Suggestions on items to prepare for first year?

Veterinary Science Graduate Certificate from UofI
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Stroganoff said:
I've never bought shoes online since I have to try them on for size and comfort, even if I know my "size." That takes guts.
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Yeah I usually have to try shoes on too before buying. Some places online have free returns so that’s pretty much the only way I’ll buy shoes online
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Well I tried them on in-store but decided not to get them so I knew my size. I changed my mind after clarification about how it's supposed to fit. But the difference was the shoes I tried on were already broken in.
 
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somebun said:
I liked the feel of the Dansko I tried in person so got a dark blue pair. Hopefully not a $130 regret! I have free return worst case
Click to expand...
I got them today and I quite like them. I’m going to try them out a bit more before deciding to keep them. Got a size 38, I’m normally 8/8.5. They’re very firm in the arch of your feet but it doesn’t feel uncomfortable. There is definitely a heel but I just cannot comfortably wear flat shoes (which is why I generally don’t wear clogs). The up and down of the heel is quite a strange feeling though.
Thanks everyone who gave advice :)
 

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somebun said:
I got them today and I quite like them. I’m going to try them out a bit more before deciding to keep them. Got a size 38, I’m normally 8/8.5. They’re very firm in the arch of your feet but it doesn’t feel uncomfortable. There is definitely a heel but I just cannot comfortably wear flat shoes (which is why I generally don’t wear clogs). The up and down of the heel is quite a strange feeling though.
Thanks everyone who gave advice :)
Click to expand...
See I got a size down but I'm usually a 7. They're just wicked tight. They've broken in some but you don't have that issue? Across the top at all?
 
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Coopah said:
That's what I'm hoping for. It doesn't help it's been rather cold and I have basically no heat on for bills sake. The cold makes the leather not want to expand
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“Rather cold”

My very well hydrated self would like to remind you Californian folk that yesterday it was -50 C here after windchill lol.
 
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Coopah said:
That's what I'm hoping for. It doesn't help it's been rather cold and I have basically no heat on for bills sake. The cold makes the leather not want to expand
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Yeah, I broke mine in while I was on anesthesia during several snowstorms so I feel your pain lol. They were definitely comfortable by the end of that month (I had anesthesia the start of October and didn't get the shoes until the end of the second week) and that's with a week where I didn't wear them at all because I was on a chill rotation where we sat a lot
 
TheGirlWithTheFernTattoo said:
“Rather cold”

My very well hydrated self would like to remind you Californian folk that yesterday it was -50 C here after windchill lol.
Click to expand...
Cool, not like I said freezing ;) also not like I'm from California originally. I feel your pain, I never wear more than a heavy sweatshirt here but anything below 70 and the SoCal people start complaining :p. It's been mid 30s this week so definitely not freezing but not that warm either. Especially since I was referring to shoes :laugh:
 
vetmedhead said:
Yeah, I broke mine in while I was on anesthesia during several snowstorms so I feel your pain lol. They were definitely comfortable by the end of that month (I had anesthesia the start of October and didn't get the shoes until the end of the second week) and that's with a week where I didn't wear them at all because I was on a chill rotation where we sat a lot
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Cool good to know, I think I'll keep breaking them in slowly rather than taking them to class where all I do is sit and lose circulation in my feet :laugh: thanks for the advice!
 
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Do you mean the band over the top of the foot is tight? I don’t remember that being a problem with mine. They definitely feel different on your feet - like you expect cushion and there isn’t any, but they are shaped to be supportive anyway. I hope they do loosen up. Maybe wearing thick socks with them for a bit?
 
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somebun said:
I got them today and I quite like them. I’m going to try them out a bit more before deciding to keep them. Got a size 38, I’m normally 8/8.5. They’re very firm in the arch of your feet but it doesn’t feel uncomfortable. There is definitely a heel but I just cannot comfortably wear flat shoes (which is why I generally don’t wear clogs). The up and down of the heel is quite a strange feeling though.
Thanks everyone who gave advice :)
Click to expand...
i always get a nice height boost when I wear them haha. Hope you like them!!
 
