Ariel Millennium Thornton

🔒 Manual approval

@arielmt@computerfairi.es

  ✨ Kind 'Net Help Desk fairy by day. ✨
  ✨ Weird & furry Unix fairy by night. ✨
✨ Sometimes a retrocomputer fairy. ✨
  ✨ Pays the ComputerFairi.es bills. ✨
✨ Sparkly✨shellscript✨princess. ✨
    ✨ Age: Mere days younger than ✨
✨ the Intel 4004 & Unix 1st Edition. ✨
       ✨ Follow requests welcome. ✨
                        ✨ ✨

Pronouns: she
Species: feline/phoenix (shifts at will between them)
Fairy wand currently on: GEOS programming guide
Website: https://thornton2.com/ArielMT

3Posts

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2026-07-06T00:12:45Z

Ariel Millennium Thornton@arielmt@computerfairi.es

Replying to @atax1a@infosec.exchange

@atax1a Or trigraphs if I need to get really creative, I suppose. That sounds doable and, importantly, much lower effort than the zero/oscar and one/lima substitutions the typeface and keyboard force on me.

2026-07-06T00:01:53Z

Ariel Millennium Thornton@arielmt@computerfairi.es

Replying to @arielmt@computerfairi.es

And if your typewriter has the keys your coding language uses. Oops. Using my '54 Royal QDL for math expressions and HTML just got more challenging.

A 1954 Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter with a backed page inserted and paper lock lifted out of the way to show the typewriting. According to a 1955 ad, this is probably the Dove Gray color: a medium drab gray shell and deep sea green key caps. Photo taken with a 1998 Sony Mavica MVC-FD51 camera with flash on.

The typewritten page, showing I still have to learn the shift depth, adjust the touch weight controls, and practice typing more. Photo taken with a 1998 Sony Mavica MVC-FD51 camera with flash on.

Typewritten text:

Hello, fedi! It seems I have a lot to learn if I want to become a sparkly
typewriter princess.

For starters, how do I type the less-than & greater-than symbols on this
1954 Royal Quiet De Luxe of mine?

@arielmt - 2026-07-05

The keyboard. It has all the English letter keys, the number keys 2 through 0, hyphen-minus, semicolon, comma, period, and slash keys in their Standard/Qwerty positions.

However, the number 1 and exclamation point key is missing, and the shifted characters of the comma and period keys are also the comma and period, not the less-than ("<") and greater-than (">") characters on computer keyboards. The special keys are the half and quarter key right of P and the cent sign key right of semicolon.

Photo taken with a 1998 Sony Mavica MVC-FD51 camera with flash on.

2026-07-05T16:23:54Z

Ariel Millennium Thornton@arielmt@computerfairi.es

13h

I just realized that, if your main coding PC has a document scanner and OCR software, like a cheap flatbed and Tesseract for example, then you could, at least in theory, use a manual #typewriter in your favorite hideaway as the ultimate distraction-free code authoring tool.

If your typewriter doesn't have a delete key, then take along a typewriter eraser and a writing correction tape.