Taking Notes

• Try to reference to the source material exactly as much as possible for those who come after you. For YouTube videos, include timestamps. For books, include page numbers. For websites…link to sub-headings if there are links?
• Have syntax/grammar highlighting and abstraction as much as possible. For everything from books to math to …. It just happened to be most useful for coding.
  • Excellent visualization linked from Bret Victor: http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/

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• Summary here…although I'm more about remembering.

• A “study skills” textbook that is really awesome and includes a lot more than how to study. See the wiki page: Becoming a Master Student

• Lots of intuitive, interesting and simple pictures/animations/demos! The more crazy the example, the more memorable it is! (from from game creator Jesse Schell's slides)
  • Something like Bret Victor's interactive website on The Ladder of Abstraction is in order…we'll see!
    • Saved it…really hard to do! ladderofabstraction.zip
  • Probably easiest right now to do animation in Matlab / Matplotlib (using 3D) and do a voice-over later, as opposed to learning Blender / POVRay
• Let's get started, shall we?!

• Good Templates: Tufte-Latex, Springer's Latex Template,
• Looks like a good solution for doing real-time notetaking. Other than the annoying tapping sounds that is.
• Take word and math notes using LaTeX, and use pen and paper for graphs / diagrams to scan in and insert.

• If you want to do professional-looking graphs later, use TikZ (good YouTube video)
• Takes 6 lines to generate figure to right.
• Free body diagram with Tikz: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/free-body-diagrams/

7/27/10: I read a PDF called “How To Read” by Paul Edwards.

• Reading (or doing anything mentally taxing) for more than an hour is impossible! Read a book in several short sessions, rather than one long marathon. When coming back, try to recall what you learned before and what you’re hopefully going to learn next.
  • Read a book/article 3 times (pg 4)
  • First for overview and knowledge of what it will be about and what sub-topics you’re most interested in.
  • Secondly for detail and understanding.
  • Thirdly, for marking up text and making mental notes on how to do things. If this is digital, you’ll be able to instantly search your computer and look at it!
• Try to take notes on the article itself in PDF or other digital form for better searching later. Not sure if Preview is good enough for this yet, but splitting the screen seems to work pretty well…
• Use multiple modes of memory
• I think I learn visually best, so try and remember by drawing pictures.

• Open-Source Computational Algebra System: Sympy that works just as good as Wolfram Alpha
• The technology is never as important as the process. It is just there to enable you to do a few more things. Be sure to have a plan before you buy something, or else you risk wasting money on it!

• NEW (2/3/11): Colin suggested having a “smart” board that automagically recognized what math symbols you were writing and then solved the rest for you. It seems like a few products do that.
  • SMART Notebook Youtube clip, pretty slick but I'm sure costs a ton.
  • Windows Math 4.0

NEW(8/4/10): So, now that I have a MacBook, I’m not as jazzed about taking hand-written notes. I would like everything to be searchable though! …However, that might not be possible in Signals and Systems.

Tricked Word into recording from the iPhone headphone mic by clicking record and then popping in the headphone. Might bump up recording quality of the lecturer on the cheap, otherwise it’d be best to go with mom’s Olympus microphone. We shall see…

(From Google Groups page)

A good overview article of technologies

Livescribe: (digital note-taking pen) –$150 is cheapest model –Smart method of tracking position on page using micro-dots and an IR camera –Notes come out perfectly on the computer thanks to the camera –Will record the lecture up for you and allow you to go back to that point with your pen (also a feature of OneNote) –Handwriting recognition as well

Tablet PC or (hopefully) Mac: (using OneNote) –Allows pen transcription as well, and in different colors –Everything is already digital and backed up –Allows you to annotate PDF's and other documents right on the screen –Allows you to keep an audio recording of everything indexed, just like Livescribe –Does handwriting recognition too

Good Tablets: Classmate PC Tablet/Netbook (Wired article on new one, Engadget article ($500 now at CTL))

NEW (4/21): –Just bought a Hantech pen thing on woot.com Should be fun!. Competitor (and very lookalike is Hanwha Duo, which should come out soon…) –Pair this with a Boogie Board ($30) and you're set for school – OneNote 2010 is most definitely the way to go (can do everything online Google-Doc-like!, fast search)..download beta eventually? —-OneNote Canvas Plugin (review, website) from Microsoft Research is also a great add-on for visualizing all your notebooks at one time! —-Online access (Windows SkyDrive) isn't quite ready for prime-time yet, but syncing everything via a WebDAV should be ok (here) ——NEED TO SETUP BLUEHOST WebDAV account…

NEW (5/1): –Download updated drivers for Tablo from web or personal share (up in a few )…) –If you ever want to run it on Ubuntu (forum postings here)