Moments in Time

In a couple of previous postings I have described my use of the ATOMA notebooks, disc bindings and stationery in conjunction with a manual typewriter for writing an analogue journal which I hope will stand the test of time. I have also posted about a method I use for converting segments of my journal into editable text files which I can incorporate into other documents or systems, as well as allowing me to have a digital record of my material should a natural disaster strike.

The purpose of this posting is to outline the method I use to "incorporate" digital material into my journal where I feel that is desirable. Naturally I accept that if the referenced digital material becomes lost or unreadable it will no longer form a part of the journal. It is for this reason that referenced material is NEVER part of the critical journal material, more of an occasional enhancement.

Pondering how to do this I discounted using conventional URL pointers as I felt that would be too time-consuming and inconvenient. I needed something that, when looking back at my journal, I could easily access without going through the rigmarole of typing a URL into a web browser. I also needed to be able to use something which I generally would have available, my mobile telephone.

The solution was quite obvious really, I decided to use QR codes which are so widespread these days that we hardly even notice them. These codes have the advantage of being easy to generate, free to generate and readable by pretty much all smartphone cameras.

I already frequently print out labels for all kinds of things and for this I have been using a DYMO LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo, these small thermal printers are widely available and apart from anything else they make printing Christmas Card address labels a doddle!

I bought myself some 25mm x 25mm DYMO labels for the printer to print my QR codes onto, the next decision to take was which QR code generator to use, it had to free, it had to be convenient, and it had to be simple to use.

I generally use the Google Chrome browser when accessing the Internet and it made sense to me to use something that was built into the browser. There will I am sure be plenty of different options but I opted for the "QR Code Generator" currently v 8.27, which is available from the Chrome Web Store.

Using the extension is simple, whilst viewing the web resource you wish to link to simply select the QR Code Generator icon in the Chrome web browser and this will open the generator and show the QR code which can then be downloaded. Once downloaded I print the code onto a DYMO label which can then just be stuck into the appropriate page in my journal.

Using QR codes in this way allows me to incorporate all sorts of digital material into my analogue journal, here are just a few example of the types of resources QR codes can be used to "point" towards. There will be many more but in reality you are only limited by your imagination:

1). QR codes can include simple segments of plain text.

2). QR codes can contain contact details.

3). QR codes can contain email addresses that will open a mail application.

4). QR codes can contain a mobile phone number that will open a SMS application to send a message.

5). QR codes can contain any URL and can therefore point to pretty much any Internet resource.

6). QR codes can point to any public or unlisted YouTube video.

7). QR codes can point to an online photo or photo album.

That list is by no means exhaustive. In Japan QR codes are even appearing on "tombstones" and when scanned these codes take visitors to Internet resources about the deceased, the options really are never-ending!

I actually use very few QR codes in my journal but it's an option that I really like to have. Having opted to typewrite an analogue journal I did not want to be unable to include information from the digital world, for that is where I store many of my photographs and other materials. I wanted, as far as I could, to have the best of both worlds and above all to be able to write my journal using a typewriter.

The photograph at the top of this short article is just a bit of text I generated, with an included QR code, to illustrate how this works for me in my journal. Point your smartphone at the code and it should recognise it as a code and offer to take you to a place mentioned in the text, it's just an illustration.

As I mentioned, I do not use many QR codes in my journal, that was never the intention. I also do not "label" the QR codes I do include. Over time I forget what the QR codes refer to and I enjoy the "surprise" of pointing my phone at the code just to see what will pop up :-)

Typed on an Imperial Good Companion typewriter, serial number AC859, made in Leicester, England. I have no commercial relationship with either ATOMA or DYMO, I simply buy their products.

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?

If sufficient care is taken in terms of storage conditions, physical and fire security, an analogue paper journal should remain readable and accessible for many years, possibly decades or even centuries. Richard Polt, typewriter aficionado and thinker wrote to me, "Digital journals seem like a contradiction to me - the documents are just too liable to disappear or become unreadable". I have experienced this myself with old word processing files which I can no longer access, had those letters been written on a typewriter who knows, I may well still be able to read their contents today.

I wrote in a previous short article "A Typewritten Journal & The Atoma Notebook'' about the system I have adopted for my journal writing, this short article takes this a step further and describes my process for extracting segments from my journal for use in the digital world. It cannot be ignored that sometimes a digital version of something written on a typewriter can be a convenience, especially if the majority of one's writing is done on a manual typewriter, as is now the case for me.

Apart from the ability to conveniently share text, the facility to create a digital version of material from a typewritten journal may protect against loss or destruction in the event of a flood or fire. A digital version of analogue material can always be returned to a paper (though not original) version if required, if the original typewritten version has been destroyed.

