Jim Stogdill on cloud-based typewriters and smart watches
The O’Reilly Solid Podcast: Distractions, wearables, and reference peanut butter.
Hemingwrite (source: Astrohaus)
Subscribe to the O’Reilly Solid Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.
In this episode of the Solid Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Jim Stogdill, one of the key figures behind the launch of our Solid conference, about some of the cool pieces of hardware that we’ve come across recently.
Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther.
Stogdill starts off with the Hemingwrite, an ultra-simplified Internet-connected typewriter for writers who need to isolate themselves from distraction. It duplicates, at significant expense and austerity, a small part of any modern computer’s functionality. The Hemingwrite’s existence — along with that of its oversubscribed Kickstarter campaign — demonstrates the new economics of hardware: development costs have fallen enough that clever entrepreneurs can isolate and solve niche consumer problems like needing a browserless computer because you sometimes don’t want to be distracted by your browsered computer. Also, I’d like one.
Other things mentioned in this episode
- My photo of NIST’s Standard Reference Peanut Butter went viral last winter.
- I cannot recommend NIST’s museum highly enough. In addition to the standards you’d expect, it also has things like the standard ohm.
- Ringly
- The Pebble watch
- Piper, the Minecraft Raspberry Pi toolkit
- AlphaSmart Neo, the predecessor to the Hemingwrite
Cropped image on article and category pages by Mohylek on Wikimedia Commons.
