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Stardate: 20181129.22h35
Location: Home office
Input Device: AlphaSmart dana.wireless
Audio: Binaural Brainwave set to Creativity Boost
Visual: Messy desk with random electronic clutter.
Energy: 40%
Mental: 50%
Emotional State: Relieved, relaxed, free.

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On call duties are over!  The changing of the guard has been
completed.  I am relieved of on call duties until next
year!!!  And I get a comp day tomorrow to boot!  I fared better
at the end of this round, considering the work I had to do
and the wonky sleep schedule.  Hopefully I won't kill my comp
day by sleeping through it.

This evening, I was reading through the gopher.club phlog
postings and was surprised to see a mention of The Xiled
Rumination Construct in a post by tfurrows[1]  The site was
complemented on and I was welcomed to the gopher.club community.
This device, the AlphaSmart dana.wireless was a topic of the
post as well and it makes me happy to see others still using
this device.  Thanks for visiting the Construct and the
welcome, tfurrows!

Regarding the dana, I am not the original owner and the
device was purchased on ebay several years back.  They had
many of these for $20US or less.  Not sure what they go for
now or how common they are in the second-hand market.
Mine still works with the battery it came with, but I know
that eventually, I will have to rebuild the battery pack
(easy job...it uses 3 AA rechargeable batteries and can use
alkalines if necessary.)

I usually keep the dana plugged into one of my Raspberry Pi
when I'm not mobile with it since the USB port will charge
the batteries as well as allow me to use it as the keyboard
for the Pi. This is one of the features I thought was really
cool.  Basically, in AlphaWord, the dana does some weird USB
keyboard emulation that it basically becomes the keyboard for
your computer or device.  What it also does is it will dump
the contents of your document into the device that it is
plugged into.

For example, I am currently typing this out in AlphaWord on
the dana.  The dana is also attached to my Raspberry Pi
workstation, but is only charging.  When I am done writing
this phlog entry, I will save it to the SD card on the dana,
press the "Home apps" key, and then press the memo key, which
is mapped to AlphaWord. My phlog entry is still open in
memory in AlphaWord (but password protected...yeah, kinda
paranoid) so I'm prompted for my password to open the phlog
entry and then I'm presented with a screen that is titled USB
Keyboard Emulation. At this point, the dana keyboard is on
the Raspberry Pi.  I open a terminal, open nano and press the
"send" key to have AlphaWord type out the whole entry into
nano.  You can even pick the speed of the typing (fastest,
fast, slow, slowest.) When it's done typing, CTRL-X on the
dana and then post.  I could probably save the file transfer
step and just log in to SDF and have dana type it there
directly instead of to a local file on the Raspberry Pi. If I
want to stop the keyboard emulation, I just click "done" or
go to the home menu.

Transferring the text this way eliminates the file conversion
from the funny AlphaWord format. Plus, every time the dana
sends text like this, I get this weird fascination, kinda
like watching a hard drive being defragged or watching a
roomba clean the floor.

I didn't learn about this keyboard trick until I had the
dana for about 6 months and it was on accident while messing
around with the USB port.  Glad I found it since it has
become more verastile with other devices.  It doesn't require
special drivers or anything for the keyboard to work...or
atleast for the devices I have used it with.

OK, time to be fascinated!
/me queues up Human League.

[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/tfurrows/phlog/2018/ad7_lowTechFolks.txt

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