Ernest Hemingway once said there is nothing to writing all you do is sit
down at a typewriter and bleed a little
graphic but true Ernest hemway was one
of the most prolific writers and most respected writers of our time would you
agree jonno I read half of the Sun Also R Rises and got bored and and got rid of
it I Dr a Mojito drank a Mojito apparently
Hemingway loved Mojitos and he also loved distraction free wrting which is
what today's product the AST house
Earnest Hemingway free signature edition is all about that's a really long name
so they say you can also just call it the Heming right which is what this
thing was originally called when it launched on Kickstarter in 2014 it's
supposed to be a distraction free writing tool um they changed the name
from the Heming right to the free right because I I actually don't know why they
did that so a fan was like Hey I bought this thing for
$900 jez Louise um and they were like do
you want to cover it we're like sure as
somebody who whose job is to put words down on a digital page I can understand
that sometimes distractions are very distracting and uh you know a tool or
some sort of setup that would allow you to get rid of said distractions and just
focus on your thoughts your ideas the
shapes squiggly l lines that you want to communicate something like that might be
useful wow look at this thing we got some leather Rich cognac leather what's
Co I thought cognac was an alcohol I mean it's definitely it looks like it's
all new I mean the idea I think is that you want to travel the world go to Spain
run with the bulls as Ernest Hemingway did and uh this thing is going to gather
some wear and tear you can also use it as a drum
okay I got to say the USB-C chord that
comes with it it's a USB-C to a chord for charging it's kind of not the same
Vibe is it there's like a furry thing a
poofy stuffy what do you call that fleece sure it's got fleece on the other
side ah I'm I'll keep you writing safe
okay so to to address anybody's uh confusion right off the bat this is a
distraction free writing tool the idea is that instead of writing on your
laptop where you can get notifications you can be tempted to open a new tab and
switch to Twitter and have multiple Windows and all these things coming at
you from all sides you say no I won't do
that I will get a typewriter or rather a modern typewriter I guess you this would
still be a typewriter wouldn't it there's just no paper so there's an e in
screen so you can see what you're writing and you can write the truest
sentence that you know as Hemingway tells you to if you're just going to
listen to him and then you have uh it's also got Wi-Fi it's got 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi
and it syncs up with Google Drive
Dropbox and Evernote I believe so it's not like you're just like typing these
things and then they stay in there forever and it's just like a journal I guess they got different folders here A
B and C you can be writing three things at one time and that's it I thought it
was heavier I thought it was going to be heavier than that it's supposed to be 4 lb I think cleaning cloth which for for
the whole thing I guess is it for the screen or and then we got a sticker and
then warranty card cool cool cool Astro house please wait booting
sorry for some reason I thought it would just be like boom you know cuz it's literally just an earring screen and
like a word processor I guess I I I
imagine that it would be a bit more like jump into writing right away but no you
got to oh I just had an idea oh this
inspired me I have to write many many
hius booting your distraction free
writing experience awaits oh man your account and input languages at this URL
it's time to begin push new plus new to
start your first draft as in like hold the new button and then press the other
new button there's a bit of a delay there
eh and I love Earnest
Hemingway oh oh
no right away I feel like the delay between when I hit a key and when it
shows up on screen is kind of problematic like right there I was
trying to type something and then I made a mistake so I was backspacing and
trying to rewrite again but it like it wasn't catching up so I had to wait for
the thing to catch up before I could keep typing okay so this might just be a
limitation of of eink screens in general and I'm I'm almost positive that it is
so as we can see this has a aluminum uh
chassis and apparently it's it's hand polished but it's uncoated so it will
develop like a natural patina over time there's a reason why lonus is not doing
the ShortCircuit it's this is not the type of product meant to impress a
hardcore Electronics uh Enthusiast
unless that Electronics Enthusiast is also like I don't know into poetry or
something there's a reason I'm doing this one because I'm LMG's resident
hipster douchebag and I can acknowledge
there's an alternate version of me that would really really really like this
thing this is a special edition of the
Astro house free right which was it's
$600 I don't even want to say the price but this is
$900 but to continue on with the device itself these are Cherry MX Brown
switches and they do feel nice I mean like I got to say like it's you know
it's a it's a good mechanical keyboard uh it feels good to type on it's got
embedded flash memory so that's how it stores uh the the little drafts you're
going to write um it's got a type-c port for charging which I already said uh the
battery will last 4 weeks so you can basically be working on three things at
once which is fair because part of the concept of this thing is that you sit
down to write and it's meant to like separate the writing process from the
editing process so this is just supposed to be the straight content generation I
had an idea and I'm going to like stream of Consciousness blurt it out into a
draft form and then I'll sync that to the cloud and I'll pick it up on my
laptop and I'll edit it more I can see
that working I just can't I it's $900
this might be good on yeah on on airplane if you need to do some writing but the thing is that like this is
really only for creative writing if you need to do any sort of research while
you're writing like for my type of work I need to like have all the sources that
I'm like referencing and stuff up at the same time while I'm writing this is like
you're writing a short story you're writing a a poem you're writing a
firsthand account of like your own life there is a specific cool case and and
the thing is that like astroh house says that in people who have tried this thing
they have they've seen you know obviously there aren't like maybe there
are studies but they say that they've seen people's writing productivity
double and maybe even triple what I will say is that may okay this is $900 and
you probably shouldn't buy it but I will say about astroh house they have a
number of other products that might make more sense like the regular free right
is only $600 still too expensive but they have a free right Traveler and I
don't know how much that is but I'm assuming that it's less than $600 I
would take this thing a lot more seriously honestly if if there was a
faster refresh rate with like response rate with the typing to screen press the
special button it will cycle through a few different things that you can display down here so uh originally I
guess it just says freewrite and then the the folder that you're on press it
once you get it'll tell you the number of words you have characters and how
long it takes to read what you wrote that's kind of cool if I want to write
like a 3 long thing it'll tell me where when I've reached around 3 minutes
that's kind of cool oh and then here's a timer the latency of the e-reader cuz e-
readers are slow so I think that
removes is there an e Inc screen that doesn't do this no there isn't but
here's the thing the amount of time it takes for the hammer to like strike a
page is probably the same except we were we were just saying the opposite like
you hit it it goes yeah but the time it t it's just that you're seeing movement
that whole time but might similar for what this is they
did it the right way there are people who like you want to go to a coffee shop
and type your screenplay and not be distracted by the internet but you have to bring your laptop and the internet is
like a click away you could actually this is still small enough that you
could just put this on a table at a Starbucks and jam and there's not going
to be any distractions that's the whole idea how much does it cost
$900 out of here this is the thing I don't don't understand how these guys
are are making any money this thing made
$342,000 it raised $342,000 on Kickstarter in 2014 with a
$250,000 goal it blew past its goal a
bunch of people wanted this I mean clearly there's a market well I think
overall this is kind of a defeat for the Astro house nnest Hemingway free right
signature edition but to quote Ernest
Hemingway man is not made for defeat a
man can be destroyed but not defeated so
I guess the the Heming right wins again
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