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Coopah said:
See I got a size down but I'm usually a 7. They're just wicked tight. They've broken in some but you don't have that issue? Across the top at all?
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A little but it isn’t actively painful. Honestly I don’t find the shoes feel comfortable but when I take them off my feet do not hurt at all, which says to me something about the fit and support is right
 
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Coopah said:
Cool, not like I said freezing ;) also not like I'm from California originally. I feel your pain, I never wear more than a heavy sweatshirt here but anything below 70 and the SoCal people start complaining :p. It's been mid 30s this week so definitely not freezing but not that warm either. Especially since I was referring to shoes :laugh:
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That comment was when I was about 10 drinks in haha, I 100% feel your pain. Cold is cold and I’d probably be complaining about being cold if I was there right now. Ignore me being a drunk tool. :)
 
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TheGirlWithTheFernTattoo said:
That comment was when I was about 10 drinks in haha, I 100% feel your pain. Cold is cold and I’d probably be complaining about being cold if I was there right now. Ignore me being a drunk tool. :)
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Nah it's fine, I like to slander people for being wimps about cold too, especially the SoCal people :laugh: but it's all in good fun. I get teased about saying "wicked". Some things are just traditional.
 
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kaydubs said:
i always get a nice height boost when I wear them haha. Hope you like them!!
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I'm on the tall side and mine make me feel two feet taller lol. To be fair I got paired with people who were three inches shorter than me without the shoes on for surgery labs and stuff so the height boost was much more noticeable
somebun said:
A little but it isn’t actively painful. Honestly I don’t find the shoes feel comfortable but when I take them off my feet do not hurt at all, which says to me something about the fit and support is right
Click to expand...
Yeah, I've gotten to the point of not really noticing them when I put them on but there's never been a real "Aaah, so comfy" feeling when I put them on. But my feet and back don't ache when I have them on and at the end of the day I still feel good.

I had some issues with the toe box being a little tight initially, but that stretched out around the same time the rest of the shoe broke in
 
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somebun said:
I got them today and I quite like them. I’m going to try them out a bit more before deciding to keep them. Got a size 38, I’m normally 8/8.5. They’re very firm in the arch of your feet but it doesn’t feel uncomfortable. There is definitely a heel but I just cannot comfortably wear flat shoes (which is why I generally don’t wear clogs). The up and down of the heel is quite a strange feeling though.
Thanks everyone who gave advice :)
Click to expand...
I have the same size as you and also normally wear an 8-8.5. I wore them for the first time yesterday. When I was trying them on, they seemed a little small but I decided to get them because the arch support was very nice. However, wearing them for a few hours, they started off pretty comfortable but after some number of hours my toes started to hurt. The toe area is not really too short but rather too narrow (I don't have wide feet)
 
CoffeeQuestionMark said:
I have the same size as you and also normally wear an 8-8.5. I wore them for the first time yesterday. When I was trying them on, they seemed a little small but I decided to get them because the arch support was very nice. However, wearing them for a few hours, they started off pretty comfortable but after some number of hours my toes started to hurt. The toe area is not really too short but rather too narrow (I don't have wide feet)
Click to expand...
Huh, that’s weird. I wore them all day yesterday with no issue at the toes.
 
CoffeeQuestionMark said:
I have the same size as you and also normally wear an 8-8.5. I wore them for the first time yesterday. When I was trying them on, they seemed a little small but I decided to get them because the arch support was very nice. However, wearing them for a few hours, they started off pretty comfortable but after some number of hours my toes started to hurt. The toe area is not really too short but rather too narrow (I don't have wide feet)
Click to expand...
Yeah they rub the top knuckle for me with the toe, after they losen up a bit hopefully it won't be bad.
 
yellowappy said:
Anyone have recommendations on shoes for horse work? Looking into old posts people have highly recommend Ariat Terrains.

Figured I'd put out feelers if anyone had different recommendations. I'm going to invest in some new shoes soon!
Click to expand...

YES cannot recommend the Ariat Terrains enough! I lived in them for all 8 years of high school & college (rode daily in high school, rode 3x/week in college, did all kinds of barn work on my feet in between), and they held up really well. They’re still my riding boot of choice, and my dry-weather work boot of choice around horses. They fit nicely under a pair of half chaps too!
 
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Does anyone have any flats from Dr.Scholls?
 
Cbabcock22 said:
Does anyone have any flats from Dr.Scholls?
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No flats but I have a couple of pairs of runners from them. One pair I love and the other I hate (different models), so I'd say they're a bit hit or miss.
 
