filled up dozens of them & love them to this day.
I also bought high(ish) quality laminated folders & further reinforced them with Gorilla tape. This also came after using fairly janky ones most of my life, & not being able to find anything that satisfied me once I went for something new. I still use many I made in 2017.
Got a fair amount of questions about them throughout school.
The Pentel Graphgear 1000’s are an amazing writing tool, as are their Hi-Polymer block erasers. I’ve found nothing able to come close to the Pentel block erasers, and I’m surprised that Staedtler’s have not been completely laughed off the market by this point.
I'm almost the opposite. Cheap notebooks feel crappy. the covers feel crappy, the paper isn't smooth when you write on it. They actively make me want to NOT interact with them.
For me, the Rhodia Webnotebook is a nice "not cheap" notebook with great paper. It handles my heavy flow pens, and pens and pencils both slide across it with a wonderful smooth feel.
Disclaimer: I'm very bad at taking notes and generally at writing (both aspects of it - physical and intelectual).
But having said that... I do love expensive notebooks - at this moment I'm going through moleskine hard cover pocket with dotted pages.
Add decent or even luxury automatic pencil and this elevates it to the whole new level (rotring 800 with retractable end has the ideal length to attache it to moleskine pocket sized notebook with pen loop, this way you can always carry them both and this model of rotring is quite nice to use as writing tool)
I have tried both cheap and quite expensive ones (both pencils and notebooks) and I have found that the quality of my notes goes up with the price and quality. Especially with notebooks its like I subconsciously pay lot more attention to details and general legibility when I know I do not want to spoil this work of art product with my scribbles.
These days, I just carry around about a dozen index cards clipped together along with a cheapo Pilot G3 gel pen. On my desks (home and work) I have a legal pad that I just leave on the desk, but carry into meetings. Digital notes, and photos of index cards go into the Obsidian app.
I absolutely destroy almost every notebook I've tried, including Moleskines and Field Notes.
They last a few weeks, top, before the binding or something is worn to the point it's falling apart. I really liked the waterproof Field Notes for a while, they were durable but super finicky about pens, especially my chosen cheap pen: Pilot G3.
For the Pilot G3 pens, I buy a bulk pack from Costco and don't worry too much about losing them. When my blister pack is running low, I buy another one from Costco. I think I've only bought 2 packs total over 3-4 years. Somehow, I lose cheap pens much less than fancy pens.
The index cards + binder clip got popularized for a little while as the "hipster PDA" - one possibly useful improvement is to buy a cheap plastic pocket folder and cut it into index card sized pieces - then clip those on the outside of your cards to have them not get torn up in a pocket.
I used to get hung up over having specific journals for specific thoughts -- one for my projects, one for cool stories, one for whatever else. But eventually I consolidated. I stopped categorizing, I stopped judging, and I just started writing. I guess that's kind of the same blocker as the author, just a different spin.
Had similar struggles as well. Then after few experiments with plain paper (tried A4, B6, A5 - all landscape), I switched to Midori Paper Pad, carrying it in a leather pouch. Using A5 on the go and A4 on my desk. All in landscape orientation, like slides. My output is mostly diagrams/schemas and tables, very little prose.
Advantages so far: high quality per that works with fountain pen. No fear of ruining whole notebook with an ugly note or a drawing. I can carry only sheets that are relevant to the problem I am solving right now. I can lay out the sheets in front of me to get a bigger picture. I can throw away the bad ones. It is easier to scan (using iPhone scan to PDF function).
