The Alphasmart Neo 2: the Anti-Winword.exe

The following was written on my latest acquisition: an Alphasmart Neo 2 word processor. It's basically the world's least impressive LCD screen mated to a a full-sized keyboard. For a writer, it is mana from heaven in a world riven with gadgets and gizmos of increasing price and decreasing utility. Despite its spartan appearance, the Neo 2 is not all that old, its manufacturer only ending production in 2013. Its sheer existence—in the post-convergence period—is a miracle worth exploring later on. But now, the words.

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Here I am. Typing away for the first time on this thing. Just me, a proper keyboard and my words, displayed on the world’s most piss-poor LCD screen. I’m in heaven.

Introducing the Alphasmart Neo 2. In this age of convergence—let’s face it, post-convergence—this is a device which does one thing and nothing else. It’s a word processor, not dissimilar to the types which used to be mated to a printer/typewriter thing, and spit out the fruits of it labour on the wonderful dot matrix printer paper I and many of my cohort grew up drawing on. I feel I can just write with this thing. It doesn’t matter much what I write, but the words are coming down the fingers. I expect such a device will get some looks, but it works really well. So well, I might have grab a couple of them to ensure I have a backup or two.

I think I can probably just sit here and watch the world going by. My touch typing is okay, although I have some troubles as I migrate between Mac and PC keyboards. The Apple Extended Keyboards—the best keyboards ever made—mark their home keys as K and G; PC keyboard tend to mark F and J. Take a look on your keyboard, they’re little bumps which help tell the fingers where to go next. But I digress, none of this should prevent me from writing something of at least a vague interest on here. And technological determinism is bullshit.

I wouldn’t call myself a writer, but words matter to me. Words matter to me so much that I piss about trying to find not only the perfect words, but the perfect tool with which to scribe them. I was listening to an interview with Geoff Dyer recently on the sort of podcast that talks a lot about Writing (with a capital W). Dyer is, of course, an incredibly talented yet incredibly unpretentious writer who has a knack for making almost any topic interesting. His latest book is a blow-by-blow critique—though 'critique' is far too serious a descriptor—of the Richard Burton/Clint Eastwood film Where Eagles Dare.

The interviewer asked whether Dyer has any particular writing system (longhand; word processor) or whether he has anywhere in particular he must write. Dyer gave one of those disarming answers that fills mere mortal wordsmiths with joy. He, of course, uses a computer (what sane person wouldn’t) but can write almost anywhere or—as he corrects himself—he can not write anywhere, that is to say it is equally easy and equally difficult regardless of his location.

That is, I reckon, an entreaty to all of us to get out (or in) there and get those words on the page. They won’t write themselves. Now, how the fuck do I get the words out of here?

Overheard: Google Home

“Oh I soooo want Google Home,” one woman said to her colleague as they commuted into the city.

The benefits were self-evident, she said, like being able ask the omnipresent connected listening device to convert ounces into grams when cooking in the kitchen, “But because my husband works with computers — like, how do I describe it, like…”

“Like a competitor?” The colleague asked.

“No, not a competitor, but he works with like with spyware and that sort of stuff, Google products are off the shopping list.”

The colleague made a sympathetic disappointed noise, “I love my Google Home. It’s so good.”

“He’s concerned about like security and hacking and stuff.”

“Oh yeah, but you know, you’d like to think a company like Google would be protected from hackers and stuff,” the colleague said.

“Yeah if you couldn’t trust Google, who could you trust? They’d have to be safe from all that. They’re so big.”

“Exactly. It’s just so great, so convenient, just being able to ask it anything…”

“My husband always talks about how these things are always listening…but seriously, good luck to anyone listening to our conversations. They’d be bored in a few seconds!”

Politicians Jumping On-Line to Surf the Information Super Highway

Insert naff cyber stock image here

I repeat, yet again, my call for the internet companies who terrorists have again used to communicate to be held legally liable for content.

