Spray-painting holy on the grail (or Pink Typewriter, for all you literal-minded search engines)

Here is the original typewriter before I painted it. As acknowledged, I am late to the painted typewriter game. Behold this gallery of pioneering paint makeovers from the typosophere:

• Little Bluebird
• Dyed Brother
• Lemony Weirdness
• Pink Forecaster

This just in: Mpclemens has created a most excellent Flickr gallery of painted typewriters for your enjoyment.

Note for purists: This typecast was in fact typed with, well, what else? An Olympia SM9 the color of depression mixed with burlap. Because after all, beauty's on the inside.

The amazing scanless, direct-to-upload pencast solution (or at least, an experiment)

This is the tablet I'm using, if anyone is curious. If you're wondering why one would want to pencast if it didn't involve Parker 51's or Clairefontaine notebooks, well, good point.

But the tablet is kind of fun, for the record.

Memo to the typosphere: meet me on Google Wave

We're all acquainted with the confused thinking out there that sometimes equates a love of tech history and 20th century writing machines with a fear of technology. (It is all the more comical when you realize that the more hard core someone is about typewriters, the more likely they are an engineer or machinist, someone certainly far beyond the commonly understood 'tech savvy' standard of thumb-typing on an iPhone and reading Ashton Kutcher's tweets.)

My point is this: Google Wave. Either it is the Edsel/Segway Scooter of online communication, as some have said, or this kind of thing is the long-awaited death of e-mail (lord, I hope it is the latter). Either way, I want to be one of the first to find out. And I want to bring the typosphere with me.

Here is a video explaining Google Wave. Here is another. I've sent out some wave invitations to some typospherians, who each now probably have around 20 invites of your own. Invite more people. Start waving about typewriters. Add us to your waves. We'll figure it out. Cause we're just that clever.

Typing in public: classroom edition

I know several of you all out there have attempted that brazen act of retrotech performance art known as TIP (typing in public). I've tried it myself a few times. You pack up whichever portable is least likely to pull your arm out of the socket as you unload it from your trunk, trudge into the local cafe, and sheepishly set up shop. Of course, you know you're coming off as preeningly anachronistic, a showoff perhaps. The kids and older folks are nonetheless impressed. Anyone in between, however, tends to give you the stink eye, as keys striking a platen appear to startle the delicate sensibilities of the modern ear, tuned as it is to the soothing frequency of Taylor Swift ringtones and the 'Jersey Shore' theme song.

Clearly, This kid raises the stakes. Surrounding himself with a crowd of undergrads born well after Apple MacIntosh was a household name, he engages in the ironic exercise of typing out a few notes on what looks like a Smith Corona Galaxie in a college lecture hall.

Professor: "Can you figure out a way to mute your sound?"
Kid: "It uh... it doesn't do that."
Typewriter: Ding!

(I think this happened awhile back, but for some reason it's making the Twitter rounds today.)

And the winner is...

...Alex!

Congratulations, you're the winner of the leather journal, chosen by my lovely assistant, a random interweb number picker (after adjusting for super advanced math concepts such as multiple posts by the same person, etc.)

Alex, e-mail me your mailing address and I shall whisk the prize off to you.

Yet another drawing for a new prize is just around the corner. At this rate, I need to hire a slick-haired elderly gentleman with a booming voice to handle all these contests.

In other news, it's high time for some new content. (That goes for the entire typosphere, coughSpeegle Mondaandotherscough.) Good thing there is some vacation coming up.

'The Manual Typewriter ideal,' or why Linda Holmes thinks you are a moron

Just read an interesting article in The UK Guardian Observer by Tim Adams about the pitfalls of our general cultural movement toward the "always on" model of personal digital engagement. Some interesting quotes:

Slowly all the aspects of the world that were formerly external to us, out there – friends, shops, newspapers and now books – are being accommodated into this space, so that they can be contained almost entirely on our personalised screens.

We are quickly moving toward an era that will allow each of us to become the editor of our own newspaper and director of our own television schedule; our computers will help us in this process, listen to our histories, define our likes and dislikes and recommend accordingly; they will be our personal shoppers and cultural critics, reinforcing our tastes...This new solipsistic power, however, is unlikely to be without consequences.

Will anyone who is "always on" have the concentration to read the great social novels – those ultimate "interactions" with the world – on a screen? Will anyone be able to see far enough beyond themselves to write one?

If those seem like reasonable points, The Manual Typewriter Ideal, a rebuttal of sorts by Linda Holmes at NPR.com, is likely to annoy (if not solely because of the title, which implies that people who value traditional methods of reading and writing are, well, morons).

Linda Holmes fancifully calls the Guardian article "a distilled version of what people who hate the Internet believe about it," and goes on distort most of the original's points to support her curiously strident thesis. When I finished her piece, I remain unconvinced that we read the same article, but then again, I value traditional methods of writing and reading, and therefore, am likely a moron.

Rhodia Meeting Book, and Blue Diamond stamps

Rhodia, it's official. You are better than e-mail.

This weekend I went to the Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle and bought the two Blue Diamond stamps that you see on this page. I've always been a skeptic of the acrylic style stamps, being that your traditional wood and rubber stamps seem a tad more old school to me, but I'll say this: the Blue Diamond stamps seemed to make cleaner impressions than rubber stamps, plus, you can see exactly where you place them on a page (because they are applied with a transparent acrylic block). So for any stamping types out there, I would say give them a try.