Re: [NTLK] Build your own Newton?

From: Alexander Schreiber (als_at_thangorodrim.de)
Date: Mon Oct 29 2001 - 06:50:44 EST


On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 08:25:33AM +0100, Oliver Brose wrote:
>
> >>Imagine a newton the size of a palm doing things palms can only dream of
> >>doing. Think it'd sell?
> >
> > I keep wondering if I'm the only person out here who is happy with
> > the size of the Newton.
>
> Now we're two! :)

Three. I consider the Palm screen to small - although the overall size
of the unit has it's advantages. A Newton just the size of the display
and being all display on top with only a very small protective border
(say, 1 mmm) would've been great.

> > The only other viable note taking device I've
> > seen since coming back to Uni is a Psion 5 (pretty much the only
> > device I would consider for the job apart from the Newton).
>
> The fraction of people using digital devices for their studies seems awfull=
> y
> low. I've seen *nobody* with *any* sort of PDA in economics, a handful of
> WinDoze-Cheapo-Notebooks among the law-people, one Psion among the
> journalists.

Same here, I seemed to be the only one who switched from pen and paper
to PDA for lecture notes. I would would prop up the handstand case,
complete with Newton and Newton keyboard and tap away (HWR is less than
ideal if I have to enter lots of text quickly). My approach was to use
Newtonworks as a glorified text editor and directly write LaTeX source
in it which would later be exported to my (UNIX) machines for
proofreading (using vim <grins>) and running through LaTeX to produce a
collection of dead tree at the end of term. Worked great - I did it for
almost 2 years. Funny thing is, although I'm a CS student I usually got
some funny looks for appearing with "so much technology", even in CS
specific lectures (like compiler construction). But the Newton tended to
be a nice item for post lecture discussions, sometimes also with the
lecturer ;-)

Regards,
       Alex.

-- 
q: If you were young again, would you start writing TeX again or would
   you use Microsoft Word, or another word processor?
a: I hope to die before I *have* to use Microsoft Word.
  -- Harald Koenig <koenig_at_tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de> asking Donald E. Knuth

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