Shrinking tools
Posted on June 1, 2007
Filed Under All, Photos, Weblogging, Technology, Podcast |
For years, on and off, I’ve carried around a small black notebook as a way to capture ideas, notes and to-do lists. My favorite notebook is the nicely-made Moleskine with quadrile-ruled pages. The Moleskine has quite a history with famous artists and writers.
Once made by hand by Parisian stationery shops, the last maker of Moleskines, a shop on Rue de la Ancienne Comedie in Tours, shut down in 1986, ending production of the little books. In 1998, a Milanese publisher brought the books back.
My Moleskine lives in a little pocket in the Oakley computer bag that accompanies me to and from work. Just before we left for France, friend Kevin McKean and I went on a Fry’s run, and the tiny Olympus WS 300M DVR came home, and has now joined the Moleskine as a note-taking tool et al. I find myself taking notes, doing podcasts, capturing church services and otherwise using the little machine quite naturally.
Amazingly, the Olympus will record for 68 hours: I’m not sure how many words that would be if it were alll dictation, but surely it’s vastly more than the Moleskine will capture. I write 50 or so words on a page, I find, and the Moleskine has 192 pages, for some 9600 words or so.
The Olympus isn’t much bigger than a thumb drive, and indeed, has a cover (the L-shaped part to the left of the cicular controls seen here) over a USB plug. Pop the cover, plug it in, and the Olympus shows up on the desktop as a mass storage device, complete with a folder structure. I just drag the recordings into my file system (and usually into iTunes).
I’ve also digitized content from the Moleskine: sometimes using the Lumix to copy pages, and sometimes the scanner in our Canon MP 530 printer. But no USB plug on the Moleskine… I realize the picture of the Olympus here is actually larger than the machine…
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[…] Still wobbly, but we got with our oncology nurses at UCSF yesterday, compared notes (from my Moleskine) and are now on a steroid ramp-down that I hope will be more successful than last time around. This time I think I’ve got a good idea about the steroid lag-time: nurses had thought about 2 days, but my charts make it look more like a week in the case of my body. So we’ll ramp down slowly, hopefully back to the place I was 2 weeks ago in France, where edema is under control without too big a weakness hit from the steroids. I am eager to be exercising again… […]