When I was in grade school, I used to bring my homework from and to school folded up in my back pocket. Life was simpler then. I always knew exactly what I had on my plate at any moment by checking my back pocket.
Fast-forward to the era of planners, PDAs, and productivity software. I've gone through all the phases. None of them fit, but I took something away from each. These days I know what I want, and none of the traditional solutions come close.
I want something analog, very simple, compact, and easy to put together. When I came across the Hipster PDA I thought I had found it, but I soon found that even the hipster wasn't easy enough. I didn't like even the smallest binder clips or paperclips because they had to be removed to actually use it. Rings didn't suit my fancy either. Loose index cards are of course a disaster. The supply of index cards got almost as unwieldy as the hipster itself. To top it all off, blank index cards alone wasn't quite enough structure. So it fell into disuse.
Then I found the D*I*Y Planner, most notably their Hipster PDA edition. This added some structure and beauty, so I gave it a try. I soon decided that printing onto index cards is completely infeasible without special equipment. So that was out, alas.
The other day, I came across PocketMod. Here was something not entirely unlike the homework in my back pocket. It had some structure, it was easy and simple and cheap. It was perfect, except… I don't want to visit a website and run a flash app every time I want to print one. What if the website disappears? And what if I want to add custom pages? (There's a Windows app for that but I don't use Windows.) Also, the printouts generated by the flash app aren't quite right—the fold points aren't on the center and so the end result is a little sloppy-looking. I wish the US used A4 paper, but that's beyond my control at the moment (though I might consider ordering some online…). So the pocketmod flash applet had to be replaced.
So I decided to combine the D*I*Y Hipster and some scripting magic, and the result is hipmod. Thanks to the magic of Multivalent (I was going to use pdftk but it's segfaulting on my laptop for some reason) I can now create hipmods including whatever PDF of interest I find lying around. See the README for more information. Here's a screenshot:
