Has technology changed the way we do things? I know, I know, silly question. I was riding on a longer than normal trip with my wife last week. We were talking about how we navigated around the U.S. with an Atlas pre-smartphones. You know the book that links page 34 with page 19 so you can move from North Carolina to South Carolina. We could get anywhere and hardly ever missed a place we headed for. This includes an individual business or house.
Now of course we are Waze or Google Maps users. “Turn Right”, “Turn left in one mile”, and my favorite, “Police ahead” (that is just a joke, of course). I will not even mention streaming TV shows, movies, reading books and magazines-not on paper. Oh, and how about phones, including no more long distance charges?
How about spiral-bound notebooks? Let us look at “Rocketbooks”, getrocketbook.com.
There are several types of Rocketbooks. But the basic trick they do is to allow you to write on each page repeatedly using a notebook that is like the old spiral-bounds. They cost from $20 to $40 a notebook and use a special pen to write with called “Pilot FriXion Pen” which is not expensive.
All the Rocketbook family allows you to write your notes instead of type them. Google Scholar says handwriting may be better for our brains. Check this link if you are interested, ghtech.site/writevstype. They are different sizes of notebooks to fit all of our needs and backpacks.
Now how do they work this magic? Of course, no magic, only technology. They make the pages out of paper they came up with that allow you to write with the FriXion pens. When you write, it becomes permanent…almost. One notebook I checked has 80 pages but again that varies with different Rocketbooks. Once finished with a notebook, you can go back in and eraser the ink and reuse the pages over again. There are different ways to erase. The most basic is to use a cloth dampened with water and wipe it off. Yes, almost like a dry erase board. But the page still looks and feels like paper.
OK, so you erase the pages and you start over, but what about all your notes, drawings, sketches, and formulas? What about them? Guess what, you have already loaded them to the cloud. The free app for the Rocketbooks includes the ability for you to use several cloud storage areas for all of your notes. Places like; Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and iCloud to name a few. So, your files are safe in the cloud and you have all of your notes immediately available to you.
One other thing about the Rocketbooks app. It will also use OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition) and convert your handwriting to type written text…if your handwriting is discernible to the program. Which even my handwriting can take advantage of OCR. Then you may copy and paste into any other document.
The final one I would like to mention here is the Rocketbook Pro Wave. This one is similar in most all respects, with one big exception. You cannot wipe the pages off with a damp cloth. Are you ready? You put it in the microwave over for several minutes and the pages come clean. Then you use it again. The only drawback I can find is that it will only “microwave” the book about five times before it stops working. However, getting all of your thoughts to the cloud in a fully searchable format could make life much easier. Of course, this depends on what you need it for.
What do you think?
