Taking notes

I've increasingly come to take notes during lectures and presentations using a combination of photos and notes. A good smartphone can help with both these, as long as image quality is good enough and you're a comfortable touchscreen typist. A 2x lens is very useful for getting good shots of slides.

For the trip RISE recently arranged to HK and Shenzhen I set up a deployment of HackMD. It's a spiritual successor to EtherPad and uses MarkDown and supports real-time collaborative writing. Crucially it also supports upload and embedding of images straight from smartphones.

I took photos using an iPhone 7 Plus, using an iOS app called BatchResize2 to scale all images. I'm not a fan of touchscreen typing however so I used a ThinkPad x230 burner laptop (that keyboard can't be beat!) to take notes. The documents could then be shared to the other people in the delegation using the HackMDs publish feature, which creates a permalink to a version of the document formatted for readability.