Everything New Is Old Again

 Disclaimer: This post has not been sponsored by 8BitDo. 

I got a new keyboard. It's from the fine folks over at 8BitDo. Not only do they make some awesome controllers for the Nintendo Switch, but they also have some mechanical keyboards on offer. I'd been eyeing one for some time since Logitech, in their wisdom, decided to discontinue the G413 Carbon (and replace it with some pale imitations and alternates) and I was worried about the impending day when it would stop working. I have a backup for my mouse, but the closest thing I had to a backup keyboard was the Nimbleback I use with my iPad. It's a fine keyboard, but I want to keep it available to carry with my iPad rather than be tied down to the Mac mini. 

As for 8BitDo, this came in a few different flavors, the first two themed after the original NES and its Japanese counterpart, the Famicom. When I checked their site a few days ago, I found not only had they expanded the keyboard to include a number pad, but they had two other styles of the original, including a translucent green XBox themed one (which was very tempting with its early 2000's aesthetic) and the one I ended up buying, based on the Commodore 64. 

Put simply, and if you'll forgive the pun, it was love at first byte: The large print on the dark brown concave keycaps, the tan body, and all topped off with a rainbow sticker along the upper edge and a big, red LED indicating that it's on and connected.

For perspective, I was born in 1981 and my first computer in the house was an Apple IIgs circa 1986, which is the equivalent of having a brand new Porsche as your first car. I have no real nostalgia for the Commodore 64; I don't even think I'd heard of it until the 1990's. According to Wikipedia, it was discontinued in 1994. Needless to say, a IIgs and a C64 look nothing alike, and have even less in common under the bonnet. I saw plenty of other computers and typewriters that looked more like the C64 in terms of the color scheme, so maybe that's where my nostalgia lies. 

As for the typing experience, it's phenomenal, though the backspace key is a little difficult to reach as the whole keyboard as a substantial slope (it doesn't even have feet on the underside to prop it up). It is notably louder than my G413, especially the space bar, but that's due to it having tactile keys rather than linear. Linear keys, like those in the G413, have all the advantages of a mechanical keyboard switch, namely not needing to press the key all the way down for it to register the keystroke, with the added benefit of letting you subtly control the volume of the keypresses. If you press softly and deliberately, it's no louder than any other keyboard, including non-mechanical ones. Think of it like slamming a door or closing it slowly depending on your mood. As for the C64 keyboard, there's really no minimum or maximum volume, as each key emits a distinct click for each press. Another notable difference is the lack of a resonance. On the G413, there's a metallic clang with each keypress, especially the space bar. I'm not sure what causes this besides a lack of dampening in the housing. With the C64, no such noise, only the distinct plastic-on-plastic clunk of the keys, and I love it. 

If I ever fall out of love with it, it does give me the option of swapping out the key switches for any other variety of my choosing, which I'm almost tempted to do for the space bar. It just sounds so different from the other keys. Then again, it's technically two keys being pressed down instead of one, so maybe that's why it sounds different. 

Pardon the rambling. It's the hype of having a new keyboard. I've been in more of a writing mood than a drawing one of late. My art block that's plagued me over most of last year still hasn't left. I also rediscovered a website called Writer (from Big Huge Labs). It's a browser-based word processor/note taking app that offers a minimalist, distraction-free writing experience (which is a little ironic given it's on a browser rather than a standalone app). Its biggest perk is the ability to select the color scheme of your background and text, which I've set to values consistent with an old school amber display. 

It almost makes me wish my monitor were smaller so I could put it on its side like some vintage workstation from Xerox. I've learned recently that you can purchase iMacs without their stands, opting instead for a VESA mount, so you could conceivably orient it sideways. I only wish they came in colors other than their muted rainbow variety. If they made a brown that matched my keyboard, I'd go for that. I could have sworn they had a black one available, but maybe I'm thinking of an older model. There's a light silver one, not even Apple's enigmatically inconsistent Space Grey. 

I can respect Apple and Microsoft not giving users this level of customization in their respective word processing apps, Pages and Word. To be fair, they do have accessibility options to create a high contrast or inverted color version of the display that can kind of sort of recreate the experience of an old school monochrome display. Even the browser based version of Word gives you the option of a dark mode.

