I’ve been looking for a while at getting some grid ruled index cards for my card index (Zettelkasten or fichier boîte if you prefer). The big issue is that most grid or specialty ruled cards are insanely price in comparison to either blank or line ruled cards. They can typically range from US$0.10 to over $1.00 per card in comparison to an average of $0.02/card when buying either white or lined versions. The price differential almost had me making my own custom cards or buying in bulk from China and setting up a distribution outlet here in the United States.
This is a great quality index card for one of the best prices/values for this size and grid ruling.
It’s a noticeably thicker index card stock compared to most (~0.0106″ compared to Oxford’s 0.0072″ or Amazon Basic’s 0.0078″). Most of my pens and pencils weren’t visible through the Stockroom+ card even when held up to a standard room light, something which I couldn’t say about the thinner Oxford or Amazon cards. Only a thick Sharpie pen was slightly visible held up to a light, but none of them came remotely close to bleeding through. These cards write smoothly and take fountain pen ink well without any feathering.
The grid is 1/4″ and printed on both sides. The lines are a light grey which doesn’t overwhelm black ink lines in the 0.4-0.5mm range. The printed grid is also very standard from card to card, so if you need to line the patterns up or are OCD, you’re not going to have problems. The second line down matches up well with the top red lines on most other standard index cards.
I got mine for about $0.043/per card, so it’s a fantastic value.
I can’t wait to use them more and expect them to hold up incredibly well over time. This should be useful given that some of the math, engineering, and science topics I’ll use them for are some of the more well-traveled pathways in my slip box.
Have you used 4 x 6″ grid index cards that you like? I’d be curious to hear comparisons.
I recently finished reading* The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow; I enjoyed it very much indeed. I thought I’d write a two parts review for CT, and here’s the first – I will p…
I’ve only begun reading the text for a book club being run by historian Dan Allosso who is also doing an experiment in a communally shared wiki/notebook platform Obsidian, but I’m quite curious about the Neolithic pieces relating to the inhabitants at Stonehenge. In particular, I’ve recently finished Lynne Kelly’s research in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) in which she touches on the primary orality of those peoples and the profound impact that settling into sedentary lifeways may have had on their culture. If she’s correct, then that settlement was dramatically “expensive” and more complex than we’ve been led to believe. This may have had confounding issues within their society as it grew and flourished. I would suspect that Graeber and Wengrow don’t touch on this portion of the complexity, but it may support their general thesis. I’ll try to report back as I get deeper into the topic.
Incidentally, if folks want to join this Obsidian book club on this text, it’s just starting and is comprised of a number of academics and researchers in a vein similar to CT. A quick web search should uncover the details to join.
Fraidycat lets you "follow at a distance" blogs, social media accounts, and other web sources. I find it much more attention-respectful than a typical feedreader.
Fraidycat is one of my favorite tools as well. I particularly like it for it’s time-related functionality in comparison to other feed readers which don’t have this kind of categorization/sorting. Reminds me a bit of the sort of reader that Ton Zijlstra was always looking for.
Shout out to @getbluelab which replaced my malfunctioning #pH#sensor quickly and with minimal fuss. No “your concern is so important to us we make you wrangle for hours with some minimum wage guy who never used the product” nonsense. Just got it done. #recommended
An excellent question. I happen to plan to write a post about that before too long :-) The core challenge is aggregation ... no point having isolated reviews. We need an aggregate, across multiple rating dimensions.
A couple of weeks ago, I got my new Thinkpad E490. It replaces two desktop PCs and my old laptop, so I needed a serious work horse. The most obvious choice within Lenovo’s line-up would be a T480, but I found those to be rather expensive. It’s follow-up model has just been announced, but the new T490 has fewer configuration options.
I’m writing this post using a new post editor that is coming in the next version of WordPress code-named, and likely named for all-time, Gutenberg.
In fact, I’ve written several of my most recent posts, including this photo post of South Iceland, using this new editor.
Gutenberg is an editor that allows a WordPress author to use an interface for writing that is much more akin to using Google Docs or Microsoft Word. You type, drag images, add headlines and quotes, and all other various things using a much more visual way of editing than previous versions of WordPress had with what is now being called the “Classic Editor”.
If you are going to buy a new velomobile, this is the time of year when you should do it to get it before the next summer. Because with most models, the delivery time is at least three months. I decided to make this list of 15 awesome velomobile models you can buy today with usefull links to different velomobile models and some velomobile dealers around the world. I also list few forums and other places where you can find second hand velomobiles.
Same list in my blog: http://www.saukki.com/2017/12/kuinka-ostetaan-velomobiili-how-to-buy-a-velomobile/
I spent several hours looking at Velomobile resources, and this one video and its attendant links are one of the single best resources I’ve come across.
There are worse things you can put through a tea strainer than ants.
Scientist reviews on Amazon are just spectacular! I think there are a few things I could add to the pile…
I love the Post’s disclaimer about Bezos’ ownership of the Post:
Disclaimer: The Washington Post is owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, who also runs Amazon, though we really don’t think we’re doing the site any favors with this article.
