http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/09/zen-and-the-art-of-writer-deck.html Charlie's Diary Being the blog of Charles Stross, author, and occasional guests ... [ Home ] [ FAQ ] [ Contact me ] [ Older stuff ] Back to: They don't make readers like they used to Zen and the art of Writer Decks (using the Pomera DM250) By Charlie Stross This is a brain dump about a gadget I acquired recently--a Japanese grey-market import Pomera DM250--and it's of limited interest so I wouldn't normally write about it here, except the manufacturer has pre-announced a kickstarter campaign, coming in the next couple of months, to sell a US/English version of the machine. I still have the occasional vestigial tech journalist itch, even though it's been nearly 20 years since I stopped doing that for a living, so you can take this as me scratching that itch. The relationship between a writer and their writing tools is fraught and highly idiosyncratic because there are so many different ways to write. Some novelists (I'm talking about novelists because what the hell would I know about the needs of advertising copywriters or product engineers?) still write long-hand, using fountain pens on paper. (Classic examples: Neal Stephenson wrote the first draft of his Baroque Cycle novels longhand; Mary Gentle wrote 1610: A Sundial in a Grave that way specifically to slow herself down--spoiler: it didn't work--and I'm sure there are many others.) Others are stuck on various ancient word processing systems: George R. R. Martin famously relies on WordStar (running under DOS emulation); Jo Walton uses (or used until recently) Protext), even though the company that developed it closed down in 1995. And while publishers generally demand Microsoft Word compatible DOCX files so that their production workflow can be standardized, some of us still insist on using other tools--in my case, I've written roughly 20 novels using Scrivener since 2008, because nothing much has changed since 2013 when I wrote about why Microsoft Word must Die. (TLDR: it's a terrible tool, and if the only good argument for using it is that everyone else uses it, then you might as well eat shit like all the trillion other houseflies.) Hell, there are probably still bestselling novelists out there bashing keys on grandpa's manual Underwood typewriter: but these days most of us use laptops or a desktop computer. Of course, computers aren't just for word processing any more--not like the Amstrad PCW8256 of 1985, which was sold to the British public as a dedicated all-in-one WP: just put a plug on the mains cable (they weren't sold pre-wired in those days) and go. If you buy a Windows PC or a Mac, or install one of the less unpopular Linux distributions with the default applications out of the box, you get an email client, one or more web browsers, a calendar program, instant messaging (if only SMS texts), phone syncing, and almost certainly a word processor (almost every Linux desktop includes LibreOffice: macOS includes a free license for Apple Pages if you choose to download it: Microsoft tries to upsell you an Office365 subscription but will grudgingly let you use Wordpad or whatever it's called this week). Windows 11 tries to spam you senseless with advertising and sports news updates and their on-demand TV services. Apple would like to sell you an Apple TV+ subscription and a bunch of other services (but will generally desist after you say no to the notifications right after initial setup), and even on Linux, the default web browsers can usually play video and don't come with adblockers preinstalled. So computers are distracting environments that actively get in the way of the creative process--especially for creators with a touch (or more than a touch) of ADHD, which seems to be about 90% of us. Probably as a direct result of the increasing spamminess of the internet in general and Windows 11 in its own right, over the past few years a market has emerged for WriterDecks--single purpose writing machines that include a keyboard (or your choice of keyboard), a screen, and some minimal distraction-free writing software. AlphaSmart pioneered the market in the USA, initially marketing their product as a smart keyboard for education markets (keyboard, two line display, plug it into a PC via USB and it could replay your keystrokes), then developing it (via the Dana) into something a bit more generally useful (the Dana was quite close to being a Cambridge Z88 done right--except the display was even murkier, and the case was annoyingly fat at the rear, to permit the poor quality fixed-angle non-backlit LCD screen to be visible in direct illumination). At the same time, FreeWrite began marketing "digital typewriters"--initially the hipster-attractant Hemingwrite (named for Ernest Hemingway), a gizmo the size of an old-school manual portable typewriter, with a mechanical keyboard and an e-ink screen that synched anything you typed on it to your dropbox account: and more recently the FreeWrite Traveller, a much lighter device (still with mechanical full-sized keyboard and e-ink display) of roughly the proportions