61–70 of 70 posts
I have an alternate proposal: • buy a ball-head typewriter. Very satisfying to write on. And you get to see your text on paper right away. • modify it to have a USB interface • setup a Pi Pico to log all text entered on the typewrite • when you connect the Pi Pico to your PC it replays the entered text at high speed.
No need for the trouble with USB / Pi. You can use an app on your phone to OCR the paper.
I've never understood these devices. I get that they're for people who just don't have impulse control, and need some sort of hard separation between play and work. But inevitably, these devices become the abstraction. People obsess over the features and look for upgrades and otherwise immerse themselves in trivialities, because buying a device still doesn't improve your impulse control.
If I had more experience in making stuff like this (and money to buy the components and other tools I’ll need to make it), as soon as I saw the price of this thing I would have started making my own clone right away and thrown the code and hardware specs on GitHub.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait until you find out the BOM for every device costs less than the retail price.
Sure, but the retail price of a ASUS E410 laptop (some celeron, 4gb ram, 64gb storage) is currently $159 on bezos' website. So for the same price, I either get some small gadget that is horrible to actually use (just try scrolling through tens of pages on this), or a full featured laptop (yes, performane-wise it sucks, but less than the gadget) and just run gEdit fullscreen. Keyboard included.
There are a bunch of distraction-free writing devices, from the BYOK to the Freewrite. They range for $100 - $500. List here: https://kadavy.net/distraction-free-writing-devices/ To me, YAGNI. Let me suggest two cheaper alternatives (battletested by me): 1. Fountain pen and a nice notebook with nice paper (Mnemosyne, or Rhodia) 2. A foldable Bluetooth butterfly keyboard ($43 on Amazon) paired to an old tablet (I have…
Like George R. R. Martin? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952)
"Universal keyboard compatibility" -- bah! I have working keyboards in my possession that this thing cannot connect to. - No ADB port for a Mac keyboard - No Sun Type 5 Mini-DIN - No PS/2 port - No PC keyboard port - No Newton serial keyboard port - No RJ11 for an LK-201 So much for universal.
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/pc-hardware-in/05960051...
"Universal keyboard compatibility" -- bah! I have working keyboards in my possession that this thing cannot connect to. - No ADB port for a Mac keyboard - No Sun Type 5 Mini-DIN - No PS/2 port - No PC keyboard port - No Newton serial keyboard port - No RJ11 for an LK-201 So much for universal.
By PC keyboard port are you referring to AT? [1] [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/pc-hardware-in/05960051...