Also noted: They’ve quietly hidden the key word “poop” into the meta data for the article!
This morning while breezing through my Woodwind feed reader, I ran across a post by Rick Mendes with the hashtags #readlater and #readinglist which put me down a temporary rabbit hole of thought about reading-related post types on the internet.
I’m obviously a huge fan of reading and have accounts on GoodReads, Amazon, Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, and literally dozens of other services that support or assist the reading endeavor. (My affliction got so bad I started my own publishing company last year.)
READ LATER is an indication on (or relating to) a website that one wants to save the URL to come back and read the content at a future time.
I started a page on the IndieWeb wiki to define read later where I began writing some philosophical thoughts. I decided it would be better to post them on my own site instead and simply link back to them. As a member of the Indieweb my general goal over time is to preferentially quit using these web silos (many of which are listed on the referenced page) and, instead, post my reading related work and progress here on my own site. Naturally, the question becomes, how does one do this in a simple and usable manner with pretty and reasonable UX/UI for both myself and others?
Current Use
Currently I primarily use a Pocket bookmarklet to save things (mostly newspaper articles, magazine pieces, blog posts) for reading later and/or the like/favorite functionality in Twitter in combination with an IFTTT recipe to save the URL in the tweet to my Pocket account. I then regularly visit Pocket to speed read though articles. While Pocket allows downloading of (some) of one’s data in this regard, I’m exploring options to bring in the ownership of this workflow into my own site.
For more academic leaning content (read journal articles), I tend to rely on an alternate Mendeley-based workflow which also starts with an easy-to-use bookmarklet.
I’ve also experimented with bookmarking a journal article and using hypothes.is to import my highlights from that article, though that workflow has a way to go to meet my personal needs in a robust way while still allowing me to own all of my own data. The benefit is that fixing it can help more than just myself while still fitting into a larger personal workflow.
Brainstorming
A Broader Reading (Parent) Post-type
Philosophically a read later post-type could be considered similar to a (possibly) unshared or private bookmark with potential possible additional meta-data like: progress, date read, notes, and annotations to be added after the fact, which then technically makes it a read post type.
A potential workflow viewed over time might be: read later >> bookmark >> notes/annotations/marginalia >> read >> review. This kind of continuum of workflow might be able to support a slightly more complex overall UI for a more simplified reading post-type in which these others are all sub-types. One could then make a single UI for a reading post type with fields and details for all of the sub-cases. Being updatable, the single post could carry all the details of one’s progress.
Indieweb encourages simplicity (DRY) and having the fewest post-types possible, which I generally agree with, but perhaps there’s a better way of thinking of these several types. Concatenating them into one reading type with various data fields (and the ability of them to be public/private) could allow all of the subcategories to be included or not on one larger and more comprehensive post-type.
Examples
Not including one subsection (or making it private), would simply prevent it from showing, thus one could have a traditional bookmark post by leaving off the read later, read, and review sub-types and/or data.
As another example, I could include the data for read later, bookmark, and read, but leave off data about what I highlighted and/or sub-sections of notes I prefer to remain private.
A Primary Post with Webmention Updates
Alternately, one could create a primary post (potentially a bookmark) for the thing one is reading, and then use further additional posts with webmentions on each (to the original) thereby adding details to the original post about the ongoing progress. In some sense, this isn’t too far from the functionality provided by GoodReads with individual updates on progress with brief notes and their page that lists the overall view of progress. Each individual post could be made public/private to allow different viewerships, though private webmentions may be a hairier issue. I know some are also experimenting with pushing updates to posts via micropub and other methods, which could be appealing as well.
This may be cumbersome over time, but could potentially be made to look something like the GoodReads UI below, which seems very intuitive. (Note that it’s missing any review text as I’m currently writing it, and it’s not public yet.)
Overview of reading progress
Other Thoughts
Ideally, better distinguishing between something that has been bookmarked and read/unread with dates for both the bookmarking and reading, as well as potentially adding notes and highlights relating to the article is desired. Something potentially akin to Devon Zuegel‘s “Notes” tab (built on a custom script for Evernote and Tumblr) seems somewhat promising in a cross between a simple reading list (or linkblog) and a commonplace book for academic work, but doesn’t necessarily leave room for longer book reviews.
I’ll also need to consider the publishing workflow, in some sense as it relates to the reverse chronological posting of updates on typical blogs. Perhaps a hybrid approach of the two methods mentioned would work best?
Kindle Notes and Highlights are now shoing up as a beta feature in GoodReads
Comments
I’ll keep thinking about the architecture for what I’d ultimately like to have, but I’m always open to hearing what other (heavy) readers have to say about the subject and the usability of such a UI.
Please feel free to comment below, or write something on your own site (which includes the URL of this post) and submit your URL in the field provided below to create a webmention in which your post will appear as a comment.
Jason McIntosh
Johannes Ernst