— John Mann (@JohnMannMP) June 4, 2017

The above UK Labour MP’s Tweet is a great example of everything wrong with most of our elected officials’ understanding of the internet. As remarkable as the internet is on a technical level, it is no longer remarkable in daily use, yet for many of our politicians, it remains a novelty worthy of its own romantic comedy (Now Showing: You’ve Got Hate Mail).

“The Internet” needs capitalisation because, to these taxpayer-funded dullards, it is a new frontier where criminals, paedophiles, and — terror of terrors — Muslim extremists wait in prey for their next victims. It isn’t just another piece of critical infrastructure in need of investment and protection, like highways or the power grid, it is a niche curiosity. It is the Information Superhighway. It is Cyberspace. It is the animated shooting stars of Netscape 3.0. It is best viewed at 640x480.

This is what makes the current push by some politicians to allow the state access to encrypted services, at best, silly and at worst, incredibly dangerous.

Encryption is vital to the functioning of our information-based society. Without it — and I’m not exaggerating here — society falls apart. It isn’t some optional extra beloved of terrorists to plan their nefarious deeds in the dark, it is what keeps our online banking safe, our personal data secure, our private conversations private. It’s what gives business the confidence to do business without the worry of proprietary data ending up in the hands of competitors. Of course, no system is completely secure, but without encryption, you’d may as well tattoo your bank PIN on your forehead for all to see.

Without trust that the everyday transactions we make (financial or otherwise) are free from illegitimate interference or interception, the very systems which underpin modern society collapse.

Ultimately, attempts to make systems less secure for the evil few ultimately make systems less secure for all. The tools used by the "good" guys to access the "bad" guys ultimately end up being used by the "bad" guys against everyone. This is not a theory, it was recently borne out by the WannaCry ransomware attack which was based on Windows vulnerabilities hoarded by the NSA, but reportedly not shared with Microsoft until they were leaked to the public.

Our pluralistic societies are regressing. The United States is joining Syria and Nicaragua on axis of inaction on climate change; the United Kingdom seeks to join China, Iran and North Korea and other autocratic states in controlling the internet. The worst part is of all this is that there's no evidence such controls will make ordinary people safer, in fact only the opposite.

Worst of all, no evidence has been presented that encrypted message services played a role in the latest atrocity in London, but even if these services did, they bear no more culpability than the manufacturers of the knives they carried, or the maker of the van they drove, or the operator of the roads on which they travelled.

In the vast majority of terrorist incidents in the West, the perpetrators have been known to the authorities. How will access to WhatsApp or iMessage or Signal help agencies when they fail to act on the information they already have?

Alas, even those politicians who should know better are pushing to undermine the foundations of our information society. The man who "practically invented the internet in Australia", Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has declared war on encryption — and the apps he himself has admitted using instead of secured government comms — saying of encrypted messaging apps, "security services need to get access to them".

It's sad that the tech literacy of our parliamentarians hasn't progressed much since the Commonwealth Minister for Communications —ya know, the guy in charge of teh Interwebs — stated that broadband was primarily for consuming porn and gambling, and that Mr and Mrs Average would never want such a service (and that the state had little role in ensuring reasonable access to decent internet). Or who can forget the Attorney-General's misadventures in the land of metadata ("well...well...well...the web address")? It would not be an issue if these dunces had responsibility for, I don't know, tiny lapel pin flags, or garbage collection, but they claim to make laws that affect millions of people and billions of dollars without the slightest hint of curiosity.

With democratic leaders sounding every bit the autocrat these days, there has never been a more exciting time to be innovative, agile...and encrypted.

Telecom Australia's "Fun & Knowledge Telephone Book"

Consider this my gift to the world.

I have a saved search in my eBay app for "Telecom Australia". Don't ask me why, but I think it has something to do with a time long gone when governments actually owned and built things, rather than making excuses for why they can't or shouldn't.

I'm not saying government-owned monopolies didn't have there problems, but on the other hand, there's little doubt the decades-long regimes of privatisation have left a lot to be desired. With privatisation has come the privation of job security and indeed labour security of any kind.

