Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Why does it need it? What's wrong with using a paper notebook?
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Because after a while, it gets to be a ton of notebooks. I just bought 8 notebooks to use for this semester, and may need to pick up more later. 200 pages each, that ends up being a crap ton of notes. Plus when you factor in textbooks too, back packs get too damn heavy (which, the textbook industry is one of the worst when it comes to ebooks)
Quote:
Originally Posted by pbarrette
There are many problems with paper notebooks that can be easily addressed with a suitable digital replacement.
The first issue is the volume of paper. If you take a lot of notes, you quickly end up with a large number of paper notebooks. I'm sure that you've met people who carry around a Moleskine notebook wherever they go. When you next see one of those people, ask how many notebooks he/she has sitting at home, full of information, ideas or sketches that are unavailable to that person because carrying around 5-10 notebooks is wholly inconvenient.
My next problem with paper notebooks is that they are not always easily edited. I'm sure you've seen the old paper based, tabbed contacts/notes systems like the Franklin Day Planner. You flip to the "S" tab, then look up "Joe Snuffy" to find his phone number, address, and other details. When Mr. Snuffy's phone number changes, you had better hope you originally wrote it in pencil. Otherwise you will be crossing it out and trying to write a new one in the margins. Then what happens if you meet someone named "Mr. Snarky"? Did you leave a space between "Snade" and "Snuffy", or is your contacts list going to be out of alphabetical order? Nobody really does that anymore because most people keep their contacts list on their phone, or email, or other digital format. Paper was just too cumbersome to organize, search and edit.
I find that my notes also require revision. I may have recorded an IP address incorrectly, or it has changed. I might discover more details about a subject, or realize that details I had previously assumed were wrong. In a paper notebook, that means striking out the existing information and trying to squeeze new information in. If I have more information than can fit on the page, I had better hope that I have left a blank page after the current one, or I'll have to find a blank page further into the notebook and make a note on the first page that the information continues at page "x". With a digital notebook, I simply erase the old information. If I need more space between items on a page, I just move stuff around with copy+paste. If I need another page, I just insert one.
A third problem with paper notebooks is that they are wholly un-searchable. Now where did I leave that information about SSH data packet encoding? Is it in notebook 1 or notebook 2? Is it near the front of the notebook or in the middle? With a proper digital notebook, I can use tags, bookmarks, or even OCR to search "SSH" and have all of my entries show up. I could even have a separate notebook dedicated to "SSH" and paste in the relevant bits from the RFC, interspersed with my own notes about how my code handles that particular case. Try that with paper.
So ultimately, for me, what's wrong with paper notebooks is that they don't address the issues that I have with portability, editability, or searchability
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When you take a lot of notes, searching becomes a godsend. I'm a full time tech, and a full time student. I have two notebooks going right now for work, that I OCR in to a wiki and a spreadsheet, and I fill at least one 200 page notebook per class per semester. The problem is, especially when it comes to math, is that there are certain things that you cannot type out very quickly, such as various symbols.