All five of the printers survived their ordeal in the desert!
They keyboards got dusty & squeaky, but it all worked out (& on a single charge, at that). Here are images of the two papers we made.
DanyQ surprised me by showing up , and he improvised a rope strap for mobile reporting:
Maria—layout editor for the paper in past years—was very suspicious of this idea on our camp e-mail list, and brought her laptop with InDesign just in case, but ended up the most fervent supporter of the process. It was such a relief for her to not be using a laptop.
For the second issue, we also had Masha helping with layout. The three of us were able to seamlessly hand off tasks, see what everyone was doing, and “interoperate” with analog ease. All of these are affordances we already know about, but all the same it was nice to see them in practice.
I got really into a very direct style of writing where I would sit down somewhere and just write everything I saw and heard. Without a screen, you can see the world. My first exploration of this idea (Saving the Snoring Soldier, published on the back/bottom of the first issue) was re-typed and slightly cleaned up from the raw receipt log, but by the second issue (see Taste of the Dust, back-top) we published half a page of direct observation, transcription, guest-rambling, &c. Here’s my take on Burning Man’s wifi camp spot, where I went to upload the paper to Reno:
After uploading the paper, 3000 copies would come back on the “Sewage Sludge” trucks from a company next-door to the printer. I’m still sort of grasping at the meaning of the news-on-the-empty-shit-truck metaphor means, but there’s something there, I’m sure.
Speaking of trucks, I also wrote a mini-ramble about labor/body/bureaucracy (Dennis the Trucker, second issue front bottom), adapted from private correspondence. There’s a lot missing from that piece, but some of the thoughts originated in trying to unpack a provocative essay by recent-CDG-visitor Michael Bernstein (“Work has become digital and networked. Any work now done at a computer could be done remotely by members of ‘the crowd.’”)
All told, it was a nice experience. I’ve edited many publications through high school and college, and in many ways publication production was my pathway into media interfaces (i.e. the need that made programming “real” to me), so this felt like coming full circle, but in a Hofstaeder strange-loop sort of way. The weird thing is that, even though I’ve edited & produced dozens of publications, I’ve actually written very few articles for them, and always found the writing very tedious/painful. (My journalistic writing was always over-researched & over-subtle—pained to an inappropriate level of precision and completeness.) I’m not claiming that my writing in The Daily Playa was exceptional in any sense, but it felt nice to be easy & lucid and very much a “user” of the tool/process I had set in motion.
After getting back, I threw together a (very hacky!) variation of the device as a party trick for Dave that printed a live video grid from a Raspberry Pi camera module. The form-factor is admittedly unglamorous (Bret suggested RC car batteries as a solution to my USB charger headaches, so I ordered one of those to test; the USB chargers can’t handle the high current of both printer+camera, and they auto-sleep if the current is too low, hence the double jumbo batteries in this prototype):
It printed out a little message for Dave with some rambles on loops, ephemerality, capital, mortality, &c:
Was a nice party trick indeed! (Bret may have a better photo of the Event.)
Your desert journalist,
R.M.O.
On Aug 27, 2015, at 11:20 AM, Robert M Ochshorn wrote:Many months back, I committed to edit a newspaper at Burning Man. I’ve edited newspapers and magazines before, so I know how they typically work: lots of document management, lots of single-person-doing-layout: screens, all the way down.I didn’t want any of it, this time.DanyQ and I designed and implemented a portable, battery-operated receipt printer typewriter:<IMG_3613.jpeg>We made five of them, each different:<IMG_3618.jpeg>They do have tiny screens to show you the current line you’re typing, but it’s a fairly direct way to type to physical newspaper columns.<IMG_3611.jpeg>Still working out some kinks, and we haven’t tested in harsh conditions, but we seem to get about 30hrs of battery life.At first, I just threw something together on a Raspberry Pi, as I’ve done before. This time, we used an AVR microcontroller. It’s so much better: it boots up instantaneously—everything is faster—and runs seamlessly. (Almost: there are some quirks in the libraries we depend on.) It has me asking: what’s an operating system good for? What remains universal once the Desktop Computer paradigm dissolves?Your correspondent,R.M.O.