I love that he talks about writing with pens and paper. Too many people overlook how useful this can be, I think.
When I was writing my dissertation, I followed this cycle:
+ Morning: Write new material, always by hand on legal pads, with the same pen (a relatively heavy, but thin Lamy ballpoint - good balance and weight, fine but clear ink, never clogged). Edit: I still have a callous on my finger from those two years of writing.
+ Lunch + shoot pool for a few hours (no books, clear head)
+ Afternoon: Type up what I hand wrote in the morning, edit old pages (on a screen or from print outs, that would vary) and take notes on articles and books.
Having time to think is what makes writing by hand so useful I think. It's like the (apocryphal?) Truman Capote response when he heard about Kerouac's automatic writing style: "That's not writing. It's typing." Too much of what we do is just typing rapidly, without thought.
Maybe more disciplined people can work slowly enough at a keyboard, but I find it difficult still. When I really want to think about something, I still start with paper.
In my career I've often found that during "brainstorming" meetings the highly technical attendees very often use paper and pen while the more managerial always have various different high-tech devices.
just an observation from my own career and not meant as indicative of anything in reality
As mentioned above, I use artists sketchbooks (A5 or A4). I have found by accident that opening a hard-backed notebook in a meeting and taking notes induces mild paranoia in manager types.
Managers I have worked for have used: Psion organisers, palm pilots, various laptops including the old style Thinkpad tablets, various smart phones from Blackberry to iPhone, and, latterly, iPads.
"Maybe more disciplined people can work slowly enough at a keyboard, but I find it difficult still. When I really want to think about something, I still start with paper."
With me it is a drawing. Diagrams, mind-maps, tables, doodles, phrases floating around distributed spatially by the degree of affinity. I find paper/pen just a lot quicker for that. Nowt posh just Biro and A4 copy paper or a sketchbook. I find the fashionable Moleskine paper to be too thin so I use artists sketchbooks or an Alwych notebook
To counterbalance this budding glorification of handwriting, I'll reiterate here the drawbacks of handwritten text which have more to do with the results than the process:
1. It inevitably occupies physical space for as long as it exists.
2. It is trapped in a format that cannot be (reliably) converted to electronic text.
3. As a corollary, it is not searchable by machine, so I'd argue it's not quickly searchable on any large scale.
4. As another corollary, it cannot be made accessible to people who can't read written text (e.g. visually impaired people), at least not without the manual effort of retyping it.
If you're writing just to capture your own thoughts, and the only intended reader is you, and you have the space for it, I suppose I can't object to it without getting into a discussion about individualism versus collectivism. But handwriting has absolutely no attractions for me.
If you're writing just to capture your
own thoughts, and the only intended
reader is you
Isn't that what we're talking about here? I don't write notes to put on display. I write notes to help in my personal understanding. The very act of writing some things down helps to crystallize them in my own mind. I rarely go back and look over what I've written. However, in the rare case that I do I've devised an indexing system that allows me to find a given note on a given topic fairly quickly. The whole process of writing, indexing and occasional look up is a process meant (and effective for me) in gaining understanding. I work best with handwritten notes, you do not. There is no glorification happening here.
Unlike fogus, I am trying to glorify writing by hand in some contexts at least. (The proviso is important: I don't think that writing by hand is always better.)
I believe that writing by hand helps me to think better and write better, precisely because it's slower. (There's probably also something about me liking the specific physical feedback, but I would be the first to admit that's probably idiosyncratic and learned rather than universal.)
As for all the virtues of typed text that you mention, I agree. If you look at my process from above, I typed up what I had handwritten earlier. But even though this means some obvious duplication of effort, the net outcome was worth it for me (and still is).
No doubt people vary and all that, but I think writing by hand is vastly underrated nowadays. I stand by that.
Having been working at improving my penmanship over the last few months, I've found that writing by hand can be a very relaxing activity as well. That's a bonus, for me.
(plus, I now get complimented on my nice handwriting quite often!)
