How come lab notebooks are ridiculously expensive? Also, I guess most notebooks are slightly bigger than composition notebooks

I'm tempted to make a spreadsheet template or PDF. It's pretty silly to spend a lot of money on a lab notebook when you can print a few grid pages and bind the book yourself

Current status

@cypnk I like very small grids so I printed out in landscape and made some signatures for an initial trial binding to see how it feels.
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@somethingeloquent @cypnk How did you do the binding?

@lilith @cypnk I did a kind of kettle stitch, no cover yet. And I’ll probably want to do this again with better paper and some more precision.
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@somethingeloquent @lilith @cypnk We used to do this!

I got a long arm stapler (~$20) and used that for the spines of each section. Then I wrapped an uncorrogated cardboard cover around it and glued that in place with hotglue.

We used the hotglue to hold the seconds together too.

Worked pretty well. For smaller notebooks, you can skip the glue and staple the cover straight on.

@ajroach42 @somethingeloquent @lilith I have a sideways tilting stapler (I think I got it on Amazon) and it works well for zines too

Binding like this is great for books, but you can't go wrong with staples for zines

I think we should all be printing zines whenever we can. There are fewer and fewer hard copies of our lives and those are the most likely to survive

@cypnk @somethingeloquent @lilith Such a good point.

I need to print and mail some soon.

@ajroach42 @cypnk @somethingeloquent @lilith I’m loving this conversation, thank-you all :)

@lilith @somethingeloquent @cypnk @ajroach42 durable knowledge storage is essential.

I adore the advantages of electronic information but it’s fragile compared to the printed word.

I need to find a way to distribute knowledge in print more that fits into my workflow.

I’ve been looking for an electronic document template that would print “zine-style”; re-ordering the pages, etc so I could just print & staple :)

@jjg @lilith @somethingeloquent @cypnk

Depending on your printer, it's possible you don't need to do anything special.

If you have a full duplex printer (I favor the entry level brother laser printer which is about $50, I'll explain why later) you just gotta select booklet mode.

If you're using word or whatever, just set your page size to 5.5 x 8.5, and then save it as a PDF.

Adobe has a booklet printing option in Acrobat.

@cypnk @somethingeloquent @lilith @jjg

The brother also has a built in booklet option, if you're using a different stack. And it's full duplex, so it prints both sides automatically.

The really neat part, IMO, is that you can refill the toner by hand.

So one toner cartridge + a handfull of sub $5 refills means you can print thousands of pages in a go. It's crazy cheap.

Like, we had our cost per issue down to something like 6 cents? And most of that was paper costs.

@ajroach42 @cypnk @somethingeloquent @lilith interesting!

I have a Brother laser but it doesn’t duplex (that I know of). I’d be using Linux for this job so LibreOffice or preferably some Markdown-oriented workflow.

@jjg do you know which model printer you have?

Most of their laser printers have built in duplexing, although I'm not sure about driver support on Linux.

@jjg Also, if the printer doesn't support auto-duplexing, most drivers have a manual duplex mode.

(You take the paper out, flip it upside down, and stick it back in.)

I don't like that as much, but it does work.

@ajroach42 that would be good enough as long as I could do it in some kind of batch (as opposed to one sheet at a time).

I’ll have to poke-around in the printer settings and see about booklet mode...thanks for the tip!

@jjg @ajroach42 The technical term for this is called "interleaving" btw. I know my Brother printer has the brochure option, but I am using a Windows driver.