Dead Trees Society
January 26, 2019 1:05 AM   Subscribe

When paper outperforms digital. From car tax discs to whiteboards to police notebooks, sometimes it's more efficient to keep things analogue. (Note: just continue scrolling down after passing the registration box to view the rest of the article.)
posted by Gin and Broadband (28 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
Yes! Having tested and promptly abandoned all possible calendar and planner apps, I gave up and bought an actual paper planner. It was slightly pricy, but I'm still using it, four weeks into the year. It lives on my desk and its beautiful feline presence is a constant reminder to write shit down in a way an app just cannot do.
posted by Vesihiisi at 1:40 AM on January 26, 2019 [7 favorites]


More than once having a paper and pen copy of my telephone directory has saved me from complete isolation when the phone got stolen.
posted by infini at 1:47 AM on January 26, 2019 [4 favorites]


Mod note: Undeleted post and added the note about scrolling down past registration box after discussing with OP.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:54 AM on January 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


Works better for voting too.
posted by flabdablet at 7:04 AM on January 26, 2019 [10 favorites]


Works better for voting yt too.

this a thousand times. Think of it as evidence.
posted by philip-random at 7:50 AM on January 26, 2019 [6 favorites]


And Russian tank crews communicate with Morse code
posted by jan murray at 7:53 AM on January 26, 2019


Heh...Thank you for your instructions on how to get around their cute little email-trap ploy. Not gonna lie, I was about to just not read the silly thing.

Given the subject matter, now I can't help but imagine news papers and magazines with bulky, coin-operated locks on them. Picture a device somewhere between the head of a parking meter and miniature car-boot--clamped onto a periodical. And you have to feed it change and business cards to get to the rest of the article on page nine.

Oh...and some of them are fake; you just have to jostle them till they pop open.
posted by es_de_bah at 9:47 AM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


also, this is unavoidable
Some of the same justifications apply to UK police forces, whose officers continue to use paper notebooks for their official records. Edward Whittingham, managing director of security training company The Defence Works and a former police officer, says that writing with a pen in a police notebook is easy and practical in most environments.
posted by es_de_bah at 9:52 AM on January 26, 2019


I dream of a good paper/digital integration. I need paper to scratch things out. I need to spread out paper at times. At least for the moment, digital is too limited in my physical space.

I got a digital pen (neo pen) about a year and a half ago. The tech is so close but so far. It does an okay job of reading my hand writing. But it doesn’t seem to run it against any sort of autocorrect, so things can be way off. And integration into other apps is limited.

Plus no last known location, and it always lost sync.

None of these were insurmountable problems. But I don’t think there was wide enough interest for the company to work out the issues.

Which of course keeps it from being useful enough for wider consumption. So it will likely remain under developed.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:43 AM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


I feel like the abandonment of paper money is going to be a disaster of unintended consequences.
posted by bongo_x at 10:48 AM on January 26, 2019 [4 favorites]


the abandonment of paper money is going to be a disaster of intended consequences also
posted by unearthed at 11:46 AM on January 26, 2019 [8 favorites]


Ha! Thought about saying that too.
posted by bongo_x at 1:39 PM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


This is an example I tell my medical students. Dracunculus is a blood worm which comes from Cyclops fleas.
It grows to a fair length, let's say 40 cm long inside leg veins. You can't kill it with drugs: you don't want a dead worm in your veins, a super clot headed straight for your heart (where all venous return goes). For the same reason, it is difficult to remove by surgery: you risk releasing a chunk of worm.
The native method of removal is to dip the leg in cold water. The worm thinks it is in a river and pops out its head, ready to mate. Then you slowly wrap it around a twig, carefully pulling so that it will not break.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 3:13 PM on January 26, 2019 [3 favorites]


Holy hell, I am not ready to hear about nightmarish parasites. Just talk about Hipster PDAs, please.
posted by Monochrome at 5:47 PM on January 26, 2019 [7 favorites]


dances_with_sneetches, that's also what the Rod of Asclepius alludes to.
posted by basalganglia at 6:30 PM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


I am this way about cameras, which are my primary note-taking device at work. People ask why I don't just use my phone, because phones all have such great cameras now!

