pencil

Yeah, I thought this was a Web page advertising an actual pencil.

But I was afraid that if I dropped my pencil, I might miss something that could change my life. Now that's what I call a good speaker.

Why do they use a pencil? Also, won't the future be one of neural interfaces?

Some days I had to fight just for him to keep his head up, but then one day, he brought a pen and pencil to class. I almost cried, I was so executed.

Have you considered a pencil and a paper? Crayons?

When we got home I got out a pad and pencil and got her to write down 0, then 1, then asked her, if you only had two digits, what would come next? Tentatively she wrote 1 0.

Plus anyone who's ever been near a 2CV know you could probably drill through the metal with a pencil if you tried hard enough. Edit: some more info on why it's possible.

The iPad mini video with the pencil reminded me of Facebook's terrible Chair ad. I miss the lightness and humor of watching a John Hodgman riff with what's-his-name.

My father used to give me similar advice when I struggled with physics problems: "Keep your pencil moving." Along similar lines, John Carmack once said: "If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."

We hear "pencils down", and so the break period comes around. I comply, and the teacher collects our tests. I then picked up my pencil again and started doing a bunch of math, trying to find out how many questions there were per section, or how many multiple choice there were in total, basic things like that.

Marking up a piece of paper with post it notes, pencil marks, and highlighter is a tactile experience that even the best styluses simply can't match. The lack of "UI" between you and the annotations helps tremendously with processing and retention.

Brow furrowed, pencil gripped tight between teeth, hunched over a typewritter, tearing pages out and throwing them into an overflowing waste basket, staring at the ceiling praying for inspiration. Picture a developer.

The real issue has always been solving the customer's problem, whether I had to dig deeply into the architecture, use fashionable high level tools, or just resort to pencil, paper, and duct tape. Some of my most rewarding accomplishments have been decidedly "low tech".

Failing to reproduce experimental results with broken equipment then faking the data with an excel function to get the teachers off my back so I could go back to doing something useful like staring out of the window, or using the magnesium ribbon to heat-seal peoples pencil cases shut. Good to know that it carries on up to the undergraduate level.

Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for visual feedback from a screen, these are not good experiences. Even if you discount the "gorilla arm syndrome" that StavrosK quite rightly points out here, the fatigue of trying to perform fine and accurate motion without physical stimuli for your hands and fingers to respond to is significant.

What is the way forward where we can use something like this pencil with its smart palm rejection and erase, hack together our own physical drafting tool, and plug them both in to existing software by writing a little adapter? It makes me wonder whether we need to go back and steal some of the bits of plan9/inferno: a single abstraction around sharing both data and devices, a natural way to multiplex input and output streams, and transparent network sharing of everything.

Next up, Pages 6 - a piece of paper and a pencil!" The editing is very intuitive. You just rub the other end of the pencil on the paper - very nice. The motion feels like a tablet." "There are way more pages of paper the Apple devices, Apple is just skating to the puck here." "Most people want simpler word processing. Apple has listened to its users - this is so easy a child could do it." "I prefer Apple's minimalism to a complicated and expensive device. Paper and pencil just works."

Did anyone else read this at first as a very well executed parody website explaining all the benefits of using traditional paper and pencil? I sniggered when I read "Our adaptive palm rejection instantly knows whether its your hand or Pencil touching the page."