i haz nyu riting macheen
Nov. 14th, 2009 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321T'h gave me an Alphasmart Neo for my birthday! I love it!
Yes, the LJ friends I took advice from all advised against it but why take advice if not to ignore it with worried abandon? Anyway, after pussyfooting around the machine on my actual birthday, I then plunged in and gave it test drives and I am loving it.
Why am I loving it?
• It weighs nothing. I can balance it on a finger.
• It is green.
• It is something from the 1970s. It takes me back to the hardcore, hands-on, lo-tech days of industrial typing.
• It is 100 percent portable. I am free of powerpoints, sockets, cables and extension leads. I need not the national power grid!!
• Its batteries last 700 hours.
• It has no internet and nothing on it to distract. Well, it has a typing programme (fantastic for use with t'sons except that I don't want them to get their paws on it), and it's amazing how distracted one can make myself by doing word and character and paragraph counts, but in sum: no distractions!
• It is a bloke magnet. I sat in the university grad café and a young American chap came up to me, very polite, and said, 'Excuse me and sorry to disturb you but what is that?'
• I have already typed 7818 words into it.
• Every night I move text onto my laptop so the fear of the machine being stolen is much less. With the laptop, I lived in constant panic: what if it gets stolen and my life is gone? What if it rains? What if it falls out of the bicycle basket?
• It has no hinged screen. You need not lift up anything or be afraid that it's not robust enough to withstand being carried about. One person on t'interwebs said he'd dropped it on the floor repeatedly to prove how robust it is; I'm not trying this on purpose but it is not a racehorse, it's a draught horse!
• When you plug the USB cable into the machine and into the laptop, it transfers text in a most interesting and 1970s way. The words get typed, letter by letter, as if typed there and then by a ghost figure, onto your screen. You can sit and watch them appear, as per an old-fashioned dot matrix printer or telegraphic ticker tape.
• There is no mouse. It is amazing (and unexpected) how liberating the loss of the mouse can be!
• I thought the tiny screen would be the one drawback. It contains six lines against an LCD background, reminiscent of a pocket calculator. (You can set it to 2 - 6 lines.) But it hasn't proved to be a drawback at all. When I'm out and about, doing portable writing, I'm not editing anyway. And when I do edit, I need to print out because I find even the laptop and desktop screen too limiting: I need to see all the pages. In fact, it encourages a forward momentum because there's not the distraction of reading everything back to yourself.
• It turns on instantly. This saves about 5783 hours of my adult life spent waiting for computers to boot up, applications to load, files to be located and passwords to be entered.
• It saves automatically. All you do is type; you need think of nothing else.
• It is basically a pencil. It does everything a pencil does, except that you don't need to type anything up in order to transfer it to an electronic medium and that it is legible.
• When I have it on my lap, I feel like Rodney McKay with his 'tablet'! It is a Mary Sue!!
Yes, the LJ friends I took advice from all advised against it but why take advice if not to ignore it with worried abandon? Anyway, after pussyfooting around the machine on my actual birthday, I then plunged in and gave it test drives and I am loving it.
Why am I loving it?
• It weighs nothing. I can balance it on a finger.
• It is green.
• It is something from the 1970s. It takes me back to the hardcore, hands-on, lo-tech days of industrial typing.
• It is 100 percent portable. I am free of powerpoints, sockets, cables and extension leads. I need not the national power grid!!
• Its batteries last 700 hours.
• It has no internet and nothing on it to distract. Well, it has a typing programme (fantastic for use with t'sons except that I don't want them to get their paws on it), and it's amazing how distracted one can make myself by doing word and character and paragraph counts, but in sum: no distractions!
• It is a bloke magnet. I sat in the university grad café and a young American chap came up to me, very polite, and said, 'Excuse me and sorry to disturb you but what is that?'
• I have already typed 7818 words into it.
• Every night I move text onto my laptop so the fear of the machine being stolen is much less. With the laptop, I lived in constant panic: what if it gets stolen and my life is gone? What if it rains? What if it falls out of the bicycle basket?
• It has no hinged screen. You need not lift up anything or be afraid that it's not robust enough to withstand being carried about. One person on t'interwebs said he'd dropped it on the floor repeatedly to prove how robust it is; I'm not trying this on purpose but it is not a racehorse, it's a draught horse!
• When you plug the USB cable into the machine and into the laptop, it transfers text in a most interesting and 1970s way. The words get typed, letter by letter, as if typed there and then by a ghost figure, onto your screen. You can sit and watch them appear, as per an old-fashioned dot matrix printer or telegraphic ticker tape.
• There is no mouse. It is amazing (and unexpected) how liberating the loss of the mouse can be!
• I thought the tiny screen would be the one drawback. It contains six lines against an LCD background, reminiscent of a pocket calculator. (You can set it to 2 - 6 lines.) But it hasn't proved to be a drawback at all. When I'm out and about, doing portable writing, I'm not editing anyway. And when I do edit, I need to print out because I find even the laptop and desktop screen too limiting: I need to see all the pages. In fact, it encourages a forward momentum because there's not the distraction of reading everything back to yourself.
• It turns on instantly. This saves about 5783 hours of my adult life spent waiting for computers to boot up, applications to load, files to be located and passwords to be entered.
• It saves automatically. All you do is type; you need think of nothing else.
• It is basically a pencil. It does everything a pencil does, except that you don't need to type anything up in order to transfer it to an electronic medium and that it is legible.
• When I have it on my lap, I feel like Rodney McKay with his 'tablet'! It is a Mary Sue!!