First Typoblogging Experiment
October 17th, 2007
alt="Now that I have my 1944 Smith-Corona typewriter working, it's time
to find an actual use for it. Maybe it wil be fun to blog with a
typewriter.
I'm calling this typoblogging because I own no correction fluid,
correction tape, or any other of those things that help a typist
hide mistakes. So, by calling it 'typoblogging,' I can pretend
that all the inevitable mistakes are somehow a trendy part of the
medium.
Earlier, I was wondering whether using a typewriter would change
how I write. I think it has. Before I started writing this post,
I gave the overall structure much more thought than I normally would.
I find I'm even planning out each sentence in greater detail. I have
a greater sense of accomplishment after each paragraph that comes
out of this thing intact, too.
As I was writing this, Jacob's bedtime arrived. I started thinking
about the things I needed to do before putting him to bed. But
there was nothing. No documents to save, no place to keep. Nothing to turn off or lock up. That felt somehow liberating.
The last question is: how do I provide a text version of this post? I
will try gocr on it, but I'm not sure how well it will do. The letters
on the typewriter need to be cleaned, and some characters like 'e'
have gunk in them. Once I have the text, though, perhaps I can put
it in as the ALT text for the IMG tag.
Anyway, to answer the question I started with: yep, this is fun."/>
Note: red underlined links are clickable
flickr photo page for this post
Categories: General
The text makes a very long line with w3m, but it works. ;-)
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[url=http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#adef-longdesc-IMG]See: longtext[/url]. This will also fix the nested quotes problem with your alt text.
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Rahul Reply:
October 18th, 2007 at 4:10 am
Well done putting in the effort to add the alt text, Mr. Goerzen! I came in here to point out the broken quotes as well. But as for the longdesc attribute, it appears that nobody uses it (http://blog.whatwg.org/the-longdesc-lottery).
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John Goerzen Reply:
October 18th, 2007 at 8:02 am
I wonder how well this is supported by web browsers? Especially text-mode ones like lynx, links, w3m, etc.
Also the downside of that is that Serendipity will not be able to index the text for searching. Though I wonder if Google would be able to.
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http://groundstate.ca/ocr
might want to try ocropus ;)
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John Goerzen Reply:
October 18th, 2007 at 7:51 am
I tried gocr and tesseract-ocr. Neither could make much more out of this than gibberish. Ocropus isn’t in Debian, so I didn’t have the time to try it. I hope that Clara’s trainable engine might be able to help me out though.
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heh, this is neat. =)
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Hehe, this is quite fun! :)
Lacking a typewriter, I wonder about handwriting my next post.
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John Goerzen Reply:
October 18th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
That would certainly work. Pretty soon we’ll have people photographing stone tablets…
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Wonderfully retro! I love it!
I grew up with computers, but also grew up with typewriters. There _is_ something different about the writing process.
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You make me miss the typewriter I had at home with which I played a lot when I was a child.
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You’re dating yourself, John :-). I think only those who have never used typewriters for serious work can want to play around with them.
I’m old enough to remember the transition from typewriters to word processors. I remember typewriters as awkward and unforgiving. I always seemed to make a mistake on the last line of a sheet of paper, and too much whiteout would stick the page to the roller. The first time I used a computer keyboard, it took me all of five minutes to decide I was never going back.
But now that you need a workstation to match your new printer, may I suggest:
http://www.datamancer.net/projects/engine/engine.htm
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