{"id":12674,"date":"2019-04-14T00:04:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-14T00:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=12674"},"modified":"2019-04-14T14:20:12","modified_gmt":"2019-04-14T14:20:12","slug":"the-alphasmart-neo-2-keyboard-for-writing-without-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2019\/04\/14\/the-alphasmart-neo-2-keyboard-for-writing-without-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"The AlphaSmart Neo 2 keyboard \u2014 for writing without Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Alphasmart Neo 2 is a standalone word processor. It’s a keyboard with a memory, and no Internet. It runs for a year on 3 AA batteries.<\/p>\n

The Neo 2 comes highly recommended by a<\/a> pile<\/a> of<\/a> writers<\/a> who have the same problem I do: a ton of distractions, and no attention span. A keyboard that doesn’t have Twitter an alt-tab away!<\/p>\n

It was manufactured by Renaissance Learning, who marketed these<\/a> to schools, mostly to teach typing. They fell to the advent of netbooks and then cheap tablets, and were discontinued in 2013. But there are still plenty second-hand.<\/p>\n

There’s so many fabulously retro things about the Neo 2. The design and the technology are straight out of the late 1990s. Squidgy dark-grey plastic design! LCD! Infrared networking!<\/a> Weighing about twice what you’d think it should!<\/p>\n

I bought mine for $49.95 (plus shipping) with some Amazon gift certificate dollars that were stuck on Amazon US, which I couldn’t use for much else. You can find them for $20 if you look.<\/p>\n

(This is a worked example of why the standard ICO<\/a> scheme “print our own industry-specific company scrip<\/a>” was always a dumb and bad idea. We have general currencies for a reason.)<\/p>\n

I wrote the first version of this post on the Neo 2 itself.<\/p>\n

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The quest for raw daily word count<\/h3>\n

I have a book to finish \u2014 working title “World’s Worst ICOs” \u2014 which I’ve barely been moving forward on.<\/p>\n

I was considering a folding Bluetooth keyboard,<\/a> to use on the train to type on my phone. But these things aren’t in computer stores like Curry’s, and I’m not going to risk fifty quid sight unseen, and keys untyped, on a weird tiny keyboard I may well hate. Renaissance used pretty ordinary full-sized keyboards, so I was happier to risk an AlphaSmart.<\/p>\n

The Neo 2 is heavier than I’d been hoping, at just under a kilo \u2014 much heavier than a tablet, say. I might try commuting with it, though \u2014 it’s lighter than my laptop.<\/p>\n

Testing the keyboard<\/h3>\n

The Neo 2 has a flat keyboard with mediocre keys \u2014 comparable to a generic \u00a35 keyboard from Tesco. A bit mushy. But not unusably so.<\/p>\n

My usual keyboard is either my laptop (Lenovo X250) or the lovely Microsoft Natural at the office. I used to have an IBM Model M, on which 60 words per minute required ear defenders. In an ideal world, I’d have a Natural with mechanical keys.<\/p>\n

So, just now, the Neo 2 successfully defended me from myself \u2014 I couldn’t alt-tab to a browser window to search for “natural keyboard mechanical<\/a>“. I’ll do that later.<\/i><\/p>\n

Little hiccups along the way:<\/p>\n