Geek Love: The Maker’s Notebook
I’ve gone through countless notebooks and journals in my geek lifetime. (Okay, I could count them, but it doesn’t sound as good.) In the last few years, I’ve gone back and forth between two types of notebooks - hardcover art journals with lots of blank space for freehand drawing and coil binding, or softcover books with engineering grid paper. I couldn’t seem to find the best of both worlds.
Enter Make magazine’s new Maker’s Notebook, from O’Reilly Media.
O’Reilly is already responsible for most of the books on my tech shelves. In addition to those, there’s also a shelf dedicated to Make magazine, which is one of the coolest mags ever. Now, the folks at Make have outdone themselves. This notebook has nearly everything:
- a hard cover that’s customizable and easily marked for volume referencing
- numbered pages of engineering grid paper
- handy rulers on the inside covers (US *and* metric)
If they’d stopped there, it would be worth the $20 USD, but they included a reference section that is beyond a bonus. The standard tables of measurement and conversions are expected, but there are also:
- resistance and capacitance charts
- standard pinouts for common chips and connectors (do you have any idea how many times I’ve had to look up the 741 pinouts? Sure, I could memorize them, but I’d still have to check each time to make sure I was *right*.)
- battery types and sizes
- common bonds (!)
- Morse code table
And my personal favorite:
- a table of “Hello, world!” code in several languages
My only beef is that it doesn’t have coil binding so that it can lie flat on my workbench, but that really is minor by comparison, and if I really wanted to, I could rip it apart and rebind it. Honestly, though, that’s the only thing I don’t like about this notebook, because it is otherwise perfect. I highly recommend this for the hacking geek who is plotting world domination through gadgetry.
If you’ll excuse me, I must go. Pinky is calling, and we must do what we try to do every day.
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