Scribe

Yeah, I totally forgot. Is that tomorrow?

Well, Saturday Night Live this past weekend.

Pretty good there.

Yeah, that game show, the. The game show where it's like calling the guy out for like posting about all this stuff, but, like, doesn't actually remember any of it.

Sorry, that's not even my name. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty good. If you want to bring you back. Because we just had Halloween and I just had to share the best thing that's happened that I've seen in my life in a while, which is related to Halloween. And we went out on Sunday and we came back to the house and my daughter had dropped a pack of like candy outside. And we pulled up and we looked out the window to our walkway and there was a squirrel holding. Holding a pack of peanut M&M's in his mouth, like walking down our drive. And he dropped it, stared at us, put his head into the packet, grabbed a red Peanut M and M and just took off into a tree and stared at us, like, watching to see if we would pick it up. Like, we just gave that squirrel the greatest.

Yeah, it. It was. You looked inside the package and there was just like, you know, colors from like the outside of these M M's just like smeared around. And he had eaten, like all but one. And he had this big red one in his mouth. And he just took off down the road, like down. Right down the middle of the road and stopped like halfway. Stood on his hind legs and looked at us. And then Kept running. It was.

I was like, oh, what was it?

She said, will they know who the. What I mean when I say the Boss? I said, sure as hell better.

No podcasts. Co host of mine isn't going to know the reference of the Boss. That's why I was like. I was like. She's like, well, they know what I mean when I say that. Yeah, they'll know.

Yes. We had Dorothy from the wizard of Oz and Bruce Springsteen. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, basically. And that's what I'm like referring to is like anything that uses like some sort of stylus to, to capture something digitally. Which I gotta say, like, from the start, like, in this conversation, I. I do not prefer it, but like, in general. But there are certain settings where I am like, all in. Like, I am totally fine with it. Like, certain use cases where. And I'll talk. I can talk about those later, I guess, but where it just makes my life easier.

Especially if you have the right tools, because my son has an iPad with an Apple pencil and I hate writing on that thing. Like, I. It's, you know, the glassy surface and. Yeah, that just. That feels. But with the scribe, it's different. So, like, that it really did, you know, it's. Again, we can talk about later. But it like, sort of sparks the same thing in my brain a little bit. It doesn't feel different cognitively.

Unless I'm doing it for, like, long form writing, which I would never want to do anyways.

It does, but I don't know. I don't want to, like, just start jumping all over the place. But, like. So you guys just want me to talk about the scribe? Because, I mean, I feel like that's. So go ahead.

Oh, oh, are you talking about like the notebook that can be like transferred?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You write an Evernote teaming, like they teamed up with Evernote.

That kind of thing is stupid to me. Like, that I don't like. And I think part of the reason it feels extra stupid or like useless to me is that I write in cursive and there's no way it's going to recognize my handwriting. You know, like, if you write in like neat print, then you can like scan it. You know, you can scan it into your app and it'll turn it all into text or whatever. Like, that does not work for me because I just kind of have like idiosyncratic cursive that, like I blend in, you know, cursive and print and whatever. But so I was using. I. I've had a Kindle. I've had a Kindle for a long time. And then I got a Kindle Paper White, which I loved. My only knock on the Paper White was that it was just kind of too small for me. Like, I wanted it to be bigger, like where I could have more on the page without the print being tiny. And my paperwhite had gotten old enough that I was like on the hunt for something. And I. So I started thinking about the. The scribe. And it had this double benefit of being similar to that thing that's the Remarkable two, which a buddy of mine, Jason, has. So I gotten to see that and I was like, oh, well, again, that's.

Yes. It's also a good bit more expensive, I think. So they had some, you know, Amazon had some thing where you trade in your barely working Kindle and they give you like 25 off of something new or whatever. So it worked out and I got it. And. And it's great as the Kindle part. Like I read on it and I love reading on it. It's still like a Paperwhite. It's still that E ink. So screen. So it's not like it's bigger than a paperware, right? Oh, yeah, It's. Which I don't have mine anymore. But I mean, it's. I'D have to look at the measurements, but I would say it's like 30% bigger. I mean, it's a pretty big size. And so I got it for that purpose initially, but it was kind of an added benefit of being able to write on it. It comes with a stylus. There are, like, upgraded styluses, which I don't really. I don't get. One thing that's interesting about the stylus is that the tips, and I don't know if the Apple pencils like this, but they actually do wear down eventually. And so you, like, replace those. So they do have some, like, they. They built them to not be, like, these permanent things, so clearly it's better if they wear off. And I've. I haven't changed mine. I've had it for two months, but. And then I just got to play in. And the way they set it up is you make notebooks. So you make a notebook which is essentially just, you know, a stack of pages that you can, like, keep going and you can pick. And it gives you all these, like. I mean, I can pick the format of the page. So of course there's like, college ruled, wide ruled, whatever. But it goes, like, way beyond that, which was, like, fun to realize where this is. Like, one of the use cases that's, like, super helpful for me is that there's one that just has, like, a day planned out from, like, you know, midnight to midnight, and you can just, like, sketch out a day, and then you can really quickly use the back of the pencil and erase it and use the same page the next day if you don't have to keep track of it just to, like, sketch something out. But there are. I mean, they have like all the graph dotted. They have vertical ruled if you want to do it sideways. You do monthly planning. There's storyboards, there's music notation for, you know, I don't. Wouldn't use that checklist. So there's just all these, like, formats that were, like, really useful. The only thing that sucks is you can't mix them together. Like, a notebook has to be just one, but which is, yeah, one thing that I don't love. And then you can stack them.