For me it seems to get me in a different mode of thinking. I tend to find it helps me unblock if I get stuck writing/coding/thinking if I switch from keyboard to pen, or from pen to keyboard. Writing with a pen forces me to slow down - and sometimes that's a good thing.
And there are also the non-textual things you can do with paper. I draw and sketch a lot.
Hidden point #5 for me: it always cost me points on essay-type answers in any tests I took through all my years of school.
I could literally have written the same answer as someone else and they'd get a 10/10, while I'd get a 8/10 because the teacher would claim to struggle to read what I'd written. (This may or may not be true, but that's beside the point.)
Handwriting is way too slow for me. I lose half my best thoughts while waiting for my hand to catch up. I much prefer to write the first draft on a computer, get it all down ASAP, then read and edit on paper. That's when I need space and time to be thoughtful.
Whenever I read one of these I keep wanting them to do Patrick Bateman. These descriptions of products that people use give me the creeps (on occasion).
I generally like to hear how people work, but it gets a bit boring if it's all web developers & TED circuit guys, where it all comes down to "list of apple devices + GTD apps". I would love to see the setup of some people. A few screenshots would be nice, but a short screencast would be even better. Even if it's all pretty standard (e.g. Eclipse + Chrome, Sublime + Safari, Blender + XCode), I think one could learn a few things here and then how other people hop around between applications and accomplish tasks.
At least I think it would be interesting, it might also just lead to me freaking about because someone is doing it wrong (As Sartre said, hell is seeing other people google).
I think it would be cool to watch videos of people doing the work we respect them for. The same way that Notch occasionally posts of video of him hacking for many hours straight.
I don't really think people would be up for this. It's nice to think about, but for a lot of folks this would mean messing with some hitherto unknown to them screen recording software, finding a project they can transmit freely without copyright problems etc.
I think screenshots and screencasts would be awesome for this sort of thing. A lot of things get lost in the descriptions. I'm more interested in how people use their chosen stuff than I am in what precise gadget they use.
Don't get me wrong, I read nearly every technical interview on The Setup, but some of it is creepy or bad. Especially the people who claim they are minimalists and then rattle off a long list of expensive, high-end gear.
"My dream system would be a modular CPU slightly bigger than my iPhone with a display that I could use as a tablet while mobile and plug into a docking station when I’m at my desk"
Ubuntu-phone man, simples.
Investigating org-mode babel as a consequence of your page.
I know what you mean, a lot of the time these things read a bit like this:
> In '87, Huey released this, Fore, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip to be Square", a song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself.
I'm just waiting for the bit where the interviewer gets bashed in the head with an axe, or the interviewee has to cut the interview short to return some video tapes.
I never realised how accustomed I have become to the very same language I found quite odd when reading American Psycho. Very insightful posting, thanks!
Fogus, you say that you use an iPad when you are on the move. Do you edit your .org files with the iPad? If yes, how do you do it? On a virtual server with a ssh client?
I organize my whole life with Org-mode. I use it as a todo list, project management tool and agenda. I also use it to write documents and scientific papers and presentations, which I export to .tex.
Not being able to edit my agenda from an iPad is really what prevents me to buy one (I would probably also buy a bluetooth keyboard).
There is mobileorg, but I think it is not maintained any more, at least the iOS version. I could also ssh to a virtual server, but I'm not comfortable having all my agenda files on such a machine, because of security and privacy concerns.
I used iwriter (which is lovely) to bang out some text on my iPad and save it to .txt files on Dropbox. I post processed into org-mode in emacs afterwards. iWriter won't recognise the .org suffix by default, but that didn't matter to me because the iPad keyboard is useless for writing #* and other characters - WMMV if you have an external keyboard I guess. The nice thing is that all of my book related .org files also live in Dropbox as does the output pdf so I can read the output on the train too.
There's a video where fine sandpaper's used. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHj_AH1Fp5A) Said that the Mont Blanc cartridge even wiggles less than Pilot's own cartridge.
