Breaking ground... with moderate success

There is a select minority of humans with the surprising and also somewhat annoying ability to essentially nail everything they attempt on the first try and without any apparent effort. I realized that Karen, literally my better half, belongs to this group on a November afternoon many years ago at the end of a long walk in the forest. She had been using a piece of a fallen branch as a walking stick and, as we reached a chestnut tree that had shed abundant fruits, she casually grabbed one chestnut from the ground, dropped from shoulder height and, with an elegant and effortless movement, she hit it mid-air with the stick and sent it flying among the trees. When I praised her ability, she waived the feat away with a simple "it is not that hard", only to do it again, this time sending the chestnut even higher and farther than before.

For the rest of us humans, however, there is no way around the long and winding path of learning, investing the time and effort of making all the necessary errors until we reach an adequate performance. The difficult of a task is generally assumed to be described by its "learning curve", a hypothetical graph plotting the proficiency in the Y axis versus the time spent at the task in the X axis, although technically a "steep slope" would mean a big progress in a short time and not the other way around (the common sense association between steep slopes and effort might be the culprit for this misnomer).

Photo: own work

One way or another, the fact is that this pandemic has forced many of us to explore new ways to carry on with our life and that exploration has required, in many cases, learning new methods, new tool, new routines. From your video conferencing skills to simply establishing the custom of getting dressed in the morning even if you do not have to to the office, all this has to be learned, with the unavoidable opportunity cost that it entails, since all the time and effort you invest into learning cannot be devoted to anything else, including "actual" work.

This week has been really trying for me. After I wrote last week about the lost pleasure of handwriting I have been exploring possible ways to resume that sacred habit but, contrary to that day with Karen, it has not been a walk in the park. After I discarded flat out the option of buying the expensive e-ink device, I was looking for a stylus that would do the job on my old Samsung tablet. It is a Galaxy Tab S, from 2014, so it is not literally old, but in technology terms seven years is a very long time. My first try was a beautiful Staedtler Noris Digital stylus, which looks and feels like the classical pencil by the same name, but unfortunately my tablet did not react to it in any way. It turns out that this stylus relies on a technology called EMR, developed by Wacom for their digitizing tablets, and it requires a dedicated circuit under the screen that my tablet obviously did not have. I asked Karen to try the pencil on her Wacom tablet, but there seems to be also a small compatibility issue and the pencil did not work smoothly, so I returned and continued my search.

Once the screen had been indubitably identified as capacitive, I was left with three alternative technologies. The first one was a pencil with a thick rubbery tip, which would be a nice replacement for my fingers, but did not replicate the experience of writing adequately. The second one was similar, but the tip was finer and had a sort of transparent plastic disc hanging there, so that it lies flat on the screen and glides over the surfaces as you write. I was not sure of how it would feel, but for 10 euros the risk was not very high. The third option was an active capacitive pen, with a copper tip and a USB-rechargeable battery. This one was about twice the price but I had the impression that the writing would be much more similar to actual paper than the previous one, so I decided to give it a try and, eventually, I could return one of them or keep both.

The result of the trial was indeed yesterday's post, which was fully handwritten with stylus sporting the transparent disk. The experience was not 100% satisfactory because there is no reliable palm rejection system in place, so I had to write with my hand "floating", but otherwise it was quite satisfactory. The user flyer (I was going to write "user manual" but it is in fact a single page) warned me to keep the screen clean and it was visible after some writing that the disk had a tendency to gather any dirt that might have been on the screen, so it is convenient to have a paper napkin at hand to wipe the disk every now and then.

This morning I have received the second stylus and I can confirm that it works beautifully and the writing experience replication is very good with two caveats: the palm rejection is still an issue, but I should take care of that with a two-finger glove; the other minor inconvenience is that every time I lift the pen to jump to the next letter, the contact produces a click, similar to the one of the chalk on a blackboard. It does not bother me, but Karen or the kids could eventually complain about the noise.

Additionally I have found that, when writing in portrait mode, the line appears slightly lower than the tip of the pen. Surprisingly, this offset disappears in landscape mode, so it must be a touch-screen calibration issue. This effect, which could be an issue for drawing (it would be hard to draw a line through a particular point) is almost irrelevant for writing, so much so that I have written the first half of this post with the active pen and enjoyed it very much. If I finished it by typing is only due to the fact that looking up references and setting up links is much easier on the laptop.

I was originally planning to write about another trial that I had this morning, but the post is going long already, so I comment at another time. The bottom line is that all my investment in looking for a workable solution to the problem of hand writing seems to be paying off. I still have to see how the glove plays along, but if all fits in place I expect to be writing many other posts by hand, because it gives me a completely different mindset. And I hope my example invites you to some extent to break ground in your own little projects, even if only to break the tedium of the pandemic. Have a nice weekend.