it's really nice. Like, if you're reading and you want to write down, like, a quote, of course you can highlight in a Kindle, but I can also just switch over to a notebook and, like, write it down. And then that's kind of a cool feature. And then as far as the stylus goes, they even give you. I mean, they give you choices with how you want it to look, which, like, you can choose fountain pen. You can choose, like, Fizzle tip. You can choose pencil, and you can, like, how big you want the point to be. And it actually has the kind of, like, the edges are a little blurry. You know, it looks just like pencil. And the fountain pen is the one that I use all the time. I just sent you guys a picture. You can. It's basically an italic. Like, it's all. It's set up as an italic, and so you can choose, like, how thick or thin you want it to be. And so I put it side by side with, like, my typical fountain pen nib. Like, I wrote the same things. And you can see, like, my handwriting looks, you know, identical. I don't know, it's kind of rambling, but it's just so it's found its uses.

Oh, not at all.

I mean, not at all. Once you. Yeah. I mean, this is faster than my paperwhite was. But, I mean, it's immediate. If we were on video, you'd see I'm just, like, scribbling and it just follows. I mean, there's no feeling of, like, you know, that sort of disorienting feeling when you're writing on a screen or with your finger on something. And it's like. It's kind of a step behind you, a letter behind you the whole way. I mean, it's right on top of it. So it's real fast.

Wait, can I say one more thing? Because with that response rate thing erasing. So it's got this, like, button on the end, and you can erase what you've written. But one cool thing is that, like, when you erase, it actually shows, like, the shadow of what you've just erased. Like very faintly in the background. So if you're like, you wrote something and then you're erasing it and you're going to write something else, you can still look and then it gradually just fades away to nothing. So you can like, still kind of see, you know, in case you lose track of it, you're like, oh, what was I saying? You can still kind of see it and then it disappears. Yeah, so that's also a cool.

So for me, it's like the things that have been super useful is like a template. Something that's in a template form that I just, like, need to use to, like. Like a graphic organizer kind of thing, to just like, gather my thoughts on something. One kind of interesting thing that popped up recently was I. I sent you guys a picture of this recently. I assembled a guitar. Like, I built a guitar from parts. Yeah.

It's gorgeous. Yeah. And I mean, but like, it was a really fun project. Worked on it for a long time. But there was. I found this. There's this website called Stumac that sells, like, all these, you know, guitar parts or whatever. Everything's overpriced. I don't actually buy anything from them, but they had a PDF that had like, the checklist for building a parts caster. And there were, like, lines. It was on a PDF so, like, I could have printed it off and just, like, had a hard copy. But I changed my mind so many times and, like, things weren't working and I had to, like, get a different part or whatever. And so I had it on my Kindle. I just sent it to my Kindle using that, like, thing where you can, like, email it to your Kindle and it shows up. And so I was able to have just that one page of like a checklist with, like, note lines and like a picture of a guitar where you can mark things that you have to do. And then if something changed, I just Erase it. I keep going. It's always on there. I can even pull it up on my phone. I wouldn't be able to write on it, but I can look at it on my phone if I need to, like, reference a part number or something. And now I'm getting ready to work on another one and I don't need that old one. So I just, like, washed it clean. Didn't have to, you know, I probably would have ended up printing 10 pieces of that sheet. You're like 10 copies of that sheet to go through that whole process because it would have just been ravaged by the end. But it was just like always there in my pocket, which was like. So, like templates, something that's like, I'm not going to be saving, you know?

Wait, without being able to. What do you mean?

Oh, yeah.

No, because, I mean, I'm measuring the screen right now. The screen is roughly like eight and a half by six inches. So it's a pretty good sized screen. It's like, not that much smaller than the page. I mean, if I was like. And it wasn't like a detailed blueprint, I probably would feel that way if it was like a detailed thing, but it was just like a picture where you could just kind of like circle things or whatever. It was on like, one half of the side. So, like, that wasn't a problem. I haven't run into an issue, like, of like a situation where it wasn't working out for me. But I also haven't, like, tried it on a whole lot of different things. I basically just. I had like, one, the one I told you about, I had another one that had the. The wiring diagram. Like, I soldered all the. I did all the wiring myself, which that was like, plenty big. I mean, it was bigger than the actual thing I was wiring. You know, like, I could just see the whole thing.

