Typewriter nostalgia

On our shelf: the old Halda, from the 30´s.

Here is a fun post for writing nostalgics. I saw a documentary last week about Woody Allen, who still writes all his scripts on his 40-year old Olympia. The salesman who sold it to him said it would last longer than him, and so far it looks like he was right! Swedish author Jan Guillou (who wrote the Crusades trilogy, and the books about Swedish secret agent Hamilton/Coq Rouge) writes everything on one of his four Adler typewriters, and has stocked up on ribbon to last him until he is 100 years old, at his present speed of writing. Sounds like he is all covered.

My mum had a Facit, with the old key layout (they changed the positions of å, ä, ö and some other keys in the 70´s), which I played with as a kid. I learned proper typing on an electrical, and my first jobs involved real typing, as the pc and wordprocessor didn´t become standard in all offices until the early 90´s. I was probably at my fastest when I was working as a clerk/secretary at Stockholm City Hall, by then on wordprocessor DisplayWrite4. We had a state-of-the-art ink-jet printer, I loved that thing! It was like magic.

I used to have a very nifty travel typewriter with exchangeable types, that allowed you to use different types of font. It also had an eraser tape, very practical. But I gave that away when I got my first laptop. I just tested my speed (something I haven´t done since school) and I can write a modest 60 words a minute. It is puzzling, I think, that schools don´t seem to teach proper typing skills, considering everyone uses computers these days.

Jag kan skriva60ord i minutenHur många ord i minuten klarar du?

Book-related Crafting

A friend directed me to a wonderful crafting website, and I just think this bookmark is so attractive! And a classic hiding place for your bookshelf. I´m not sure about this camera sweater, though...

SUI - sewing under the influence

Last Saturday, I was a grass widow, as Superhusband had put on his Football Referee suit and flown south. Not that I was entirely alone, I had Vodkalainen, cordial lime, and Mr Kindle, who I found on a shelf with a layer of dust on him. Truth is, I haven´t been able to read a single one of my Kindle-books since Christmas. Circumstance has invited me to do some other reading. It occured to me that I should have some sort of cover for the Kindle, to keep it from the dust and such. Like the one I made for my Iriver Story. Yes, I know there are these handsome leather covers, but I am not crazy about them. This is more along the line of something I would do, but I don´t need a pattern to create with hook and yarn. And this time, I wanted something faster.

I decided to go without a plan. This probably would have been hard without the vodka, as I´m usually a very organized, very mapped out kind of person. But who would I be if I didn´t sometimes present myself with a creative challenge? I have a large enough stash of pretty much everything, and Thrift is my middle name.

First, I fished out an old, empty plastic folder from years and years. It was marked "political socialisation", which seems to be a university course I once took and have now completely forgotten about. It´s all probably swimming around in my subconscious frame of reference. I simply placed Mr Kindle on top of it and cut around him. Which gave me something solid to build on.

Next, I found in my stash of fabrics a pair of trousers from a wrecked project. It had the exact right shape for what I needed and it seemed like a shortcut from having to do a lot of sewing. I measured, by eye, a bit of leg the length of 1½ of the plastic cover, and then some for seam allowance.

By now, I was firmly under the influence of cordial Vodkalainen, and decided to staple the thing together. Quick and dirty - indeed! I totally like the shape I had come up with, it was like a sturdy, padded envelope with two pockets, created from folding the hemmed end of the trouser leg towards the inside middle of the cover.

However, it wasn´t pretty. What to do? In another stash I found a tie. (Not the husband´s, I assure you I wouldn´t touch any of his - this one I thrifted to make a belt from, but then I found a better one and this one ended up in the stash.) I cut the tie up for an appliqué design that covered up the staples and that wrapped around the envelope shaped cover. And then I just stiched it in place.

(If you like to do improvised sewing, consider having threads of different weights at home. Some materials call for delicate thread, others for something coarser. And tip of the day: if you need to mend your sneakers or your backpack, use dental floss.)

The end of the trouserleg that was a bit wider (only about a centimeter on each side), invited me to add an elastic there, which held my envelope together from the sides. And then, what to use to fasten the tie end? A snap would have worked, if I had thought of it before I started sewing, which of course I didn´t. But, in my buttons&buckles&cetera-stash, I had a bunch of suspender clips. Well, waste not, want not. It seemed like the perfect thing for this dapper cover. No doubt, Kindle feeling so much like a Mister to me is what led me through this entire process.

By now, the vodka had worn off, and so had the staples, so I added stitches to the sides, to make it all proper and neat and safe.

The whole process took about two hours. And I´m pretty happy with the result. Ok, it might not be something I come bragging about to mum-in-law (the professional seamstress), but it is very functional, and thoroughly original. It cost me nothing. It makes me happy and keeps the dust off Mr Kindle.

