My Dad, Typewriters, and a Rolltop Desk

Father's Day

Something Old, Something New. The Rocket + RocketBook

This is an experiment mixing the old and the new technologies.
I am typing this note on an old Hermes Rocket, but the paper
is a blank that I downloaded from the Rocketbook website. I
will use the Rocketbook software to take a picture of this page
and then upload it to my gmail account. The Rocketbook software
will save this as a PDF image and do character recognition on
the text. If this works, I think I have a very interesting new
process that I will use for writing.

And I love the coincidental symetry of using a Rocket and a
Rocketbook.

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OK, this experiment totally worked. The text above is was cut and pasted straight from the Rocketbook OCR text. Now the cool thing is that anybody could do this. I think it would work with pretty much any typewriter and you don't even have to buy anything (assuming you already have a smart phone). The blank Rocketbook PDF templates are at:

https://getrocketbook.com/pages/rocketbook-for-free

I use the Dot-Grid one for typing. You can print off as many blank pages as you'll ever need.

The Rocketbook software for your phone is a free download from either Apple or Google Apps, depending on your religious preferences.

Now, of course, once you start playing around with the Rocketbook stuff, you'll probably want to buy one or two of their notebooks, which I wrote about here:

https://seldomspeedy.blogspot.com/2020/05/what-heck-is-rocketbook.html

The Rocketbooks have totally changed my creative workflow. Sketches, handwritten notes, an now typing are all easily scanned and uploaded. Any text in any document, be it hand-written or typed, is recognized (although the OCR software occasionally stumbles a bit if my printing is sloppy). The text is nicely searchable so if I'm looking for all my notes about snails (don't judge me), I can easily find them.

Blues For My Dad

Back on April 3rd, early in this whole pandemic lockdown thing, I woke up with a fragment of a blues song in my head. Once I got up and started writing the whole thing was done in about 20 minutes.

The lyrics go like this:

Oh I woke up this morning

Alive in my bed.

I woke up this morning

So I still ain't dead.

I woke up this morning

'cause I had to go pee.

Now that I've done that

What's next for me?

I could turn on the news

But I bet it's all bad.

Maybe I'll just stay here

And keep feeling sad.

My dear old daddy

Said that he's lived too long.

So I woke up this morning

And I wrote him this song.

He's kept on going

For ninety-five years.

He's had lots of laughter

And plenty of tears.

My mom passed on

A few years ago.

It damn near killed dad,

But it didn't, you know.

Now he's miles away

and I'm stuck in my home.

He can't hear very well,

So I really can't phone.

But I can write him this song

And drop it in the mail.

We're stuck in our homes,

But at least it ain't jail.

My daddy's still living

So I guess I can too.

I wrote him this song,

But it's also for you.

You may think you're alone

With no reason to live,

But you're somebody's reason,

That's what you give.

So if you woke up this morning

There's a reason for that.

Somebody needs you,

Perhaps it's your cat.

Maybe it's your neighbor,

Or the girl down the hall,

Maybe it's the old lady

Who thinks she's lost it all.

Oh I woke up this morning

Feeling pretty bad,

But I feel better now

'cause I wrote to my dad.

I woke up this morning

With nothing to do.

I woke up this morning

And I wrote this for you.

Now I did type up the song and mail it to my dad, along with a letter. I'm not any kind of musician and I told him and I'm telling you that he was lucky that he couldn't hear me sing it. I really didn't have much of a tune for it, more just a vague notion of a tune for it.

I also emailed the lyrics to my friend Anni, who is a musician and who knows musicians. She emailed it to her blues friend Carl and by later that afternoon Carl had set my lyrics to music and recorded this:

I was then able to email this audio to my sister, who was able to play the song on her phone for my dad.

So, the moral of this story is that you never know when inspiration will strike so be ready to write stuff down. And if you can't do something, you might know somebody who knows somebody who can. And somebody might need to hear what you need to say.

My dad is still hanging in there and so am I. I hope you are too.

Ray Bradbury's Typewriter

Ray Bradbury wrote all of his books and stories on a typewriter, he never used a computer. He famously spent $9.80 to type up Fahrenheit 451 on a rental typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library.  You can see a picture of Ray's 1947 Royal KMM and read a bit more about him at:

https://www.lamag.com/askchris/displa-case-71-ray-bradburys-typewriter/

I've loved Ray's writing since I first discovered him as a teenager. While his science fiction is what he's most famous for, he also wrote a several fun spooky weird mysteries that I especially enjoyed, DEATH IS A LONELY BUSINESS and A GRAVEYARD FOR LUNATICS.

What the heck is a Rocketbook?

A Rocketbook is a reusable note book that does a couple of really cool things. First off, it's erasable. You write on it using a Pilot Frixion pen and  you can erase by using a damp cloth. The notebook pages are not paper, they are more like thin plastic.

The thing that makes the Rocketbook super useful is that it has a phone app that snaps a picture of your pages and lets you send them to email or dropbox. It does a pretty good job of character recognition.

If you are artistic (or even if you are not!), you can draw pictures in your Rocketbook.
Rocketbooks come in several sizes. I have both the executive sized one and the pocket sized one.

The one downside to the Rocketbook is that you have to let the ink dry for about 15 seconds or so and in those 15 seconds it's easy to smudge. It's something I've gotten used to, but it is a deal breaker for some folks. I kind of think of the Rocketbook as a bunch of whiteboard pages that I can carry in my pocket.

Another neat thing about the Rocketbook is that all the notes you upload are searchable. Again, the text recognition does a really good job. It's very handy having all my notes searchable on both my phone and the computer.

The Rocketbook is a very handy mix of low and high tech. In day to day use it just feels like using a notebook but those notes can be easily used in emails, blog posts, stories or whatever. Rocketbooks are one of those things I find myself enthusiastically recommending to friends.

Me and Tom and Corona

I don't think my pal Tom will mind my sharing our latest letter exchange here. Stay safe everybody.