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 suffered from exactly this. Bought an expensive notebook, imagining that it would cause me to "really do this new thing properly" or some such fool thinking. Opposite is true, every time. Making a purchase can be the opposite of putting in effort, rather than an assistive force if one is not careful.
i prefer the moleskines because they don't get ripped or bent when i slip them in and out of my pocket, the ribbon lets me open them to where i'm writing, and they don't fall apart when i get rained on
by the same token, water-soluble fountain pen ink is not an option for me; the best option i've found is 0.3mm mechanical pencils with 2h lead (though i can only find hb these days) but cheap ballpoints are also an acceptable option
i go through about a notebook a year. here's a scan of a couple pages from my notebook last year, which was a hannemühle because moleskines had become unobtainium here in argentina; there's an english translation below the spanish scan
Every few months I switch from digital notetaking on an iPad, to using notebooks. I think it's rooted in some weird anxiety or something, and I resolve it by saying "fuck it, I'm switching everything".
My current routine:
I use Muse on iPad for thoughts I don't need to share anywhere or worry about searchability of. Project ideas, etc are what go in there.
I use Nebo for handwritten notes because the OCR is better than anything else, and it can actually OCR notes in outline form (I don't know of any other apps that can do that reliably). I take my notes there, convert handwriting to text, then paste it into Notion in a semi-organized way.
When collaborating with my colleagues, I use either Google Suite, or Miro.
I'm sure in a few months I'll switch back to pen and paper, but it is quite nice to only haul around an iPad for a change.
I started Bullet Journaling a month or so ago...not that fancy arty kind, just the basic layouts. It's working really well for me, because it always feels better having my todos on paper, with occasional electronic reminders. For me, there's no friction between me and writing something down, and the BuJo techniques of page numbering, indexing, etc. work well. Also, my work life and home life are sharply divided, so having a paper notebook to carry between the two is handy.
I just use a composition book and gel pens or Varsity Pilot disposable fountain pen. My only complaint is that the composition book is a little too big to fit comfortably in my work area along with my mouse and ergo keyboard.
What sucks about these cheap 99 cent notebooks are the pages are so thin that they get all folded up and tattered easy, especially if they get tossed in a bag. I don't like how floppy they are if you don't have a table to write on either. stuff like mead cambridge line is a little more expensive, but the paper is a lot thicker per sheet which makes it stand up to abuse, and the cardboard back is substantial. They end up still looking pretty good when I would fill them out even carrying them in a backpack every day. There's probably other cheaper notebooks out there that also have these thicker, more durable sheets.
I don't have any concept of the quality of paper, binding, etc., but I have always been baffled at the slightly more expensive notebooks (like Moleskins) with extremely stiff binding. Those things are difficult to even leaf through to read, let alone to actually write. I really don't get it. An extremely basic spiral bound notebook is vastly more usable. Some more expensive ones do have a very thin spin that can "fold" so that the notebook can lie open relatively flat (I don't know the terminology for any of this stuff), and those are okay too.
I really love having a work journal, and have been keeping one since 2004. Currently my favourite notebook is the Baronfig Vanguard Softcover. I prefer the "Flagship" size, which is just a bit smaller than A5. It's $13 USD for a pack of 3. They're well made, have great paper, offer a dot-grid, and each journal last for about 5-6 weeks of writing.
What got me to use nice notebooks with abandon was switching to fountain pens, which require thicker paper not to bleed, and I did that because I'm left-handed and was tired of all the problems that come with that.
Some problems left-handers need to deal with:
* smearing,
* awkward hand positions to avoid smearing,
* needing to press harder to get lines,
* ripping paper because I'm pushing instead of pulling the pen to write, and
* pens unscrewing themselves, leading to cracking and thread stripping
A nice notebook should be filled with nice notes and sketches.
But at the same time it’s a waste to keep nice notes and sketches in a bad notebook.
I’ve settled on Mujis notebooks. I like the A5/b5 format in size and portability. The paper is good enough to keep nice notes on it, but it is cheap enough for just scribbles that go nowhere.
When studying I usually always have a shitty pad near me, where I write down intermediate calculations or other things that are useless the minute after they have been written.
And then there is this. $32+ tax $8 + shipping $12 = $52 for us in US. Thanks, I’ll stick to my Cambridge 9x7 spirals. They last me years. No damage yet, except when I spilled a full cup of coffee on one. Cured me of using erasable ink pens.