of the old-time Sony Vaio P-series subnotebooks. In general, though, Writer Decks are a commercial niche market in the west: nobody has made a fortune selling them, and tablets or laptops still remain more popular for most people. Not, however, popular enough to prevent a cult of DIY WriterDecks emerging, as witness this Reddit curated list of all known projects for building your own deck, generally using a Raspberry Pi Zero W (which is dirt cheap and plenty powerful enough to do basic text editing), your choice of compact mechanical keyboard, a battery pack, and a 3D printed case. The basic software setup isn't hard: here's a howto guide for turning your Pi Zero into a black box that, on boot, launches a full-screen X11 based writing environment (using WareWoolf, a pun-ishingly named minimalist novel-writing tool: you could alternatively go large and install NovelWriter instead, which adds stuff like Markdown syntax colourizing and a preview mode). But that's in the west. In Japan, writer decks are a much bigger thing and they've been quietly sold in high street electronics stores since 2008, when the office supplies company Kingjim launched the first of their Pomera digital memo typewriters. Here's a review of the Pomera DM30, a digital typewriter with a 6" e-ink screen (600x800 pixels) and folding full-sized keyboard, which runs off a pair of AA cells. The DM30 was sold not to hipsters trying to write their novel in a coffee shop but to Japanese businessmen who wanted to capture notes in meetings or on the train. I nearly bought one on a trip to Japan in 2012, but won my saving throw vs. Ooh, Shiny! because it wasn't immediately obvious how or even if it was possible to get it to show its menus and user interface in English. However, the DM30 was followed in due course by the rather different DM200: and then the DM250 provided a slightly tweaked version that explicitly supported English, just as the Yen devalued to its lowest level in 30-odd years, and I was in. So, what is the DM250? And what's it like to use? The DM250 weighs 615 grams--for reference the 11" iPad Pro weighs 444 grams and the 13" iPad Pro 580 grams--and has almost exactly the same footprint as the numpad-less Apple Magic Keyboard (the compact bluetooth one for Macs, not the folio case for iPads) or a Logitech K380 portable keyboard. It's a clamshell in grey plastic, and when you hinge it open you see an upper case framing a 7" LCD display which appears to be black and white. (The brave pioneers who got Linux working on it, however, found it's actually an off-the-shelf colour panel with 1024x600 pixels: Kingjim's own software only uses B &W but X11 under Linux can do a lot better with it.) On the left edge, you will see a USB-C socket and an SD card slot. (There's nothing on the right.) No webcam, no microphone, no HDMI out--this is an austere writing machine. The DM250 charges in about 4 hours, drawing up to 3 amps at 5 volts, and has a runtime of roughly 24 hours in use (per Kingjim--I haven't actually sat and typed at mine for that long!). The battery is an internal Lithium polymer cell, of indeterminate nature, and the wires are soldered to the obverse side of the battery so don't buy it hoping to be able to replace it. On the other hand, that 24 hours and charge time reflect a maximum possible capacity of roughly 20,000mAh, so a boringly small USB-C booster battery as backup should guarantee you an entire working day of backup power if you really feel the need to go off-grid for a week or so of writing. The DM250 boots up automatically when you open it, taking just a couple of seconds. When you close the lid, it suspends. Software wake /sleep is as close to instant as I can tell--they've nailed it at least as well as macOS on a current Apple Silicon laptop (although the latter takes a lot longer to start up if you have to cold boot it). (To switch between Japanese and English interfaces, press the "menu/ help" key to the right of the control key, then go to the "Settings" menu on the right. The menus drop down automatically, and when the DM250 is in Japanese the "Language" option is the only visible English submenu. Just confirm that you want English and the US keyboard layout and it'll switch instantly to all-in-English ... except for the equivalent Kanji menu title to bring it back to Japanese.) The SD card slot is limited to SDHC cards of up to 32Gb capacity--newer SDXC cards are unrecognized. They need to be formatted in FAT32; again, it doesn't read/write ExFAT filesystems. The Pomera software is limited to filenames of no more than 18 2-byte characters (because: Japanese!) so really long descriptive filenames are right out===the file manager will display them, but the text editor will refuse to read or write such files. The DM250 works on UTF-8 unicode plain text files (a modern superset of ASCII, and a standard part of the web) and is limited to approximately 200,000 characters in a file: my attempt to load a 130,000-word novel (640K characters) failed, but a 24,000 word work-in-progress (roughly novella length) loaded and saved pretty much instantly. The DM250 has internal