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Cbabcock22 said:
Does anyone have any flats from Dr.Scholls?
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I had those for a little while - they were cute and fairly comfortable, but they were very stiff & had a strange shape to them (definitely built for someone with a long, narrow, inward-facing foot). Definitely not the right shape if you have duck feet or flat feet.
 
Stroganoff said:
Thank you for tomato-timer.com and Pomodoro. Forgot about this site. Need something to help me on long study sessions to break and stretch and hopefully stay on task.
Click to expand...
There's also a pomodoro-style app called Forest that lets you grow little plants and trees for each chunk of time you stay focused. It's kind of nice because you can look at your "forest" over time and see a visual representation of productive time!
 
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Hey Notability fans!

support.gingerlabs.com

Notability for Android, Chrome, and Windows

Notability is not currently available for non-Apple platforms but we're tracking interest in that. If you fill out the form below, we'll let you know if we ever make a new version of the app. Thank...
support.gingerlabs.com support.gingerlabs.com

Please take 1-2 minutes to fill out this form so they can gauge interest and justify to their executives to spend money to bring Notability to Windows, Android, Apple Watch, etc. There's a job listing for an Android developer so it looks like they're serious about Android. But Windows would be a big win.

I know a lot of schools use ExamSoft or LockDown and require Windows so you're stuck with OneNote or Evernote or whatever.
 
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Stroganoff said:
Thank you for tomato-timer.com and Pomodoro. Forgot about this site. Need something to help me on long study sessions to break and stretch and hopefully stay on task.
Click to expand...
PippyPony said:
There's also a pomodoro-style app called Forest that lets you grow little plants and trees for each chunk of time you stay focused. It's kind of nice because you can look at your "forest" over time and see a visual representation of productive time!
Click to expand...
You swiped my Forest suggestion! :laugh:
The thing I really like about forest is that if you have it running on your phone and you open any other apps it'll kill the tree you're growing and then leave this ugly tree husk in your field. I hate killing trees so it's a good motivator for me to not get lost in my phone when I'm supposed to be working.
 
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vetmedhead said:
You swiped my Forest suggestion! :laugh:
The thing I really like about forest is that if you have it running on your phone and you open any other apps it'll kill the tree you're growing and then leave this ugly tree husk in your field. I hate killing trees so it's a good motivator for me to not get lost in my phone when I'm supposed to be working.
Click to expand...
I won't change my ways until it starts killing real trees.
 
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tl;dr: Note-taking apps! OneNote, EverNote, Notability, GoodNotes, etc.

It seems to come up a lot here, so it'd be cool to pick y'all's brains and share your rants and raves. Please correct anything that is wrong.

Uh, so I've gone back and forth on the topic of note-taking apps for months/years now but it's a massive life change. I used Microsoft OneNote at a job in like 2014 and my team had a huge OneNote notebook with tons of useful stuff, so I sorta kinda got to play with it, and it's pretty and colorful. But this was all on Windows laptops with keyboard/mouse. No stylus experience like with a Surface Pro tablet or a 2-in-1 like a Dell XPS/Lenovo Yoga/etc.

Overall need: I want to go all out with this and replace my Academic life, my Professional life, and my Personal life from paper notes to digital. I want ONE app to rule them all instead of learning one app for school stuff and other apps for other stuff.

SDN/Pre-Vet largely focuses on the academic side (e.g. taking lecture notes, annotating a bazillion PDFs and PowerPoints, and studying, searching) and there's typically no super top secret PHI or PII or client/patient information in course notes. But since I am making major lifestyle changes to my privacy, security, and freedom + being a tech enthusiast, there's more I have to consider.

I hope that at least my academic use case for taking class notes or CE/conference notes overlaps with the use cases here.

