BYOK – Bring Your Own Keyboard | Hacker News Reader

BYOK – Bring Your Own Keyboard

byok.io

60 pointskevinbluer68 comments

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There are a bunch of distraction-free writing devices, from the BYOK to the Freewrite. They range for $100 - $500.

List here: https://kadavy.net/distraction-free-writing-devices/

To me, YAGNI.

Let me suggest two cheaper alternatives (battletested by me):

1. Fountain pen and a nice notebook with nice paper (Mnemosyne, or Rhodia)

2. A foldable Bluetooth butterfly keyboard ($43 on Amazon) paired to an old tablet (I have an old iPad Air 2) with Wifi turned off and no apps except a writing app. Google Docs works in offline mode! (this is what I use in cafes when I’m traveling). I recommend a Samsers keyboard. This is what I have:

https://a.co/d/3kIJZsv

I love good typography and I just can’t with these distraction free devices. The iPad Air 2 has a retina screen that displays beautiful typography.

Forget e-ink devices — they might sound like a good idea at first, but their refresh rate is slow enough to be annoying.

If you don’t need portability, an old DOS PC running Wordstar or WordPerfect is also distraction free. I used to write long articles for my school newsletter using nothing but Wordstar.

1. Fountain pen and a nice notebook with nice paper (Mnemosyne, or Rhodia)

Spending money is overrated. The pen at the back of your junk drawer from a hotel you don’t remember staying at will do just fine. There’s a notebook in there too that’s as good as new if you just rip out the first page.

> The pen at the back of your junk drawer from a hotel you don’t remember staying at will do just fine.

Vehemently disagree! Few things hurt on my nerves more than a pen that leaves ink spots behind, or works intermittently, or needs excessive pressure on the paper...

Agreed, but sometimes a nice pen, and a paper makes the task more fun.

100% agreed. Save your money. That's also my opinion after spending several thousand on a couple of these devices over the years, only to find that they don't solve my problems.

E-ink is slow and is hard to read because of the low contrast. And contrary to all the marketing it actually increased eyestrain for me because it's so dark.

Not to mention the software on all the tablets I had was severely lacking, slow and buggy, and the subscriptions tacked on top felt outright offensive to me.

1. I'd go one further and say the nice paper notebooks and pens haven't worked for me either. Instead I just use a free A5 paper notepad and pen I have laying around.

2. Agreed with iPad + keyboard as an actual alternative. The retina 120Hz screens of the Pro models really help. Reading PDFs is a joy, even when compared to a large A4 e-ink device I had. It's just so much faster on the iPad.

Although I use it with Wifi on, I don't have many apps installed on it and basically all notifications disabled. I'm in the iOS ecosystem so everything just syncs, which means less work and mental overhead organizing my notes and reminders.

I'd recommend the iPad Pro Magic Keyboard though, it's expensive but snaps in place and feels great.

I find a clipboard is nicer than a notebook. Pen and a folded A5 works nice. I learned Gregg (or partly learned it). I do use my iphone and bluetooth headset to isolate. Phone stays in the pocket.

You can get any old thinkpad, remove the WiFi module and then you have the full choice of any writing app you want to use.

> an old DOS PC running Wordstar or WordPerfect

Like George R. R. Martin? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952)

The question is how gimped the device is going to be if you don't want to lease their software monthly?

There is a special place in hell for people who make hardware that runs static software, but still withhold ownership just so they can indefinitely bilk money from you.

> so they can indefinitely bilk money from you

Or just stop supporting altogether, a la Spotify Car Thing.

If you’re charging $200 you should really be able to see more than 15 lines of text at a time.

I know the idea is to be distraction-free but it’s hard to justify over a basic writing app on the phone you already own, which includes a nicer screen.

Yea for me having lots of vertical real estate is important while writing. iPad Mini (or Daylight Computer if you care about working outdoors) in portrait orientation combined with any number of writing apps seems like a great solution.

Where do you see 15 lines?

In the video they show the 3 text size modes. The smallest text size only shows 8 lines, even though the text on the screen claims it goes to 11: https://youtu.be/5hV8xfhdk7c?t=208 (3:28) I can't imagine 15 lines of text on a low resolution screen like that.

I like the concept of the device, but I must not be the target audience at all. I can't imagine spending time writing on a low-resolution, tiny LCD display like that for any extended period of time.

Even the response time of the LCD looks painfully slow in the video. The letters slowly fade into view as they're being typed. They only show the typing for a couple seconds so if you blink you'll miss it in the demo video. This is in contrast to the campaign's claims of zero latency and high responsiveness

Apparently there's a market for it, though, because they have a lot of Kickstarter backers.