storage too, of course: about 3Gb of FLASH memory, configured as internal file space and as a backup file partition. (You can configure it to autosave files on close, and to autosave a copy to the backup location.) As we're talking about plain text files, not audio or video files, that 3Gb of internal storage and 32Gb of SDHC space is ludicrous overkill: English text in UTF-8 averages roughly 5.5 characters per word, so you can cram roughly 2000 normal novel's worth of text into 1Gb of storage. The USB-C port isn't just for charging, of course. Once you hit the magic keys to switch the user interface to English, you'll find a conventional text menu across the top of the screen. Plug the USB-C port into a Mac or PC or iPHone or Android via a USB-C data cable, go to "Tools->PC link" and the Pomera's screen goes blank and says "Linking to PC", while the Pomera itself shows up as one or more external drives on the other computer. (The internal storage and the SD card show up separately--remember to unmount them manually before unplugging and hitting "Escape" to end the PC Link session.) The DM250 has a bunch of other connectivity options, some of which I haven't fully explored because the manual is in Japanese (there's an online auto-translated version of the manual but it's a bit hard to read due to formatting errata in the PDF). Notably it is supposed to be configurable to automatically connect to wifi and send a file as an email attachment via Gmail (I haven't been able to get this to work yet), or turn a file into a QR code that can then be read by a smartphone. There's also a Japanese app store only sync app for smartphones (both iOS and Android are supported): again, I haven't tested this. (For my purposes "carry a USB-C cable and treat it like an external drive" is good enough.) The display supports a handful of built-in fonts, but they can be zoomed in/out to order: I'm not a fan of the English font, but I've worked with far worse. The text editor itself is snappy and responsive and provides a bunch of useful options. While it's not a Markdown-aware editor as such, the "View" menu sub-option "Outline" displays an outline area on the left, where lines starting with one or more hash symbols (like #, ##, or ### ...) are treated as sub-headings: you can jump forward or back through the outline using the alt-arrow keys. It can provide line numbering or a ruled or grid background: it can also show two files in side-by-side comparison, or do split screen editing. The Files menu gives the usual load/save options; File->Open provides a sub-menu of recently edited files to speed switching, while Files-> Properties shows various metadata about the current file (oddly not including a word count). The function keys (and their shift/alt/ctrl states) are customizable from the Settings menu, so you can define shortcuts. Find is the usual stuff you'd expect, augmented by full regular expression search with groupings and alternates (I haven't yet checked if regexp back-references are supported in Replace). There are some bundled peripheral applications. As you might expect for a business tool, there's a built-in calendar/memo system (which I haven't explored, because that's not my use case). It also includes English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries, and a Japanese dictionary and thesaurus. (Again, not really my thing!) All told, it's a fairly comprehensive text editing environment marred by a few inexplicable eccentricities like the lack of a word count and the seemingly-arbitrary file length limit. As Kingjim are currently taking emails for early notification of an impending Indiegogo campaign for an American market version of the DM250 I'd assume that these--and the lack of an English version of the Pomera smartphone app--are likely to be fixed in the new model, which hopefully will surface in 2025. Certainly English dictionary/ thesaurus apps and some more polish to the text editor would be welcome, and as they've been selling the DM250 since 2021 they've had time to update things. (Price: I bought a Japanese DM250 via eBay for PS260, plus about PS60 in tax and import duty. Kingjim are indicating a "special early bird price" on Kickstarter of US $499, and ambiguous wording suggests this is 30% off their eventual retail price point, in which case it's a little disappointing: but if the early bird is 30% off $499, that'd be a really good price for a writer deck like this.) So. What's the point of this thing? I have an M3 Macbook Air. It's a lovely machine with a better keyboard and screen than the DM250, and with an 18 hour battery life there's not much in it in practical terms (how often are you away from a mains socket for more than 18 working hours?). But ... the Macbook Air cost me more than six times as much as the DM250, and it weighs nearly twice as much. The DM250 is something you can probably afford to casually sling in a shoulder bag (or an inner suit coat pocket)--it's about as costly to replace as a mid-range smartphone or a cheap PC laptop. (NB: this is not an invitation to tell me about how you can buy a perfectly good five