A bit more ISO 12757-1

This is all very nice, but what if someone would like to try making art with all these fancy ballpoint pen refills without buying an expensive Italian-made pen or spending hours in an office supplies store trying to look for the least-rattly one? There is one more interesting hack-like solution to this - using a clutch pencil (or a lead holder as these are called in Japan).

Retro Writing 12 – The Panaword

In my wanderings through machines that can be used as dedicated, retro-distraction-free writing devices, I had already gone into a few quite forgotten places. I'm fascinated by machines that I was not able to try because, in their hay day, I was just a kid with for whom his AMIGA 500 was everything. This time,…

Retro writing 11 – Casio HW-300JS

The device I'm trying to use in this part of this retro writing series of articles is genuinely unique. I knew I had to try it out as soon as I saw it on the Japanese second-hand goods website I usually frequent. A small format, portable, personal word processor with a built-in printer! This should…

Retro Writing 09 – printing on the go.

Even though the NEC Mobilegear has some downsides, it's still my favorite go-to mobile writing device mainly because of its compatibility with file formats and just how dully usable the Windows CE system is. Thus, I was delighted to spot online a cute portable printer that can be used with Windows CE 3.0 and wirelessly…

Retro writing 06 – HP palmtops

One of the things that inspired me to look at old computers as cool and exciting tools for writing texts was Neil Gaiman typing one of his novels on an old Atari Portfolio Palmtop. However, the second one was Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin admitting to still using a DOS program Word Star 4.0 to write his…

Retro writing 02 – ARDATA

In my search for an interesting, distraction-free writing device, I went first for the most capable options – my laptop and the iPad Pro. With a good application, such as Scrivener, writing and editing on my iPad is just a pleasure (especially lately with the wireless keyboard and trackpad support enabled). I could just end…

Using old tools creatively

The whole thing came out of a small accident - while in Poland I dropped the small camera that I used to carry with me and it broke. It broke enough that after coming back to Japan we sent it over to the travel insurance company so they can fix it or reimburse for it.…