Another issue I wanted to overcome is that without a complex and extensive indexing system analogue data can be difficult to access, we all remember the frustrations of the libraries of old I am sure. However, if a typewritten journal is given the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) treatment, even selectively, that journal then becomes immediately searchable and this can be invaluable.

The simple method of OCR analysis I use makes use of Google Photos and Google Lens, Google Lens is built into the Google Photos application and can be used on pretty much any smartphone these days, it is available free of charge. For the purpose of extracting segments of text from my journal I find it simpler and quicker to use a smartphone rather than a dedicated scanner. Doing it this way I can capture a segment of text even whilst the paper is still in the typewriter, publish it, and then just carry on typing.

The method I use is extremely simple. I generate the typewritten text and then simply point the smartphone camera, and capture a photo. Having captured a photo I open that photo with the Google Photos application, the application will recognise the text in the image as soon as I select the Google Lens option which is available at the foot of the screen as a "square with a dot in the centre" icon, as shown in the photo above.

Once the text has been recognised the application offers the option to "select all" text, with that selected the text can be copied to the clipboard for use elsewhere by simply pasting the text into a document, social media, or whatever is required. If the user is using Google Chrome and the browser is logged in as the same user as the Google Photos application the option is presented to copy the text to a computer and if this is selected the text is immediately copied to the computer clipboard, this is the way I tend to work.

Using this process I find it is simple to quickly, conveniently and accurately extract typewritten text from my journal for use elsewhere. This process also allows me to make far more use of my typewriters to generate text because for many reasons I prefer to work this way. It also allows me to selectively digitise only some of my text so that some of it remains strictly "analogue only" and therefore impervious to hacking, theft etc.

Confidentiality is of course extremely important and is one of my primary reasons for using a typewriter. For this reason I only photograph sections of text that I intend to put into the public domain anyway, such as this short article. It is also my intention to scan, on a monthly basis, all the pages of my journal as a means of protecting them from damage or destruction, by retaining a digital version should a disaster strike. This digital version will also allow my journal to be searched for keywords which is important to me and which I cannot achieve with a handwritten or wholly analogue system.

In the end it looks as if in the future the vast majority of my writing will be done with a manual typewriter but that this will all be protected by retaining a digital version which I can search. My ATOMA notebook system is going to be the repository for pretty much everything that I generate in written form, certainly my journal, important letters etc. I will stick with messaging services and email for unimportant writing but anything that really matters or that I want to be confident I can get back to in years to come will be typewritten, on paper, with a digital version extracted as required.

Typed on an Imperial Good Companion Model T. The machine was made in Leicester, England in 1939. I have no commercial relationship with ATOMA, I simply buy their products.

For more years than I care to remember I have toyed with the idea of writing a journal and from time to time I have actually managed to make some progress. My efforts started almost inevitably with a paper diary which was written in longhand but it wasn't long before I started to run out of steam and the process withered on the vine, until the next time of course.

Over the years I stopped and I started. I experimented with any number of different types of notebook, different pens, different types of paper, you know the score. I bought and tried Moleskine notebooks, Evernote notebooks, Whitelines notebooks, pretty much all of them have passed through my hands and under my pen(s) at one time or another. For me, as well as writing a journal, the whole process itself was important and I found myself concentrating just as hard, in fact probably harder, on finding the perfect "system" for writing my journal, rather than actually writing it.

It may well be familiar to others but I was always in pursuit of the "perfect" system, if such a thing exists. I wanted to be able to settle on a system that I would be able to use for years into the future without suddenly finding that the system I had settled upon was no longer available, it’s format had changed, it had been updated or in some other way had been "improved" in comparison with the system I had originally chosen, it has all been very frustrating.

You will have gathered from my mention above of the Evernote and Whitelines systems that I have had many a dalliance with various technology based "solutions" to writing in a journal, none of which have truly delivered what I had initially hoped they would.

I have tried a number of phone/tablet based options to record my trials and tribulations, one of the more recent ones, and one that lasted quite a while, was the DayOne system but I still felt that something was missing. I think the fundamental problem, for me at least, of technology based solutions has been the fact that it all lacks "feel" and authenticity. I find that if I type my journal into a phone or tablet my words just seem to have disappeared never to be seen again and if I'm honest the whole thing just became a chore to me which I ceased to enjoy. I needed something founded in reality, not a virtual record somewhere in "The Cloud".

TYPEWRITER, enter stage left. I have always liked typewriters, I like the sound, I like the authenticity, I like the mechanics and I like their longevity. I could go on but there are many reasons for me liking typewriters. It seemed to me that if I decided to type out my journal using a vintage typewriter that settled one side of the problem, no more looking for the perfect pen. I played around for a few days and realised quickly that this was the right solution for me, it just felt "right". A typewritten journal it was then, but what about the recording medium?

