“Gonna crack my knuckles and jump for joy. I got a clean bill of health from Doctor McCoy!” – Space Hippies
Friends,
It’s a sign of aging that you talk about your health. Here’s mine: I’m not doomed. I’ve changed doctors and health plans and even healthcare systems, and they’ve taken the opportunity to check out my things, and it turns out that those things are fine. Feeling fine? I’m not entirely sure, but better!
Typestar 3 Update: Don’t hit Code+Paper Feed when you have a roll of paper in the machine. It lets the machine think that you’ve fed a sheet without putting in a new one. You’re spoiling a few inches of the roll and if you haven’t loaded a “new sheet” then you have no business continuing to type, so cool it.
Oh hey! Ooops. I seem to have set the line spacing to 1½ instead of 1. You know, like a dope. I really need to pay attention to the Code and Mode keys, don’t I?
As far as using thermal paper on a roll goes, this is really great. I’m enjoying this. Seems like I should figure out some sort of a roll holder that isn’t just a bent coat hanger. By the way, I’ve decided to keep this typewriter for my own use.
Functionally, that means that I’ve peeled off the retail sticker from the top of the machine. Most people do that anyway, but if I was going to sell the thing, I’d have left it attached. The dumb part is that I forgot to take photo before I removed the sticker. I guess I’m really keeping the machine.
What, you might ask, will be the fate of the Brother EP-22? I’m glad you asked! Surely some computers around here need a friendly serial printer, and the Brother is just the thing. Besides, it’s smaller than the Typestar, so it may be an easier machine to carry around, while I leave this one here, despite its power stinginess.
As you know, I had a Brother EP-22 in the 80s. More accurately, I begged and pleaded for one to connect to my old Commodore 64. It worked great then, and there are lonely 8088 and 286 machines here that need to print. The sad old computers that need to express themselves.
It’s a serial printer that doesn’t implement the entire ASCII character set. Things get weird when that happens, and Windows really doesn’t play nice with the thing. Macs? Forget about it. They can’t figure out any of this, and why should they?
Meanwhile, the Typestar has a more complete typeface, so when I hope to scan these pages for the blog, my hope is that the character recognition will be more accurate. That’ll happen tomorrow. Today, we write!
Your pal,
– bob