Resurrection

Remember my Iriver Story ebook-reader? The one glued together by Irish Cream? Well, the guarantee wasn´t going to cover that, so we just decided to open it and see if we couldn´t just clean it out. What that means is, my husband - who has 20 years of experience as a sound technician at the Swedish Radio, before he went into academia - did the work, while I cheered and and assisted where I could.

It was a bit disconcerting to see the insides of the reader exposed like this. At the same time, it´s fascinating and kind of beautiful the way the circuit card and all the components is laid out. It´s just amazing to me that these itsy bitsy things can do such complex tasks and be so useful. Powerful, and yet so fragile.

The inspection focused on the keyboard, as that was the bit that wasn´t working for me. It seemed easy enough to just rinse it out, and we did. I then attacked the reader with my hairdryer and we let it lie for two days, just to be on the safe side, and then assembled it.

Turned out, there was even more Irish Cream in places we hadn´t looked, like all around the screen (which is made of what? glass?), and I´m pretty sure that contributed to this:

Oh well. I started looking at a replacement reader, at 1500 SEK (or 235 USD, or 175 euros). At the same time, my husband was looking for a replacement screen, and found one in Hong Kong, via Alibaba.com, for only 345 SEK (54 USD, or 40 euros), which was a bit cheaper, but would it work? Was it worth the risk? "Well", my husband said, "there is also the challenge." Which settled it.

Nine days later, the new screen arrived from Hong Kong. And on Saturday lunchtime, using the brief hours of daylight, the husband assembled it. I woke up (still sleeping at this time, I work nights, you know, not just lazy...) at the sound of the plastic cover snapping into place. When I had made my first cup of coffee, all the screws and little bits of cover plastic were in place, and the thing now works wonderfully.

It actually works better and faster now than before, since the screen is of a new and improved make!

Ok, so the plastic cover doesn´t look virgin any more (hard to open with only the help of screwdrivers, decidedly designed for other purposes), but really, that only makes me like it more. We´ve been through things now, Iriver Story and I, and survived. Scarred, but stronger. And every time I see those scratches, they remind me that I have Superhusband by my side, who keeps our household machinery going for years and years. (Have I ever mentioned that our washing machine is 22 years old, and never worked better?)

Lesson 1: Only drink water on airplanes. It´s better for your health, too.
Lesson 2: It is possible to fix things, even in this day and age. All is not lost when a screen goes blank.
Lesson 3: The market place is huge these days - you can really get anything. (And delivered fast. From anywhere. By FedEx and their friends.) I can just imagine trying to find that screen just ten or 15 years ago. Not that there even was a screen to be found...

Kindle. My Name is Kindle.

Got my Christmas present today, brought to me by car delivery! To my door! Amazon, you shouldn´t have... The grand entrance was followed up by the smoothest introduction a new piece of gadgetry has ever done of itself. In all my life I have never seen anything like it.

Not a single piece of paper came with it. Just an instruction on the screen that said how to start it. Press the button. And then it guides you through connecting to your wireless, installs your profile with another single press of a button, and you are provided with a very easy-to-read introduction brochure. And with no effort at all, the few kindle-books I have purchased before, (convincing myself that I would read them on the computer, but never do) were down-loaded on this charming reading tablet.

Not that the Iriver Story was particularly hard to get on with, I love it, too, but this was an experience on another level, I must say. Someone has been thinking, and that will win me every time. Even the box it came in was elegant, and so easy to open. And you know what that´s usually like. I can not fault this. The whole process was so darn elegant.

Now, I need to design a cover that is good enough for it. Can´t do another crafty crochet&plastic-solution here. I need something that looks more like... a tuxedo.

Measuring the world

Earlier this spring, before I started this blog, I read german author Daniel Kehlmann´s "Measuring the world" (swedish: "Världens mått"). I was impressed as I was reading it, the book is incredibly well written, well researched (I imagine) and funny. The story revolvs around a fictitious meeting between Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, and in flashbacks their respective stories are told. What they have in common is this urge to measure, hence the title.

However, when I had finished it, I couldn´t help being slightly disappointed. There just didn´t seem to be any point to the story. I didn´t really learn anything, didn´t change my point of view about anything. And the humour was a bit slap-stick in nature. Laughing at people is not nearly as satisfying as laughing with them.

I was reminded of this book when we visited the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. This is a smashing museum, not overwhelmingly large, has enthusiastic guides, and it is located in the original Ashmolean, the building erected by Elias Ashmole in 1683 to hold his vast collection of curiosities.

Now, it is mostly instruments of different kinds. And that´s what got me thinking of Kehlmann´s story of Humboldt and his long journey across the south-american continent. This is just the kind of things I imagine he would have lugged along.


Aren´t these things absolutely beautiful? I could post tons of pictures like these.

And what about this: a blackboard written on by Einstein himself during a lecture in 1931. If I remember the guide correctly, it is an estimation of the size of the universe. I would have thought you´d need more numbers to work that out, wouldn´t you?