Mastodawn

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/27/24016791/astrohaus-freewrite-alpha-digital-typewriter-e-ink

I have no idea how such a shitty product can exist. Same price buys you a Chromebook; there are plenty of software libre distraction-free writing apps out there (try opening a terminal and typing "vim"?).

Or you could chicken out and buy a Kindle Fire Max 11 with keyboard case for the same price.

Both of these let you type for more than a day on a charge: the only benefit of the freewrite alpha is an 80 hour battery, which is pointless with USB-C charging everywhere.

Astrohaus will be shipping its cheapest Freewrite digital typewriter in January

The $349 Freewrite Alpha will be available in mid-January. It lacks the E Ink screens found in its pricier predecessors but should offer longer battery life and mechanical switches.

The Verge

Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)Dec 28, 2023

The hell? "Word processors" were a thing back in the 1960s, dedicated single-use computers that everyone dropped in the 80s because, you know, "single use."

This looks like some weird nostalgia trip.

Next up, someone's going to offer an IoT Pet Rock™ you can't lose.

For those not famliar with the background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_device)

Word processor (electronic device) - Wikipedia

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@ovid Oh boy, you really need to google for the Freewrite and it's predecessors. Started as an attempt to build a manual typewriter work-alike, only with cloud storage. Turns out there's a cult following for this sort of idiocy.

(There was a thing in the 90s in Japan for portable word processors with fold-up keyboards you could slip in a suit pocket and power off a pair of AA cells for a day or two, but they never caught on outside and touchscreens were better for kanji/katakana.)

Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)Dec 28, 2023

A manual typewriter with cloud storage? Given that I learned to type in the 80s on a manual, I now feel the pull! This sounds like a hugely fun hobby project, but as a consumer gadget, uh, no.

But still, the description makes my socks roll up and down! (Off to search for Freewrite)

David Cantrell 🏏Dec 28, 2023

@ovid @cstross now there's an idea for a product! a sock roller up and downer, controllable from your phone!

@DrHyde @ovid @cstross I guess that makes your phone a ... socks proxy?

bazzargh Dec 28, 2023

@barubary @DrHyde @ovid @cstross I'm not sure I'd want one as a present, but it would do as a stocking filler.

@stevewfolds Dec 28, 2023

@ovid @cstross Adapted to slim keyboards. Still have 2 old Apple curved IBM Seletric style long stroke ones used for typesetting.

Resuna Dec 28, 2023

@stevewfolds @ovid @cstross

Bah, the last decent keyboard Apple made was the Extended II.

@stevewfolds Dec 28, 2023

@resuna @ovid @cstross Liked being able to use the function keys from home row.

Resuna Dec 28, 2023

I just discovered that there's a USB adapter for a manual typewriter to read the pistons and levers and plug in to your computer as an utterly insane mechanical keyboard.

They have dozens of variations for different makes and models of 1930s Underwoods and things.

Canadian Curmudgeon Dec 28, 2023

@cstross
And there are plenty of lesser-priced Android tablets...

As a writer, I much prefer a larger screen to see more of my work, as well as the apps like Grammarly to help my fumbling fingers stay within the bounds of spelling.

Sure, Kerouac typed the original On the Road ms on one large scroll, but we have come a long way since then.

HighlandLawyer Dec 28, 2023

@cstross Or your phone with a bluetooth/usb c keyboard of choice.

Medea Vanamonde🏳️‍⚧️ ♀Dec 28, 2023

@cstross as a Burroughs Enthusiast I’ve been watching and rewatching Naked Lunch over the Holidays and remembering writing on manual and electric typewriters .
I would horror vision this kinda typewriter would transfigure into a fully realized NOVA Police Field Officer whose natural form is somewhere between a Nevian and one of the “Old Ones”

Pete Keen Dec 28, 2023

@cstross is this for the person who really wants to drag an IBM Selectric to the park but can't fit it in their Tom Bihn messenger bag?

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@zrail Yup: toys for terminal hipsters.