ATOMA notebook, enter stage right. The choice of the recording medium itself was going to be very important, I was in this for the long haul and I wanted to be as sure as I possibly could be that what I started buying now was going to be available in 5, 10 and maybe 20 years time, or at least there had to be a fighting chance that it would be. I was looking for something with a pedigree and hopefully a future.

After much thought and exploration I settled on the ATOMA system, the company itself has been going for over 70 years having started in 1948, this gave me some confidence that it was hopefully going to be around for the long term. The company is Belgian and the product range is relatively modest, which I like.

The key feature of the ATOMA system is that it is a disc binding system which means that pages can be removed from a binder and replaced, a bit like a ring binder only better. This system allows you to remove pages and replace them in different orders, to also use smaller format pages in the same notebook and to simply insert them where you like and also to use the special punch to produce your own sheets or to add external material to your journal if required. Sadly the dedicated ATOMA punch is not a cheap item, it is expensive, but there are alternatives I believe, I bit the bullet and bought one.

The all-important paper itself is available in plain paper, lined, chequered, dotted and there are also other inserts available. I use the cream plain paper for my writing and it works very well for me. I simply remove a sheet from the binder, pop it into the typewriter, and type away, when I'm finished it simply slips back into the binder. The paper is 90gsm and I find that I can type on both sides of the paper without any problems at all which is a big plus for me.

I am now completely settled on my journal system, it's a manual typewriter and an ATOMA notebook and paper from here on, the final decision has been made and I'm delighted. It is nice to know that in five year's time I know that I will still be using the same system and I love seeing a real journal appearing out of the typewriter, one character at a time.

I love the fact that there is a direct physical conversion of my thoughts into ink embedded into the paper via my muscles and the mechanical linkages in this old machine. No distractions, no alteration of my words and errors by a computer algorithm, no grammatical suggestions and no spellings being altered. I've even reverted to using a proper dictionary to look things up myself so that I don't have to interact with technology at all as I write, I leave my telephone in another room.

In purely practical terms I put a piece of paper into the machine in the morning and type on and off during the day adding as I wish, as things happen, and when I feel like it. At the end of the day the paper comes out of the machine and goes back into its binder. With this system I am finding writing a journal easy and an absolute pleasure.

Seeing a little record of my life slowly appearing in a bound book as each day passes is something I enjoy and will have no problem continuing with, this system works for me. If I want a segment of my writing in a digital format I have a very simple process for that so that I now type up pretty much everything in my notebook/journal on a manual typewriter and just extract the text I want in a digital format as required, that's for the next short article.

Typed on an Imperial Good Companion Typewriter Model T. The machine was made in Leicester, England in 1939. I have no commercial relationship with ATOMA, I simply buy their products.

Quentin Field-Boden.

The tier 4 restrictions came into force to try to prevent the spread of the new strain of the Coronovirus spreading to the rest of the country from London and the South East where it is currently rampant. Predictably the selfish behaviour of many people came to the fore and they promptly jumped into cars and onto trains to "escape" the restrictions and to get out of London and to other parts of the country where the levels of restrictions are somewhat lower.

It really is extraordinary how so many people are willing to put the lives of so many other people at risk for their own selfish ends, even to risk killing their relatives for the sake of Christmas. Why can't people in general, just for once, look to do the right thing and try to prevent the spread of this disease to others, they really don't give a candle for others.

The main line railway stations in London, Paddington, King's Cross etc. were absolutely rammed with people, no social distancing possible at all and all this, spreading the virus to others, when it is such a simple matter for most people to delay Christmas until such time as things have improved, they just don't get it at all.

The inevitable consequence of all this is going to be a huge surge in virus cases in the New Year and of course then there will be the inevitable calls of it all being the fault of The Government which it is not. Perhaps people will change their behaviour when they realise there are no hospital beds if they do fall ill, I still doubt it.

There have of course been mistakes made and areas where things could have been done better, that is always the case when people are dealing with something completely new. It is, however, an inescapable fact that human behaviour is what spreads this virus and human behaviour which would stop it spreading. If people would just follow the simple rules of washing their hands, wearing a mask and not getting close to each other this virus would be under control within weeks.

Sadly, a substantial proportion of the population seems to be unable to follow these rules for more than a few minutes and the result of this is that things will simply continue to go from bad to worse. Public behaviour is the cause of the problem, and also the solution.

Paying for messaging services from the likes of FaceBook, SnapChat, Apple etc. would still be no guarantee of any real privacy, I distrust them completely. I'm happy to use WhatsApp and the like for communications which I KNOW contain nothing that matters and I feel the same about GMail. If they want to read my emails with a machine and to use that information to target ads at me then that's fine because I don't look at any of the ads anyway.

Anything at all that I write that I wouldn't want to be machine read I'm increasingly using analogue means and anything that really matters to me I avoid generating in digital form at all these days. It's too damned easy to "forget" about copies of things which are residing in backups and the like which one day may surface. All that said I do pay (quite a lot!) for cloud storage for some things that matter to me and which I don't want cluttering up my HD or to have on local CDs, DVDs, HDs, USB Drives etc. where they just get lost or forgotten about.

