Thomas came up with an idea on how to bind his Hipster PDA together. He called it flip-top mode:
I want to share my replacement for binder clips… Binder RINGS (aka, Loose Leaf Rings). The rings in these photos are 3/4″ rings by Acco and are widely available at places like OfficeMax and Office Depot.
I cut an unused plastic pocket folder into two slightly-oversized covers for the hPDA. You can easily read through the covers, but they provide a lot of protection for virtually no extra weight or bulk.
These rings open easily for sorting or swapping cards. Use two rings for a “flip top” approach or just one for the max in random access.
It has same protection as hardcover notepad, but it is very flexible to swap in new pages. Thanks Thomas, great idea!
HipsterPDA in flip-top mode – [Thomas @ flickr]
I made one of these a couple of weeks ago, with 1 ring and used the business card holder from the inside of the folder to hold a business card on top. I really like that flipping between cards doesn’t have the potential to drop them and the covers give it added stability for writing when there’s no decent surface to write on.
Blog post: http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/?p=116
This is a cool idea for replacing the binder clip. I really like the plastic cover too.
What is the recommended method for having cards ready to add? Would you pre-punch holes in a stack of cards, or do you just poke the cards individually with the rings as you are adding them?
I have one 100 card stack prepunched, another 75 or so (haven’t counted) sitting in the inkjet printer (also prepunched) and a plastic guide for the holes sitting, next to the holepunch, by the rest of my card supply in my home office. I basically have a spot where all of the “Hipster stuff” sits together by the inkjet printer. I don’t use that printer for much else at the moment (I use my laser for documents).
For my template cards, I just print new cards from wherever I am in the house and pick up my preprinted, prepunched cards when I next go through my office.
Having them prepunched and ready to grab just eliminates any obstacle to actually using them. It only takes a couple of minutes to go through a whole pack. And, when my current stack runs out, I may try my hand at drilling them with a drill bit instead and do 1000 or so in one sitting.
I would definitely avoid using the rings themselves to do the punching. You’ll end up with a jagged hole that’s far more likely to tear.
The biggest downside so far is that most of the templates have meaningful text (like the card name) in the top left corner, but I’ve been moving to my own templates pretty quickly and I build mine without that problem.