At Telecom's privatised and <sarcasm> greatly loved</sarcasm> successor, Telstra, a new CEO is installed every few years and undertakes the review to end all reviews. They try to find new efficiencies (read: people to sack) and ways to "foster relationships with [their] key stakeholders, operate at best practice in issues management, build [their] reputation through ongoing promotion of positive activity, and leverage our technology and expertise to make positive contributions to the community" (actual line from Telstra's 2015 Annual Report, p.17).

After all, what else screams "SUSTAINABILITY" than embedding "...social and environmental considerations into our business in ways that create value for the company and our stakeholders" (ibid. p.27).
But I digress, on one of my eBay searches, I found this delightful publication: Your Fun & Knowledge Telephone Book. It's a freaking Telecom colouring and activity book. How could I not?

Ostensibly I have bought it for my son, but really I have bought it to gift to all you as well so that the imperfect past can be remembered into an uncertain future.

I've scanned each page using my Epson V700 and lovingly cleaned it up so that you too an learn about the history of the telephone and the new technology called "touch tone".

After you've read the books, colour in the pages!

Download the PDF (11mb)

A Magazine from Blurb

In my last post, I spoke about my most recent experience producing a Blurb photo book as a family album. The album was of a very high quality, however the price was on the high side. If you want you photographs in print (which you absolutely should) there is another option.

In addition to photo books, Blurb also offers other book formats including trade paperbacks (best for text) and magazines. While the magazines don't have quite the print quality of the dedicated photo books, they offer a cheaper alternative for getting your photos printed and bound.

This is the option I took at the end of 2015. With the (very) recent arrival of our first son, I knew time and money for gifts would be at a premium for Christmas. So I prepared a magazine with photographs from the previous 12 months to give to family, with space for one very important 6x4 of our new arrival at the back, who came just too late to be included in the magazine proper.

Although the images from 2015 were more fresh in my mind than previous years, it was no less rewarding going through my catalogue, reassessing previously discarded images, and building a good selection of images. Once again, I undertook the magazine layout in Adobe InDesign, affording me much more design flexibility than with Blurb's own in-house software (I must stress though that Blurb's own software is thoroughly decent if you just want to make a basic photo book from a selection of photographs. But if you have any Adobe skillz at all, InDesign is worth the effort).

140 pages later, I had a magazine. 140 pages may stretch the definition of "magazine", but Blurb's print services can handle it and that's all that matters. Oh that and the familial reception. They loved it; it spawned the usual "oh Richard it looks so professional you should do this for a living because it's so professional" question/statements that ignore the practicalities of profitable publishing. My 104-year-old grandmother sits it proudly on her table, telling me every time how much she "thoroughly enjoys" reading it.


It's nice to have an appreciative audience.

And it's nice to have a physical thing. Yada yada yada, DIGITAL DARK AGE, yada yada yada. No shit, you will lose your shit at some point. Shit being your bits and bytes of data. Either through neglect or nefariousness. A physical printed thing is a hedge against that.

Besides, a physical product like this one is pleasurable to read again and again. You don't read them every day, but it's much nicer flicking through them and reminiscing than swiping through 12,397 images on your tablet/smartphone of choice.

REPENT

REPRINT!

A Photo Book from Blurb

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the physical object in the digital age. As a photographer, that means the importance of the print. The ephemeral nature of data means that already many of our memories and much of our information – that used to be physical – have disappeared. Some are already warning of the "digital dark age", an age where there has never been a greater saturation of recording devices and data, yet we have never been at greater risk of losing it all forever.

This is why it has never been more important to print. Print isn't forever, but it's for a damnside longer than data. Data comes and goes, data becomes corrupted, data gets deleted, reformatted, rendered obsolete by the march of progress (and of marketing departments). A print may get torn or creased or scratched or fade, but there is usually still something left to be seen, to be interpreted. A fragment that is not a slave to the technology of the day. All you need is vision and light. That is why I have been making a concerted effort recently to make more physical things, both photographic prints and photo books.

