First phlog - the one about NC100

I managed to get my hands on an Amstrad Notepad NC100 still in
original packaging, mint condition and with a Swedish keyboard. It
had been sitting in a warehouse or something for about 25 years.

I was planning to use it for Kilo Lisp or something, but since I
didn't find any PCMCIA Type I 3.3mm 1MB SRAM cards I decided to see
what the machine could do without using another operating system.

What I found out was that it is a wonderful typing machine!

It has a lot more features than I need, and ever use, but spelling
and fancy formatting and a lot more exists.

Since it runs on batteries, it actually is a wonderful laptop to
bring along if you actually just need to type things.

The machine also has a serial port which can be used for serial
communication. I first tried it as an SSH terminal, but since it
is not capable of control characters in the way my workflow needed
I decided to only use the serial port for sending files.

I bought a null modem cable, and setup a r-pi to always listen on
/dev/ttyUSB0 for anything incoming. And if it finds anything it
saves the file and starts listening to the port again.

Then there is another service which checks for incoming files and
reads the last line of the document. It then uses that word as a
keyword for which action to take using the document as input.

At first I made it email the document to the a recipient if that
was found as a keyword, and then when I wanted to try phlogging
I decided to add the keyword PHLOG and save that document using
the date system for ordering of bunch of textfiles in gopher.

At last another service uploads the phlog post to the circumlunar.

So the only thing needed is to press the "secret menu" button,
it is really called "secret menu" and then transfer the document,
the rest is automated.

Nothing fancy but maybe someone finds something useful in the
setup itself.

Me, I am very happy to be able to do my writing on a really
old piece of hardware in perfect condition. And my laptop, err
typewriter is, so far, always the coolest one on the table.