[Edit: Removed spoiler encapsulation]

My Mandatory Requirements:
  • Must have stylus support.
  • Longevity - I'd like something that I can stick with for many years without worrying if the app or the company will disappear leaving me stuck with 10,000s of hours of notes that are now stuck in some obsolete format. Like ideally it's an open standard that is still readable decades from now. Or at least I can save it as a more open standard like PDF just in case.
  • Absolutely require the ability to sync or backup to an open protocol like WebDAV so I can set up my own private cloud (e.g. with NextCloud) in my own home, make it encrypted at rest, put in Terabytes of hard drives, etc. I don't want to be forced into Apple iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, or any commercial public cloud where the employees/contractors of that company have carte blanche access to potentially sensitive information.
  • Must be natural and intuitive. I want a natural extension of my brain so I can focus on taking notes or working on an idea without losing my train of thought because I'm annoyed that a bulleted list isn't indenting right. In other words, I don't want it to feel like I'm typing notes in MS Word or whatever.
  • Must support importing PDFs, PowerPoints and annotating all over them.
  • Must support "web clipping" and grabbing parts of a webpage that I want to save forever.
  • I want to be able to resize and move stuff fast and easy. Shapes, charts, text, boxes.
  • OCR - I want it to read my handwriting and have all notebooks searchable. This is obviously a huge advantage over paper.

Nice to Have:
  • Free/Libre Open Source Software - I searched around on YouTube and the web for "Open Source OneNote alternatives" and there's a dozen that came back. Joplin looks promising, and it uses an open standard called MarkDown. But it requires a keyboard, and it's a glorified text editor. I need stylus support. I'm trying to move my entire life over to F/LOSS stuff for philosophical reasons and privacy reasons. Like moving away from Windows to Linux ideally. Moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Honestly F/LOSS apps are probably beyond the scope here. I haven't found a good one for note-taking that has all the fancy features, and this would requires 6-7 figures in donations to pay developers. Maybe a Foundation or a big corporation that supports this philosophy. Maybe one will come some day!
  • If it's not free, I don't want to be trapped into a subscription where I pay monthly/yearly to use this app. I think this rules out Evernote.
  • Audio recording for the situations where it's legal/ethical to record a talk.
  • Encryption at rest! That way all the data is encrypted before leaving my device with keys that only I have and maybe opens up the possibility of syncing to Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. and they can't see anything inside any of the notes.


Example Use CasesSpecial Requirements
AcademicTaking notes in class, annotating PDFs, PowerPoints, Continuing Education, ConferencesProbably zero sensitive or confidential information
ProfessionalTaking notes in my day-to-day job at work
  • Legal and Regulatory Compliance: HIPAA, SOX, PCI-DSS, GLBA, etc.
  • May contain Intellectual Property or Company Secrets
PersonalDo-It-Yourself, Home Improvement, Hobbies, Volunteering, Family StuffVaries


AppPricePlatformsSyncingBackup
Microsoft OneNote"Free" but requires OneDrive, so if you want to keep your notes after you graduate, will have to pay for a personal OneDrive account if more than 5 GBAll: Windows, Mac, iOS/iPadOS, Android, Web. (No Linux)OneDriveOneDrive
Ginger Labs Notability$8.99 one time. $1.99 in-app purchase for handwriting recognition. Themes are $1-2.iPadOS, iOS, macOS
Hiring for Android :xf:
Windows would be great too!		iCloudDropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, and WebDAV protocol
Time Base Technology Ltd. GoodNotes$7.99 one timeiPadOS, iOS, macOSiCloudDropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive


There's a dozen or so others, but this is a PITA. Will revisit later lol.


Bottom Line at this Point
  • OneNote - As AWESOME and fully-features as OneNote is, Microsoft is hardcore requiring everything be stored in OneDrive. This is a non-issue for academic use as most schools provide this to students for free. Like 1 TB or whatever. When you graduate, you'll have to transfer to your own personal OneDrive account and pay monies for the privilege of still having your notes. If I'm wrong, please lemme know. This seems like a dealbreaker for me, since I don't want to be married to Microsoft for life paying money or else. With no WebDAV support, I can't sync to my own private NextCloud at home.
  • GoodNotes - This looks so similar to Notability and offers a lot. I think it has more color support vs. Notability's couple dozen colors. I need WebDAV support, and they've had this on their to-do list for years. I'd also like more support than just Apple iPad/iPhone/Mac.
  • Notability - This is literally the only one so far that supports WebDAV, so I can turn off iCloud syncing and just auto-backup to my own NextCloud server. For 99.99999% of people here though, it supports all the major ones like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.

