De-teching
March 17, 2008
About a year ago, caught in a seemingly endless spiral of finding more and more references, reading about more and more sports matches and generally being increasingly unproductive, I spent some time on ebay (obviously) considering buying a typewriter. An old one. With no electronics.
The general idea was to remove all the fancy things that my laptop can do, and trim it back to basics, then scan my writing back in for formatting and editing. Thankfully, I didn’t plunge in and don’t now spend my days covered in black ink and wrapped in tangled ribbons, and do actually manage to get some writing done.
However, faced with an article in the Wall Street Journal, which argues that an inability to avoid faffing on the web is inherent, inate or genetically determined, whichever you decide (which I will pass over for now), and a test match series between England and New Zealand, I began to think about it again. A path between the Scylla and Charybdis of hi- and ultra lo-tech was provided by Dark Room, an application which, when you’ve really got to write, clears everything clickable out of the way and lets you do it. In bright green on a black screen. An excellent idea.
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