This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,764 for Thursday the 5th of January 2023.
Today's show is entitled, my text focused journey into tech.
It is the first show by new host NSTELLO and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, my journey into technology covering some of the pros raking technology
I've used along the way.
Alright, this is NSTELLO, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio with very short of episodes
at the moment.
So, if you've ever wanted to record a podcast, grab a microphone and go and record something
that you think people might be interested in and get yourself out there.
Come a broadcasting star, my son.
It's traditional on HPR to have your first episode, or your first recording, to describe
your journey into technology, or at least that's what I've heard a few times over the
last year or three that I've been listening to HPR.
So I thought I'd do the same by trade on a writer as in text or prose and what became
apparent while I was scribbling some notes for this episode was that my journey arc, if
you like, through technology, was pretty much step by step in with my use of technology
as a writer.
So I thought I'd discuss the two together and maybe share some of the writing tools and
tips that I've picked along the way might be useful and interesting for anyone who writes
any type of prose might be documentation, might be blog posts, there are a few things
I've picked up along the way and there's a few techniques as well, which hopefully you
guys might find interesting.
So to start at the beginning, I first got into computing back in 1981, I won't say how
old I was.
There was a computer kicking around our house at home called the ZX81, made by a company called
Sinclair, coming out of Cambridge here in the UK.
So I learnt programming basic on that and also Z80 assembly, I guess the ZX81 came with
one K of RAM, which obviously is very limiting.
So we bought the 49 pounds worth of 16 K RAM pack, which sort of plugged into a proprietary
port in the back of the ZX81 and you had to type on a membrane keyboard, which there
was a particular technique to it and it involved kind of wiping your fingers across each
key.
All very physical and of course that had the effect as well of wobbling the computer
slightly, which meant that the RAM pack wobbled slightly, which meant it crashed all
the time.
The RAM pack as well as providing 16 K also provided some seismic instrumentation and if
someone dropped a pin in the next room from where you were trying to write your code
byte by byte and the whole computer would crash because the connection between the
RAM pack and the computer would break momentarily and then you get this kind of grey fuzzy
screen on your television in front of you, which meant the computer had forked itself.
So after that, having learnt a bit of programming, we progressed in our household anyway
to the risk computers from ACON, another Cambridge-based computer company, risk of course
now being really quite popular and you can track obviously arm computing right back to
Cambridge in the 80s.
The computers we're used with a BBC Micro A and B and the ACON Electron, these
are computers, I think that never really got far from the UK, so I guess it was about
the same kind of time as the TSR-80 was big in the US and early Apple machines as well
were coming out the Apple II I think was floating around that time.
So we're talking about that sort of era of technology.
They were running on 6502 processors, I think they were called so again our program on those
in basic and also some assembly as well and then I guess when I went away to college
I discovered very early 386 and 486 as running DOS, DOS 3.1 and the first word processor
I ever used was word perfect, which I think was version 6 and had this fantastic white
on blue display of text which I still used to this day actually at least that color scheme
and it was great because what it would do as a word processor it would show you literally
how it was putting together your page so rather like HTML tags or XML tags if you
wanted to select italics you could see if you turned on this mode you could see the computer
insert the italics tag and then you type whatever text it was you wanted in italics and then
when you turned off a italics mode it would insert another tag so you could see literally
exactly what the computer was going to do to your text and it would show you spaces it
would show you new lines it would show you underlines and so on and so forth using these
tags so you could predict incredibly accurately what your page was going to look like
and this I found to be absolutely fantastic when I eventually got my first computer which
was a Macintosh LC475 I think there was also a performer version and a quadriversion
of the 475 depending on which market you're in I used word perfect on that Mac and until
it was eventually stopped it stopped being developed and I was unfortunately pushed on to
having to use word by Microsoft format and it was there really that I discovered or using
word for Mac it was there that I discovered this distraction thing and what I mean by that
was that I would try and write something and if my line of thought wandered off course or I got
distracted I call it writers block it's probably blowing it up a bit really I don't think it
was ever that grandiose but let's say you know I'd lost my way a bit well then I found that I could
adjust the margins or change font or find a setting that would indent the first line of every
paragraph and do things like remove orphans and all these things that a graphical user interface
in a word processor will do for you anyway after a while of you know using comic sands and then
switching back to times or aerial or gill sands or whatever font I found most attractive that
day I realized actually I was spending a lot more time playing with the layout than I was
actually writing and obviously this is something that a word processor offers you all the time
and it's a real distraction and so it was from there really that I started to get into
distraction free word processing or distraction free text environments and these are fantastic
the one I used on the Mac which is still going to this day it's called writer room which you can
customize to a massive degree so you can have kind of funky luminous green text on a black background
with a block cursor that blinks to kind of make you you know like something of 80s or 90s
hacker movie it offers you this thing called typewriter mode which only shows you three lines
three or four lines of what you're writing and blurs the rest out so there's no even
glancing back into your previous text it really does keep you focused one I switched to Linux in the
I would say the early norties perhaps not full time perhaps not as a daily driver but I certainly
began to use Linux about that time I was using crunch bang Linux on a Samsung 10 inch netbook
I discovered various text editors in the Linux world some of which I use to this day the one I'm
using at the moment in Linux is called focus writer which is great so rather like right room
and obviously there are dozens of these so I'm just mentioning a couple and again you can
configure it you can put a black screen or any color you can put an image around your text you can
blur text you're not concentrating on out just show a few lines the blinking cursor white on black
black on white whatever you fancy really the idea being that you can if you want even you know
turn off things like spell correction as you go along normally as you're typing away in most
text editors or prose text editors you can see words you've misspelled with an underlining or
red wobbly line under a word you've misspelled well with a distraction free text editor I would say
