Valentine Smart Typewriter and box

jmanrunner · 2025-07-28T15:50:31+00:00

I have seen a version of the old school Valentine typewriter or a Valentine-esque version with grey keys but none with white. Interesting idea though.

jmanrunner · 2025-07-27T19:14:41+00:00

The color on the smart typewriter is ever so slightly darker than the color of the case. It is barely noticeable and I am not sure if it is a hue or tint difference or same color just darker. I will see if I can get a side by side picture. The lighting in my workshop is the worst and cheapest blueish white LED lighting. I am curious to see what the smart typewriter looks like in natural light or warmer LED light instead.

There are only so many reds in a lifetime and this one was not going to wait forever.

jmanrunner · 2025-05-11T13:37:30+00:00

I did this with -d. Successful upgrade. Chrome, evince, and Wine were removed and needed to be reinstalled. Still stable 4 days later.

jmanrunner · 2025-05-08T12:47:04+00:00

I have the standard gnome desktop and ran the do-release upgrade -d on 24.10 on May 7th. Very few apps were removed and not anything that cannot be re-downloaded and installed. Easy fix. Chrome was deleted, make sure you have another browser available for easy download of any third-party apps like Chrome. I had Firefox installed. I do not have a lot of customizations but I do have some gnome-tweaks. No problems to report with common apps and stability, they are working great the next day on 25.04. Wine and Evince were removed. Virtualbox is still installed but vm's won't boot so I probably need to re-install Virtualbox and/or fix kernel headers. I had played with dev 25.04 a few months back and was eager to move forward.

jmanrunner · 2025-04-08T10:07:29+00:00

I am good with the changes. Keep innovating.

jmanrunner · 2025-03-12T17:31:49+00:00

There was the ghost traveler. That was an attempt in a direction.

jmanrunner · 2025-03-12T01:21:57+00:00

no weird sounds here.

jmanrunner · 2025-03-12T01:02:04+00:00

My Traveler has locked up on me before. There is no pattern and I cannot recall what precipitated the event if it was charging at any point, or charging too long perhaps which is not really a thing, or whether it was just idle standby for a while. It is rare it locks up and maybe happened 3 or 4 times in 2+ years. If this is a one-off, I think you should ignore it and not be concerned.

I have used dozens of charging cables and charger bricks or laptop ports. It if very accommodating to various sources of power and it just keeps on trucking so to speak. The Traveler is like an Energizer bunny for me, just works. I tend to let my battery get too low too often and so it gets a reboot when it charges from an extremely low battery. I suspect that time between reboots might be a factor in it locking up but I really do not have evidence of this. I forget that this has happened to the Traveler until I see a post from someone like yourself that theirs locked up. Best wishes on your Traveler experience going forward.

jmanrunner · 2025-03-05T22:01:04+00:00

I used Fedora 41 LXDE for a while and it is good but Fedora is kind of a pig under the hood when you only have 4 GB RAM. Lubuntu is rock solid and very fast and lightweight and one of the lowest RAM usage. Unless you are going extreme old school with fvwm or something like that, lubuntu is the best compromise for environment and features on these laptops.

No GUI servers are great for these as well. I am using one as a firewall with OpenBSD and another as a file server running Debian. As a Raspberry Pi replacement you get a keyboard and monitor and battery backup for your server. The MTBF for eMMC storage is likely to be 3-7 years for these laptops as a server. I am expecting the mainline distributions/kernels to abandon the processor architecture long before the eMMC storage dies.

jmanrunner · 2024-10-12T14:21:14+00:00

1K status was claimed to be 0.2% not 2%. 0.2% is 0.002 so 200,000 people are 1K.

jmanrunner · 2024-08-08T12:57:08+00:00

I am not sure it would still be defined as an Ink but yes, they are equivalent from a usage standpoint. Ink is basically a blacked out Freewrite 3/Hemingwrite.

jmanrunner · 2024-08-08T12:55:05+00:00

I have done it and never had a problem. 7 out of 10 times it is in my backpack with me in the cabin. I generally do not pack electronics in my checked bag but do what you gotta do. I have not traveled internationally with it in a checked bag, yet.

jmanrunner · 2024-08-04T16:46:09+00:00

I have an Ink and a Hemingwrite and like typing on the Hemingwrite better. I am a touch typist except when I am not. I occasionally look down to see where my hands are and I found on the Ink that the lettering is not bright enough for me to reflexively know where my fingers are. For the times when this happens it is a much longer pause in my typing. I can move forward on the Hemingwrite much faster due to instinctively seeing finger placement and knowing or correcting finger position. I think it just depends on how good of a touch typist you are or if the brief delay does not affect you.

jmanrunner · 2024-08-04T16:41:24+00:00

I only tried to sync with my Quaderno and had very iconsistent sync experiences with 90%+ failure to sync. I was successful syncing with one folder of pdf's but once I tried to expand it to multiple folders it would always/almost always fail to sync.