(I know *some* novelists—maybe 10%?—who like a "distraction free environment" but I'm part of the opposite 10%.)

adamrice Dec 28, 2023

@cstross The impulse toward these monotasker word processors seems like an allomorph of the impulse toward old typewriters, which is also A Thing among the Youth of Today.

It does seem these guys are leaving room for a competitor to undercut them, if there’s that much of a market. Seems like you could sell a device with a really nice keyboard, 4x80 display, and Arduino for ~USD100.

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@adamrice Nah, you need to clone the Cambridge Z88 (Sir Clive Sinclair's last computer venture, circa 1988) only using Raspberry Pi hardware (because British) and make it thinner and lighter (the thing was *amazingly* small by 1988 standards; today it's thicker and heavier than a 13" Macbook Air, and doesn't run for as long off 4 AA cells).

Atomic Orbitals Dec 28, 2023

@cstross @adamrice I was surprised the Z88 didn't have a bigger impact - did it arrive too late, were there issues in production or was it underpowered compared to competition?

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@geoglyphentropy @adamrice It suffered shipping delays (I think it was about 6-9 months late?) and there was no follow-through. However, anecdotally, it pointed John Sculley at what was to become the Newton when he attended a management meeting at Apple and realized nearly everyone at the table was taking notes on a Z88—the use case for a PDA was so blindingly obvious he decided to go for it. So ... great-great-great-to-the-nth-ancestor of Android and iOS, maybe?

JulesJones Dec 28, 2023

@cstross funnily enough I was wondering a few days ago if I would be able to transfer data from my Psion 5mx to my Win11 machine. Pocket size (at least for male values of #pockets), and yet a keyboard I can type on, with bonus ebook reader. Getting that running again would be much more useful than this thing.

JollyOrc Dec 28, 2023

@cstross thing is: I do kinda want a device that looks like this: A proper ISO layout keyboard with proper 75% mechanical keys paired with a simple screen for text editing. But I do want this to be a nicely readable e-ink screen that fits more than two lines - about a paragraph or two would be good, so I can write and edit with context. Bonus if it syncs the finished markdown files not to a commercial service but to my own homeserver.

At some point I probably have to dismantle a Kindle and then fire up a 3D printer...

Philippa Cowderoy Dec 28, 2023

@jollyorc @cstross Yeah, there's a lot to be said for what you can kitbash with the right skills here.

It's not quite where I am, but I have a full-blown theorem prover sitting on my phone (and might even learn enough emacs to be fine using it moderately seriously - though the screen size is a little small for me unless I "luck out" when I next get my eyes tested!)

[email protected] migra Dec 28, 2023

@cstross
#VIM you say? Nothing is as distraction free as that! I launched it 5 years ago on my PC and I have never been able to exit from it since!

Philippa Cowderoy Dec 28, 2023

@lgvs @cstross tfw :q isn't an emoticon

@cstross some #TechIlliterate even recommended this shit to me instead if a #Laptop when I was in school.
I told them unless it comes with the same #TTS voice as #StevenHawking has I don't want them to ever be allowed to make any technical decision or suggestion in their life!
Those things are like #TexasInstruments #calculators: an absolute #ripoff given even the shittiest #Netbook with the abundant #Intel #Z3735F #SoC running #OS1337 is more versatile.
And I literally just started that distro.

Philippa Cowderoy Dec 28, 2023

@kkarhan @cstross I remember the old Amstrads starting to show up for newer kids when I was at [special needs] school. They were awful, but who cares about damaging kids' necks?

@flippac @cstross I mean it's obvious shit like #Astrohaus is a #grift aimed at exploiting #TechIlliterate #GareGivers and #Parents who don't know better.

It's like a lot of shit solutions pushed towards #disabled and #needy people.

Speaking of "breaking childrens necks":
We could've had all the #Schoolbooks as #ePub textbooks over 25 years ago but #Texbook #Publishers refused to make that possible, so kids lugged around up to 20kg of books depending on their schedule and homework assignments.

