Typewriters and Security

If it’s good enough for Vladimir…

At the moment, the most secure and, at the same time, usable, method of creating, sharing and storing information is to write it up on a manual typewriter and store it in a locked filing cabinet or send it in an envelope via the good old Royal Mail. This is not a perfect system. It can be vulnerable to burglars or to Police Officers armed with a search warrant, but it may be better than anything else that is available to the general public, or, for that matter, to corporations or government agencies that truly wish to protect their secrets.

Brack — A Lovely Tea Loaf

Brack - My Favourite Cake

Ingredients

450g sultanas 220g raisins 220g currants 350g demerara sugar 300ml hot tea 2 eggs 450g Be-Ro Self-Raising Flour

Method

In a large, heat-resistant bowl, mix together the sultanas, raisins, and currants. Dissolve the demerara sugar in the hot tea (see tip below) and pour over the dried fruit.

Cover the bowl and leave the mixture to soak overnight.

The next day, preheat the oven to 150°C (fan oven) or 170°C (conventional oven).

Grease and line the bases of two 2lb loaf tins — this is a double-quantity recipe, so you’ll need both tins. I make a double quantity because the loaves keep well and with the cost of energy I think I might as well bake two as one as I’m heating the oven anyway.

Add the eggs to the soaked fruit mixture and beat well. Then, slowly stir in the self-raising flour until fully combined.

Divide the mixture evenly between the two prepared tins.

Bake for 1 hour 30 minutes to 1 hour 45 minutes, or until the loaves are firm and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.

Allow to cool in the tins for a few minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Tip

Always use hot tea to help the sugar dissolve and allow the dried fruit to swell more easily. A useful method is to dissolve the demerara sugar in the hot tea first by stirring it in a saucepan, then pouring the mixture over the dried fruit before soaking.

Writing & Artificial Aids

Analogue Only

I’ve been thinking about the way education is delivered these days and how employers complain that so many school-leavers and graduates do not seem to be well equipped for the world of work in terms of literacy and numeracy, where are things going wrong I ask myself.

As I sit here at my typewriter without really thinking about the words, the spelling, or very much else, I was reminded of a couple of video clips I watched recently. The clips were of some younger people being exposed to typewriters in various situations and how they got on actually using them to write was interesting.

What struck me was just how incredibly slowly these people generated the text and how many simple and basic errors were made as they typed. It dawned on me that the problem was that these people were not having all their errors corrected for them in terms of grammar, capitalisation, spelling, spacing etc. - in essence they were unable to generate words accurately without the constant assistance of technology, it was frightening.

My observations made me wonder whether technology is in fact “covering up” yawning gaps in what people coming through the education system are actually learning, that real gaps in skills and knowledge are being hidden from view.

As I pondered on this I thought how interesting it would be to truly test the writing accuracy of a group of people by completely removing technological assistance. What would happen if we took 100 people and sat each of them down in front of a typewriter and asked them to produce 1000 words on say “My Life So Far”?

This would remove all technological assistance but the subject matter would allow total freedom of expression. The “piece” could be handwritten if preferred, or even typed using a simple text editor which incorporated NO spelling or grammatical assistance and which did not allow backspacing, errors would remain.

The scripts could then be marked for spelling and grammatical accuracy as well as artistic and literary merit. This study would provide a clear measure of the literary performance of the subjects, from brain to paper, without any external assistance whatsoever, the results would I think be, at the very least, interesting.

But, in the end, does it matter?