So what do you do on yours? Like, like, what kind of stuff do you end up, like, drawing with or, like, using like, the digital pen?

But yeah, I think the Kindle, like it's just one. Like there probably are settings but it never record. Like my hand's always resting on the screen. Yeah. While I'm writing.

So I think it just, it only picks. I can't even write with my finger. If I write, try to write with my finger, it'll just switch to the next page. It like knows the difference between like a finger, like using the.

Well, please tell Apple standards of Apple.

we're all writing in like block script. Yeah, they're all writing in Helvetica.

Yeah.

No good.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, I still, like, carry a notebook, but, like, I just thought of, like, one thing that. And it probably would do this on your iPad, too. That I've found really helpful is, like, with newer Kindle books, instead of, like, you know how you would have to, like, highlight a passage and then click, like, take a note, and then you would, like, type in your note of what you wanted to note about it. Now, like, basically, like, you highlight a passage, add a note, and like, a sticky note pops up, and then you can use the pencil and actually write on the sticky note. So if you're, like, looking through it and you see the part where you're like, oh, that's that quote I was looking at. And then you click on it, it'll show you. Your handwriting will pop up and it'll have, like, your note that you wrote for it, which is, like, I've already noticed the sort of phenomenon of the ones that I've handwritten, I haven't had to go back and look at because I remember them. Whereas, like, when I type in a note on a Kindle, I forget that I even did it. Like, it's just totally gone from my brain.

You know, it's just, like, does not exist anymore. So something like that. The handwriting, like the sort of, you know, what we've talked about with, like, you're writing it down to remember it now or whatever. Like, the handwriting part does translate in that way where I'm like, I remember I took a note or I remember what I wrote down, as opposed to when I do these stupid little text notes in a Kindle book.

the idea of like, I love that.

Yes, like that.

guess we have to have him back.

Yeah.

I don't think it. I just. I have trouble imagining any situation in which it totally replaces paper. Like, paper isn't going anywhere. I think it's just, like, they're going to get close enough together that at least the experience of both is going to be, like, almost identical eventually.

And, like, I think I still don't understand why all these E Ink devices are so expensive. Like, I feel like they. There's going to be like a boom of them where they're going to get, like, really cheap. Because I think they. They definitely have a use. And I started, after I got this, I started. It was like a combination of having some sort of existential crisis about technology and, like, phones and stuff, while also, like, getting this scribe. And then I started to imagine, like, how awesome it would be to have an E Ink, basically, like a Kindle Scribe, handheld size. That's also my phone, you know, like one of those, like, super simplified phones that also has an ink display, doesn't have video, whatever, but I can write little notes on it if I need to. Like, in a way that, like, was much more satisfying than, you know.

I have heard of the Light Phone. I've googled it many times. I. Yeah, I haven't pulled the trigger on that, but I want one. I want to go to there and I. But there's a title. Yeah, it's just such like a. I don't know, it's. Oh, and also, like, another reason of why that came up is do you guys remember me talking about that book I read that novella, it was like a year or two ago. The Psalm for the Wild Built title. It was an incredibly good book. It's little novellas, like post basically, like AI has just, like gone off the rails. They're robots, they're whatever. They become sentient. This is all before the book happens. And the book happens at the point when the robots have been gone for like 50 years. They just like walked off and they're just like, please let us leave thing. They go off and then one comes back and, like teams up with this one human and they start going around together. Anyways, like, great book. And like. But like, the way that technology is, like, talked about in that series and I'm actually reading the second one right now. I just got the second in the series. It's called Prayer for the Crown Chai. Prayer for the Crown Shy and. But he talks about something that is akin to a phone or. I think he just calls it the computer. But it sounds like a little Kindle device that sort of is at the center of everybody's life that, like, they track things, they contact people or whatever. But it's been like dialed back like this. You know how we've talked about with technology. Like, the seat belt's been put on, so it's like they've got the seatbelt on it. So they have this phone that they use for all this kind of stuff, but it's not like their life is not revolving around it and there's all this amazing technology.

Right.

Yeah, yeah. Those ones are annoying because I saw an e Ink phone that was just like, oh, so now you can carry two?

Thanks. That I was trying to address because then I would just leave that one in my pocket and just be scrolling Instagram on the other one.

Like, I think we'll be long dead by that point. Yeah.