I was being generous by guessing based on the small font, and what I think would be the bare minimum for myself.

There's a guy I see at my local coffee shop who uses a word processor. Based on what I found on eBay, I think it might be an AlphaSmart. If so, it would have run him about $75. I thought about getting a similar device, as I also write a lot, but settled on a $90 used laptop instead.

Not seeing the case for spending $175 and only getting half a word processor. If portability was the goal, an external keyboard goes against that. If the goal was better ergonomics, the screen wouldn't be the size and shape of a table tent. So... why?

its a toy for techies. i see crap like this on youtube all the time. useless and impractical tech that people gobble up because were all children at heart and we like toys even if we're grown ups now. but it annoys me nonetheless because i always can't help but think "when would i ever use this...?"

I once wrote a ~2,000 word draft,on an alpha-smart ($6 at a goodwill) and then couldn't get the transfer to computer function to work correctly, so I had to rewrite the whole thing because I wasn't gonna sit there and manually re-type three lines at a time from the grayscale LCD. The subsequent draft was actually better though, so for this reason I would recommend such a device. It's also a fun novelty thing. Really though, if you keep getting distracted from your writing, maybe consider if it's because you don't actually have anything to say?

Writing things twice is actually a technique for improving quality.

https://grantslatton.com/software-pathfinding

Cool idea, you should consider adding a photo of the device on the landing page. It did not make sense until I clicked into the device page (Firefox mobile iOS).

Agreed... even as someone I consider much more curious than the average consumer, the fact that there were no pictures or easy description of what this is, made me close the tab right away.

"Universal keyboard compatibility" -- bah!

I have working keyboards in my possession that this thing cannot connect to.

- No ADB port for a Mac keyboard

- No Sun Type 5 Mini-DIN

- No PS/2 port

- No PC keyboard port

- No Newton serial keyboard port

- No RJ11 for an LK-201

So much for universal.

I'd like to see that collection of keyboards

Do you have any interesting layout and language variations?

Not really; I have pretty much the "standard" keyboard for each of a bunch of systems.

The most interesting thing about them is the range of variability in quality. Some of that is survivorship bias, but I think it's remarkable that the Newton MP2000's keyboard works at all -- as far as Apple products go, it looks like a product of the middle Mac age but feels like the worst membrane HP ever shipped with their bottom-range consumer PCs.

By PC keyboard port are you referring to AT? [1]

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/pc-hardware-in/05960051...

Yes, although I think that one of the keyboards I have is from an XT.

I've never understood these devices. I get that they're for people who just don't have impulse control, and need some sort of hard separation between play and work. But inevitably, these devices become the abstraction. People obsess over the features and look for upgrades and otherwise immerse themselves in trivialities, because buying a device still doesn't improve your impulse control.

There are studies that show that having your phone in the desk in front of you lowers your test scores, even if it is turned upside down.

Glad to see it has a micro SD.

My main gripe with the freewrite (and to a lesser extent, this option) is the whole cloud/app/document management offering. I get that those features are important to several people, but I am happy to pull data from the device on occasion, or to back things up via git myself. Having to lock in to some vendor's cloud thing without any alternative is an instant way to make a device untenable for me personally.

The standalone device's display reminds me of the Apple LCD display for the //c: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc#Portability_enhancem...

If you wanna DIY then you could achieve something similar with the open source ZeroWriter

https://github.com/zerowriter/zerowriter1

Or an Eink phone/tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard.

Wanting to DIY is one of the distractions BYOK is seeking to combat

And $200 is another.

I'm from GenX. I remember these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart

If you want to relive your glory days someone is making an open source version. https://www.crowdsupply.com/zerowriter/zerowriter-ink

When I started out in the eighties I was maintaining (repairing) these little monsters for a major daily newspaper.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

Those Alphas were the upgrades. Fancy!

I've still got one! I can't believe anyone loved them though, they miss key presses if you type too fast.

I work with a couple people who worked on these, and own one myself!

I love little computer-shaped devices.

I had a Laser PC4 in the early 90s: https://oldcomputermuseum.com/laser_pc4.html

I wish I still had it just to noodle around on.

I picked up a Cambridge Z88 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88) at a Goodwill a couple years ago but haven't done much of anything with it. Apparently they have quite the following.

These saw use in my secondary school for SEND kids as late as 2019. I did not realise just how old they were.

Writing isn’t a linear process. You need to keep enough of a context window viewable and to scroll/jump to different parts quickly.

