Simple Technology

I'm increasingly attracted to tech that both *is* simpler (in terms of energy use, moving parts, ability to make and maintain) and also that makes things simpler for people using it. By "make things simpler" I don't mean more *efficient* or faster or even necessarily easier - I mean less complicated, less fiddly, and fewer dependencies.

I went down a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole earlier this week, looking at mimeograph technology. Part of me thinks it would be cool to own and run my own platen printing press, but that is incredibly fiddly, time-consuming, and requires a level of attention to detail and patience I know I don't have. Mimeograph technology on the other hand, allows for the copying of an original text or design, but importantly can all be done without electricity. If you own a mechanical typewriter, some mimeograph template paper, ink, and a mimeograph machine, you're in business! Alas, the key thing that seems to be the missing piece is one of the consumables: the mimeograph paper. I'm sure it's possible to make your own, but it sounds like it would be quite fiddly.

Mimeograph

The next best thing looks to be a risograph machine, but that feels much too close to a photocopier to be bothered with. Maybe I'll use someone else's one day.

Risograph

Something else I was looking at this week is "Offpunk", a multi-protocol (gemini, http, and others) command-line browser app. Not only is it quirky because it's a browser that runs inside a terminal, but it also has a feature highlighted as a recommended way to use it, where you can make a local copy of the sites you want to read, and then read them offline. Unfortunately it seems to be made for Linux and I couldn't get it running on my Mac, but I love the deliberate slowing down of the web browsing experience: it feels very 1990s.

Offpunk

My final "simple tech" thing from this week was that I finally realised what all the Zotero shills in my life are going on about. I've been increasingly frustrated with Pocket, which seems like it *should* be a "just works" simplifying tech, but has a lot of glitches, unusable search, and far too much JavaScript. I realised this morning that I can probably swap in Zotero for Pocket and have all my complaints rectified: Zotero will often find the underlying PDF of a journal article, it will make a local copy of a website I save, has good search and I can managed metadata easily. I'm sure the code itself is complex, and there are a lot of different things going on so it's not "simple" in that sense, but it certainly will make my experience of saving things to read *and write about* later a lot simpler.