This Olympia SM4 was made 67 years ago, in 1958. It comes with a portable case. I have two spare tapes for it, but I after 200-300 pages typed my first tape is still almost as good as new.

The tape is divided in two halves, the upper part is black and the lower part is red.

The keyboard layout is British, it comes with the pound sign and @ sign, and even the fractions up to 7/8th, but it doesn't have a digit "1" - one could use capital "I" in place of "1".

One thing you notice about this typewriter is that it is very, very mechanically complicated, with many knobs and levers.

For example, you can see the knob for the left margin right on the ruler, as well as the carriage return and line feed lever (large), right in front of the carriage return lever (small). There's also a tiny switch with marks to select the interval between the lines, and one more lever that I forgot about!

With this simple video you will understand two things immediately: why the Shift button is called "SHIFT" button, and why the Caps Lock is "LOCK".

You might also connect it to the reason "Enter" is also known as "[carriage] return"

Pressing on the SHIFT moves the CARRIAGE up and down. Pressing Caps Lock locks the SHIFT button down, raising the carriage up.

The type bars are very pretty. Raising the lid allows access for ribbon replace, tension control lever, and for type bar cleaning.

The ribbon is advanced for each letter. I think when the spool is empty, the typewriter detects that and reverses the direction of the ribbon advancement. It is all mechanical, there is no any power needed except the power of fingers pressing the keys.

The page is set, the margins are set, the typewriter is ready for work. It is possible to feed multiple pages at once, with carbon paper sandwiched between them, to get 2-5 copies from a single pass.

There used to be special ribbon with aniline dyes that allowed making dozens of copies directly from the typed page, but I do not have one.

Note the paper holder behind the typewriter. It can be used for vertical positioning of the page - so headers and such will be always on the same height.

As I mentioned, important text can be typed in red. The captions can be centered with the built-in rulers: set the page margins correctly, then center the page with the ruler, then count the number of letters in your header, divide by two, and press "BACK SPACE" exactly that many times.

The typewriter offers simple facilities for underlining the text and drawing rectangles. There's a tiny hole in the ruler that can be used with a pen or pencil. Moving the carriage or scrolling the page would leave vertical and horizontal lines.

This typewriter can be used for making tables. There is a really clever mechanism for TAB stops: there are about 80 or 90 levers behind the carriage, and the TAB button moves the carriage to the next TAB STOP set. The tabulation stops can be set with the "+" button on the right side of the space bar, and removed with the "-" button on the left side of the space bar. There is also a lever to reset all the tab stops.

I have set a few tab stops at the column names, and made a simple table.

Note that the page also has a little demo of the "line interval" selector.

2 of ?

1st, there is the Privacy Violations / Unlawful Disclosure of Personal Information that has recently transpired.

If they shared your email address (or other personal data) without your consent, and especially in a mass email or public context, you may have a case under, GDPR (if either party is in the EU), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) (if applicable), and other data protection laws (depending on your or their country).

Sharing personal information without consent can trigger liability under these laws, especially if it's used for spam, harassment, or distributed to third parties.

#Sharkey #Fediverse

On a practical note: this summer I'll be experimenting with a few more of these essays. Fediverse news was quiet this week, so Fediverse Report is skipped this week, and instead I wrote this article. Next week's Fediverse Report will have the news of the last 2 weeks instead.

If you cant wait, the most important news of this week is the release of Mastodon 4.4: blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/07/…