Devices without fast refresh or a large enough screen are unsuitable for many of today’s writers except for the very few who write linearly (streams of consciousness).

A word processor is a tool of thought. You need to be able to manipulate thoughts easily in it. Small devices don’t serve this purpose well.

This seems like something you could make yourself for under $50. Pi Zero W2, battery, cheap LCD screen, and 3D-printed case. The only exceptions would be a) the extra physical buttons (requiring a custom PCB) and the amber backlight (not sure if you can get a screen that comes with one, or if you’d need to get it separately and install it yourself).

If I had more experience in making stuff like this (and money to buy the components and other tools I’ll need to make it), as soon as I saw the price of this thing I would have started making my own clone right away and thrown the code and hardware specs on GitHub.

Why do none of these have larger displays? I imagine it's annoying to type without the ability to at least skim over the last page of content? Are larger monochrome displays just harder to procure?

I think they aimed for a very portable format. I think it's a bit took much especially considering that you will be already carrying a keyboard anyway.

This is already relatively large for this type of display. There is no market for these types of screens at a larger size. (They are mostly used in products that are not connected to a computer such as a controller panel for a factory, or mechanical device.)

I have an alternate proposal:

• buy a ball-head typewriter. Very satisfying to write on. And you get to see your text on paper right away.

• modify it to have a USB interface

• setup a Pi Pico to log all text entered on the typewrite

• when you connect the Pi Pico to your PC it replays the entered text at high speed.

No need for the trouble with USB / Pi. You can use an app on your phone to OCR the paper.

True. But that results in elevated error rates.

Honestly, this just looks like someone made a really basic writing app as a demo project on an LCD, and then their friend said "You could totally sell this" and then they ran with that.

This is a "solution" looking for a problem.

"distraction-free" because there's nothing else on that screen.

But it's another screen. There will be other distracting screens, if only a smartphone screen.

We have just moved the problem into hardware.

I’ve been considering making something like this since usb host support showed up on the raspberry pico. My dream is something like this with an eInk screen for weeks long battery life n

Looking at the app, for people who write, say fiction, do you really write like that where everything is broken out and summarized?

So you can get a working vintage Smith Corona hardware word processor for under $100. Probably much less at a garage sale.

Sure, but I don’t want to keep one in my EDC bag.

Why is this so expensive?

Raspberrypi zero 2w + some stripped down OS that boots directly to an editor, lcd display and a nice case would be much cheaper. Also easier to implement other stuff, like different fonts, use your own 'cloud' to sync stuff (and not being forced into a subscription), etc.

I believe this is equivalent to lamenting that the price of tea in a shop is more than the tea bag's price.

Sure, but here we're talking about 20euros for a PG Tips teabag and some water in a weird cup (eg )
At some point you ask yourself if it's worth it, and in both cases, for me, it isn't.

https://goat-story.com/collections/coffee-mugs/products/goat...

Because a bag of parts isn’t a functioning device, and things like labor and customer support cost money? Things like a “nice case” can only be done affordably when you’re stamping out tens of thousands of the things.

Sure, but the full price is $200, which is already in the cheap laptop range. With much more functionality, more expensive parts and yes, with labor and customer support.

ASUS E410 is $159 currently on Bezos' website.

Wait until you find out the BOM for every device costs less than the retail price.

Sure, but the retail price of a ASUS E410 laptop (some celeron, 4gb ram, 64gb storage) is currently $159 on bezos' website.

So for the same price, I either get some small gadget that is horrible to actually use (just try scrolling through tens of pages on this), or a full featured laptop (yes, performane-wise it sucks, but less than the gadget) and just run gEdit fullscreen. Keyboard included.

I’m sure with the volume of products that ASUS produces they can really lower costs due to economy of scale.

Parts for something like this? $1 ESP32, $5 LCD, $2 lithium battery, $5 3D printed case. Assembly? (Depending on quantity) maybe $5. This is max $20 to build.

I guess if you want something like this but don’t have time to build it it could be worth $100

And the regular (non-reduced price) is $200.

Which is already in the chromebook price teritory

  https://www.google.com/search?q=coolest+cooler

See also the many iterations of the Micro Journal: https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal

I just don't understand why all of these distraction-free devices use screens that are so small they're basically unusable. What's the point?

I don’t understand the point of a distraction free writing device. I am constantly flipping out of what I’m writing to go look at codes, chat with ai, read papers or tutorials, and then back to what I am writing. I realise I may not be the target audience. I guess if I was writing fiction then I wouldn’t want a distraction.

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