[HN Gopher] The digital typewriter and the unnecessarily costly ...
___________________________________________________________________
The digital typewriter and the unnecessarily costly pursuit of
focus
Author : Apocryphon
Score : 40 points
Date : 2022-07-14 07:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.emergencycreative.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.emergencycreative.com)
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| the refresh rate on the latest kindle is pretty impressive. It
| has wifi and descent refresh rate as well as a usbc port.
|
| amazon could easily add a dock that lets you turn it into a
| distraction free writing device. Hell they could just add some
| software that lets you connect it to a existing usbc keyboard for
| the same purpose.
| myself248 wrote:
| You could also do this easily on that $60 laptop or any
| chromebook just by running an editor full-screen in kiosk mode.
| For some reason, this obvious answer is not preferred by anyone
| pursuing this bizarre line of thought.
| floren wrote:
| "I'll really be able to buckle down and write GOOD stuff,
| just as soon as I get that new [pen/laptop/$600 digital
| typewriter]" is not an uncommon line of thought among wannabe
| writers.
|
| Compare with amateur photographers who spend most of their
| time obsessing over gear on forums instead of just taking
| pictures.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| The photography thing hits home. I see all these people
| obsessing over prime lenses because "thats what pros use."
| Better to to be out taking photos with a phone camera than
| oggling 1k+ glass. Personally I use the nikon 24-200mm.
| purists may scoff a the use of such a big zoom and a
| relatively high fstop but its small enough to always be in
| my baga and flexible enough to cover a large range of uses.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Yep. If this is about writing, shut off your wifi, open
| Word/iAWriter/Google Docs/Ulysses/it doesn't matter just quit
| messing with the font.
|
| If it's about aesthetics--if you want to light candles and
| put on an old jazz recording and feel like you're a postwar
| novelist living in Paris--that's totally fine too, you can
| pick up a _real_ typewriter for under $100.
|
| E-Ink is amazing for ebooks, but I'm not sure what the appeal
| of this low-tech/high-tech thing is, especially given the
| price.
| cartesius13 wrote:
| E-ink display though
|
| >You could also do this easily on that $60 laptop or any
| chromebook
|
| You couldn't because these devices don't have an e-ink
| screen. This would be the entire point of having a kindle as
| a writing device. Otherwise you would be correct
| jfim wrote:
| It's too bad that transflective displays didn't pan out,
| the OLPC display was perfectly workable and worked well
| outdoors too. It would be the ideal kind of display for
| such a device, which doesn't really need high resolution.
| antonymy wrote:
| You can skip the first two sections of this rant entirely if you
| don't care about his life story or his opinions on the creative
| process, by the way. The product review starts over 900 words
| into it, in the third section. I have no reason to doubt this man
| is paid by the word, I bet his grocery list has an ISBN label.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| I'm really hoping the Raspberry Pico will get USB host mode. Then
| anyone could build a little word processor with a USB keyboard
| and an eInk screen.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| TL;DR It doesn't let you edit. Which is frankly insane.
|
| P.S. This blog post was way longer than it needed to be.
| netsharc wrote:
| The fact that the title had an "-- or --" and took the whole
| screen on a 1080p desktop display hinted me to this...
| jrm4 wrote:
| It really is odd to me that there's not a wide range of "general
| purpose computing e-ink devices" out there, and even odder that
| this thing is apparently not that either.
| ghaff wrote:
| Refresh times is probably part of it. And once you start
| creating special-purpose devices, your market drops off a lot.
| I guess if I spent a lot of my days reading scientific papers a
| Remarkable tablet might be interesting but I don't so it isn't.
| (And, oh, an iPad works pretty well too and I can do a lot of
| other things with it too.)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Modern e-ink displays can update at about 2 Hz at highest
| quality and at up to ~8--10 Hz, possibly better, with reduced
| quality (more ghosting / lower resolution).
|
| If usage is for reasonably static material and navigation
| tends to be via pagination rather than scroll, it works quite
| well.
|
| Full video is possible, if of lower quality than on an
| emissive display.
|
| I've written a set of my own recommendations for e-ink Web
| and App design here:
|
| https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/638a8d10e041013afba844.
| ..
|
| Mostly because it seems no one else had.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Display cost remains a huge barrier, with little thanks to
| E-Ink's (the company) control over patents and I'm presuming
| excusive contracts.