But you can't operate a phone with gloves on, their flashes are garbage and switching from flash on to flash off is a chore, you can't increase the exposure when you need to photograph something silhouetted against the sky, the zoom is relatively pitiful even on the newest phones, they can't get stuffed in a toolbelt without getting scratched all to hell, they're slippery to operate one-handed, and if I drop one off a ladder it will definitely break.

They just aren't optimized for doing basically anything other than photographing human faces in social environments, which let's face it is what 99% of photos are. Not the photos I take at work, though.

If I need to take written notes (which is rare) I will pull out my phone, though. However, that's only if I'm not going into the job expecting to have to take notes. If it's a job where written notes are going to be a big thing, it's a ringbound Rite In The Rain notebook and a pencil, every time.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:49 PM on January 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


Pencils are going to come back into vogue once the hipsters work out that they're right on the cutting edge of materials science.
posted by flabdablet at 9:20 PM on January 26, 2019


"notebooks are designed to be tamperproof."

To be pedantic; nothing is tamperproof, hell, nothing reputable even claims to be. What things claim* to be is tamper-evident.

There is a growing body of research showing how to tamper with things that claim to be tamper evident without leaving a discernible trace.
posted by el io at 12:42 AM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]


I've heard positive things about Sony's "Digital Paper" e-ink tablets, but they're still very pricey and not widely adopted enough for me to want to take a flier on one (vs. an iPad pro for around the same money).

So I use disc-bound notebooks with easily removable pages, and scan them when I don't need the paper anymore - there are various branded systems but they so far they all seem to be compatible. Staples even makes a "hole" (tooth?) punch for their "Arc" line.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:33 AM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah when I do take paper notes, I go back to the office and transcribe them to text files, expanding them as I go. The paper notes are just aides–mémoire, and I need to "write them up" so that they make sense and can be shown to other people who might need to make use of the information they contain.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:43 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]


es_de_bah: "Given the subject matter, now I can't help but imagine news papers and magazines with bulky, coin-operated locks on them. Picture a device somewhere between the head of a parking meter and miniature car-boot--clamped onto a periodical. And you have to feed it change and business cards to get to the rest of the article on page nine."

Isn't this just a coin feed newspaper box?

Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The: "But you can't operate a phone with gloves on, their flashes are garbage and switching from flash on to flash off is a chore, you can't increase the exposure when you need to photograph something silhouetted against the sky, the zoom is relatively pitiful even on the newest phones, they can't get stuffed in a toolbelt without getting scratched all to hell, they're slippery to operate one-handed, and if I drop one off a ladder it will definitely break. "

The market for P&S cameras is dying and it makes me want to go out and buy like a dozen WG-50s while they are still available. Though I suppose I should find something similar that takes a non-proprietary battery if I still want to use it in 2040.
posted by Mitheral at 6:41 PM on January 28, 2019


Mitheral, the Olympus TG line is excellent, and still under active development. My TG-5 is very good indeed, especially with a silicone jacket and screen and lens protectors on. Good stuff. It has some really great features. RAW capture, excellent macro, built-in focus stacking, exposure compensation dial, intervalometer, GPS & compass, 4k video, on and on. Really good stuff. Adore mine. Looking forward to an eventual TG-6 someday.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:47 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


There's nothing that takes a standard battery but at least it'll run off of USB in a pinch.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:47 PM on January 28, 2019


Like with no battery at all in the camera? Cause that is practically as good as a standard battery in a pinch as USB battery packs are buck simple to make.
posted by Mitheral at 8:18 PM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


Yep, no battery needed, straight USB.

Pic 1

Pic 2
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:20 AM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


*dives right into fav convo to say I'm off to dusty arid lands again with the P&S soon*
posted by infini at 12:55 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


infini, if you ever get that TG-5 I'd be happy to explain to you how I have mine set up. It's definitely not stock. I know your needs are a bit different from mine but I'm sure you would be able to figure out the necessary adjustments.

You might also be interested in Pro Capture mode, for what you do. That's where you press the shutter button and it saves a burst of photos starting from a couple of seconds before you pressed it. Very discreet, if you get the hang of it.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:51 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


Anticipation, I think now I will definitely put the TG-5 on my purchase list for this project. I believe I might even be able to talk them into paying for it ;p
posted by infini at 3:54 AM on January 31, 2019 [1 favorite]


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