Chasing the rainbow and looking for love

[austin_dern]

On trying some out, I think I'm falling out of love with the palmtop concept. The ones with miniature keyboards seem right out; the keys are too small. The buttons are easy to press, but I can press only one or two at once. I type fast; my last measured speed was around 105 words per minute, and that's low as I ran out of typing material during the test and had to find the examiner for instructions. I don't type letters; I type words. Anything slower is achingly slow. Plus their miniature keyboards don't have semicolons, insufferably cramping my style.

The ones with freeform writing letters don't fit me either. I write small, newsprint-type small. This is small enough the devices can't make out my letters. Yeah, the cure is to write larger. I have tried for thirty years to write larger, in response to the pains I've given parents, teachers, friends, coworkers, and students. I must at this point conclude I'm not going to ever learn to write bigger.

The freeform draw-and-sketch-out types don't really work either; I tried scribbling a little spectral analysis and found the symbols turned to pixellated gibberish. Yeah, yeah, write larger. Not gonna happen. The stylus is part of the problem; my ideal writing instrument is a fountain pen, delivering precise lines exactly as thick as I want just where I want while gliding frictionlessly over paper. It's the only graceful thing I do, but I do it well. I'll try again, but I'm leaning towards the scanner and reference books.

Trivia: To raise money for his rubber research, Charles Goodyear pawned all his possessions, including his children's schoolbooks. Source: Life Science Library: Giant Molecules, Herman F Mark.

Currently Reading: Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981, T A Heppenheimer.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Did you ever get to play with a later generation Newton? I'm afraid I only ever saw one a couple times.. and was quite impressed, particularly with its pukka PCMCIA slot, so it was perfectly feasible to have, say, a modem/ethernet card installed. Wouldn't mind having one, actually, but even now, they're hardly dirt cheap.

That said, the handwriting recognition lives on in OS X as Inkwell, though nobody's quite sure why, given there's not much use made of it in the OS generally.

On the few occasions these days when I actually have to write something, I'm reminded how unaccustomed to the task my paws are now, after years of getting away with tapping away on little plastic squares. Not that I mind the results - I was taught a form of script writing early on, and it stuck well. (It did grate that a later school all but insisted I learn their scheme, even when they could see I could already write, and cursively)

Have you noticed your handwriting style evolve gently over the years?

On the budget front, something else you might consider useful: an external hard drive (handy for large volume backups, or transferring data easily from some office system elsewhere, without having to navigate the network perils), and/or a wireless data card, for being networked on the move (3GPRS, HSCPD, or suchlike).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I never got to actually touch a Newton, no. I'd seen a demonstration of how some bit of its coding snuck into OS X, but actually missed the name Inkwell and couldn't figure where to find that.

My handwriting hasn't changed all that much, except for getting a bit more legible and quicker since I started trying to adopt ham radio-style quicker moves for writing block capitals. That's based on writing letters with less movement so you can keep up with the fastest Morse code speed you can decipher, which in my case isn't that fast.