Weapon of Choice: 1981 Montgomery Ward Escort 550 (Brother JP-7) This typewriter as offered in the 1981 Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog Nearing the last stand for Manual and Electric Typebar machines offered by Monkey Ward. By 1984, only the electric is offered alongside various electronic wedges, the new Brother Type-O-Graph and a selection of home […]
Category: From the Desk of Reverend Munk
Typecasts from the desk of the Right Reverend Theodore Munk
Twinsie Seikos
TWDB: Milestone nearly reached!
UJTU: TWDB Epsilon Teasers!
Serious Research View (SRV) Typewriter Porn View (TPV) Grid View (GRD) Weapon of Choice: Thunderbird 3, 1966 MW Signature 440T
1966 Monkey Wards Signature 440T: Thrift Score – with User Manual!
Weapon of Choice: “Thunderbird 3” 1966 Montgomery Wards Signature 440T My other two previous Signature 440T finds: Return Of The Typewriter Bone: 1968 Monkey Wards Signature 440T (Brother) Deja Vu All Over Again – The Twin Brother and some info I found on the 440T: The 1968 Monkey Wards catalog that shows these 440Ts The spring-loaded […]
The Five-Tape Session: on cassettes and why I still use my tape deck
Weapon of Choice: “Little Jake”, 1933 Monarch (Remie Scout, 10cpi Art Gothic face) Last week’s session with The Brother took up 5 tapes, two 90’s and three 60’s, total 6 hours, enough that I had to dip into a fresh tape pack! Example: “Swing World” uses a sample snippet of The Brother in a song […]
Culling the Herd & Trimmin’ the Fat
1982 IBM Selecrtic III 12cpi Single-Pitch, Correcting. He Gone! 1990 IBM Personal Wheelwriter, he gone too! Probably 1990’s to early 2000’s Swintec 8014-8. Off to Greener Pastures. 1987 Brother Professional 90 (CX-90). Got tired of trying to make this into a printer. Weapon of Choice: 1956 Smith-Corona Skyriter – A Keeper! :D
The Case of the Disappearing Ebay Listings, or how to Wrangle Ebay EPN API Feeds
Weapon of Choice: “Joanie”, 1964 Hermes 3000 The current PHP API Feed display ads. Pretty, but a bit flakey lately. You also need to add some request variables to the Javascript call to Ebay’s servers. Attach the above to your call to toggle the return of the SuperSize image url and to tell Ebay to […]
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.
Also testing the ability to *not* auto-post on Facebook, to make sure that works.. :D
Typewriters stored with half-finished thoughts
In this edition of “Is This Weird or Totally Normal?” we present an example of “Typewriter Stored with half-finished Typecast”, a common sighting at the ranch. The volume of unpublished half-finished typecasts is large, and just last week I moved a mountain of such typed pages out of a rubber tub and into a filing […]
UJTU: Folded stipple finish paper, Ghost Chocolate and Epsilon forms like a storm…
The stipple finish paper results in some rub transfer from the ribbon, and at large magnification, an interesting embossed look. “Ephemera”? “Shops”?!? what could those buttons lead to? Weapon of Choice: “Ghost Chocolate”, 1957 Olympia SM-3
StarSent: An Alien Invasion Science Fiction Story for Joe VC Typing Assignment No.18
Synergies flow: the Interrobang, Quomma and Queriod for typewriter lovers!
How to type an interrobang on a typewriter, and some reasons why we should. Much easy, so wild!
Weapon of Choice: 1956 Tower Commander Chad Comello’s Crusade for the Interrobang 99% Invisible on the Interrobang Various ways a computer can make an interrobang
Smith-Corona Skyriters 2Y, 3Y & 4Y – 1949 to 1962
I noticed the other day that most of the Skyriters in TWDB were mis-dated, probably due to the fact that I had “clarified” the numbers into actual ranges instead of December numbers earlier in the year. I had to re-date and clean up the Skyriter listings so they were correct. Doing this revealed some things […]
Yes you can swap the long return lever from a Corsair for the vestigal return arm of your early Skyriter!
My 1956 Smith Corona Skyriter with vestigal return lever… First remove the carriage cover of the 6Y machine – you need to do it to access the one screw that holds the carriage return assembly in the machine. Yep, that long screw at the top of the assembly is all you need to unscrew once […]
Olympia SM-7 Typewriter Reviewed: The Points System Gains Shape…
Weapon of Choice: “Cadwallader” 1963 Olympia SM-7
Converting a TRS-80 Model 100 REX ROM to work in a Tandy 200
Well, I was too broke to spring for the NADSbox and REX200 when they were available, and regretted it for sure when the supply dried up and they couldn’t be had anymore. The NADSbox I can live without, thanks to mComm, but a REX200 was something I really wanted for my 1985 TRS-80 Tandy 200 […]
Inspiration and more reports from the 8th Phoenix Type-In: Brought to you by the Letters PR-10-M
Weapon of Choice: “Mothra”, 1972 IBM Selectric Composer The Quirky Qwerty’s Report Joe VC’s “Smuggling Typewriters to Phoenix” report and first video review of some of the movers & shakers in the AZ scene. Joe’s second video interview from the 8th Phoenix Type-In – This one’s about MEMEME!