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!
I suffer the same problem and recently I've found those cheap $3 pocket-sized flip notebooks to be my solution, and so I have 1 in my office, 1 downstairs, 1 in the car and 1 in my coat pocket. I make sure to actually tear out old pages and throw them away so it's always fresh and nothing at all is permanent.
Biggest and best life change I've made in a while! Get some cheap notebooks and throw the pages away as you use them.
I found "my" brand/style of notebooks a while ago -- Quo Vadis' Habana unlined blanks -- and bought a dozen each of two sizes because you never know whether they'll be available forever, and indeed they no longer are from the small online pen & ink company that I used to like. Beautiful smooth paper for writing on with a fountain pen!
But I still keep cheap legal pads around for rough drawings, &c.
I tend to use legal pads to write initial drafts. I carry a few A5 kraft notebooks in a Lochby Field Journal. Each notebook has a dedicated purpose, and carrying them in the Lochby means I don't destroy the notebooks while they are in my bag. I don't care much about the brand of notebook, since I write almost exclusively with pencils -- I'll grab whatever is available at the office supply store.
The furniture in my house is awesome! It’s from a now-nonexistent Restoration Hardware outlet store. We’d get everything at 60-75% off by waiting until they added to the normal discount. It would be lightly marred if at all. Liberating! Never minded if the kids got to it because hey, it’s already used.
Prefer to buy slightly damaged or store demo musical instruments for the same reason.
I am not making my notes in coherent and chronological order so my notebook would be random stuff of what I was working that day on followed by more random stuff from other days.
I am using cheap notebooks so I can rip pages from them and then throw them away (if I was just thinking on a paper), digitize them or put them into a folder with pages from same project and digitize them when project is closed.
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)
A small 3-ring binder, plus packets of hole-punched graph paper. Extremely cheap. The beauty of the binder is that it allows for easily rearranging pages, something notebooks do not. Thanks to Lion Kimbro for this advice.
A big +1 for legal pads. They lay flat, the margins are useful for notes after the fact, and you can find them in dot grid or lined with good quality paper for quite cheap. I absolutely understand the "I don't want to ruin it" anxiety the author speaks of but I've not yet had that problem with my notebooks. Instead, I have it with my laptops haha.
A tip not just for notebooks but for anything (e.g. electrical appliances) if you're buying them for the first time: Buy them cheap. If you use them until they're used up (in the case of notebooks) or broken (in the case of electrical tools), buy a more expensive / higher quality one. If not, you didn't waste too much money on it.
Counterpoint: Buy cheap, buy twice. Personally, I think it's better to buy the name brand that you can then sell on for a reasonable price if it's not to your liking rather than buying the knockoff, not getting a proper experience to tell if you actually like the thing or not and then not being able to resell it afterwards. Obviously this is all dependent on your finances. Cheap is better than nothing if you want to try something out and you can't afford the name brand, and it's always better to start with smaller goals and work your way up to bigger ones e.g if you want to make a film, its better to make a low quality film on an iPhone than to wait around for years and do nothing because you're saving up for a cinema camera and lenses or whatever.
I think you can buy cheap and get by if quality is not a goal. I buy expensive art materials because I have used cheap materials and I can really, really tell a difference in the quality. I buy mid-grade Ryobi instead of Dewalt tools because I'm not great at carpentry and the extra value of Dewalt tools is never going to show up in my work in that area.
I took it a step further by starting on sheets of paper, second draft goes into a notebook, then the three draft gets typed on the computer. This really helped me not be afraid to write crap since I will toss the paper if it is bad. And the iterative draft process really forces me to pick out what ideas are best.
I'd like a stock of cheap notebooks, but at least in my country it's not always easy to find them with plain paper. Lined paper is only useful for children learning to write from my pov. Online catalogues here don't always even specify the paper type - childrens' paper is just assumed.
