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Comment by Imustaskforhelp

9 days ago

This is an insightful comment that you have written and I appreciate you writing it, I had bought many pocket notebooks from a local shop but I ended up using them less than I imagined though I do have it near me but I don't end up writing on it.

Personally I have found recently that Excalidraw is really good in terms of drawing with one of the mouse that I have (Logitech Razer) though I also found that drawing with mouse or staring into screen while writing is a bit more dizzy experience than I expected and I still thrive on pen/paper when thinking about coding problems and within that a standard A4 size notebook really does wonder but the problem to me is also what many people here face and I didn't know that everyone felt so much of this exact same problem!

I will try to keep the pocket diary in my pocket now, and probably a pencil (maybe mechanical) with it :)

but do you keep the content from diary and merge it with your digital notes and if so how do you proceed doing that?

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Imustaskforhelp

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iammjm  9 days ago

I digitise some of my handwritten stuff, but not all of them, just what I really want to keep or be searchable.

For that I created a simple Shortcut on my iPhone: take a photo > rotate it > resize by 20% > save file > rename > share with Obsidian and add it to either Daily Note or a specific note.

In Obsidian I have a Claude integration (Claudian Plugin) with an /ocr skill, which runs optical character recognition on the uploaded image and corrects any mistakes and adds some markdown formatting. I have a pretty ugly handwriting but it still does a great job and gets it like 95% right.

All this results in a lightweight (~200kb) image in chosen note in my Obsidian vault with a transcribed and edited text below it.

Generally I’m a big fan of Obsidian because it’s very intuitive and customisable. Like I also have an Excalidraw plugin there for example :)

But most things start in one of my notebooks before they get ingested into obsidian just because I like to handwrite and stay away from my phone as much as possible

As far as pencils go, I got annoyed by the “normal” pencils because their tips kept getting broken or flat and I would need to carry yet additional thing with me, a sharpener. So I looked into mechanical pencils and settled on a 0,5mm tip with HB or H leads. I ended up getting a couple of mechanical pencils to test out and then gave away most of them as gifts to friends. I really liked the Pentel Graphgear 500 for its metal grip which make it well balanced; the uni-ball kuru toga for its rotating tip that keeps the lead sharp at all times; and the Parker jotter for its full stainless steel body. They are each like 10-15€ on Amazon and I think they are all great quality and just fun tools to use

  • jmhammond  9 days ago

    Can you share the shortcut link? That sounds very useful

    And if you like the Pentel GraphGear 500, you might want to check out the Pentel Sharp Kerry -- it's metal but with a post-able cap which makes it very pocketable.

    • iammjm  9 days ago

      Sure - here’s the shortcut:

      https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1be6bb1d4b3c458eb4600314805...

      Some notes on using it: - Don’t input any degrees if you don’t want the image rotated (I wanted an option to also take vertical photos)

      - I usually save the image directly in my obsidian vault (folder)

      - In the final “share” step you have to choose the obsidian app and then import it into your vault and into the daily note or somewhere else. Or some other app of your choice.

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