Twenty Reasons To Use A Typewriter

Imperial Good Companion Typewriter

1. Security. Documents produced on a manual typewriter cannot be hacked or downloaded, keep the document in a locked drawer and unless you give it to someone it is safe from those prying eyes.

2. Convenience. Your typewriter is always ready and you do not have to worry about the availability of a power source.

3. Unchanging. The typewriter will always be there and will remain the same. There are no endless updates to be done.

4. Longevity. A typewriter will last for many years and will probably outlast you if you look after it. I am currently writing on a machine that is over eighty years old. There is no requirement to update to a new model.

5. Focus. Using a typewriter allows you to focus on the task in hand, writing. There are no annoying distractions such as The Internet and endless notifications from various apps.

6. Education. You do not have grammar and spelling correction to constantly fall back on, you write what YOU write, nothing more nothing less, if you cannot spell something look it up in a small pocket dictionary before typing it, you will be surprised how much more easily you will remember it next time you use the word.

7. Pleasure. Using a typewriter just feels nice. I love the clicking of the keys, the ringing of the bell and the slide of the returning carriage indicating that another line is complete.

8. Make it personal, sending a hand typed note or letter is a nice thing to do. The reader will read it warts and all and know that some human and personal effort has gone into creating it. Every typewriter is unique and every letter generated on a manual typewriter is itself unique, it’s like a fingerprint.

9. Instant Documents, no need to mess about with a printer that isn’ t working properly, just wind the sheet of paper out of the machine when you are done and that’s it, sign and send.

10. Thinking Time. A typewriter forces you to think before you press those keys, the marks on the paper are permanent and are there for ever, think before you make them.

11. Typewriters are cool and people are interested in them. If you use one often people will want to talk to you about it, they are a conversation starter.

12. You have an immediate physical backup of your work. Everything you have produced exists in a real, physical, analogue form, a fault on a server is not going to trash it.

13. Affordability. If you get in before everyone wants one a typewriter can be bought for far less than a laptop or similar. Prices are rising as people start to appreciate these machines and they are not manufactured any longer so don’t leave it too long before investing.

14. Appreciation. A typewriter may well be an appreciating asset. People increasingly like and collect these things. If it turns out not to be for you, you can always sell it, probably at a profit.

15. Chill Out. Using a manual typewriter forces you to slow down and in today’s world that is a good thing. People these days are just in too much of a rush, slow down, type a letter, enjoy the rhythmic “ping” of the bell and take time over things.

16. Going back to using carbon paper is fun. Type out your letter and hey presto at the end you have not one but TWO copies.

17. WiFi, Simple benefit this, you just don’t need it, if it’s unavailable who cares, not the person with the typewriter.

18. Aesthetics, Yes, this does matter. A vintage typewriter just looks nice, lovely black and white keys with chrome rims, shiny black enamel cover, fitted leather case etc. Beautiful.

19. Crashless. A manual typewriter will NEVER crash and cause you frustration. These things just keep on working, year after year.

20. Viruses. Well, a lack of viruses at any rate. You will never have to worry about your manual typewriter getting infected by the latest virus, it will just remain the same, day after day.

    Well, that’s just a summary of my top twenty reasons for using a manual typewriter. Don’t forget that if you want to it is still very easy to bring your work into the digital world, a typewritten page is easily scanned to generate an editable . txt file but it’s just not nearly as nice.

    Original document typed on an Imperial “The Good Companion” made in 1939, serial number 2D237.

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Bruce Schneier - Cryptographer

The term Schneier’s law was coined by Cory Doctorow in a 2004 speech, the law is phrased as:

Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.

He attributes this to Bruce Schneier, who wrote in 1998:

Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break. It’s not even hard. What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after years of analysis.

Merging MP3 Files

I take no credit for this but this information may well be useful, it was to me!

The Question:

I have an audiobook that’s been separated into a truly stupid 560 files, and I want to combine them in one big file. There’s a million threads about this on Google and its difficult to find good information in any of them so I’m hoping for some clear help for a free way to merge .mp3 files.

The Answer:

You can do this on the command line. Navigate to a folder containing the mp3s. Right click and select Services > New Terminal at Folder. That will open a terminal window. Type cat at the prompt, followed by a space. Don’t hit enter/return. Now go back to the folder with the mp3s in Finder and open it. Get the mp3s in descending order (for example by sorting by name), and then select all of them. Drag the lot you’ve selected over to the Terminal window. Create a space after the last part of the last file name and then type > BigAudioFile.mp3, or whatever you want the single file to be called. Then hit enter. A new mp3 will be created that has combined all the mp3s.

One problem I’ve encountered:

While the newly created mp3 contains all of the individual mp3s combined together, sometimes my iPhone audiobook player will only recognize it as the first of the individual mp3 files (despite the file being much larger than just that first individual file). To address this, I use VLC to “convert” the new big mp3 to a new…big mp3. Something about running it through VLC gets my audiobook player to recognize it as the big complete mp3 that it is.

Further Question:

Thank you for this! It worked for me. One question - How did you “convert” using VLC?

Further Answer:

Go to File > Convert/Stream… . Then hit Open and select the big mp3 file you just created. Then under Choose profile select “Audio - mp3”, click Save as File, and then give it a new name and choose where to save it (add “.mp3” as a suffix). Then hit Go!. VLC will process the file and create a new mp3. For some reason, my ios audiobook player (CloudBeats) will sometimes need me to do this before it’ll treat the large mp3 as containing more than just the content in the first of the many mp3 files you concatenated using the process in terminal.