Welp, I have spent the morning playing with/exploring my Pomona DM250, and I have to say, it's proving a LOT friendlier as a distraction-free writing sidecar for #scrivenerapp than I'd expected! Makes the advertised features of the Freewrite Traveller look weaksauce, and it's only half the price.
https://artvsentropy.wordpress.com/2023/08/12/retro-writing-15-pomera-dm250/
At some point I should probably write up a comparison between the DM250 and my first portable writing deck computer, 1989's Cambridge Z88 (from Sir Clive Sinclair). 35 years on, the DM250 is half the weight, 120% greater battery life, 1000x the built-in storage, CPU is about 1000x faster, screen is infinitely better ...
And less than half the price (adjusted for inflation).
@cstross
I liked my Z88
Made on-call visit notes on it, imported them into Idealist, printed them on sticky labels. Easier than my handwriting.
Now there's a TCP/IP stack for it, I saw. Might dig it out one day.
@fazalmajid The LCD on the Z88 was very bleeding edge at the time—eye-bleeding! E-ink would be better than that, but a good OLED would be miles better than either.
Scrivener on iOS is a mixed bag—better than nothing. Scriv has increasing sync issues with cloud services these days. Literature and Latte are beta-testing a new app called "Written" that gets sync right AND has the perfect core feature set—it's like iOS Scrivener 2 done right (but it's not file-level-compatible, so a new app).
@cstross For productivity with these devices do you focus on writing that doesn’t require references or similar? Pre-load text formatted notes? Just write with a lot of of notes like “confirm dates for this reference so I look less stupid later?”
I know I’m writing different things (more smaller/technical than fiction) but your works come off as “research required” at times and wondering how this fits in your workflow.
@MacBalance I am waiting for an opportunity to find out! Because I normally write on a Mac, but am a bit wary of pulling out an M3 Air in a pub/coffee shop (easily spilled hot liquids ahoy!).
Yes, research is mandatory for my work, but you can just type TK and come back to it later …
@MacBalance I am waiting for an opportunity to find out! Because I normally write on a Mac, but am a bit wary of pulling out an M3 Air in a pub/coffee shop (easily spilled hot liquids ahoy!).
Yes, research is mandatory for my work, but you can just type TK and come back to it later …
@pdcawley The Z88's devastating weak spot was that everything in its RAM was lost if you swapped AA cells without plugging it in to the wall wart first. The EPROMs were a poor substitute for non-volatile storage. But since about 2000 you can buy FLASH memory and OS 4 lets you selectively erase/write to them in any slot. So up to 2.5Mb of non-volatile working storage is now A Thing, plus 512Kb of RAM (there's a 512K RAM/512K flash card).
That would have been amazing in 1989.
@cstross It's a rare product that so spectacularly hits the sweet spot of its uneconomically small target market, isn't it?
Delighted to hear that it's being kept alive.
@cstross I'm still waiting on hearing how it goes with Debian, but so very very tempted if it works out!
(Why yes, I will be installing LaTeX and GHC if I get one...)
@gordoooo_z @cstross If it helps any the aspect ratio and resolution is not good for viewing anything except maybe slides you produce with LaTeX? But yeah.
(I honestly think if your slides aren't readable at that resolution given the right optics, your slides are the problem)
@cstross Really nice! I wrote a blog post (in Swedish) about writerdecks, both commercially sold abd DIY. I knew about the other version of Pomona, but not the one you wrote about. Thanks!
@cstross That looks like a very sensible little device. Far more than the original Freewrite, which just... I have so many thoughts (caveat: and zero hands-on time; just lots of opinions).
For starters, as much as I love a full-fat keyboard, I can't imagine using one in a coffee shop being very distraction-free, given the regular interruptions by curious strangers (or annoyed ones asking me to be quiet). Chiclets just make sense.
That it looks like 90s era Sharp/HP palmtops is a plus, as well.
@cstross
Cool. Keep us up to date on how that goes.
I've been considering buying a used Thinkpad and putting #HaikuOS on it with #libreoffice for writing on the road.
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