Junk Hunt - Strange Typewriter Thing

I'm on the hunt for information, or even the actual thing... What thing?... Well, in the early 1990's my parents took me into a stationary store in Nottingham, I think it was Staples or Office World near the Post Office main buildings, so we're talking St Anns or City Centre ish, certainly behind the Victoria Centre.

Anyway, in there I saw a machine I was sorely tempted to get, it was a semi-electronic typewriter, so it had a form factor about 11" a typewriter keyboard with an LCD screen across the center, you typed could see the text then when you hit enter it write it to the typewriter as a nearly silent printed line...

It also simultaneously write this as an ASCII text file onto a 3.5" floppy which was inserted into the right hand side.

The one I saw was red, cherry red.

The print was a very strong, black, the ribbon was a one use thing once it had put a letter down if you came over the same piece of ribbon (by winding it back) and put another character it'd be missing the bits from the mask cut by writing the prior letter.

And... I loved it.....

I went to see this thing about six times.  I really wanted it to augment my then A-Level studies.  because it was silent, the keyboard had a tactile feel, but no click, the printing was this nearly silent swish and you got the text file from it... or you could put a text file into the disk, load it and it'd print the whole thing out in this lovely type.

Remember, at home I was toting a 9 pin Citizen 120D+ printer, so this really vibrant printing really appealed to me to present things.

If you have any idea what device I'm talking about, comment below!

Horsing About

I thought I'd come to these pages to explain what all these videos I have posted of horses were actually about.

Well, at the stables we're at, we all much in (or muck out should that be) together, it's not a livery yard, it's not a business, it's a friend of ours whom had a horse and wanted to get him some company.

He's a 25 year old race horse, called Cluff, and he's a total idiot when he's alone, he thrashes about, gets distressed, he really properly will not be on his own.

So, when we wanted to look for a new livery location, our friend said "bring him up, the girl here with her horse at the moment is a pain in the arse and never picks up her poo"... So up we went, and away she went.

So our pony Gerty, became best buds with Cluff.... This was interesting as Cluff went from looking 24 and very stiff, to now being 25 and looking very muscular and moving brilliantly, she's made him young.

As you can see, he loves to roll, especially in the mud.  Well, last Friday, Jo was up putting a new rug on our Pony, when she heard what sounded like a pistol crack, what it actually was was the electricity tripping as Cluff had managed to roll and roll over into the electrified fence.

He ended up on his bum, with the wire trapped around his legs, and it tore into his leg.

Jo went into full rescue mode, cutting the wire to release him, and getting her Dad to help him into his stable, and I got the vet on the way to sort him out.

The end result is he has a cut about the size of a large mans index finger along his leg where I indicate in the videos.

Needless to say, he's on the mend now, and the challenge later in the week might be how to keep that leg dry if the heavens open up after this hot patch.