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Saturday, January 22, 2011

This month's giveaway



7 comments:

  1. Wow, archiving your typecasts. A good idea, I haven't heard this talked about in the typosphere before. I always recycle mine right away which is kind of silly, since the scanned images of them are linked to a Rube Goldberg machine of random image hosting services which could at any time collapse, taking all posts with it.

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    1. ... which is exactly what happened when Photobucket first started asking for a ransom of $399 a year, then relented but became very unreliable. I am going through all my old posts, trying to fix and reconstruct them. Very annoying.

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  2. I like the archive. You book of old posts will probably outlive the internet as we know it.

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  3. My old typecasts are all shoved into a desk drawer. I should probably do more to preserve them.

    I tackled the ribbon scarcity problem this afternoon. I've been fixing up a Remington Standard No.6 to working order. Unfortunately, the wide ribbon--while still holding sufficient ink--was so dry that it shredded each time it was struck. New ribbons of that width are now unavailable, even through Jay. So I ripped out the tattered ribbon and wound in some paper with a sheet of carbon paper in front of it, substituting for a ribbon. It's awkward--the Remington is now double-blind--but it gets the job done, and is as crisp as a carbon film ribbon.

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  4. Clever, MoLG!

    Have you tried DeBarth for wide ribbons?

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  5. Mine are in my desk drawer as well. Great idea, Richard.

    Carbon ribbons should be around for quite some time, as there are still a lot of offices using typewriters for forms.

    And until dot-matrix printers and printing calculators disappear, there will at least be some ribbons to be scavenged and re-spooled.

    A few months back, out of curiosity, I called a guy in the printer ink business (locally) that I used to do some freelance computer work for and he said while he didn't have any spools, he'd be happy to wind as much 1/2" nylon ribbon onto spools as I wanted. Now, he's in his late 60s, but I know his son-in-law is likely going to carry on his business, and he's in his 40s...

    Some of us will hopefully be having this same discussion in 50 years!

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  6. Typing the URLs in blue is a neat way to catch me off guard, alright! Works well.

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