A slightly eccentric physicist's EDC
A slightly eccentric physicist's EDC
- An all-black LAMY Safari fountain pen filled with a mix of water, Platinum carbon black, and inkjet printer ink.
- A blank sheet of A4, folded in half three times.
- My passport.
- A fully loaded Secrid card carrier.
- A really nice rock. It has been in my pocket for a year. Don't think about it.
- A dumb watch. (Casio W-59. Very small, light as a feather. Green LED-backlight LCD display. 50 metre water resist. Tough, within reason. Effectively infinite battery life.)
- A beta of the PinePhone Pro, equipped with dreemurrs archlinux.
- A USB drive containing all of my computers' boot partitions and Archiso.
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you know it wasn't till I enrolled in a physics degree that I met another human using a fountain pen. My first year prof.
Why are we so fucking weird? It's obviously superior not having to exert normal force on the page to write (fuck you ball points) but why isn't that more widespread.
because we have to fill or change cartridges, buy or make ink, clean the nibs, carry our pens carefully… too much effort just to write
ballpoints are efficient, sturdy and effortless. There are situations when we have to write/mark quickly while standing or outside under the weather
it's not a question of "superiority" but practicality. when i'm writing or drawing on my desk i use a fountain pen. outside i carry a small zebra ballpoint
you have to do that to ballpoints to. Unless you use them disposably which there are disposable fountain pens too if you are a paper plates sort of person.
Felt tips share most of the advantages of ballpoints and fountain pens so are a defensible choice. They tend to work upside down too which fountain pens and ballpoints don't. Although pencils, soapstone, or pressurised paint markers are better in those applications generally.
space pen works upside down and it's a ballpoint
it's also a space pen which is designed to work in an environment with no upside down so it would obviously have to.
Ah yeah the felt is actually my preference for writing, because they never jam . . . (unless you leave the lid off like an idiot lol). But they're not refillable and the tips aren't replaceable. Usually. I have seen refillable felt tip markers. It's definitely something I would be willing to try.
Yeah I had one ages back but you did need to replace the wicking material and tip periodically, filling also involved slowly infusing with a syringe and drawing needle.
In the end it was about as much hassle as a solid fountain pen and I couldn't use archivists ink so I went back.
Interesting story, @[email protected] . Why do you use archivists' ink?
If I write something down it's usually because I want to remember. Sucks to lose notes/journals/data to sunbeams, coffee spills, rain, leaks, or time.
Well, I can comment on water damage. My printer ink is totally immune, and so is the Platinum carbon black. I don't trust the black in felt tips, but the printer ink would be fine. Probably. My printer ink has a curious property of being perfectly water soluble until absorbed by certain materials including paper and fabric, after which it becomes pretty darned permanent.
UV damage, well, if my ink dyes are the same as in the UV faded inkjet printouts I see taped to the windows of abandoned storefronts, then that will be a problem if I decided to put the pages of my notebook on display in direct sunlight. I've never done that or have been compelled to do it, but never say never, I guess.
That's a good question, though. Have you lost data to sunbeams before, or is this more of a hypothetical?
Yeah I'm in Australia and I left my lab notebook by a window over a holiday break. It was probably getting over 50 C daily and the ink all faded. I don't think it was UV, as multiple pages were damaged, I think the ink wasn't hugely temperature stable.
It wasn't like magically gone, but faded enough that my chicken scratch was hard to read. Between that and water damage at various points I figured I'd just switch before something got fucked up beyond salvaging. Besides, you never know what'll be interesting to future generations. Whether it's a grandkid paging through something to get a sense of who you were or some researcher going through archives. Archivists ink is non acidic, so it doesn't destroy paper over time. Idk whether printer ink is.
Wow, that's awesome! I mean yeah I'm sorry to hear your ink faded in the heat, but at least some good came out of it: that's a whole new mode of failure I didn't know about. Hey, maybe I'll try putting a test page in the oven's warming drawer or something.
Yeah might be worth a test. I assume most modern pigments are probably pretty stable, this was 10 years ago using ink that was 40 years old even then. At a certain point we all just develop idiosyncratic neuroses as a result of experiences :)