year old IBM Thinkpad X1 Carbon on eBay for PS100; I'm just noting the price point comparisons for new kit.) Most importantly it's not preloaded with distractions. It's a writing tool, period. Your nearest point of comparison might be a Psion Series 5, stripped of the spreadsheet/email/database apps but with a bigger screen and keyboard. I could carry a folding bluetooth keyboard and a stand for my phone instead, and it'd be significantly cheaper--but if I did that I'd be at constant risk of distraction--and my phone is very distracting indeed, with social media and a web browser and email and games. In a nutshell, this is a stripped-down single purpose piece of tech that solves a problem in the user's head, namely how to write stuff down without getting distracted. In the original use case it was for Japanese salarymen who needed to write notes in meetings: in the Writerdeck use case, it's for writing books, not tweaking the typography or gassing with other writers on Discord or BlueSky or Mastodon. And I think it could be a harbinger of things to come. Our current internet and tech culture is increasingly enshittified (as Cory Doctorow puts it) by the pervasive process of profit-seeking plutocrats trying to extract more money from their platforms, first by selling out their customers to advertisers, then by selling out their advertisers in turn. (It's crapitalism in action.) Some of the stuff they're coming out with is ridiculous: if you recall the fad a year or two back for folding phones, Huawei are taking it even further with their Mate XT phone, available for preorder direct from China for around US $2000--it's a double-folding phone with two hinges so that it opens up to present a 7.9" or even a 10.2" display to the user, with 16Gb of RAM and 1Tb of FLASH storage on board. This is madness, both for its fragility (each panel has its own battery and is only 3.6mm thick: add in hinges and, well, it's not a good idea to drop it) and the degree to which the hardware has overrun the software--a phone operating system, FFS, which mostly runs a handful of flagship apps designed to monetize your social media presence and dodgy adware games from a variety of Android stores. This beast is as powerful as a circa-2005 supercomputer and yet it's hobbled by design and will probably make life worse for its users. If enshittification goes much further I expect we'll see a growing trend to get back to basics. It might be by way of things like the homebrew WriterDeck subculture, or buying ultra-inexpensive but powerful computers like the Raspberry Pi and tailoring them to do a single thing and do it well. Or it might be from the most unexpected quarter--a century-old office supplies company that quietly starts selling a barebones information appliance that doesn't know anything about who you are and that cheerfully works without an internet connection. PS: I mentioned Linux, didn't I? Yes, the DM250 runs Linux. Here's a blog documenting how to get Linux running on the DM250. Note that it's in Japanese (translating browsers are your friend). Also note that you will need at least a couple of 16-32 SDHC cards and you should back up your firmware at least twice before you scribble all over it! (Although you can download a replacement firmware image from Kingjim's website--again, it's in Japanese.) Also note that the halt() system call halts the DM250 permanently and it'll be non-bootable until the battery runs down completely and you recharge it. Hopefully once a US English version is shipping some more adventurous users will sort this out. Until then? Even though I'd love a DM250 running neovim with syntax colourizing and full markdown/folding support and pandoc for document format conversion, I'm not going there until some braver soul irons out the power management and bluetooth bugs. Posted by Charlie Stross at 16:19 on September 14, 2024 | Comments (8) 8 Comments | Leave a comment Unholyguy # Unholyguy | September 14, 2024 18:09 | Reply 1: I really don't have this "distractions" problem, once I get in the zone of either coding or writing it takes a bomb to snap me out of it. But fully realize yymv. I couldn't handle long form writing without grammerly+ though. is it the push notifications that are getting you? Is it "push" or "pull" distractions, things you initiate (like checking a web browser). Unholyguy # Unholyguy | September 14, 2024 18:16 | Reply 2: Also how would you see it comparing to a Chromebook? The one my kid uses for school is pretty locked down Charlie Stross # Charlie Stross replied to this comment from Unholyguy | September 14, 2024 18:17 | Reply 3: I keep almost all notifications turned off, all the time: nevertheless, I have the attention span of a weasel on crack and I will wander off and do other things/check social media/look at email/ hoover the cat at the drop of a hat. Not having distractions on board helps. Hell, for a while I had two Macs -- one with email, and one without, simply so I could hole up and write on the email-free machine. Betty4Cats # Betty4Cats | September 14, 2024 20:10 | Reply 4: Coincidentally I came across this Kickstarter