8th Phoenix Type-In Report, and an afterparty with the Albuqwerty Type Writer Society
Nice selection of books available at Changing Hands. I didn’t have the “Typewriter Rodeo” one yet, so I got a copy of that one. The typewriters were pretty busy. Although it seemed like there wasn’t much more than 30 people around at once, I noticed that the people seemed to completely change from one hour […]
Leaping to the Defense of the Late 1950’s Underwood Portable
Weapon of Choice: “Tex”, 1957 Underwood Quiet Tab Deluxe (Golden Touch) Richard Polt’s post on his Typewriter Safari, which prompted thoughts on the Underwood Crest. UPDATE: This post came up in the Facebook ATC, prompting a discussion of this typeface, which I called “Slab-Serif”. Turns out the real name of the typeface is “Stymie”, and […]
Second Chandler Type-In Report – Galaxies, Buttons and Commanders, oh my!
On the “Death” of the Typosphere, a Few Thoughts and Ideas
Weapon of Choice: Indy, 1957 Tower Chieftain III Had to prune a few hundred comments when the Beta Testers for Typewriter Database Wanted! post had so many that it stopped loading. The sheer number of comments broke the page!
Cool Night Typing, A Weird Selectric Ball and Typers to Bring to the Type-In – UJTU
Phoenix Type-In for National Typewriter Day, Sunday June 24, 2018 – Even Though NTD is actually on the 23rd
While the Typewriter Day post on The Typosphere blog went neglected after 2014 (but it’s nice to go back and see the videos from 2011), Typewriter Day on June 23rd has still been suitably celebrated across the globe. This year, it appears the Phoenix celebration will happen the day after, on the 24th: I’m a […]
Vintage Typewriter Hunter Multimedia box
I noted in my last post that I was pondering loading a fun Linux onto one of the Core 2 Duos for the Type-In, I meant AMD Turions, actually: Weapon of Choice: 2008 HP Pavilion dv6815nr 2.0 GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 4gb DDR2 SDRAM, 120gb SSD, 1280×800 15.4″ WXGA screen Nvidia GeForce Go […]
Chandler Type-In – Saturday June 9, 2018
YES! {insert air guitar solo, a really ripping Glenn Branca style cacophony of multi-layered atonal scream backed with tube amplifier harmonics and subsonic bass.} Why am i so happy, you ask? The Quirky Qwerty, previously known as Jeremiah, (but now that he has joined the ranks of the Typosphere, he gets his chosen Typecaster Name, […]
Staplers, Stapling Machines & Fasteners – Volume 1, a Review
Ooh, look what came in the mail today! This is a book I’ve been waiting a few months for, and it’s been very much worth the wait. I wrote a bit about this project before, when I’d seen an earlier, incomplete version of the manuscript, and I was quite excited about it then. Now that […]
Five Years Later: update on Using WD-40 to bring an old typewriter ribbon back to life!
Original post, and how to re-ink an old typewriter ribbon with WD-40. This 1970 Royal Sprite @TWDB
I’m bad at incentivizing Patreon Goals, and TWDB Epsilon Ideas :P
John Munroe over in the Facebook ATC group asked how many Patreon pledges would I need to make the mobile version of the TWDB into one where you can log in and do Typewriter Hunter stuff like upload galleries and etc. I replied that it was already happening, specifically that the upcoming TWDB Version Epsilon […]
Vintage Laptop Collecting?
Hmmn, looks like I have a collection of vintage laptops now. I never really thought about it because I only bought the one Thinkpad T21 at a thrift store, and the rest have been given to me because they “didn’t work” in some way or were replaced by newer machines and weren’t wanted anymore. The […]
Silly Scope Music
In 1989 I had a VHS camera, an old 1960’s tube Oscilloscope and a song to play through it to watch the squiggly green lines jump around. This is the result: The title bit is at the end, and is built from the intro to “Krazy Kitty Overdrive“, a 1990 VHS video letter I made […]
So Emo in ’97
A sampling of typecasts from a box of memories vintage 1997. Yep, was typecasting even then, but I didn’t know what it was called, or that it even had a name. Had names for plenty other things, apparently…
Weird Picture-Taker: Vtech Phusion toy PDA from the year 2000
Me, like in 2006 maybe? No datestamping on the Phusion, but that’s about the right year, I think. Upsampled from the Phusion’s original 120×160 bitmap about 12 years after I took the selfie. One of the benefits of not having a car is that I now finally get to go through boxes in the garage […]