Whenever I don't have the capacity to do any meaningful reading or writing I find myself looking into better tools for writing, like the cyclist gone to seed who keeps buying new lycra on Amazon because improper kit must be the real reason he's not cycled in a year, has tipped 16 stone and wheezes when going up stairs... Anyway I'm glad I did as I saw this on Crowd Supply. Zerowriter Ink is taking interest before running a pre-order campaign. FYI all Crowd Supply projects are fully Open Hardware so this quite different from the Freewriter. It means, amongst other things, that [we/you/me/someone] can program in a new text editor, for starters. Probably extremely easily as it'll be running Linux. (Anyone fancy an Emacs based Alphasmart? That many? Steady on, don't all rush in at once...) If you have any interest in this please consider doing what I did and sign up for email updates on the project. Without the email sign-ups they cannot launch their Crowd Supply campaign proper. (I have no connexion to this project.)
I liked it at first sight for the mechanical keyboard (though not sure what 60% means?). Signed up for updates. Ok, I remember—the % means it isn't a complete keyboard, it doesn't include all the peripherals like the numerical keypad etc, just the essential ones for writing. Ok, sweet!
I tell a lie, it runs on an ESP32 chip rather than an ARM chip, meaning I don't think it runs Linux, meaning no Emacs for the masochists out there. Doesn't bother me though; just means you get a better battery life. Still Open Source its just that programming it might require actual programming, rather than installing a package.
I'm no techie, I wouldn't even dare try to mess with it, just use it straight out of the box. I'd be afraid if I tampered with it it would never work right again.
There is a companion project, apparently, that is a similar e-ink portable Linux box powered by a Raspberry Pi.
Its gone live for $199. Pretty good for including an eink display and mechanical display. There can't be much markup. See link in OP.
Thanks for sharing this. I had to give away my Neo and for a while I've been thinking of biting the bullet and getting the freewrite, but every time I moved to do it I couldn't get past the ridiculous price and the sense that the company was kind of shady. This project looks more worthwhile, I will probably end up backing it.
I just went in and pledged (if that's the right term for it). Looks like they're expecting to have them delivered by some time in February at the latest, barring possible snarls. Almost a Christmas present to myself.
For those that don't know, Crowd Supply matches orders with 80--120% extra order of their own on top, which Mouser then sells through their site. So pledge $199 and the team get ~$360--440 total, and the rest of us get to buy later at our leisure after the campaign is through (albeit with a mark-up on the campaign price).
I have talked to the man behind the FreeWriter and I can assure you they aren't shady and they aren't making a killing. But I also wouldn't buy one of their machines. For me the FreeWriter has a bit too much of the "hipster ostentatiously using an Imperial typewriter in a fashionable coffee shop" vibes. That's not a very deep product review, I appreciate. On the other side I like how Freewriter took the plunge on a dedicated Word Processor before the market was proven, as it now is. Maybe they felt they needed the hipster-Imperial-flappacrappachino vibes to market it. I would like to hear from anyone who gets on with their FreeWriter.
Okay, fair. Well anyway I made the pledge for Zerowriter last week and it looks like they're fully funded now, so woohoo.
Interesting side note: The constant improvement and ubiquity of OCR software now makes old typewriters pretty much the equal of these dedicated Word Processors in all but three ways: They weigh 5--8lb not 1--2lb. They are noisy (the best 'noiseless' models are now so old that OCR will struggle to pick up their uneven print). You can't edit of course. Except no.3 isn't really a handicap for a lot of us. More of an austere feature. Assuming you have Google Drive on your phone you can scan pages in one after another as a single PDF (takes about four seconds a page), then pop onto Drive on your laptop where you can open that PDF in Google Docs which will create a very good OCR Word document for you (although you'll want to strip out the funky attempt at matching typeface and colour). It even removes the end of line hard line breaks and create paragraphs for you.
Well, you edit after it's been converted. So it still works exactly according to the idea behind Freewriter and freewriting in general—throw it all down rapidly with no editing (because editing brings out the inner critic), and then edit after-the-fact. But of course there still is that weight factor, plus the need to buy typewriter ribbons. Do they still make those? And how about typing bond paper? It's thinner and has a harder slicker surface than copier paper. I know you can buy tablets of it for sketching, so they must make it. EDIT—Yep, both the ink ribbons and bond paper are available. Lol looks like the humble typewriter managed to hang in there and make a bit of a comeback the way the record player did.
And of course there's still the old-fashioned way. Whiteout, liquid paper, I think now they have some kind of rub-on transfer or patch that allows you to white out entire sections to type over, and then there's the ballpoint pen, marking up in the margins, crossing-out, underlining, circling and drawing arrows to where the new section belongs. I also used to type up what I called somethibng like Addendums that I would insert into the story. Sometimes there were even addendums to the addendums. Always make sure to number your pages, and keep each manuscript in a separate folder with the name of the story on it. I eventually took to stapling each story together so pages couldn't get lost, but that only works if they're short, or you can just staple sections together. And try to have spare ink ribbons on hand. I used to keep on typing as the ink gradually faded until you could just see the little indent of each letter, which I would then go over with a pen, until I just started writing in pen completley. And I'd often use a mix of typing paper and notebook paper, probably because I was a kid and couldn't always afford to buy the typing paper, but I always had school notebooks. No, it wasn't Addendum, I didn't use big fancy words like that. I just called then Inserts. There would be Insert #1, Insert #2 etc, and then the inserts to the inserts were like #1A, #1B...
Don't forget the scissors and tape method. A personal favourite as you feel like a newspaper man rushing out the front page scoop.
I'm setting up to take pics of some of my old patched-together stories from back in the day. Had to dig up my camera, which has been lost for at least a month now. I knew I had moved it from the dangerous corner perch on my table where it's lived for like 6 years (and somehow miraculously never fallen off) to a 'Safe Place' where I'd always be able to find it, and suddenly I had no idea where it was. I've searched like 6 times and never located it. So just now I decided to dust off an older camera and charge up a battery, and set out to re-learn how to use it (it's a little complicated), and I aimelssly beamed a flashlight around on my table (which has a ridiculous pile of books and papers and crap on it, like a foot high in places!), and I saw the fake leather case for my camera. I had been looking for the white plastic body of it. So I excavated the carrying case (made to look like a classic neck sling for the the old Rangefinders of the sixties and seventies), and there was the camera, safely nestled inside it. Lol, this probably should go in the Things that Make Me Happy thread. Now to figure out where to post pictures. Maybe my blog, and link to it here.
Here are the pics I mentioned aboveˆ. Decided to put them on my blog: How we did it Back in the Day (writing and editing stories before word processors)
