Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Manual Typewriters, the Original Mobile Devices

I love manual typewriters, so much so that I am writing this blog post on one.

Well, actually, I wrote the first draft on one. It turns out that there isn’t a WordPress plugin for my Remington Noiseless Portable.

Anyway, back to why I love my typewriter.

Sure, sometimes it makes an extra letter or skips a space, and there’s no good way to deal with mistakes. But there is something very satisfying about being able to literally put words to paper.

You have to think before you write. It’s cruel or ironic or something that we have reached a point where our words can travel across the globe and yet it has never required less effort to put them down. Maybe if it was a little harder, we would choose our words more carefully and assess their impact more fully.

Plus, since manual typewriters are officially now “a thing,” maybe I am cool.

Well, probably not. But, at the very least, I had a good excuse to pull Remington Sedaris Turpen Fried off the shelf. If only rotary-dial phones would make a comeback, I will totally be set.

ZDNet has a great piece up on how many other tech writers are also enthralled with their manual typewriters, with several offering their love letters. I decided to add mine to the mix.

Now, to add a bit of tech to the piece, there are some cool options to merge the old world with the new, including the USB Typewriter. Available either as a do-it-yourself kit or as an already-crafted device, the USB Keyboard is a fully functional keyboard made out of a manual typewriter.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald