kistaro

Something I've been getting the hang of as of late: effective use of computerized tools, or the fine art of actually making my software work together. MS OneNote is wonderful for keeping all my notes in one place, but it's also useful because I study best with a large fleet of highlighters in-hand. OneNote lets me read in arbitrary electronic documents (via a series of screenshots, or now a decoy printer driver I've found online), store them with the rest of my notes, and highlight/margin-scrawl the heck out of them like I do to physical texts. The problem with that is that it's desktop PC only; there's no way to take a marked document with me.

Enter RepliGo, a decoy printer driver to convert damn near anything to a PocketPC-legible format I can attack with digital highlighters. Order is important: OneNote stores foreign documents as images, and Repligo's highlighters are text-bound rather thon the free pens of OneNote. No problem- print to RepliGo, study and mark up there (using the PC and PPC viewers), then print into OneNote. My ON text notes print fine into RepliGo- for read only, as RG's editing is restricted to highlights and margin notes. But being able to read my marked, formatted notes is good enough.

It's all in having the right tools. Word would be a disaster for the Technical Writing assignment I'm about to start on- but my father's copy of Adobe PageMaker he got and has no clue how to use so he gave up on it? Mine! Perfect for the Job, and the second $500 piece of software I've gotten for free from him for his not knowing how to use it. (Visio was first.) Works for me...

I'm home again for this weekend My PocketPC (with which I am making this post) works fine on our wireless network, and being home gives me a better chance to finally get over this damn cold- and to recover from a hell of a week of homework.

But back to my studies...