for a very inexpensive Writer deck that you provide your own keyboard for: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/byok/ byok-the-ultimate-distraction-free-writing-tool I keep thinking I want a deck, but I never got into using the OG Alphasmart Neo I picked up years ago. Howard NYC # Howard NYC | September 14, 2024 20:12 | Reply 5: hmmm... UTSAPUC = ultra tight security as primary use case the fewer apps on a workstation, the lessened attack surface verging upon naught... especially without an ability to download vid's nor open e-mail / text / instant messages so... mazel tov... now there's potential selling DM250 to the DOD (and severely paranoid civilian gigacorps) based upon UTSAPUC of course we'll need one unit for word processing, another for spreadsheets, et al I'd been considering buying a low end laptop with 8G RAM, an SSD, and installing an open source word processor via ethernet cable due to physically removing the wifi card... oh such silence! no OS updates, no messaging, no possibility of becoming an unwitting DDOS bot, no spam, no popups, no nothing... only reading e-books, and other prior downloaded research stuff ... then focusing upon writing my Great American Novel (TM pending) as is said of all military plans, it failed after coming in contact with the enemy: kitten videos Mark Dennehy # Mark Dennehy | September 14, 2024 21:12 | Reply 6: It's reminding me a lot of doing college work on a VT320 (or even the VT100s) because the windows and macs were lovely and shiny and you spent an hour getting the perfect font and colours and not doing any work at all... ...and that was the 1990s. This kindof feels like it's always been around in one form or another, but never going mainstream because mainstream users just... don't really feel a massive drive to be highly efficient at work. A bit of distraction is always welcome. Thing is, I don't see it going away ever either; I mean, the slide rule is still in use today (we call them flight computers and every student pilot has to learn to use them - and hilariously, they show up in Pixar movies because they're now so unfamiliar they can look futuristic: https://www.youtube.com/clip/ Ugkxy6pXWpCRdyQL7XfIZ0ulKdK6BGJccSmc ). A solid niche and working tech in it tends to be a recipe for technological near-immortality. halfAbee # halfAbee | September 14, 2024 21:27 | Reply 7: I noticed you used the word plutocrat, while I often use the word oligarch. I wasn't sure of the difference, so I thought I would ask ChatGPT the following to try to shed light on this issue: Is Rupert Murdoch more of a plutocrat or oligarch? ChatGPT said: Rupert Murdoch is more commonly described as a plutocrat because his influence is primarily rooted in his immense wealth, amassed through his global media empire. Murdoch controls major media outlets like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The Times, which gives him considerable influence over public opinion and politics. His power is derived from his wealth and control of media assets, fitting the definition of a plutocrat--someone whose wealth grants them significant political or societal influence. However, Murdoch could also be seen as having characteristics of an oligarch, especially in countries like Australia, the UK, and the US, where his media influence forms part of a larger network of elites who hold considerable sway over political and economic affairs. In these countries, a small group of powerful individuals and corporations, including Murdoch, play a critical role in shaping policy and public discourse. But overall, plutocrat is the more fitting term, as his wealth is the primary source of his power and influence. I was very surprised by this plausible response; I usually ask it questions about programming stuff, and it will just make stuff up in response if it doesn't really know. meander112 # meander112 | September 14, 2024 23:58 | Reply 8: On the "simplified devices for consumption of written material" front, I've recently become aware of, and enamored by, the Boox Palma, thanks to Marques Brownlee's recent review. I never liked that the initial e-readers were put out by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It's only recently that I've started using a reading app on my smartphone, which, of course, has the concomitant distraction issues. I like that the Boox Palma has enough extra functionality to be able to easily get my files and apps for reading onto it, and to even serve as an audio-only YouTube player, but can't do any of the really distracting things that keep me from falling asleep all night. Leave a comment Here's the moderation policy. If this is your first time, please read it before you post. If you need to sign in and want to create a local account on this blog, select "Movable Type" from the "Sign in ..." menu. You will need a working email address. Name [ ] Email Address [ ] URL [ ] [ ] Remember personal info? [ ] Comments (This form requires JavaScript. You may use Markdown, HTML entities, and a limited subset of HTML formatting tags in comments.) 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