I don't have an iPad, and I'm not an Apple person, since I'm trying to move to free and open source. But at this point, it's all commercial stuff. If Notability comes out for Android, I could maybe find a decent tablet and go from there, but the market is crap right now (Samsung is iffy to me because of bloatware and lack of security updates.) I like Apple's A13 Bionic chips - fast as heck. I like Apple pushes out security updates instantly and you are good for 5+ years. I despise Apple's hostility to "Right to Repair." If I buy a $1000 iPad Pro and it craps out, the Genius Bar people will push for replacement. Even if the fix is actually free! (They are salespeople.)

There's a huge Windows ecosystem of 2-in-1s. The Microsoft Surface tablets and Microsoft Surface Book laptop are generally solid. There's Dell XPS 2-in-1. There's Lenovo Yoga(?).

I digress: It's important to check with your school's computer requirements. Many will require Windows for test-taking. You can buy an iPad for Notability and a Windows laptop for tests. Or get a Windows 2-in-1.

For me? I'm personally trying to move away from Windows so that rules out...most of the market except Apple iPad line or Samsung/Asus tablets. Maybe a high-end Samsung tablet with a good stylus + Notability for Android? :thinking:

This post took forever to write, but this is legitimately a massive life change for me, especially if I want to switch over my professional life, personal life too and not just school notes.

Lots of good videos, but this one was well put together:



If you need audio recording, only Notability has that. GoodNotes doesn't.

Does the highlighter still suck in Notability though where it layers and smudges?
 
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SkiOtter said:
If you hold down at the beginning of your highlight and then pull to the end of that sentence/line it’ll make a straight line if that’s what you’re asking.
Click to expand...
This video should start at 7:10 mark


Like Notability it just layers the highlighter like irl. GoodNotes does it in the background. That's the only minor complaint; otherwise it looks awesome.
 
Stroganoff said:
tl;dr: Note-taking apps! OneNote, EverNote, Notability, GoodNotes, etc.

It seems to come up a lot here, so it'd be cool to pick y'all's brains and share your rants and raves. Please correct anything that is wrong.

Uh, so I've gone back and forth on the topic of note-taking apps for months/years now but it's a massive life change. I used Microsoft OneNote at a job in like 2014 and my team had a huge OneNote notebook with tons of useful stuff, so I sorta kinda got to play with it, and it's pretty and colorful. But this was all on Windows laptops with keyboard/mouse. No stylus experience like with a Surface Pro tablet or a 2-in-1 like a Dell XPS/Lenovo Yoga/etc.

Overall need: I want to go all out with this and replace my Academic life, my Professional life, and my Personal life from paper notes to digital. I want ONE app to rule them all instead of learning one app for school stuff and other apps for other stuff.

SDN/Pre-Vet largely focuses on the academic side (e.g. taking lecture notes, annotating a bazillion PDFs and PowerPoints, and studying, searching) and there's typically no super top secret PHI or PII or client/patient information in course notes. But since I am making major lifestyle changes to my privacy, security, and freedom + being a tech enthusiast, there's more I have to consider.

I hope that at least my academic use case for taking class notes or CE/conference notes overlaps with the use cases here.

My Mandatory Requirements:
  • Must have stylus support.
  • Longevity - I'd like something that I can stick with for many years without worrying if the app or the company will disappear leaving me stuck with 10,000s of hours of notes that are now stuck in some obsolete format. Like ideally it's an open standard that is still readable decades from now. Or at least I can save it as a more open standard like PDF just in case.
  • Absolutely require the ability to sync or backup to an open protocol like WebDAV so I can set up my own private cloud (e.g. with NextCloud) in my own home, make it encrypted at rest, put in Terabytes of hard drives, etc. I don't want to be forced into Apple iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, or any commercial public cloud where the employees/contractors of that company have carte blanche access to potentially sensitive information.
  • Must be natural and intuitive. I want a natural extension of my brain so I can focus on taking notes or working on an idea without losing my train of thought because I'm annoyed that a bulleted list isn't indenting right. In other words, I don't want it to feel like I'm typing notes in MS Word or whatever.
  • Must support importing PDFs, PowerPoints and annotating all over them.
  • Must support "web clipping" and grabbing parts of a webpage that I want to save forever.
  • I want to be able to resize and move stuff fast and easy. Shapes, charts, text, boxes.
  • OCR - I want it to read my handwriting and have all notebooks searchable. This is obviously a huge advantage over paper.

