I got the head and carriage off without too much difficulty:

More importantly, I confirmed that I am also able to get them back on.

The carriage moves back and forth pretty easily, although something seems to be up with the mechanism to advance it with each keystroke. I think the gears for the type wheel are kind of janky, too, as it tend to stick in the down position.

I took the kids to see Jaws in the theater today. One of them had seen it before, the other hadn’t, and I have seen it a bunch of times (although never on the big screen). We all loved it.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect movie, but no matter how many times I watch this one, I am always astounded at how well crafted and constructed it is. For such a simple story, there is a lot going on in this movie and I would be hard-pressed to point to a better example of visual storytelling.

🔗 You do not need “analytics” for your blog because you are neither a military surveillance unit nor a commodity trading company – This day’s portion:

I ditched analytics quite early in this blog’s history when I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world. For example, when Smashing Magazine linked to a WordPress theme I’d published I got thousands of visitors over a couple of days. The only practical outcome was that a couple of people approached me to redesign their websites. This would have happened regardless of whether I knew that I’d been linked to, and how many clicks this link had generated.

🔗 Classroom Technology Was a Mistake - by Paul Musgrave:

For every minor friction that technology has removed, a giant weight of superfluous expectations has been added. If the net impact is still positive, it is much less so than the boosters promised—so much less so that one wonders whether we would have gone all-in on this. And I also find myself wondering if at least some of the lack of grit that many of the younger generations display when confronted with an obstacle has to do with being raised in an environment in which everything just works—where you never have to slap the side of a TV to fix the image, or when you never have to parse “Abort/retry/fail” when trying to load a program. To the extent that computers do make everything “just work”, they do so by bounding the ability of users to ask for anything — limiting their requests, and their imaginations, to what’s easiest to deliver. But that is far from what’s possible and often remarkably distant from what’s desirable in any given case.

After using the Olivetti Lettera 22 as my desk-side typewriter the last few days, I have switched it out this morning for the Smith-Corona Super.

While not the oldest typewriter I own, the Silent is the one I’ve had the longest. It is the machine that sent me down the road of manual typewriters and probably the one that I have used the most.

For no good reason, I had fallen out of the practice of keeping a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it on my desk and using it regularly over the last few months. I have made a minor project this week of getting back to that practice, and have been reminded of why I like it and started it in the first place.