@jk There's the "SmartPen" devices from Moleskine, Neo & Livescribe (and perhaps others). They have a camera in the end of the pen and use a special type of paper with micro-printing that converts to X-Y coords and page number. The notebooks are kinda pricey but you can print and bind your own with a laser printer. The professionally printed ones work better though. It's kinda fun.

They are fancy novelty things for most people so you can often find them used much cheaper.

A friend and I made a #screenless content management system for the moleskine pens some years back. We found specs for the proprietary vector data format and were able to convert it to SVG and sync it to a web site.

http://penpub.ink/

The code is here: https://gitlab.com/bhowell/penpub

@brainofdane I'm also into experimenting with #screenless interfaces. Most of the stuff I've built was with printers and barcode scanners. But I also have some sketches for physical inputs and audio feedback. Graphics tend to be the biggest consumer of resources and driver of upgrade cycles. For a lot of us it's a very difficult set of limits but a really interesting challenge.

@320x200 Some great #screenless ideas going on here!

@raphael I print the news in the morning using my #screenless office.

During the day, I look up stuff on my laptop that I need for work. I have a script that blocks the personally addictive sites for most of the day.

At night it unblocks for a few hours so I can scroll, amuse and discourse a bit.

@GIFmodel And in my experiments with #screenless stuff, my goal was to have things which were effective but less "smart" - here they are going towards something that will make users even more entangled and dependent than ever. He talks about empowerment but I think this would just push everyone to a different "platform" that is at least as opaque as the old screen-based ones.