Nice to Have:
  • Free/Libre Open Source Software - I searched around on YouTube and the web for "Open Source OneNote alternatives" and there's a dozen that came back. Joplin looks promising, and it uses an open standard called MarkDown. But it requires a keyboard, and it's a glorified text editor. I need stylus support. I'm trying to move my entire life over to F/LOSS stuff for philosophical reasons and privacy reasons. Like moving away from Windows to Linux ideally. Moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Honestly F/LOSS apps are probably beyond the scope here. I haven't found a good one for note-taking that has all the fancy features, and this would requires 6-7 figures in donations to pay developers. Maybe a Foundation or a big corporation that supports this philosophy. Maybe one will come some day!
  • If it's not free, I don't want to be trapped into a subscription where I pay monthly/yearly to use this app. I think this rules out Evernote.
  • Audio recording for the situations where it's legal/ethical to record a talk.
  • Encryption at rest! That way all the data is encrypted before leaving my device with keys that only I have and maybe opens up the possibility of syncing to Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. and they can't see anything inside any of the notes.


Example Use CasesSpecial Requirements
AcademicTaking notes in class, annotating PDFs, PowerPoints, Continuing Education, ConferencesProbably zero sensitive or confidential information
ProfessionalTaking notes in my day-to-day job at work
  • Legal and Regulatory Compliance: HIPAA, SOX, PCI-DSS, GLBA, etc.
  • May contain Intellectual Property or Company Secrets
PersonalDo-It-Yourself, Home Improvement, Hobbies, Volunteering, Family StuffVaries


AppPricePlatformsSyncingBackup
Microsoft OneNote"Free" but requires OneDrive, so if you want to keep your notes after you graduate, will have to pay for a personal OneDrive account if more than 5 GBAll: Windows, Mac, iOS/iPadOS, Android, Web. (No Linux)OneDriveOneDrive
Ginger Labs Notability$8.99 one time. $1.99 in-app purchase for handwriting recognition. Themes are $1-2.iPadOS, iOS, macOS
Hiring for Android :xf:
Windows would be great too!		iCloudDropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, and WebDAV protocol
Time Base Technology Ltd. GoodNotes$7.99 one timeiPadOS, iOS, macOSiCloudDropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive


There's a dozen or so others, but this is a PITA. Will revisit later lol.


Bottom Line at this Point
  • OneNote - As AWESOME and fully-features as OneNote is, Microsoft is hardcore requiring everything be stored in OneDrive. This is a non-issue for academic use as most schools provide this to students for free. Like 1 TB or whatever. When you graduate, you'll have to transfer to your own personal OneDrive account and pay monies for the privilege of still having your notes. If I'm wrong, please lemme know. This seems like a dealbreaker for me, since I don't want to be married to Microsoft for life paying money or else. With no WebDAV support, I can't sync to my own private NextCloud at home.
  • GoodNotes - This looks so similar to Notability and offers a lot. I think it has more color support vs. Notability's couple dozen colors. I need WebDAV support, and they've had this on their to-do list for years. I'd also like more support than just Apple iPad/iPhone/Mac.
  • Notability - This is literally the only one so far that supports WebDAV, so I can turn off iCloud syncing and just auto-backup to my own NextCloud server. For 99.99999% of people here though, it supports all the major ones like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.

I don't have an iPad, and I'm not an Apple person, since I'm trying to move to free and open source. But at this point, it's all commercial stuff. If Notability comes out for Android, I could maybe find a decent tablet and go from there, but the market is crap right now (Samsung is iffy to me because of bloatware and lack of security updates.) I like Apple's A13 Bionic chips - fast as heck. I like Apple pushes out security updates instantly and you are good for 5+ years. I despise Apple's hostility to "Right to Repair." If I buy a $1000 iPad Pro and it craps out, the Genius Bar people will push for replacement. Even if the fix is actually free! (They are salespeople.)

There's a huge Windows ecosystem of 2-in-1s. The Microsoft Surface tablets and Microsoft Surface Book laptop are generally solid. There's Dell XPS 2-in-1. There's Lenovo Yoga(?).