|
| I've some sympathy as hardware is a mug's game and price
| competition when it does hit is absolutely brutal.
|
| That said, the 10" and 13" displays available now are
| excellent, and are being found in Android tablets (sold as
| e-book readers, but fully general-purpose). The Onyx BOOX line
| for example.
|
| Android itself is hugely limiting in numerous ways. I'd like to
| see actual e-ink laptops, and suspect we will before too much
| longer.
|
| A quick note on power use: if the device is only used for
| reading reasonably static text, battery life is exceptional.
| Once radios, backlights, and in particular web-surfing are
| added to the workload, power draw really ramps up. You'll get a
| full day or two off a charge, but not a week or more as with
| reading books.
| Qworg wrote:
| In comparison to the BOOX - I love my Remarkable2 and it is a
| Linux box under the hood.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I considered the Remarkable.
|
| For my primary use: a portable library, 16 GB onboard
| storage was simply too little. The BOOX Max Lumi offered 64
| GB, and the Lumi II has 128 GB, which I could really use,
| and ultimately I'd prefer more still.
|
| Remarkable has since shifted to a cloud/subscription
| business model, which makes me happier for my choice.
|
| I'd prefer Linux under the hood, really. But not with the
| senseless HW sacrifices that Remarkable are imposing.
|
| I'll add that Onyx's post-purchase support of the platform
| has been refreshing after Samsung devices that saw no
| updates at all. There've been about 4--5 in a year and a
| half, including specifically addressing issues I'd
| reported.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| My sense is that trying to browse the internet on e-ink kinda
| sucks, so you're left with devices that you don't browse the
| web with... and they're competing against tablets, phones, and
| laptops. It's hard for me to imagine what market you'd have for
| an consumer e-ink device besides e-readers and word processors.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Browsing on e-ink works quite well.
|
| Better if you're using a browser optimised for the medium.
| Einkbro is excellent:
|
| https://github.com/plateaukao/browser
| Animats wrote:
| The author is grumbling that this very special purpose device
| doesn't have quite the feature set he wants.
|
| The era of writing on paper was backed by a large human staff of
| typists, rewriters, fact-checkers, editors, and Linotype
| operators. Everything was re-keyed several times before it
| reached print. It's not about nostalgia for typewriters. It's
| about nostalgia for _servants_.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I'm a PhD student, and as a result often have to write. I've
| always had the problem of editing as I type, constantly back
| tracking, writing alternate versions of a sentence, insisting
| that I get it right the first pass.
|
| Increasingly, I've taken to outlining my work (like Xe Iaso
| recommends[0]) on pad and paper (helps if you have a nice pen and
| nice paper), and then trying to write a stream of consciousness
| for each section.
|
| Then, I'll go to my text editor of choice and start forming more
| coherent, cogent, and discrete thoughts and arguments from the
| previous word salad.
|
| All to say, I appreciate that typewriters make it really hard to
| revise your work while you're writing as it facilitates that
| draft phase. Same deal with writing in pen, you can only scratch
| out so much before the page becomes an ink rag.
|
| Perhaps this implementation was sloppy in that it _only_ has this
| no-cursor/no-backspace mode. A physical dial could be a cool
| alternative ("Draft Mode", "Editing Mode")
|
| [0] https://xeiaso.net/blog/doing-a-writing
| gandalfff wrote:
| Being offline helps. I've recently taken to writing on a Power
| Mac G5 paired with a Cinema display. Nothing fancy, just a window
| of TextEdit. No notifications or Internet to distract. A silent
| operating system running on a loud tower. My writing happy place.
| flobosg wrote:
| I use an old Thinkpad x220 on a virtual console running micro.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| We had something like this in school circa 1995 or 1996.
|
| It had a keyboard and a three-line LCD display. It was powered by
| batteries, and could be connected to a computer as a keyboard via
| ADB. Press a button on the device, and it would send your
| document as a series of keypresses to the computer. I think our
| classroom had two of these? I'm not sure. You could take them
| outside and write, and then bring them back to the classroom and
| dump them into the computer. No software necessary.
|
| When I try to look it up, I get results for AlphaSmart. I wonder
| how much they cost at the time. Sometimes you can figure that out
| by digging through computer catalogs on the Internet Archive.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart
|
| I understand that this is a whole category of devices called
| "word processors", but I'm a bit too young and I never really
| encountered them besides the AlphaSmart (which required a
| computer). You can dig up old commercials for word processors on
| YouTube.
