Technical trauma

I attend the RWA National Conference every year, and every year I buy the mp3 CD set that contains all 250-odd hours of recorded program sessions.

This leaves me with a technical problem. My car is too old to have one of those little jack-holes you stick your iPod or your mp3 player jack into.

My car has a CD player, but again it’s too old to play mp3 discs. Just audio.

My car also has a tape deck, and for years I had one of those round mp3 players and a little plastic cassette tape that jacks between the car’s tape deck and the mp3 player. However, the mp3 players were nasty cheap things, and the interface even cheaper, so I had to keep replacing them. Then one day they stopped working at all, no matter how many new bits I bought.

So I bought an iPod, but then I had the same problem. How to get sound out of that little silver deely and into the car speakers? I became acquainted with the doohickey that plugs into your iPod, then magically broadcasts what’s on the iPod to your car radio via an FM frequency that nobody is using.

Well, I live in Chicago. We have almost no FM frequencies nobody is using. Plus, reception is wonky even when I find a “blank” station, so I have to keep moving the transmitter around on my dashboard, which should qualify as DUI of recalcitrant technology. Picture many bad words coming out of my mouth and floating in a balloon over my car.

So I’m asking for help here. Isn’t there something simple, a little boom-box or something, that I can plug my iPod into, that has its own speakers, and you plug it into the cigarette lighter? I’m getting gray hairs trying to interface this penguin.

NEO Luv

NEO Luv

I don’t go brand-crazy very often. I buy generic bacon one week and Oscar Meyer the next, and I couldn’t tell you what kind of ballpoint pen is in my purse right now. But I’ve just got to burble about my new toy, my Alphasmart NEO.

I’ve owned an original Alphasmart for maybe eight years. It had three features I didn’t like, and the NEO, the latest upgrade, has solved two of them: the four-line screen is now an eight-line screen, and the touch has been improved. NEO the smoothest, most delightful keyboard I’ve ever used. I only wish it had all the function keys of a regulation PC keyboard; then I could plug it into my PC and chuck the keyboard it uses now.

But I can’t, because the NEO is strictly for text composition.

NEO holds 200 single-spaced pages across eight discrete files. It runs for 700 hours on three AA batteries from the drug store. (You can get a fancy rechargeable battery, but why bother?) The On-off toggle key is also the Save key, and NEO turns itself off after a few minutes of inactivity, saving everything you’ve typed, of course. It’s incredibly durable—I’ve dropped mine a number of times onto hard floors.

You upload stored text from the NEO to your computer by USB cable, or, if you like fancy stuff, you can use the available infrared send-and-receive peripherals. Doesn’t matter if you use PC, Mac, Linux, whatever. Your computer thinks you’re typing really fast, because NEO only stores keystrokes. You can also download text into your NEO, so I have my outline in one file, and pull stuff out of it to other files, one scene at a time, via familiar Copy and Paste keystrokes. It can spellecheck, bold, underline, cut and paste, and a few other little applets that I don’t actually use.

It’s cheap, too. I think my rig cost about $200, bells, whistles, and shipping included.

NEO has a big brother, the Dana, which can do email and surf the net and handle spreadsheets, oh my, but I think that defeats the whole purpose. I need to get away from the internet, not have it follow me around. But of course I don’t own a PDA or iPhone either.

This little baby allows me to do the coffeeshop thing when I must must MUST get away from my email and write. I can take it on planes. I can sit in the yard, in my lawn chair, in the sun, and work. I can wake up at two a.m. and lie on my back in bed, with my NEO on my lap, and type in the dark.

The one beef I have with NEO is that the screen isn’t backlit. This means that if I want to write in the dark, I have to shine a little book light on the screen now and then to make sure that my fumblefingers haven’t turned on the all-caps, or hit some other key that kluges my input. I understand why the manufacturer decided not to backlight the screen. Backlighting would suck battery power, big time. However, I would settle for a little button you can push to make a temporary backlight, just to check on the screen.

These guys know how to build a keyboard. I haven’t used one I liked this much since the dawn of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I used the NBI (Nothing But Initials) dedicated word processor. There was a fast keyboard for you. I could do 140 words on the flat with the NBI. They actually consulted professional keyboard monkeys when they designed the NBI and tweaked the beta.

I think the Alphasmart people must have consulted ‘em on the NEO too. It rocks.

-Jennifer Stevenson