Subject: New Beginnings
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2022 01:07:33 +0000

After coming back to Zaibatsu after a rather extended haitus I had the
most brilliant realization that I could simply phlog in the phorm of an
email. Of course the ridiculously wonderful part about that is because
[RFC(2)822][1] specifies that Things Should Be Text, and in gopher
Things Are Also Text, one could actually quite easily just curl this
phlog into their maildir or append it to their mbox file and just read
it in their favorite mail client.

I have a pretty strong desire to just go back and re-work my previous
Shlogging into this format. I would be pretty delighted by that.

Anyway, lots of things have been happening to this Sundog over the
course of the last several months, but probably the most interesting and
exciting and relevant to nearby folks is that I acquired some new old
technology, namely the AlphaSmart Neo2. I actually managed to find a lot
of 4 of them on eBay for ~the price of 1, which is a pretty substantial
discount!

They had some battery acid damage, but all of them are in at least
sort-of working order. I'm composing this message on one.

If you don't feel like heading to Wikipedia or one of the more
Internet-y things, here's a description of them. They were designed as
word processors for educational use, when $2k/computer was par for the
course for a computer lab, and not something that schools would be wont
to spend for all of their students. At closer to $200/per, the Neo (and
predecessors/antecedents) were substantially cheaper. Designed by former
Apple engineers, they had the incredibly clever design feature of being
able to plug into a computer and appear as a regular keyboard. By
clicking the "send" button, the Neo2 will begin transmitting characters
as if they were typed by a (particularly slow) typist. At a rate of
about 7 chars per second, they're not going to win any typing awards,
but the functionality is ubiquitous. Especially on the Neo2, which
simply uses USB. I haven't tried hooking up via adapters and USB-C yet,
but I expect it would work just fine.

Anyway, they are equipped with a very basic LCD screen that offers 4
lines of text, at about 400 characters per screen. They have a full
sized tenkeyless keyboard, but where the function keys would normally
appear is a row of keys:

    on/off, file 1-8, print, spell check, find, clear file, home, end, applets, send.

The escape key is found near the arrow keys, next to the delete key. The
typing bumps are large and satisfyingly easy to acquire. The entire unit
is curve-ish, and an uninspiring shade that I would call "90's computer
light black". I mean, it's not really grey, but more of that almost
bluish, but definitely "black" color. I think the case is ABS, I forget
from when I opened it up.

You have at your disposal 8 different files that can be toggled via the
file keys - it takes about 2 seconds to load each file, regardless of
size. Each file has the capacity for ~50,000 characters, which is quite
reasonable. I'm currently at 3,000 characters and nearly 600 words, so I
could write about ~8,000 words. Ctrl+w actually provides word/char
counts and estimated remaining capacity for the file, which is kind of
amazing. But the best part of all? It's powered by 3 AA batteries. To
all estimates you should get over 70 hours or something. I know that my
battery meter (shown when the Neo2 boots up) hasn't depleted at all and
I've been writing more or less daily for about 2 weeks now. It's pretty
heckin' impressive.

I've definitely written more lately than I have in a while, largely
because how trivial it is to actually write. Press the button, and then
I'm writing. Maybe 2 presses if I need to change the file or something.

In other "new"-s, I had been on mastodon.technology in my public
persona, but it's shutting down so I've needed to find a new space. I've
petitioned for refugee status at fosstodon, so we'll see if that one
happens.

I think the final thing that I have to mention - I'm *pretty* sure that
at some point in the past, soldierpunk attempted to email me about
granting shell access to Zaibatsu, and I attempted to respond in the
affirmative, but... I believe things were lost in the ether, and then I
ended out losing my maildir on acci/purpose. So if I was not simply
dreaming such an offer, and this comes to the attention of soldierpunk,
I *would* welcome shell access. If not, feel free to disregard this
message.

Live well, sundogs.  [email-masked]

[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt