Post written by Kal S., a junior at UC Berkeley who is proud to be an engineer major. Interested in sharing how you use your Pulse smartpen? Email Karen at klee @ livescribe.com:

Engineering majors have the pleasure of taking classes that have TONS of graphs, equations and strange symbols, so taking notes with my laptop has been out of question since day one. My handwritten notes were useful, but when I was studying for a midterm or a final, I’d come across a few parts of my notes where I thought, “What is this? Did I even write this? What does it mean?”

Hence, I started using the Pulse smartpen. Whenever I come across these “stumpers,” I just tap my notes to have my professor explain it to me all over again, as if I was in a classroom with him.

I attend Cal Berkeley, a HUGE school where the typical lecture halls are filled with 200+ students. The Pulse smartpen would work fine if I sat in the front of class, but I like to sit in the back (about 75 feet or so away from the board).

Since I’m too far away from the professor, I need to use the 3D recording headset with my Pulse smartpen, which makes the quality of my audio recordings exponentially better. The downside of using the headset is that I don’t like to wear them in my ears, so I used to hang the ear buds on the edge of my desk. But even then, it was tough to keep the ear buds from moving while I was writing.

So, I made the contraption (see the picture below) with a lot of masking tape and an unwound paper clip. This keeps the 3D recording headset up in the air, and off my desk!

This is my modified 3D recording headset with a lot of masking tape and an unwound paper clip.