I discovered the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen when my marketing class team chose to use it for our group project last semester.  After initially dismissing the device because it seemed like an expensive gadget (two versions for $150 and $200) that couldn’t do anything my laptop couldn’t do, I quickly changed my mind and bought one.  It made taking class notes and recording interviews for my summer internship significantly easier.  And I know this blog is for the broke, but this thing is totally worth the money if you’ve got it.

Briefly, the thing contains a small camera that records what you write via microdots printed on special notebook paper.  While writing on this paper and recording your text, it can also record any sound it hears and syncs this audio to what it is recording with the camera.  Consequently when tap your pen on the paper you have been taking notes on, the audio that was recorded at the time of writing will magically come out of the pen’s speakers!  All of this information can then be archived on your computer (Mac or PC) via software that nicely organizes your notes and makes all your crappy handwriting searchable!  To get a better idea of all this, take a look at this video from Livescribe.  If you’re still not getting it, you should try a little harder and search “Livescribe” on YouTube – you’ll find tons of video demonstrations of the pen.  Oh, and here’s an example of a “pencast” – Livescribe’s online tool for sharing your downloaded notes.  While I think these things are pretty useless in general, I really like this one.

The device has won tons of awards, and its new availability at Best Buy and college bookstores as well as continued presence at Target, Amazon.com, and its own website, shows it has a bright future.

Related posts:

1. Evernote Rocks.

So I have spent a long time trying out various ways to take notes and jot down ideas.  I’ve got lots of school paper outlines, class notes, brainstorming sessions, etc scattered throughout my hard drive and online.  Most of these are in somewhat organized word documents, a lot are on Google Docs, some in Google Notebook, and others are on small note taking programs like Mac’s Stickies program or my slightly used xPad program.

I’ve never been entirely happy with any of these.  They all work well for some things, and not well for others.  The online programs aren’t available when I’m not connected to the internet and are sometimes buggy; Word documents are a pain to organize and search even with Mac’s Spotlight search function; and programs like xPad are a good start, but are still pretty limited.

Then Evernote entered my life.  Ahhhhhhh Evernote!  I’ve been an almost daily user of it for about a year now, and I’m not going to stop anytime soon.  It now holds 516 of my notes, and they are all insanely easy to find and view.  The desktop software offers a great way to jot down small notes and organize them quickly, easily, and with a lot of flexibility.  All notes are synced to an online account so you can access them anywhere with an Internet connection.  Evernote’s servers analyze any scanned documents you add to a note so that the text on them is searchable.  Oh, and there are various free mobile versions of the program available for most smart phones (and the iPod Touch).  And most of what anyone would use it for is free!  There is a paid version ($5 per month), but there is really no need for most users to buy it.

There has been tons written about this program, so I will stop now.  Check out these reviews:

• Review from Ars Technica
• Blog post about why paying the monthly fee is worth it
• Another random but good blog post about Evernote

Related posts:

1. Group projects are now slightly less awful