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@flippac @kkarhan Which Amstrads? The PCW family needed a tilt/swivel base as an add-on but were <chef's kiss> solid CP/M machines if you ditched the training wheels dedicated word processing package it came with and booted off the other side of the floppy.

Philippa Cowderoy Dec 28, 2023

@cstross @kkarhan Yeah, my dad had one back in the day (and LocoScript) - I'm talking about the much later "glorified calculator with a text editor and a few other hardcoded apps" flat ones with an LCD strip a few lines deep as a display. Around in the mid-90s.

The second laptop of my school run was actually up to running Quake just about (and obviously I spent no class time modding it), but what had started out as strictly a fix for my handwriting issues had become, amongst other things, where I was writing music in a way the school was barely used to being possible...

Philippa Cowderoy Dec 28, 2023

@cstross @kkarhan Looks like the NC100s. I would've still been highly offended by being expected to use the NC200 Notebook (at least an actual clamshell and probably not as prone to breaking its screen every time it fell off a school desk), but given what I was capable of, the fact we had an IT GCSE and the fact you weren't going to get Scream Tracker 3 or Impulse Tracker running on it, I figure I had some grounds for it.

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@flippac @kkarhan Feeling my age here: when I was in sixth form my school got its first computer lab—a Systime 525 Concurrent CP/M box with 8" floppies and a DECWriter teletype as well as the console screen/keyboard, and three Apple IIs with 48K each. Oh, and shiny new 5.25" floppy drives! Even a UCSD Pascal compiler!

Philippa Cowderoy Dec 28, 2023

@cstross @kkarhan Turbo Pascal 5.5 was my first compiler, but I don't know if that's helping or hurting. Not for the laptop (the first one ran DOS Word).

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@flippac @kkarhan TP5.5 was a pretty neat language. I started with TP4, which was the first to have the modern-layout IDE. TP5.0 added a source level debugger (which was bliss to discover) and TP5.5 added classes and OOP features. But even TP4 was a step up from original Pascals—it had dynamic strings. (Original Pascal gave you a Char and expected you to roll your own using arrays.)

Philippa Cowderoy Dec 28, 2023

@cstross @kkarhan I'm currently punting on "do I add a string type?" in a language that's designed for writing [toy-for-academia] typecheckers. Admittedly the real punt is that it's already got Lisp-style atoms (or close enough) and enough to build lists in a manner completely idiomatic for my audience, but I'm damned if I'm just adding a Char and calling it a day.

Even if odds are I'll add Char, String and give String to/from functions to that list-of-Char representation for doing anything more complicated than checking if two strings are equal...

edit to add: yes, yes I do have reasons to keep the language small. I don't need strings at all for typechecking per se...

@flippac @cstross Okay, I'm checking out...

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@flippac @kkarhan Oh, *them*. The NC100 ("what if we copy the Z88 only make it brain-dead?") and NC200 ("now let's add a washed-out 16x80 blue-grey LCD flip-up screen and a floppy disk drive: also C-cell batteries to stretch your arm murscles").

The Z88's Pipedream software was at least weird and original (as you'd expect from Sinclair).

Philippa Cowderoy Dec 28, 2023

@cstross @kkarhan Luckily for the local educational authority (who, tbf, I'm pretty sure hated my entire family: they brought that on themselves) there was no conversation like:

Them: Can you tell us what you think of this computer?
Me: I'm not sure I can find the words
Them: Communicate however you need
Me: Are you absolutely sure?

...and not just because back then I would've delivered the last line deadpan because I couldn't not, and there's a risk they wouldn't realise what I was asking until I'd already put the screen through the nearest table corner!

Feòrag Dec 28, 2023

@cstross It reminds me a bit of the Z88 that got me through university, though. But that was a long time ago.

Jeremy Graeme Dec 28, 2023

@cstross I've noticed a great hobby amongst writers of my generation is getting the just the right gizmos to allow them to write, and not actually writing. I'm somewhat guilty of this myself.

