I'm still writing my journals on paper. Makes it about a decade of notebooks, most of them Field Notes, kept in the archival wooden boxes. Writing by hand helps me remember and process life. Finishing notebooks give me the feeling of closing a chapter on those problems, at least for a moment.
Paper notebooks are also a very flexible medium, as most teenagers can confirm: you can take train tickets and elmers-glue them in there to commemorate a trip, or make sketches to illustrate some anecdote. Want five different kinds of checkboxes, and lines connecting paragraphs? You can do it in a paper notebook, and probably not in Notion or other digital tools.
Collecting ephemera in notebooks has been really satisfying, so I've been experimenting with something new: a tiny printer. In particular, the Liene Pearl N200 Pro. Here's some of that experience.
It's a little printer. Exactly the height of an iPhone 16, and about twice its thickness. The photos it prints are small - 2x3 inches. My beloved Field Notes notebooks are 3.5x5.5", so the photos fit really well: any wider and they'd creep too close to the binding of the notebook.
The Liene charges by USB-C and connects via Bluetooth. Virtually nothing that uses Bluetooth is reliable, and this is no exception. Half the time it pairs immediately, the other half I have to restart it to connect both to my iPhone and to the app. And it's kind of odd that it doesn't support AirPrint, Apple's standardized way for printers to connect to iPhones. You have to use the app, which is fine to use if you ignore the goofy AI features. For Chinese-based consumer electronics like this, the hardware is usually a lot better than the software.
And the photos are stickers! So far I haven't printed something from this and not wanted the photo to be a sticker: wouldn't I want to stick it onto a postcard or in a notebook? The quality's totally fine but won't replace a desktop printer or a film photo.
It prints with dye-sublimation in a three-color CMY process: yellow, magenta, and cyan. You can see the photo at each stage, and then it does a final lamination pass. The image rendering is punchy - high-contrast and high-saturation.
Then the photos work nicely as full-width, or can be aligned vertically with a squeezed left column, like here:
The printer supposedly goes through a cartridge every 10 prints and eats special paper that costs 50 cents a print.
It's hard to say that this kind of thing is practical: is putting little photos in paper notebooks 'practical'? The whole exercise is sentimental and psychological. The prints are tiny and the printer takes a good 45 seconds to make them. They're kind of expensive. It usually requires a minute of futzing to connect.
But I've used snailjet for years - a service that lets you send a postcard with any photo, straight from your phone, for $1.41. Is surprising a friend with an old photo worth $1.41? Obviously.
Have I gotten some joy from buying a ~$110 printer to decorate my little paper notebooks? Definitely. Someday I'll read the notes that I'm writing this year and be nostalgic for this phase of life, and it'll be fun to see how I was doing.