|
| AT&T: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piROIAJ6Jhg
|
| Wang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuX-6761KTQ
| themadturk wrote:
| Yes, he even mentioned the AlphaSmart in the article. I had a
| Neo...an excellent writing device with a great keyboard,
| fantastic battery life, and enough storage to keep me satisfied
| for a week or so (and the editor was full screen, none of this
| "only go forward" crap). The only thing it required a computer
| for was to offload the text you'd written...and with additional
| software, you could even upload files to it and modify the
| fonts to give you more lines per screen.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| Hah, I didn't quite make it to the end of the article! I see
| that you can still buy the AlphaSmart Neo online.
| vr46 wrote:
| I love a good hatchet job and this was definitely it.
| devonnull wrote:
| This reads like a long rant about having a case of buyer's
| remorse. That said, I can understand his frustrations with a
| device like the Freewrite.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| A few comments as someone who has done a lot of writing both
| pre- and post-computers.
|
| - I am most _certainly_ not Hemingway but you could write on a
| typewriter--especially inverted pyramid, newspaper style. Yes,
| you did compose a sentence or a paragraph mentally. And, then,
| between you and /or an editor there was various (literal)
| cutting and pasting/scratching out/etc.
|
| - However, you get used to certain styles of doing things.
| These days, I mostly don't even like writing someplace I don't
| have Internet access because I'm accustomed to being able to
| check facts, look something up, etc. on the fly. Hard copies of
| research materials are just a partial solution.
|
| - Yes, focus is a thing but there are probably better ways to
| achieve it than using something that is so suboptimal in other
| ways.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| I'd like to add that literal copy/paste is, in many ways,
| superior to the way it works in a computer.
|
| If you have something printed out, you can cut up the
| paragraphs or sentences and physically rearrange them until
| you figure out an order that makes sense. It's much faster
| than doing the same thing with ctrl-X ctrl-V, and when you
| ctrl-X, the material you've cut vanishes from sight.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Ted Nelson really hammers this point a lot.
|
| Unless you've had experience with physical paste-ups, it's
| hard to appreciate.
|
| In vi/vim, the concept of seting marks then moving copy
| (especially with a split in the buffer so that the original
| / destination locations are both visible) comes reasonably
| close. It at least avoids that intermittent disappearance
| onto the clipboard / paste buffer.
| ghaff wrote:
| If I'm working on ad copy or tight marketing copy for an
| about section of a website, getting physical can
| absolutely be a good idea.
|
| That said. I have a lot of writing experience and I'm
| mostly not going to sweat the average 1,000 word piece I
| write. I do like starting off in Scrivener for the odd
| longer piece I write on a Mac.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| IME structure starts mattering somewhere above the 6,000
| word mark (about 12 printed pages, 24 typewritten).
|
| For longer works --- fiction or otherwise --- structure
| matters far more, and works written without consideration
| to this tend to show this as much lower in quality.
|
| That said, many writers (both before and after invention
| of typewriters) would _dictate_ their works to an
| assistant who would either write longhand or type the
| text. If you read a lot of 19th and early 20th century
| material, this is sometimes evident in the style, which
| tends toward conversational. I 'm presuming these would
| typically at least begin with notes.
|
| John McPhee is an example of a writer whose works are
| heavily structured, and who relies on index cards for
| drafting his stories, as well as extensive editing and
| rewriting. (See also Niklaus Luhmann and Nabokov.)
| dhosek wrote:
| I disagree with the premise that a typewriter is a lousy first-
| draft device. My old-school writing technique before I got my
| first computer was to type a first draft (on a manual
| typewriter), full of typos and ^H^H^HXXX corrections. Since I had
| a manual typewriter back in high school, but tended not to have
| paper for it, most of those first drafts were typed onto whatever
| paper I could come up with. Then, I would edit it on paper and do
| a clean draft on the electric typewriter at the school newspaper
| office, using liquid paper to fix the inevitable typos.
|
| I still do something similar now, although I use Word instead of
| a typewriter. I print the first draft, edit on paper and retype
| from scratch for a second draft. I always print that and do (at
| least) one more editing round afterwards. Sometimes I may do a
| complete retype deep into the revising practice as things become
| more dramatically changed.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-15 23:01 UTC)