Yeah, I saw at some point I think I went down like rabbit hole in my brain of like, also thinking about like the carbon footprint. I like question you Know like notebooks versus like something like an E reader. I think I was like looking at more about like an E reader and I have to like look it up to find the number. But it was something like, you know, of course if you ask anybody from Amazon, they're going to say, oh well, it's, you know, a million times better. But like there was this guy, he had written this book and it was something like the carbon footprint of life or of all things or something like that. But that according to him and his research for writing the book, that basically, like with an E reader, once You've read about 35 books on your Kindle, you've broken even carbon footprint. Really interesting. Yeah, it was something like 35 books, like paperback books has the same digital footprint as owning any reader.

Or I have to find that to confirm it.

Yeah, I mean that's a whole different thing. I think he's definitely talking about like books that are being like bought or basically box books that are being manufactured. Like, like buying a Kindle versus buying 35. It was in the 30s, but it was like 35.

And like, yeah, I mean, if anybody

You gotta drink more coffee, Johnny.

like drinking it out of his palms real quick.

I wouldn't have gotten anything done.

Hey.

Yeah, I agree.

That was gone. I had totally left. Yeah, right.

I was just about to bring that up because when my. When we got Henry his Kindle, or. Sorry, his iPad. His new iPad with the pencil. My sister bought him that. And. Gosh, I should have thought of this earlier because we should have had my. She would never have done this because she's too shy. But my niece is in college now, and she's an incredible artist and almost 100% digital.

Ashley's daughter is.

Yeah, she just started.

She's 11 years older than me, so she's like, 47. 40.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, she's. Yeah, she's. She stayed young. Art. That's what it does. But. Yeah, so. But, like, she would. So they got Henry that Procreate app because, you know, for drawing. Because he was getting into that, like, sketching and drawing these, like, little cartoons and stuff, and it was incredible. I mean, because, like, I was talking about. And you talked about this a little bit, like, with the Kindle scribe, like, I was able to, you know, do the different pencil tips or whatever, and I thought that was cool. But then, like. Yeah. You look at something like, Procreate, and it's like, oh, there are 500 million other things you could do.

So drawing is something that, like, I can't really speak to, but like you were saying. I mean, I think that's, like, a place that people should really consider it, because it's just, like, I know that she, like, just really has fun with it, and, I mean, she's doing, like, legit drawing. It's not like. Yeah. You know, it's not, like, doing it for her. Like, she's like, I. I watch her do it, and she's doing all the, you know.

Outline of the face, doing, like, the lines through it to know, like, where the eyes will go and how to line everything up perfectly. And then she's able to erase the line she doesn't want without having any sort of smudge Marks. It's pretty incredible.

Berries taste like snozberries.

Just for my. I. I've talked about that cartoonist Asher Perlman before, but I got his book and Henry would, like, look over my shoulder and, like, would he hear me laughing? And he's got some in there that I'm like, you don't need to see this one. He's like, oh, this is amazing. Like, this is so funny. And so I bought him at a used bookstore. I found three volumes of Far side and gave it to him. And he's just become, like, so hooked on it. And so he started on his iPad. Like, if he made his own, my daughter wants to too. So I'll have to see if he makes what he finishes one on his iPad. Like a little Far side Style comic. Yeah, I'll send it to you guys.

I mean, yeah. It made me so happy to see him, like, have tears in his eyes. He was laughing so hard at a one panel cartoon. I forget what it was. It was like one where it was like a castle and there were these guys, like, they're like, they're charging the castle, and these are like the guys up on the wall, and they had this, like, big bucket full of water balloons. And he goes, hot oil. Forget the water balloons. We need hot oil. He thought that was the funniest thing he had ever seen. He was just like, yeah, gasping for air. He was, like, imagining them, like, their first idea was water balloons. And they're like, never mind. Bring us hot oil. Forget the water balloons. That's been so fun. Oh, my God.

Oh, so funny. Yeah.

So, yeah, that'd be good to hear from other folks. And, like, because. And it's, you know, all in all, like, after saying all this, like, I am really excited about it, but it's like, there's no part of it that makes me want to write in notebooks less so it's just like. It just seems like it has its own. I use it for a Few. It's so far, like a few very specific things. Otherwise I'm not going to pull it out. I mean, I wouldn't even consider writing, like, you know, a journal or something in it. Like, that would just feel like, icky, you know, But. But yeah, there's some situations where it's just like. I mean, I've taken it with me sometimes when I, like, just grabbed it because I knew I would just need to, like, jot down a few notes and I wanted to read something and, like, I took it to the doctor's office so I didn't have, like, you know, backpack with me full of stuff. It was just. It worked great.

I feel like, yeah, we should revisit that because we talked about that a long time ago because there was like this some little. I know they talked about on the pen. Edict, but it was like some little mini scanner that people were using to scan in all of their field notes. Yeah, the doxy. Yeah. Yeah. Haven't thought about that since we last talked about it. Probably.