One of my greatest thrift store finds ever was banker boxes full of unused vintage (80s?) grid paper engineering/architectural design notebooks and sealed packages of sheet grid paper including legal paper sized sheets. At my current burn rate they should last me until retirement.
My to-do list is a sticky note stuck backwards to another one (double-thick), with tasks written carefully and crossed out upon completion. The trick, for me, is to have them all X'd out before the note and text disintegrates in my pocket.
I sometimes carry-over tasks, but die a bit each time.
Ha. Years ago, I got a nice mini moleskin and then proceeded to never use it once (I have it somewhere gathering dust). For me, it suddenly felt like the scribblings I was to write down were there for posterity and the thought of this kept me from using it.
I bought a block of Renshape for $80 in design school (a lot of money to me then) and have carried it with me ever since, waiting for the perfect design and also for my modeling skills to be worthy of this goddamn blue monolith.
I used to like writing on compositional notebooks under a professional setting. Now as an avid fountain user, I don’t mind paying a little extra $$ for better paper. Better paper won’t snag the nib of a fountain pen and facilitates quicker drying of the ink
I found that if I get the nice wirebound A5 notebooks, I actually use them consistently. The cheap ones annoy me, and I don’t use them, and they end up collecting dust in the closet (along with all the others).
One of the reasons I got a reMarkable. Effectively infinite pages. Writing can be copied and pasted or moved around. And I don’t have to worry if I’m wasting paper or ink.
One of the first things I do on a piece of new hardware is to scratch it somewhere less visible so I can use it knowing it's no longer pristine. Tools are tools.
I work in some fairly hostile environments and I was hoping this would be a discussion of "I use commodity laptops instead of Panasonic Toughbooks." :P
I use an iPad mini with a paperlike screen protector. Tap on the screen with the pencil and you can start writing. Notes are taggable with a # and searchable.
Same. It's great to have unlimited sheets and an undo button. They don't quite replicate the feeling of flipping through a notebook, but it's close enough.
That is what I mostly use. That and post it notes. The notes are nice for 'im done with it toss it'. The pads for making lists of items. I used to have hundreds of old notebooks full of stuff. After one move I went thru them and realized none of it really mattered. Nice paper, very expensive pens/mechanical pencils. I just chucked it all. El cheapo notebook and pens. Switched exclusively to a 'todo' style system for paper. I found all of that info I was writing down, was fairly useless and out of context meaningless. Unless I meticulously went back and cataloged it. Even then it was not really worth it. If I come across an old legal pad with stuff I flip thru it quick and decide 'do I need to keep it'. Usually not and I garbage it.
I used to love getting that sort of thing. Then disassembling and figuring out exactly how they worked. Knew all the different types of lead to get for them. All the different harnesses and sizes and why to pick one over the other. But after awhile I realized I was obsessing over the tools and not actually doing anything with them. My 'choice' these days is a el-cheap bic-biro. Not totally junk but not very expensive if someone walks off with it. Played around for awhile with the gel ink style disposables. They have a nice clean line usually.
I got a Macbook 12". That's pretty much a premium netbook, and it's fantastic.
It's not a powerhouse, but it handles Docker, Sublime Text and Firefox together just fine. It's absurdly small and light, and perfect for café hopping on a bicycle.
I think motivations for wanting to write in Bearblog are quite understandable for somebody in this community. Is there a particular reason why writing in Bearblog would be a surprising and/or bad thing that needs defending?
I read once a stellar idea to help get over the fear of starting to draw in a notebook (or an art project, or a new software project) is to just start scribbling and drawing. Intentionally starting with a mess makes it much easier to break the cycle of "This thing I'm doing isn't good enough yet for this".
One notebook brand my wife found, that I love very much, is minimalism art. I like the small, softcovers. They aren't too soft, and hold their shape really well. The paper quality is high.
I also just tried out the new "sidekick notepad" from Cortex. Very expensive (overpriced), but I was happy to support their work.
https://www.minimalismart.com/cn-soft-cover