Blurb is a well-known provider of print-on-demand book publishing services, particularly targeted at one-off publications such as family albums and low-volume photo books. I am a regular user of Blurb, having printed my first book with them back in 2011. Since then I've printed books with a variety of papers and bindings for a variety of purposes. Some have been consciously "professional" photo books, others have more family album-oriented in their content.

It has not always been smooth sailing with Blurb, however. Their print quality back when I first started using them left a lot to be desired, and I've had to return two books because of printing blemishes and errors. But when these problems have occurred, the customer service has always been excellent and rectified the problem promptly.

Most recently, I've been taking the time to collate my vast catalogue of digital images and print something of a yearly album. This most recent album covers almost exclusively 2011. I am trying to give each its own personality, reflecting some of the content inside the album. In this most recent publication's case, it was a year spent mostly at home with study occupying most of my time. Hence the Melway-inspired cover (colours and patterns of the 1993 edition, one my dad kept for far too long in his 1981 Ford Laser).

The downside to Blurb is that they are not particularly cheap. Luckily, they have regular vouchers offering up to 40% off. While these offer good value, I would think these vouchers have conditioned customers to wait until the next promo code comes around to upload and order their books.

Book making is a great experience, however you do it. It is particularly rewarding going back through the archives and discovering photographs you don't remember taking. Indeed it's difficult to resist reopening old files and making new edits. Sometimes you look at a photo just shake your head and think to yourself "what was I thinking!?". This tinkering can be good and bad, although even with years more experience, I found myself more often than not keeping the old edits.

The Digital Dark Age is upon us.

Repent!

Or should I say...REPRINT!

P.S. the book pictured above is not available publicly on Blurb, it's a Richard-only special

A Spotlight on the Dictionary

My 7-year-old Macbook Pro keyboard has seen better days (some keys are also about to fall off in addition to those that already have)

I don't want to turn this blog into an Apple complaints board, but a few things have been bothering me as I've been looking for new devices on which to type and write and such.

I like writing. I don't even mind typing. Sure, I prefer the black ink of my Lamy or the clickety-clack of my Apple Extended Keyboard, but I will usually make do with anything. After all, writing is not just the tools you use, it is a state of mind.

I could "write" on my iPhone, if I wished. And indeed I have been known to make notes on there from time to time. But as an object, it doesn't inspire anything "writerly" within. It doesn't look like it's comfortable doing the "writing" thing. It looks like it wants to put away its tiny (and progressively more useless) touch keyboard and go back to being a time-wasting brain hole of food pictures, selfies and #blessed.

With my 7-year-old Macbook Pro on the fritz, the 9.7" iPad Pro looked tempting...until I discovered its awful flaw.

As a Mac user, I utilise a feature called Spotlight with almost reckless abandon. ⌘+Spacebar brings up a search bar allowing me to search for anything across the entire computer. I will search for application names and open them much more quickly than navigating to the application menu with the mouse ("You mean you have to use your hands??" "That's like a baby's toy!").

Spotlight will search file names, file contents, email contents, the internet and even the dictionary. It is this last function I find most useful when writing. Once a word is in the Spotlight search, a simple ⌘+D will open that word in dictionary where I can venture into the world of language. This is not just about definitions. The in-built thesaurus is a writer's delight, allowing quick and easy access to a superabundant repository of auxiliary expressions.

iOS, the operating system of the iPhone and iPad, also offer Spotlight, but for some reason do not offer dictionary integration. This is a shame because unlike the desktop OS X, there is no stand-alone dictionary application on iOS, only preinstalled dictionaries that can be accessed when you wish to "define" a word.

This tiny feature is what is stopping me from buying an iPad Pro. Well, that and I don't have the cash, but right now, I'm not even aspiring to one because of this little flaw. And that's a shame humiliation ignominy pity, because it is a really nice piece of technology that is incredibly portable and potentially very useful for writers. I guess we can always wait for version 2.0...