“What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head off it.”
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$500 dollars would buy a lot of paper and pencils.
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The problem is that many people need digital text somewhere down the line. Of course copying a hand-written draft in one go once it is done can be faster than working in a distracting environment, but I can see why people would want to skip that step.
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I have a TRS-80 model 100 in my attic. I, too, thought of it when I saw this thing.
The Kindle keyboard was awful and not actually useful for typing, though. You might as well try typing on a TI calculator.
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If we’re talking about note-taking, someone who used a paper notebook might think “oh man, I have to retype every single word, fml”. But if you’re writing a novel or a magazine article, then normally you’re going to have to go over every single word at least once anyway, so retyping a manuscript at some point is no great burden.
I think the bigger problem with writing by hand is that it’s much slower than typing. An actual typewriter, with modern technology, could still be a good solution.
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Tablets eat a lot of power (comparatively) and the displays are difficult to read on full sunlight when one is basking like a lizard and wants to read a good book.
…todo: convert the reader to solar power to avoid charging entirely.
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Welp, I guess we just have to wait for the Chinese knockoff of reasonable quality and 5% of the price.
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I think it’s interesting that people have so much trouble with distraction. It seems reasonable to suppose, then, that when they’re writing they don’t want to be doing what they’re doing. I can understand this in the case of Mr. Franzen, but it seems odd that it is so widespread. If you don’t like writing, why not do something else?
The sun gives you cancer and is not your skin’s friend. Don’t bask in the sun.
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aka “Let’s ignore 15 or 20 years of studies of how people are conditioned to distraction with low barriers or thresholds.”
And overweight people should just stop eating and smokers just need to quit smoking.
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I had an Alphasmart until a tragic mishap. However, I was never as productive as I’d hoped with it. The screen was just too damn small for how I write.
This thing is promising, but the price tag leaves me a little dry. My current writing machines are an 11-inch Dell running Mint and a 13 inch Asus Chromebook that cost me less than $100 each.
If I want to seriously get things done, I turn the Wifi off on the Dell.
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But it is warm and makes me feel good. It is good for my mind and when you get depressed with such ease it gets to be an overriding concern.
Sometimes one has to give in to one’s inner lizard.
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I’d like to see a Neo which sports a 6" E-ink screen. That would be nice.
Indeed, that would be ideal.
I doesn’t even have to be E-ink. The LCD on the Alphasmart was always very readable. Alphasmart had a decent keyboard and transferring “files” was genius: plug it in to your computer, open up a blank document and hit print (or was it send?) for it to “write” everything out.
You can root a Kindle to become a wifi-attached display, then use it with a Raspberry Pi or similar computer.
I am using one with a cracked display that is still half-good as a bedside clock. It acts as a HTTP server to which images are uploaded from a cron job. For an interactive editor another way would be better; you can use an internal utility to send text to x-y coordinates, and also control it via HTTP. Or via inetd, just send it to a port.
The good news is that it makes the DM-100 seem cheap:) http://www.amazon.com/x3000-digital-Pomera-DM100-black/dp/B0064MESSI
In a feverish fugue state, I ordered at 3AM this morning. So far, my waking mind hasn’t talked me out of it, despite diving in to comments elsewhere about the hipster foolishness of it all. I have a very specific need, and am financially irresponsible, so off I go.
One thing I noted, though, per the FAQ:
The Freewrite will last between 3-4 weeks with normal usage, which we
define as 30 minute of writing per day, with Wi-Fi turned off.
By my math, battery life is therefore estimated at between 10.5 and 14 hours. Roughly on par with a modern Macbook, if you’re doing modern Macbook things with it. That’s quite far from Cory’s “gets more than a month’s use from a full battery” claim in the BB post here, as well as the “It gets more than four weeks worth of battery life from a single charge” claim in the Wired article.
I’ve asked Astrohaus for some clarification, because that’s a significant caveat, no?
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I gotta try this one! I can’t remember the make and model - but I had a similar product that I received as a birthday gift years ago. Unfortunately it’s power-supply fried and its gone to gadget heaven. Anything to keep my focus while writing! Whether that means using a simpler tool (not being constantly distracted by everything from Twitter to iMessage - and YES I know I can shut those things down while I write) or just a simple looking WP - For other writers here: I also love Writer: The internet Typewriter
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@Daneyul convinced me to try out Scrivener the last time the BB Store had it on sale. Now I’m a convert-- I use it for all my fiction writing and a good bit of my technical work. Lately I’ve started using it for blogging in place of Live Writer. Works for me, since my Win7 notebook is already surgically attached to me.
