ckz

Surprised my fellow typewriter folks haven't shown up yet! [paging @ebruchez]

If you want the writerdeck experience I'll echo the recommendations here for an Alphasmart. The brute-force autotyping file transfer it uses is quaint but always amusing. Gave one to a screenwriter friend and it's now gotten regular use for years. PDAs are a solid choice as well that may resonate with the HN crowd.

Don't sleep on owning an actual typewriter though. I have a small collection and use one daily. There's a rabbit hole of ~150 years of makes & models (most of which continue to function fine today) that will give any mechanical keyboard enthusiast much to chew on. :)

Just a note for those in the market (as someone with the unusual distinction of owning ~30 Alphasmarts), a few hundred $ is more like a top of the line, NIB/serviced Alphasmart Neo 2 with bag, manual, etc.

If you just want to try out distraction-free writing with USB a used AS3000 is easily found <$50 (YMMV re. battery corrosion).

Thank you for supporting monochrome OS 3.5! Will be taking this for a spin. :)

You might take a look around for it. They made two original versions, the 1000 and the 5000. The 1000s are pretty hard to find nowadays (seems a lot of early adopters went for the higher memory spec).

Some folks in the community even have upgraded PalmCards (the replaceable CPU board in these) that run PalmOS 5 now, hack the display to show more bits, etc.

I've been using a Palm of roughly this spec as a daily driver (black and white and everything) for years at this point. Love it every single day.

Careful fading Tom Swift too hard. The two main series date from the 1910-20s and the 50s-60s. Basically sci-fi Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys rather than modern YA, especially the second wave of books.

They're more "outwitting not-Soviet saboteurs with nuclear-powered inventions" and were written when science was putting the universe in our grasp.

They get mentioned here as an influence on folks from time to time (myself included), predictable adverb structure aside. :)

This is how we handle it as well. We were at friends' last night and the older kids had the N64 out. The older kids reported that ours just wanted to be read to the whole time, but early doses of things we intend to introduce anyway (video games predating modern addictive mechanics) are fine at that frequency.

We are mindful of potential Pandora's boxes though. You can't ban everything unhealthy without causing long term issues. You strive though to only introduce things when they're developmentally ready to cope with it, even if that means restrictions on yourself as an adult.

You work to constantly provide good examples via your own life, compelling narratives, etc. of people who exemplify the virtues you want to instill. That's how you help shape (the best you can) the life of someone with an innate identity to, when necessary, "just say no", or simply be uninterested in and unswayed by things that don't conform to their value system.

They aren't stifled by rules and wrestling with temptation--not valuing YT Kids is just who they are.

Agreed. So much of it is identity (going back to James Clear in Atomic Habits). "I'm not a smoker" is more powerful than "I'm trying to quit".

"We just don't watch Youtube on our phones in this house." [and you work to develop that into healthy self-confidence rather than ego]

Growing up homeschooled, we had the same simmering sense of pride in not doing what others (e.g. "public schoolers" did). Never had a rebellious teen phase, etc. Some families overdid it, but...idk...I'm still quite close to my parents, so I never felt stifled.

It makes it -very- natural in life to focus on what my SO and I think are optimal and more or less disregard what's normal.

#1 is exactly what we're doing with ours. The little one understands cassettes and the concept of an audiobook or a Welles radio drama (sometimes MP3/CD, but I record custom cassettes too).

I have a millenium-era iMac set up as the family computer in anticipation of introductory computing when old enough (probably soon) and learning that digital entertainment is a state of mind and place you go to for a time, and then shut down and do something else. It's in the living room and off, so right now we're just building familiarity with it and exploring the keyboard, mouse, etc. and mimicking dad. Currently the little one -loves- the physical interaction of a typewriter and requests one more than a keyboard (but loose keyboards are fun too!).

The TV is a projector screen that recedes into the ceiling. Total screen time for them in the home right now over the past ~2.5y is probably...3 hours? Maybe?

My daily driver mobile is a black and white PDA and almost never a phone. I don't think my toddler has -ever- asked me for my phone and certainly wouldn't think to request, e.g. a video on it. Entertainment comes from our books, legos, and trains.

My theory is an accelerated progression through history. Mastering technology means understanding where it came from. It takes the shine off the modern rectangle of doom if you can place it in time and space and your first habits aren't built around it.

To @ozim's point, the issue is what has been normalized in broader society and so, yeah, we've clearly figured out touchscreens and plenty of local places for kids have unnecessary TVs. The concerns of other kids/parents introducing things to ours too early is mitigated by building a core [home]school and social group who shares enough common values. The differences between our respective households become learning opportunities for everyone.

What's fantastic is that I can go to the grocery store or sit in a restaurant for an hour and a half (and even better, two flights with a layover--with effort) with no tantrum from a toddler and no technology. Just...not even a thought that enters.

Sure thing! Third party apps yes (see: palmdb.net), but obviously not typical 3rd party services (no Spotify, etc.).

I mostly use a few models of Handspring Visor, typically grayscale, so not even the latest OS. Visor Edge for something as thin and sleek as a modern phone. Visor Neo if I want expandability (similar to pg6-7 in the Ars article). There's a fun module that adds both more memory and a vibrate motor for alarms, but I'll swap that out for a camera or mp3 module at times. Charge or swap batteries once or twice a month.

Common tasks:

* Notes, To Dos, Contacts, Calendar (excellent stock calendar, per @j45 above)

* Alarms & Reminders (stock + Diddlebug, which lets you draw/write notes w/ a timer)

* Offline browsing (Plucker can crawl pages and sync them)

* Weather (note: cached on sync because my Palm doesn't have wifi)

* Calorie tracking

* Games (we have a Wordle port!)

* Longform writing - I have a foldable keyboard and usually use plaintext, but there are word processing apps that save to HTML if you want. I also often write on an Alphasmart Neo, which can IR beam back and forth with the Palm and PC.

* Personal project tracking/flows

* Photos (technically video too, but only have 8MB memory for everything)

I have newer PDAs too that can natively handle things like voice recording, cameras, video playback, etc., but I really like the grayscale ones. A late Clié like a VZ90 or some of the others in this thread will have more bells and whistles (even OLED!).

Note also that all of the above is a more manual process than modern phones (and more manual today than it was then, because Outlook supported Palms in 2002 unlike now). If you use Google Calendar I think you can still sync, but if there's an important work meeting that I want in my pocket in addition to the laptop--I do the little ritual of adding it myself.

IMO your last line there really hits the nail on the head with what I saw both on the ground and in the data.

Windows Phone was absolutely crushing it with first-time smartphone adopters, but for folks switching it was tougher, because WP didn't use depend on the whole "grid of siloed apps" concept as much. If you'd already used an iPhone, it took a second to unlearn.

And considering anyone making smartphone apps in 2010 was still on the early-adopter side of the curve--they'd already experienced that way of using a phone. There were still a lot of first-timers in the following 5 years, but the folks at the agencies and companies making the software weren't them.