It never fails to impress me the evolution of the word processor, from something boutique to something pedestrian. It's like the influence of the Gutenberg press bringing literature to the masses, then mass market paperbacks, and now ebooks and web pages. The craft of writing belongs to everyone, and my goal in life at this point is to grow into an old man hunched over a keyboard, probably driving the neighbors in the retirement village batty with the clickity-clack of my mechanical keyboard some kid probably custom-built for me out of sympathy to the cause. Maybe they were forced to visit the home as some kind of community service or church program and took an interest in my setup. They continued to visit long after the program ended, checking to make sure everything still worked, swapping out key switches and waiting eagerly to see if I approve or not. One day maybe they'll come and get told the bad news that I passed away the previous night, found at my desk slumped over the keyboard mid-documenttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt....

Not My Carbon

Logitech lied to me. I asked to be put on a waiting list to be notified when the G413 Carbon is back in stock. I recently received the notification and was all set to buy up my backup. When I clicked the link, however, I found it was only the G413 silver version. Similarly, they've made another G413 called the SE, which splits the difference between the silver and the Carbon in the worst possible way. 

The silver is the same keyboard as the Carbon under the bonnet, only with an aluminum faceplate and white backlighting. By no means an ugly keyboard, just not what I'm looking for. Also, I refuse to believe more people prefer white-lit keys to red. 

The SE is black like the Carbon, but uses white backlighting. There's also a TKL version that's still white-lit. As I said, I can't believe some people would prefer white to red when it comes to ambient lighting on their desktops. 

I only wish I could turn the LEDs on the Mac mini and SpaceMouse red. Guess I'm going for that 8BitDo keyboard sooner rather than later. That's not backlit at all, nor is there a number pad, but it will give my setup more of a vintage vibe rather than a Batmobile interior sort of look. I'll consider that a fair trade. 

I've never participated in NaNoWriMo. At least not in any official capacity. Frankly, the workload terrifies me. I once used it as a jumping off point for a shorter novella project I wrote some years ago from October until around mid December. It was released as an eBook for the exorbitant price of a whole dollar. I later made it free and even posted the first chapter to my DeviantART. It's probably aged far better than anything else I've written, though I'm sure if I took a good, long look at it, I'd end up sitting down and rewriting it from page one. 

There is another story of mine I thought of a few weeks ago that I might want to take another swing at. It was about someone checking themselves into triage by way of a robotic receptionist. It didn't have much meat on it in narrative terms, a quick jab at the bureaucracy of the healthcare system, the dehumanization of automation, and a cozy, wholesome interaction between a nurse and a patient. Now, years later, I want to make it a horror story, the robot now going haywire and posing a threat to everyone in the wing. I doubt I'll go through with it. My days of writing about monsters tearing people apart left me in around the end of middle school. We were learning a writing technique called "sensory imagery" which is best described as "Tell, don't show." Being the age I was, this meant an awful lot of gore and bizarre creature designs. 

Although November is now 2 days behind us, I do hope some of you consider continuing work on whatever writing projects you were thinking about during National Novel Writers' Month, even if it's only al sort of catch-and-release approach and it never moves far beyond a file on your desktop. 

A Gigabyte of RAM Should Do the Trick

I am forever fascinated by the craft of writing. I always have been. Even merely looking at photos of old typewriters is inspiring to me. I read that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a Hermes portable typewriter. In his words, it's "the kind of thing Hemingway would have used in the field." By contrast, I heard an interview with Robert Ludlum where he explained that he used to type out his books, but resorted to writing on legal pads to hand off to a typist because he didn't want anything between him and his work. 

Here's a fun fact about typography. Once upon a time, it was customary to follow each period with two spaces. The reason for this has to do with typewriters not always striking the ribbon properly, potentially making a comma look like a full stop. The extra space is supposed to signal to the reader that the mark they've just read is in fact a period and not a comma. Nowadays, with the state of word processing being what it is, this is unnecessary. Now we've adopted this behavior in texting where ending a sentence with a period is seen as cold and unfeeling. Meanwhile, leaving the sentence hanging, so to speak, is taken as warm and inviting, encouraging the conversation to continue. 