What is the advantage of Mont Blanc? G2 ink smears easily on the Moleskine, so I found them unusable together. (Not that I can justify to myself the premium for Moleskine, but I did buy one once. :) How does Mont Blanc ink fare?
It would be cool too see some pictures of this "20 computer lab". Its rather dry to read the post with just links to things I could Google if I wanted to find out what they are. Otherwise it was an interesting read.
Org mode for writing books... I've started writing a book in org-mode. The writing is all fine, but the exporting is a bit of a pain! Anyone else doing this and have any tips on pdf export from org?
I've done it with Stuart Sierra for ClojureScript: Up and Running (O'Reilly 2012).
To get high quality results, go through an intermediate format that's designed for publishing. Org mode can export to DocBook XML, then run an XLST on to make any tweaks in the elements used. Then either use your publisher's tools or XSL:FO to typeset it.
Using this technique it's possible to get extremely high quality results.
Yeah I am doing it with LaTeX, but it was a shock to the system how much actual LaTeX I had to mess with to make it work (and not look butt ugly) and I wondered if anyone had a more streamlined workflow (or better tools.)
I made a simple elisp snippet to insert a bunch of LaTeX headers for the stuff I use (including my own LaTeX packages), and found that it simplifies the work quite a bit.
I ended up making my own package (which I stole from sphinx) and including it so I can keep all of my style separate and pick and choose what other stuff I use - like minted for example.
I've found it a bit of a mixed bag though - setting up minted in one of me .el files and some of it's styling in my .sty file. Not sure if I'm really doing it right, but the output looks OK for now and I assume it will be much easier to tweak it in future.
I've opened mine up, (M13s) and there's enough electronics in it that I didn't want to put in the dishwasher.
I need to debug the trackpoint on one of them (it's simply not working, might be the cable, might be the driver circuit) and the ujm keys on the other one. I found washing the switches with alcohol worked for a while, but I'm still getting miskeys on m j and u, where m -> m, u->ui, and j->jk.
I don't have a Model M, but I've hand washed a pair of Apple Extended Keyboard IIs that I bought off of eBay (even used a scrub brush), and they've worked well for years. I shook as much water as I could out of them, and let them dry outside before plugging them in.
His hardware needs are pretty spartan, but he needs: an iphone, PDA, laptop with an ssd, computer, usbsticks, a kindle and an ipad. I guess I don't want to know what non-spartan is. Or was this some obscure form of sarcasm?
It was wry I suppose, but I think I didn't explain myself very well in the interview. I tried to convey that I'm trying to move towards a more Spartan arrangement. I don't think I mentioned USB sticks, but in any case I no longer use them because of Dropbox. Likewise, I no longer need a PDA because my iPhone/iPad cover the old tasks. Also, I no longer need a computer because Laptop, etc. The point is that I'm less reliant on multiple devices and changing my habits to need even less.
I always enjoy finding out how others work. Mostly for curiosity, but also to glean new methods and habits I could adapt for myself. I particularly enjoyed this one because fogus seems to share my habits of using a pen/pencil as a thinking tool, thinking hard before jumping into a problem and using a Model M keyboard.
When I was writing my dissertation, I followed this cycle:
+ Morning: Write new material, always by hand on legal pads, with the same pen (a relatively heavy, but thin Lamy ballpoint - good balance and weight, fine but clear ink, never clogged). Edit: I still have a callous on my finger from those two years of writing.
+ Lunch + shoot pool for a few hours (no books, clear head)
+ Afternoon: Type up what I hand wrote in the morning, edit old pages (on a screen or from print outs, that would vary) and take notes on articles and books.
Having time to think is what makes writing by hand so useful I think. It's like the (apocryphal?) Truman Capote response when he heard about Kerouac's automatic writing style: "That's not writing. It's typing." Too much of what we do is just typing rapidly, without thought.
Maybe more disciplined people can work slowly enough at a keyboard, but I find it difficult still. When I really want to think about something, I still start with paper.