David Hughes

Notes From Afar

Tag: LoFi (page 2 of 3)

7 June 2013

Three Rules of Proper Notebook Management

I stumbled across an interesting website this week: First Today, Then Tomorrow, written by professional writer Randy Murray. I’m still perusing the articles, but I was taken by three articles entitled Three Rules of Proper Notebook Management:

  1. What To Write In Your Notebook
  2. The Best Notebook To Use
  3. What To Do With Filled Notebooks

With so much bullshit written about notebooks, and particularly about a certain brand of notebook that despite what the marketing department may claim were most definitely NOT used by Van Gogh and Ernest Hemingway, these three short articles are a breath of fresh air.

The answers to the questions posed by the articles sum them up perfectly:

  1. Everything.
  2. Whatever is available.
  3. It doesn’t matter.

My favourite piece of advice concerns What To Write In Your Notebook:

A notebook kept for a single purpose will likely go unused. A general notebook, well managed, is a mass of ideas, reminders, and observations.

In the few days since reading that single sentence I’ve written more in my notebook than the preceding few weeks. Good advice.

21 November 2011

Typewriters

I love this image that I just came across on The Well Appointed Desk; it combines my love of old technology with some of my favourite authors.

typewriters

There is one striking omission for me; that of my favourite author William Gibson who wrote the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer on an manual typer writer of 1930s vintage. Of this typewriter William Gibson said:

Neuromancer was written on a “clockwork typewriter,” the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane’s office in Chiba City.

This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual portable, dates from somewhere in the 1930’s. It’s a very tough and elegant piece of work. Cased, it weighs slightly less than the Macintosh SE/30 I now write on, and is finished in a curious green- and-black “crackle” paint-job, perhaps meant to suggest the covers of an accountant’s ledger.

Its keys are green as well, of celluloid, and the letters and symbols on them are canary yellow. (I once happened to brush the shift-key with the tip of a lit cigarette, dramatically confirming the extreme flammability of this early plastic.)

It amuses me that such a prescient story was written on a typewriter so old it could not be repaired when it broke a short time after Neuromancer was published.

It amuses me even more that I wrote this post using an app that in essence recreates a typewriter on shiny new technology.

5 April 2010

Beautiful Ceramic Speakers

ceramic_speakers_joey_roth

These ceramic speakers are just beautiful. Designed by Joey Roth and created using simple materials including cork, aluminium, cast iron and of course ceramic they are wonderfully minimal and stylish. Whilst their form is beautiful their function is of equal importance:

Typical speakers are designed to play even the most compressed or poorly recorded track. They gloss over the details that give high-resolution music its depth. The Ceramic Speakers’ custom-made drivers, porcelain and cork enclosures, and Tripath amplifier reveal every nuance. They will show the difference between lossless and mp3 files, and will unlock vinyl’s richness.

I wish I had the space for a set of these on my desk.

Via Minimalissimo

10 December 2009

Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness

I love my iPhone, I really do, but every now and then I find myself hankering for something simpler, smaller and well just different. I think the new Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness could stop that hankering.

The display is monochrome (gasp) but also transparent as demonstrated in this video:

The keyboard is invisible until activated; so half the phone is transparent while the other half is invisible.

Amazingly the Xperia Pureness is an HSDPA phone and has a web browser, although I’m not sure how good the browsing experience will be on a mono transparent screen, but then again I guess that’s not the point. The Xperia Pureness doesn’t even have a camera, but it does have access to a concierge service à la Vertu.

The only problem…the price: £600 and only from Selfridges.

9 December 2008

Google Adds Tasks to Gmail

You may have seen the news that Google has added a tasks application to its Gmail email service.Well the even better news is that since they recently added Google Labs to Google Apps email I get to play with it also.

I’ve tried a number of task apps over the years and not found one that I could stick with and met my varied but rather basic needs but tasks from Google looks promising.

I like that it is in my email but can also be “popped out” to float as it’s own window.

I like that because it is web based I can access from both my iMac and my Samsung NC10 running XP.

I like that you can easily make an email a task; most of my tasks seem to arrive via email.

I really like its simplicity: tasks, sub tasks, due dates and that’s about it.

I rather hope that Google don’t develop it much further than this, but if they do they make new features configurable. I’ve been put off other task applications by the complexity or multiple stages of simply adding a task and would hate to see that happen here.

Additions I would like to see are:

  • the ability to view and edit tasks from my iPhone
  • a “quick add” function like that found in Google Calendar
  • some kind of self-contained tasks view which could be off-line via Google Gears

I love the almost constant upgrades and additions that Google makes to its services such as Gmail, Docs, Google Apps etc. particularly when you consider they are all free.

« Older posts Newer posts »