Re: [TUHS] Document management in Unix, back in the day?

[Michael Parson <mparson@bl.org>]

On Fri, 13 May 2022, George Michaelson wrote:

> heading off-piste, the Boox series are also worth looking at. Android,
> anything android can do, a boox will do slowly in eInk. their version
> of the reMarkable markup thing may not be as "good" but its the
> alternate, and alternate pricepoint.

I love my Boox Nova Air.  I carry with me just about everywhere.  I can
read the book I'm currently reading, plus I also scribble notes and
doodles in the note app.  I've doodled ideas for things I later work up
in FreeCAD for 3D printing.  If my focus was more on the note taking and
drawing, I'd have gone for the bigger, closer to sheet-of-paper sized
devices, but I primarily wanted an e-ink e-reader that could also do
other things.  So far, I've been very impressed with the other things it
could do.

I've been a fan of e-ink displays for a long time.  I really wish
someone would make a reasonbly priced 20+ inch e-ink monitor.  Most of
the stuff I deal with is in text, and working with text on an e-ink
display would be so much easier on the eyes.

I only mentioned the reMarkable because it seems to be one of the
popular ones out there, or maybe they just have better marketing.  I
think my wife said that one of the women she works with at her design
firm has a reMarkable and loves it.

> when I think about the BSD manuals, bound with steel rods, in a metal
> construct welded to the desk at the back of the lab. Wonderful source
> of knowledge. Or.. the VMS fiche set, and the reader. you want to fix
> this problem? ok, if you learn Bliss32, then everything is in this
> stack of blue-grey plastic, if your eyes are good enough. No peeking.
>
> I think the experiential aspects of 2D thinking with pens, on paper
> are lost online. I totally don't engage with "visualisations" beyond
> the very very good. It is very easy to avoid having to say why by
> falling back on "my eyes aren't good" or "I don't understand this" but
> in truth, I dont LIKE them. I like paper, and I miss fanfold printout.
> Plus. I liked taking the boxes of it to kindergarden and handing them
> over for the kids to write on.

I miss fan-fold paper too... I pretty much quit printing out program
listings when I quit having tractor-fed printers.  It just wasn't the
same.  Also, no more multi-page big-text banners. :)

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX

> On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 11:33 AM Michael Parson <mparson@bl.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, 4 Feb 2022, John Cowan wrote:
>>> On Fri, Feb 4, 2022 at 12:39 PM Seth J. Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Besides, it's fun to scribble notes all over printouts and Xeroxes :^)
>>>>
>>>
>>> I mark up a printout with scribbles ("hourglasses and arrows and a
>>> documentation resource for each one, sayin' what they was about, to be used
>>> in evidence against us"[*]) and then re-transcribe them into the original
>>> electronic doc.  I wish I had a better approach that wasn't so
>>> environmentally destructive, but I just don't notice errors as easily when
>>> they're just on the screen.
>>
>> Have you looked into e-ink tablets?  The reMarkable series seems to be
>> pretty popular.  I recently got a Boox Nova Air e-ink tablet, works
>> great as an e-reader, but it also has a pretty decent PDF editor built
>> in that lets you scribble all over PDF docs like they're paper.
>>
>> --
>> Michael Parson
>> Pflugerville, TX
>