I digress: It's important to check with your school's computer requirements. Many will require Windows for test-taking. You can buy an iPad for Notability and a Windows laptop for tests. Or get a Windows 2-in-1.

For me? I'm personally trying to move away from Windows so that rules out...most of the market except Apple iPad line or Samsung/Asus tablets. Maybe a high-end Samsung tablet with a good stylus + Notability for Android? :thinking:

This post took forever to write, but this is legitimately a massive life change for me, especially if I want to switch over my professional life, personal life too and not just school notes.

Lots of good videos, but this one was well put together:



If you need audio recording, only Notability has that. GoodNotes doesn't.


Does the highlighter still suck in Notability though where it layers and smudges?
Click to expand...

I've tested 10+ note taking or PDF annotating apps and none does exactly what I want it to. It's very disheartening. I think there's a lot better options being developed for the iOS (and other mobiles OSs for iPads) but they've left MacOS by the wayside. It sucks
 
blueheeler said:
Any backpack suggestions?
Click to expand...
Personally, I've always been a fan of taking my laptop case and chucking it into a $10 tote bag from old navy, along with ~22.5 pens and pencils, random makeup, plastic silverware in case I stumble across some free mac n cheese without utensils, crumpled receipts, a bottle of advil, a can of seltzer +/- my wallet/keys/student ID

(more serious answer: Amazon has some cute ones that aren't huge/heavy and also aren't too expensive. Can't find the exact one I have, but it looks a little like this. There are also many anti-theft designs these days, and those seem like a generally good idea for life/traveling as well as school. Although tbh I use the tote bag.)
 
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blueheeler said:
Any backpack suggestions?
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My $35 Jansport was purchased in 2013 from Office Depot. The Jansport before that was purchased in 2007ish. The bottom is wearing through some, but I don't put pens/pencils/small things in that big pocket. Has enough pockets to carry everything I need, without letting me basically live out of my backpack. I also now only carry a folder, binder, clipboard, surface pro, keyboard, two notebooks, and a planner in the big pocket. That way I actually don't accidentally overload the backpack.
 
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batsenecal said:
My $35 Jansport was purchased in 2013 from Office Depot. The Jansport before that was purchased in 2007ish. The bottom is wearing through some, but I don't put pens/pencils/small things in that big pocket. Has enough pockets to carry everything I need, without letting me basically live out of my backpack. I also now only carry a folder, binder, clipboard, surface pro, keyboard, two notebooks, and a planner in the big pocket. That way I actually don't accidentally overload the backpack.
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I have an obnoxiously green Jansport that I got in 2016 to replace the one I'd had since 2006 (and which was still functional, I just thought it was ugly). I love it so much :biglove:
 
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SkiOtter said:
Looooove the Dakine brand. I used to go through a backpack (or two) a year in school and this one is the only one that has lasted me YEARS. I’ve had the same one since 2012.
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I got my Dakine before vet school - it’s made of recycled soda bottles - and it does look a bit worn but it’s still a solid bag all these years later.
 
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My L.L. Bean Turbo Transit (their largest) from 2002 won't die. The newer ones have all the fancy pockets.
(Also the waist strap makes you look like a dork if you use it, but omg it takes the load off your upper back and shoulders.)
 
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I wore the danskos for the first time on my feet all day today. They held up really well, my feet did not ache like they usually do, but I did get some mild discomfort in my arches after a while, they expect me to have them or something. I took them off at the end of the clinic day and my feet refused to lie flat (that's what it felt like anyways). Interesting sensation. But as soon as they were off, no more discomfort. My back didn't hurt either. Cool, maybe if I keep it up the arches of my feet won't hurt either
 
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SkiOtter said:
Looooove the Dakine brand. I used to go through a backpack (or two) a year in school and this one is the only one that has lasted me YEARS. I’ve had the same one since 2012.
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twelvetigers said:
I got my Dakine before vet school - it’s made of recycled soda bottles - and it does look a bit worn but it’s still a solid bag all these years later.
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I went ahead and bought a Dakine backpack. I love it! It has six pockets. :eek: It's slightly too large for my petite stature, but I'll live.
 
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I’ve had my dakine for 8 years! How has yours already died?! An LL Bean is actually one of the backpacks that died on me in high school after about 5 months :bag:
 
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