As for my weapon of choice, I'm using a Logitech G413 Carbon mechanical keyboard hooked up to an Intel-based Mac mini with a mere 8 gigabytes of RAM. I don't know remember how big the hard drive is, maybe 256 gigabytes, but the most data intensive thing I even do on the Mac is SketchUp, and I haven't opened that program more than a half-dozen times since my job finally agreed to reimburse me for using it out of pocket all these years. I think the largest file I've ever created in SketchUp was about 20 megabytes, and that was because it used a custom texture I painted in Procreate on my iPad. Speaking of my iPad, keyboards are the primary reason I don't ever want a laptop again. I utterly despise their keyboards. They just don't feel right and they hurt my fingers after a while. It doesn't help that many are also exceedingly fragile, a problem I seem to recall Apple having with one of its MacBooks. I have a portable, bluetooth keyboard for my iPad I sometimes take with me when I go out. It has a kind of low-profile version of a mechanical switch. It marries the solid, tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard while also keeping a low profile in terms of its ergonomics. It's still no match for my G413, but it does well enough on its own. I have considered upgrading to something a little closer to my G413 in a portable package, but that may end up having to wait. Besides, I've written at length about it in a previous entry, so I'll try not repeating myself here. 

Really, I simply felt like typing something today. I wrote up a long Wordpress article a few days earlier, but there was a fair bit of copy and pasting there. For as long as it ended up being, I was able to write it up fairly quickly, since most of the counterpoints I was offering to the diatribe it was dissecting were old hat. It was practically instinctual, like when your predictive text is making all the right suggestions because its well-worn territory for your earlier discourses. 

It does give me quite a charge when I get into a good groove and can almost space out a little while I'm writing. The only issue is I tend to make a lot of mistakes. Auto-correct catches most of them, but it always makes me feel a little guilty when I lean on it too much. Once upon a time, unless you shelled out for some especially fancy typewriter, your options were limited in the backspace department. Your speed suffered, but your accuracy went up, and vice versa. Makes me wish there was still a good typing game out there I could drop into and hone my craft with. That one typing game I was eyeing some time ago has been delisted from the App Store, and Facebook games aren't exactly a thing anymore. I mean, they exist, but it's a very different landscape than when I played Bejeweled or something like that. It's more cluttered and overall has less variety than it appears. It's over-saturated and spread too thin is what's wrong with it. Searching for "typing" returns zero results. It's a shame, really.

Maybe it's all this internet discourse that's reduced our need for typing games. Now, we have keyboard warriors training themselves via online spats over various socio-political discussions and hot takes gone awry. I'm sure the rising of mobile platforms hasn't helped things much, either. More people interact using their smartphones than laptops or especially desktops, where that's more the realm of online gaming, MMO's and shooters and such. 

My Mac isn't exactly a gaming machine, but that's not why I got it. I needed something for SketchUp and Inkscape. It's more than adequate for that, though I'm wondering more recently if it's worth getting an upgraded Mac mini or simply going in whole hog on a new iPad. I wouldn't be able to bring my G413 with me, but I'd still have plenty of options for keyboards. The fact is I don't use Inkscape that much here as Affinity Designer is a very good vector drawing program. As for SketchUp, like I said, I don't use it very much at this point for my artwork. Of course, I'm making it sound like this is all going to be a decision I have to make soon. My Mac is holding up beautifully and my keyboard is great. I may get a new monitor, such as an ultra wide so I can have reference images off to the side while I work in Affinity Designer. 

Ideally, my monitor would be some kind of split-level affair, a normal-sized monitor up top for most conventional tasks, and a small, narrow, lower-res one just below it, about where I'd be looking at a sheet of paper in a typewriter. There are some "cyber deck" projects out there that are close to what I'm looking for, but I don't have the patience for such a project. I feel I would get too absorbed in the process and lose sight of the end goal. It would be the Ferrari Cameron's dad wipes down with a cloth diaper in his glass house. 

My keyboard at work is wearing down, certain letters completely worn away revealing the colored backlight. It certainly doesn't get used to anywhere near the extent as this one, but it isn't exactly a high end model anyway. There isn't any noticeable wear on the G413, not even a fuzzy edge on any of the letters. I think it's due to how the keycaps are made. Logitech recently got more back in stock, according to an e-mail alert I got some time ago. Maybe it's time to buy that backup I mentioned in a previous entry. 

My roommate is upset that she doesn't know what to get me for Christmas. My answer is always nothing, which flusters her. Maybe I'll move that one keyboard I added to my wishlist up a few tiers and start dropping some hints her way. 

If you made it this far, thank you for joining me on this little typing session/stream of consciousness. 