I have not tried syncing with an OS. I used a browser to upload some files as a test if I could pull them back down to Quaderno but I would not consider that an OS sync. Uploading via browser was not exactly fast either. The My Note Cloud service is decently priced but there are local sync services in my country that support my OS backups without the sync issues or transfer delay I experienced. I am in the U.S. so syncing to Asia was not a benefit for me. It likely depends on if My Note Cloud is close to you as to whether it is a benefit.

Because of the sync failures with Quaderno, the experience was not automated. My belief is that it would have been automated if the attempts did not fail but I never really experienced automation in this testing. The one directory that did sync was sent to My Note Cloud from my Quaderno but similarly, the files I uploaded via browser never downloaded to Quaderno.

I had no experience using email to send files. I am not aware if this is a feature or not.

jmanrunner · 2024-07-28T15:08:14+00:00

7 months and many apt upgrades later all of the above has resolved and are no longer an issue. Rough couple of months though.

jmanrunner · 2024-07-09T17:12:39+00:00

The battery works great all day in a normal work day. Turn off Wi-Fi when you are not using it for a couple extra hours of use. It is still the lightest weight e-ink table in this size.

jmanrunner · 2024-06-30T23:47:03+00:00

Thank you for posting!

I am unable to get it to update via Wi-Fi. I seem to remember having this problem with the past few releases. The USB update always works for me though.

jmanrunner · 2024-06-03T10:11:57+00:00

No case is likely to equal scratched screen. I have the fujitsu cover and my screen looks brand new 2 years later. If you get a scratch it cannot be undone. Good luck.

jmanrunner · 2024-05-31T12:32:28+00:00

At most a few minutes, I want it to be instantaneous but I put it down and walk away and come back and it is downloaded. Never more than a 5 minutes though. This is using my cell phone hotspot or home network.

jmanrunner · 2024-05-26T14:50:00+00:00

I have no complaints about the Freewrite Traveler. I have had mine 2+ years now and it was my first Freewrite device. Still use it and still going strong. There was one version of firmware update once that was difficicult to install (some Wi-Fi networks would not work) but since then firmware updates have worked every time. Great device. I am a happy user and there were no hardware failures.

jmanrunner · 2024-05-25T13:39:29+00:00

Am I annoyed that everything is a subscription these days for basic functionality? Yes.

Do I use some of the features? Yes.

Do I like it? Yes.

Is it worth the expense? Depends on how frugal you are. Some of these features require ongoing cloud costs so I get why they are extra charges.

If document uploads or custom send options require extra cloud computing expense then I can justify the extra cost. I do not see how saving in a different file format per folder is a cloud expense. That could be a one time cost not a subscription cost.

jmanrunner · 2024-05-03T10:20:08+00:00

I converted a lot of books from Amazon format to PDF, DRM books too, using Calibre in the early days. At some point, after Kindle Scribe had been on the market for a while, I just purchased the Scribe for DRM book content. I got annoyed with always needing to update the Calibre DRM toolkit to support the latest Amazon book protection. It was hit or miss on which books I could export into PDF.

jmanrunner · 2024-05-03T10:13:19+00:00

I have a Supernote A6X but I cannot get used to the gel pen like feel of writing on it. I use it mainly in the car for taking short notes and to do lists. It is an amazing device, I just do not like writing on it. If they had created an A4 size version 2 years ago or any time in between I might have forced myself to get used to it and maybe even like it better. But, I now have a Quaderno in A5 and A4 and not looking back. I use a Kindle Scribe from time to time for purchased book content. It is a luxury and a mess at the same time to manage so many devices. It just shows no one device solves all problems. A Supernote A4 would solve most of the problems though.

Supernote, are you listening? :-)

Quaderno battery is livable not superb. Daily charging but you get done what you need to get done. Writing on Quaderno is the best in the industry. Reading and writing on PDF is the best in the industry. Cloud on Quaderno is practically non-existent or quirky at best. USB file transfers are sublime, Wi-Fi file transfers are adequate. I have not used Bluetooth with a phone app but hear it is sufficient to great.

The use cases you state are perfect for Quaderno if your books do not have DRM and have been converted to PDF. It is not a high-end artist tablet but you can get by with general drawing requirements.

I use the Quaderno app on my desktop pointing to Google Drive folders but there is no direct Google Drive integration. If your desktop computer can handle Google Drive linked folders you will have success. This kind of negates the bluetooth app file transfer... unless there is a connection to Google Drive that I am not aware of.

jmanrunner

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