turn that off because if you're typing a long sentence it's really tempting to go back and
correct your spelling as you go along and that way you lose your thread and it slows you down
it's for me at least it's so much better just to splurge the text out and then go back and
do all the fun stuff like formatting and spell correction and grammar correction and things like
that it is something that drives me crazy actually the whole system and the way that computers
have now centralized communication as well as work into one place into one desktop environment
often for instance the latest iterations of the macOS turning off notifications is really
quite difficult but like Android you have to go through each application and turn off
notifications one by one or make sure that the do not disturb mode last sold day and all night
personally I don't that doesn't work for me at all in fact if I've got a serious job of work on
I'll turn off all notifications on my phone on the computer I'll even go and put my phone or tablet
in the room next door so if it pings or burrs or words or rings I'll just ignore it while I'm
concentrating and what I'm doing and this works for me very well I suppose it's an hour just
using distraction free text editors it just keeps me concentrated on exactly what I'm doing
when I go into the office in which I work a few days a week it always amazes me that the people
younger than me in the office are sometimes on their phones they're writing or surfing or doing
their work and at the same time they're switching application and just typing in a what's that
message into a web page or they're picking up their phone and just sending off a quick text or
posting on Instagram that kind of thing and that really doesn't work for me I find if my
train of thought shifts for just a few seconds it can take me 10, 20, 30 seconds to kind of get
back on track and I'm not saying that people who switch from communicating on various platforms
to their work I'm not saying they do a better or worse job than me particularly all I know is
that it doesn't work for me and I wonder how they can because I know that I can't work like that
and this kind of brings me back now to technology and the way that I use it I tried them
or VI first and then moved onto them both in graphic and keyboard shortcut modes and I didn't
get on with them too well mostly because I'd be typing and you know would miss out the first four
or five letters of each word um well it's when I first started typing because I wouldn't be in
I wouldn't be in insert mode I'd be in some command mode and I found that I never really got into
the habit of being able to switch modes particularly in them having said that what I do like about
them is that it's all like can all be keyboard controlled and this is a big thing for me back in
the early days of my career I was working as a helpless technician and obviously I was on a computer
all day helping people out on the phone and going around the college that I happen to work in
helping people with their computers and I found that I got really bad RSI repetitive strain injury
in my right hand and this was actually in those days from using the puck mouse that came with
the iMacs that we used at that time and I just get these terrible shooting pains up my right
wrist and right at my right arm and so to this day if I am forced to use a mouse I have to keep
changing the mouse that I use so I'll go from an upright mouse to a standard two or three button mouse
and then move to a track ball and then move to a thumball track pad or a whack on tablet and then
back to a mouse and keep changing so that my hand isn't in the same position to control the computer
of the whole time and this is led to me wanting to control the applications that I use almost entirely
or at least as much as I can using keyboard shortcuts and this is why I first got into using them.
Obviously if you use them a lot you hear about other similar packages and of course
the elephant in the room there is e-max and it was from my use of e-max really that I
discovered that I had in fact come home or at least regressed 40 years. I'm now using e-max
for as much as I possibly can. I'm finding it a brilliant environment in which to work.
I'm experimenting at the moment with EXWM which is using e-max as your Windows manager
it controls the X window system and you can obviously send e-mail, read your e-mail, browse the
web in various forms to various varying degrees of complexity and all using the same keyboard
shortcuts and key bindings right across every application and this for me is absolutely fantastic.
I've very rarely have to move my right hand over to the mouse. If ever I find that if I am using
a Linux machine which are now my daily drivers I always have i3 Windows manager on those and I'll
find myself switching between maybe nano e-max, focus writer and then if I do have to use a
traditional word processor which I do in my line of work mostly actually to track changes
when the copy that I've written goes to clients and back I use WPS office. WPS office is closed
source it's a proprietary package there is a community version it's out of China
from a company called Kingsoft and the reason why I use it over for instance Libre office
or any of the alternatives Abbey word for instance Caligra I've also used an enjoyed but the
reason why I use WPS office on Linux is because it can be skinned or given the user interface of what
looks like a 1990s version of word for Mac so even though it was word for Mac back in the 90s
that pushed me onto this road of distraction free text editing and if I'm having to use a graphical
user interface word processor it'll be WPS office that I use tools as well that I use
Hunspell I find great that's shipped usually with focus writer and you can switch between
many many languages if English isn't your first language and then there are of course variations
on English so you can switch between US English, UK English or Australian English with their
particular variations if I'm using e-max I use Ispel or Aspel again switching between
dictionaries is quick and easy I haven't really got to grips with grammar checking in e-max
I know there's an API on to Grammily.com my employer pays for Grammily so it is a service I use
it's not particularly useful but it does pick up things that you think you might correct if you
had the time to prove for read your own stuff more accurately for instance you can start a sentence
with a plural subject and then use a singular form of the noun and you might not notice you've
done that but something like Grammily will pick it up. A lot of Grammily's suggestions you can
ignore but it is quite useful on occasion if you haven't got somebody else another human
to do your proof reading or subediting for you and I've yet to plum in a decent grammar editor
into e-max something I'll be looking at fairly soon I think now whether that's the Grammily
API that I end up using I don't know I'd be very interested to hear how if there are any other
writers out there whether they're using a Grammar editor at all which one they're using and
any e-max users out there how they're integrating Grammar editing into their e-max workflows
I'll be putting links to all the applications that I've mentioned today in the show notes
there's a great article I found on using them as a word process it's really handy
I'll also put links to right room ice spell or a spell and hun spell in the notes
so that's about all from me I think thanks ever so much everyone for listening into this
hope you found it useful as I said at the beginning if you want to record podcast of your
own please do feel free to find a microphone make a recording submet it and get yourself out there
so this is Anna Stella signing off on Hacker Public Radio thanks for listening
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