Logophobia

Neil DeGrasse Tyson once said that cutting the PBS subsidy from the federal budget was an act akin to deleting text files on a 500GB hard drive.
I just dug out an old 128MB flash drive I bought about ten years ago, and even with a few photos on it, barely 30MB has been used. The myriad of text files on it are probably not even a full megabyte.
I've been using DeviantART's Sta.sh Writer for the novella I'm working on, and it had been great up until just today, when I learned how utterly impractical it is. I remember writing something on an old Blackberry, a really terrible freeverse poem about nature vs. nurture, and having to open a new memo because more than a few hundred words threw its program into a tizzy. Before that, when I was writing  something on my old Mac in Simpletext, I had to split the story up into different files because the program couldn't handle a text file bigger than 12KB. I'm sure that's fine for an essay for middle school or even high school, but it seems monstrously unfair to anyone who wants to write anything longer. Yes, I can use another program, but why this aversion to large text files? Are people that afraid of novels?
Anyway, in completing a chapter just today, Sta.sh began showing me a bizarre and downright terrifying error message:

Someone else has edited this draft. 

Sta.sh is supposed to work like Google Drive in that the only people who can see your work are people with the URL for that particular file. There is always the possibility that someone could guess the URL possibly by typing random characters, the chances are astronomical to the point that a state lottery looks like a coin flip. As such, seeing this message stare back at me was horrifying; it meant someone was hacking my account. Worse yet, the view figures for the page reflected someone besides myself having seen the page once that day. I quickly went to my DeviantART profile and logged out of all other sessions, then logging out of the current one, just to be safe. Luckily, no other sessions that I didn't recognize showed up. I know that sometimes I get logged out of DeviantART and that my viewing figures will reflect this, so Sta.sh was no different. That said, I wasn't logged out, and nothing indicating a lapse revealed itself.
I put the error message in a search and found out, quite luckily, that this was not uncommon, with instances going back to the earliest months of the year. Apparently, if word of mouth is to be believed, Sta.sh Writer is not very fond of files reaching an excess of 64KB in size. This was a relief to hear, and it even matched my own data. When I'd finish writing something in Sta.sh, I'd copy and paste the text into another word program (namely Evernote and LibreOffice) for safekeeping. This is the only time I can see how big a file is, and sure enough it's been reaching the 64 mark. All this really means is that I have to move operations directly into one of the other word program, which isn't all that big of a problem, but there is a worry. It's one of those quirky little idiosyncratic behaviors that we're all prone to in some way, shape, or form.
When you work with a typewriter, even a more modern one with an LCD screen showing your first few sentences before committing them to paper (a buffer, of sorts), you have to think ahead, because you can't really go back. There's white-out and even some correct keys on certain models, but these feel like cheating, and often make weird noises or smell terribly, and just generally make your printed work look ragged and unrefined. You find yourself really mulling over every sentence before you put anything down. It's much the same for ink and paper; that's why essay questions on exams are often so taxing. Word processors fix a number of these problems, but have a few of their own added to the mix, if a little more intangible and hard to relate to in describing. You get used to how a word program works, the way it's laid out, the way the auto-save works, how the spell check picks up on certain quirks in your writing, and having to shift from one to the other can be very jarring, even affecting the way you write. Moving from a typewriter to a word processor means you can afford a few mistakes, but that can breed bad habits as well as hurting the quality of your sentences now that you're no longer turning each over in your head before putting fingers to keys.
I don't have much experience with LibreOffice, and I didn't get much use out of OpenOffice's writer, so a lot of its finer and innermost workings elude me. The biggest one is auto-save, something I've gotten far too spoiled by in recent years. I can remember writing a story on my old Mac IIsi, many years ago when I was still getting the hang of typing. I got into a real groove with what I was writing, staring down at the keys while frantically tapping away at them like Schroeder at his piano, only to look up and see that nothing I'd written made it to the screen. The program had frozen, and I was too busy looking down to see it. I was completely devastated, almost to tears. I knew right away that even if I could resume working right away (which I couldn't because I had to force quit the program and wait for it to boot up again), I'd never write exactly what I'd written before. Maybe that would have been for the best, giving me a chance to think about what I'd written a little more, but it was still a huge setback. Even now, I get nervous over similar problems with more modern programs, even ones with good auto-save, and find myself prone to small panic attacks when I get an error message telling me the sync operation has failed (even if it'll work perfectly well the next time it tries).
Maybe I just worry too much, but this is one of those things about working with text that haunts me when I write, more so than file formats and typesetting or anything like that. It's just so disconcerting that for all our technology, typewriters still hold so much superiority on account of their physicality and tangibility.