I used to have this very clunky way of copying and pasting from/to vim. All these tutorials online would have these “settings” you could add to .vimrc that were supposed to make it possible to “yank to a special register” or something, but I could never get them to work. So instead I would

:set nonu (get rid of line numbers)
:set mouse=c (allow for a cursor to select text)
Use mouse, highlight section,  shift-ctrl-c
Then ctrl-v somewhere else.

At some point I was looking over a friend’s shoulder and discovered a much better way. The key is to install a different version of vim.

sudo apt remove vim
sudo apt install vim-gnome

Now, I keep my mouse mode in

:set mouse=a

Then highlight text using the usual vim commands (shift-v and then any of the movement keys, such as “w” and “h” etc.)

Finally middle-click to paste the text elsewhere.

If you’re getting the beginning of text cut off when you paste into vim, make sure you’re in “mouse=a” and not “mouse=c” mode. In the latter, text will paste, but some of it will get cut off.

It was a little annoying to figure out how to login to IEEE Xplore using Harvard Libraries access.

(At MIT, so long as you are on “MIT SECURE” wireless network, you can go to http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp and you will be automatically logged in under MIT Libraries).

The best method I found is that, after the domain name, but before the rest of the path, add in

.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu


For MIT Libraries, the equivalent is
libproxy.mit.edu

For instance, to access an IEEE Xplore article, I would put that snipped after the “.org” and before the forward slash.

Original URL
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7487538

New URL (HARVARD)

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/abstract/document/7487538/

New URL (MIT)

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libproxy.mit.edu/abstract/document/7487538/

The URL will redirect you to login using your HarvardKey or MIT Kerberos if you’re using the libraries access for the first time.

In short:

Find the inkscape source, and an example page (in PDF) you can print, at github.

github.com/nouyang: Dot Grid Paper

preview

example notebooks

just stapling ~15 pages together at the top. the issue I found is not being able to tell which way the notebook flipped, and it being hard to flip through pages fast. Also, at 15 pages, I started accumulating “notebooks” really fast, and it wasn’t always very obvious the chronological order. The idea was to detach them, three hole punch, and stick them into a binder. I haven’t gotten around to that yet, and probably won’t ever since the semester is almost over…

using manila folders I found lying around, and a somewhat-industrial stapler across ~25 pages. i haven’t used this enough to think about pros and cons.

the overall con, though, is that now my notes are spread across five different notebooks…

before & after comparison

in detail

i reformatted to properly use clones and the clone tile factory in inkscape; and additionally, I decided on a different formatting for the “darker” lines (before, they evenly divided the page into 4 sections vertically).

Using the clone factory I thus just have two sizes of dots: small and large. And I can change opacity, color, size, stroke, etc. for *all* dots just by choosing editing those two “source” dots. If you’re having trouble finding them, just click on any dot and “shift+d” to find the source dot.

• http://www.linuxformat.com/wiki/index.php/Inkscape_-_cloning_and_tiling
• http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Tiles.html
• http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Clones.html

double-sided

pdftk tiled_clones_30.pdf tiled_clones_30.pdf output merged.pdf

printing notes

Print at high resolution (600×600 or greater), and the only b&w printers tend to have aliasing effects — and old toner cartridges tend to produce blemishes across the pages. Print with “no scale / no shrink to fit”.

example notebooks

just stapling ~15 pages together at the top. the issue I found is not being able to tell which way the notebook flipped, and it being hard to flip through pages fast. Also, at 15 pages, I started accumulating “notebooks” really fast, and it wasn’t always very obvious the chronological order. The idea was to detach them, three hole punch, and stick them into a binder. I haven’t gotten around to that yet, and probably won’t ever since the semester is almost over…

using manila folders I found lying around, and a somewhat-industrial stapler across ~25 pages. i haven’t used this enough to think about pros and cons.

the overall con, though, is that now my notes are spread across five different notebooks…

before & after comparison