LisPi Dec 28, 2023

@cstross The display also looks... significantly less clear than paper and a lot harder to read on.

Oggie Dec 28, 2023

@cstross Man, and I felt self indulgent for buying a cheap laptop for $100 for the express purpose of 'just writing '. It's a long battery life glorified keyboard with a screen and just grimly does it's job.

This seems...very silly.

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@Oggie It's a Hipster fetish item, not a useful computing appliance.

Oggie Dec 28, 2023

@cstross I have (lightly) pledged to myself that if I ever destroy my current 'writing laptop' (which again, was old when I bought it, has nothing special about it at all, etc), and/or if I actually make reasonable money writing (not big money! Just you know, small tiny amounts) I might get myself a 'ruggedized' laptop so I can not care as much if I drop it, or spill liquid on it, and keep it for years.

That actually feels somewhat 'hipster' to me, but it's a 'future possible' thing, unlikely.

Marc Jacobs Dec 28, 2023

@cstross I do wonder how the product marketing went, inside this company.

Is it intentionally a grift for hipsters? Or are the employees true believers? This is an anthropology question, I suppose.

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@trollball I believe it started with the Hemingwrite, which was a labour of love by enthusiasts ... in 2014. Renamed Freewrite, then turned into a licensing/marketing grift, discovered that Alphasmart were out of business and decided to extend tentacles into that market (but not the cheapo education models designed for kids to beat up) ...

Lots of other hipster crap here:

https://www.thrillist.com/tech/nation/tech-accessories-and-apps-for-hipsters

/1

Hipster Tech Accessories That Make You Look Like an Idiot

A backpack for my 3D printer? Where do I sign?

Thrillist

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

/2 I am PARTICULARLY amused by the last item on that list, The Field Desk, yours for only $1850! ... because it's a poor quality knock-off of a Victorian escritoire (writing box), with a shoulder strap and handle. I own a really nice escritoire, probably 1880 vintage: mahogany and brass, not cherry wood and brass, but I paid £100 for it.

Marc Jacobs Dec 28, 2023

@cstross I would gladly pay 100-200 £ for a portable writing desk. And since Victorians actually used such items, I assume it would have the bugs worked out of the design, if you will.

Also, that you own one.

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@trollball They're all over ebay in the UK. Your search terms are escritoire and "writing slope". Be warned, quality varies! The best end up in antique shops.

Marc Jacobs Dec 28, 2023

@cstross This list! Dying. Thank you.

Having a single purpose gadget for font identification. 😳😳😳

Marc Jacobs Dec 28, 2023

@cstross At least expensive fountain pens are pretty to look at. (Speaking of ways to separate writers from their money.)

A bit of context.

In University, I discovered fountain pens, and briefly fell in love with them.

My mom, born 1935, had no romanticism wrt pens. She had grown up with inkwells in school. To her, cheap ballpoints were like penicillin. Why would any fool want to go back to status quo ante?

Charlie Stross Dec 28, 2023

@trollball I had to use a fountain pen at school. (Yes, I am that old.) I have no love for them either.

adamrice Jan 9, 2024

@cstross Courtesy of @clive , I learn of the Zerowriter: https://hackaday.io/project/193902-zerowriter

ZeroWriter

This project includes all the files and instructions needed to make a ZeroWriter. It's a portable writing computer that houses a 40% keyboard, e-ink display panel, and custom software designed for drafting. And, a fraction of the price of commercial ones. Made for beginners! https://github.com/zerowriter https://www.reddit.com/r/zerowriter/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6u9zybHUFc

Clive Thompson Jan 10, 2024

@cstross @adamrice

It looks like so much fun, eh? I really think I’m gonna build one this year

Ross of Ottawa Apr 10, 2024

@cstross wow - was shocked seeing the product portfolio and the prices. At $60 it might be fair value.

Could surely make one from scratch with an #Arduino all-in for $40.