I use a company called Tresorit for this which is based in Switzerland and which is governed by Swiss privacy laws which are strict, nobody from the UK or the US could (in theory!) access the information. All data stored on their servers is E2E encrypted at source and so if I forget the access/encryption password the whole lot is gone, they cannot retrieve it from their own servers. The encryption keys are not stored on their servers, unlike many cloud storage providers. I tend to just dump all my digital stuff there and store nothing locally.

If I wanted to send something quickly and confidentially I would generate it in analogue form, scan it using a non-networked device, and then send that file to the recipient using Tresorit which incorporates a system for doing this, law firms are big customers. When I drop dead my Tresorit access codes go with me and they are gone for ever.

I have a standing daily Google search for terms like "Hacked" and "Encryption" and it's staggering what systems are broken into these days, which is why I am where I am and moving towards analogue. Many years ago in the early days of computer use when The Internet had just really been born I knew a brilliant guy who was a very highly regarded UNIX programmer and a really clever guy. He told me then that he knew where this was all heading in terms of privacy and hacking and he was right, even then. He said to me if you want to keep something private, write it out by hand or on a typewriter, put it in an envelope, stick a stamp on it, and post it. How right he was.

I really am starting to despair about the National Health Service and how difficult it now seems to access it. There seems to have been a massive and very rapid shift over to digital access to services and it now seems just so difficult to get to speak to, let alone see, a doctor.

I find the whole experience very off-putting as the whole thing seems to have now been designed to prevent people accessing services rather than helping them to access services. We are both (currently) reasonably au-fait with the use of technology for many of the things we now access and generally things run smoothly where they have been designed for digital access from the ground up. The NHS is different, it just seems to have had technology forced upon it and things just seem to be bolted on without real consideration for the users of the service.

If we consider my sister who has a learning disability as well as many other problems. It is impossible for her to use even telephone services and she will simply put the telephone down if she is faced with a system where she has to choose between various options. If the option exists, which it doesn't always, to wait to speak to someone she will give up if nothing happens, even if she can hear properly. Faced with a twenty minute wait for someone to speak to her my sister will simply give up and there are many thousands like her.

It seems to be forgotten that there are many people who cannot and do not want to deal with largely mechanised and digitised service provision. There are still many who cannot use and access online services and these people are becoming the forgotten members of society when it comes to accessing today's health services.

I think far more thought, care and planning needs to be given to the introduction of automated and online access to health and social care services. The needs of the struggling and the vulnerable need to be at the front of the minds of the systems designers. If the vulnerable groups can use services and access them conveniently then the able will have no problem, the reverse is not true.

Not sure why but I thought it would be fun to pull together a few short video clips of famous users of the humble typewriter, in action.

First up is Sir Patrick Moore:

Followed by Woody Allen:

And last but by no means least, Bob Dylan:

Definitely the best summary that I've heard of Donald Trump's US Presidency (2 min 45 sec).

I recently bought a pair of these folding e-Bikes secondhand for us to use from home for short leisure rides, to take in the car to explore further afield and to take away in our motorhome if we were going somewhere where we particularly wanted to explore by bike. We have a 125cc scooter in the motorhome for normal use but occasionally it will be nice to go away with the bikes. I've spent quite bit of time cleaning up these bikes and adjusting them and they really ride very nicely for their intended purpose but I wouldn't want to ride very long distances on them, that's not what they are designed for.

Here are the unfolded bikes, saddles shown in lowest position for storage:

In order to protect the bikes I wanted to find a suitable bag or similar so that when they are in the car or the motorhome they do not get badly scratched and I spent ages trying to find something suitable. I reckoned that there may be others out there going through the same process so I thought I'd just show you how one bag does fit the bill for these particular bikes , in case this helps you if you are in a similar position.

After much deliberation I selected the ROCKBROS Bike Transport Bag with Backpack, the backpack is simply used to store the bag in when not in use but can of course be used for shopping or to transport the folded bag. I wasn't certain the bike would fit but it does and the combination of the Raleigh Stow-E-Way and the ROCKBROS Bike Transport Bag works really well.

Below is the rucksack which has the bike transport bag folded inside:

Below is the bike transport bag when unfolded:

Below is the folded Raleigh Stow-E-Way, I remove the saddle/seatpost before packing, which can go inside the bag:

Below is the Raleigh Stow-E-Way packed into the ROCKBROS Bike Transport Bag:

I'm very happy with this solution as a means of protecting our bikes when in transit in the car or motorhome. I wouldn't want to carry one of these bikes very far, for me the primary advantage of the fold is for easy motorised transport and storage, not easy portability. These are great for nipping to the shops!

Hope that helps!