JPL's in-house newsletter, the Universe, asked me to write a profile of an engineer, Bill Farr. He's not just the usual wild overachiever you find here on-lab, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, but he also has an interesting hobby - cave-diving. Yes, one of the most dangerous things one can do, aside from, maybe, shark taunting or intra-volcano bungee jumping.
Bill is a fascinating guy, and a great interview subject. You can find the article here.
At the time I was asked to do that, I discovered that JPL has a program called a Technology Petting Zoo, where we get a chance to borrow a gadget, and try it out for a few weeks, in exchange for our impressions. Among the wonderful toys on offer was a Livescribe Echo 8gB. I have been interested in smartpens for a while, but always felt they were either too bulky, or expensive, or tied to special, unattractive, expensive paper, or... well, just impractical. But I had heard some favorable noise through the Intertubez about the Livescribe Echo. Also, I was on line (on a physical line at a store, not online) at Best Buy, and the lady behind me was buying one. I asked her why, and she told me she was buying it for her high-school age kid. She wanted him to have Every Advantage.
And certainly, the pitch is appealing. You take notes with the pen in a notebook, and it records all sound at the same time. Later, you plug the pen into your PC at home, and it uploads the audio and the eInk. The special trick the Livescribe does is to marry the audio and eInk, so that if you highlight on your screen a bit of ink, it will play back exactly what was said at that moment.
Cool. Even given the bulky, ugly pen, the special Anoto notebook, and the sort of annoying way Livescribe is trying to integrate their desktop software with some kind of Cloud business... even given all that, it could be an interesting trick. So I borrowed the pen and went off to do my interview with Bill Farr.
Because I was borrowing the Livescribe kit, I didn't want to use the notebook in the package. Fortunately, I had played with another smartpen, the Logitech I/O, which I ended up hating, but for which I had bought notebooks. Of course (I should have known) it didn't work. I thought Anoto paper would work across different smartpens, but it doesn't. You have to buy Livescribe notebooks. (BTW, anyone want to buy some Logitech I/O notebooks, not good for ANYTHING ELSE? I have three.)
They do offer another alternative, which is to print out Anoto paper. So I did that. 3-hole punched it, bound it, and went to my interview.
Because this is NASA, I like to be redundant, so I also brought a Sony DVR (digital voice recorder). Using both the pen and the recorder, I chatted for an hour with the amazing Bill Farr (have you read the article yet? here it is.)
The Upshot: I looked at my notes, listened to the audio... and ended up transcribing the entire audio and ignoring my notes. It didn't help me at all. Furthermore, the Echo has no pocket clip, the cap for the pen end is a small slippery thing that's hard to put on but easy to drop and expensive to replace, and doesn't fit on the other end of the pen! That's right. You remove the cap from the inky end, and you're stuck having to put the cap someplace. I would love to know how much they make from replacement caps. Also (I called) they don't sell a nice small pocket notebook, Moleskine-style.
I'm still waiting for a tiny ring you put on a regular pen which tracks its movements. That way I could use my own pen and paper. And why not have it record audio too? Send the data right to my smartphone. Until then, it's Bic. And a Moleskine.
