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.
Where's the rock? I want to see it.
25The exact appearance of the really nice rock is a secret.
(sorry.)
5
filled with a mix of water, Platinum carbon black, and inkjet printer ink
why do you choose 👆 solution over a commercial ink?
15This is just pure chaos. Why would you use printer ink in a fountain pen? I cannot fathom any valid reason besides just wanting to do something batshit insane.
12Printer ink is useful because each of the C, M, and Y inks is a perfect filter of exactly one colour. C filters red, M filters green, and Y filters blue. Commercial fountain pen inks almost never have this kind of absorptive specificity. They're usually a mix of two or more dyes—a mix that you don't control. Once a dye is in the mix, you can't just take it out. The best you could do is dim all of the other colours, but then you lose saturation.
Here's a specific example. Suppose you have a commercial ink of 5C:1M and you want pure C. You're stuck with that 1M. The best you can do is add 1Y to make 5C:1M:1Y = 4C:1K. You've got a balanced C, but that extra 1K is going to make everything look a little grey. Ew. And that is assuming you can even get pure Y in the first place. No ink manufacturer in their right mind would try to sell a pure Y on purpose. It is very difficult to read. (Except under a pure blue light. It's super awesome actually. This has been an underhanded privacy-invading tactic of the government for some time now. Yellow microdots are printed on all commercial inkjet printouts.)
These inks have also been designed to be mutually equally absorptive of their respective light wavelengths, so an equal ratio of 1C:1Y makes a perfectly balanced green. These inks has also been designed to stay in solution even when mixed. There are no chemical reactions that could cause precipitate to form, thus totally fucking the pen. Achieving this with commercial fountain pen inks would be difficult, and potentially dangerous.
However.
That's actually not the reason why I started using printer ink. I was in Oulu, I had just run out of fountain pen ink, and all I could find was a print shop. Here is the whole story of my Oulu trip. I did a little research online before actually doing it. Other people have done it before. You just have to make sure to use dye-based ink and not pigment-based ink. I was able to confirm from Timi that it was dye-based. And prepare for the possibility of having accidentally turned your pen into an ink firehose because printer ink bleeds like three motherfuckers. It needs at least three parts water to calm it down.
EDIT: whoops, wrong blog post.
7
I only see a pen and part of a spiral notebook.
12That's a stock image. Better than I could have taken, and the pen is identical.
1
Why this specific formula for the fountain ink? Beautiful pen, by the way.
What do you use to manage the ISOs? Or did I misunderstand #7?
9There is one ISO and three boot partitions.
First of all, I formatted the USB drive with one vfat partition. Then I copied the contents of the ISO over. That and some prodding in grub.conf is enough to get the ISO working, and there is a whole lot of extra space in the vfat partition.
The entire contents of all of my computers' hard drives is encrypted, but that leaves the boot partition. So I moved the boot partitions onto the vfat partition, each in a separate folder labelled by the host. Then, I added entries to grub.conf for each host. The USB drive boots and a boot menu appears with all of the ISO's entries, plus a list of hosts. I choose the right host, then boot.
(I need the USB drive mounted before I can update the kernel or the microcode.)
6O wow! This is totally not what I imagined. I imagined something like Ventoy. You literally made portable your boot partitions which without, the device is unbootable. Since it's on a portable USB, you can essentially brick any device as easily as pulling the drive and cutting power. That's ingenious!
6Wait, so you need the USB in order to boot your PC? If you lose the USB, or it dies, you can no longer boot?
4
I've used the same Lamy Vista, the clear acrylic version of this pen so you can see the ink color, for maybe 18 years. Absolute workhorse.
1
I've heard good things about the LAMY. Do you find it's as practical for daily use as say a ballpoint?
8You kinda have to be an enthusiast to make a fountain pen an edc. They require more work, are more prone to damage and has the potential to spill all that lovely ink all over your nice clothes. I just keep mine at my desk. They're a pleasure to write with given a quality make.
9FWIW, I've never had a leak with a modern FP.
3This, Lamy Vista FP at my desk, Zebra ballpoint in my bag.
1
Same practicality but it requires more care. If you want a daily use beater, go for Pentel energels or Sharpie S-Gels for some smooth writing and deep colors.
6I don't use a Lamy (I use a Kaweco) but I can say that fountain pens are pretty nice if you like liquid and smooth writing. It's not good on other materials other than paper like hard materials but for doing math and writing it's a breeze.
5More practical, even, at least in my experience.
Ballpoints always jam on me, requiring about a kilonewton of force and about five minutes of blank scribbling to get it going again. Then, often, they leave big blotches of their sticky ink on the page when turning a corner.
The Safari does jam on occasion, but usually, a single well-placed drop of water is enough to get it going again. That depends on the ink you use though. If you use water and inkjet printer ink, it never jams, though it is a little bloody. 30 water : 1 platinum carbon black makes a lovely grey, but it jams so bad that I need to add a bit of inkjet printer ink to keep it running. Yeah, you're definitely not supposed to water down that ink so much lol.
4
Okay, can you show us a writing sample? And what kind of ratio do you use when making that ink-mix?
730 water : 1 platinum carbon black : 5 yellow : 5 magenta is the mix for octarine.
But seriously, 30 water : 1 platinum carbon black : 10 printer ink is a good starting point for mixing. That is about how sensitive the mix is to each type of ink. Pure printer ink won't ruin the pen, but it bleeds like a motherfucker. If you don't care about the next five pieces of paper, though, you can do some pretty cool stuff with it.
3
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.
6because 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
8you 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.
6
You carry all this shit on rounds? I carry a pen.
6Why would a physicist go on rounds?
9Because I'm a moron and misread this. Hahah
7To square things up.
3
That pen isn't inked, you can see right through the ink window
5Yeah, I know. Like I told the other guy, it's a stock image. An image of the real pen wouldn't add anything except ink in the window, and I can't take a better picture than whoever did the stock image. The ink in the window looks entirely unremarkable.
...
/me looks at ink in the window for five minutes with a bright light backlighting the window.
...
Yeah, the ink in there is entirely unremarkable. It's just grey air bubbles and black water. IDK, you want a picture of the ink window anyway?
2
Computer scientist here. I also write with a fountain pen.
5Me too, is this a thing?
3Maybe, maybe not. Of the people I work with, only a handful even have a notebook. One other uses a Kaweco Sport FP. So for my sample, it's a mixed bag.
3
Nice, I've got the OG PinePhone. It had some circuit board issues, but I loved helping at the ground floor. Is the PPPro good enough to daily drive yet?
I also keep a USB, but with my Keepass database so that it's an offline carry. I keep 2 copies additional to that, 1 in my fire safe, and 1 in my mothers fire safe.
5I've used the same Lamy Vista, the clear acrylic version of this pen so you can see the ink color, for maybe 18 years. Absolute workhorse.
4OHHHH, I want that pen. I noticed it the week after I got my Safari, and was like, "NOOOOOOOOOOO!"
2Especially with the converter with the red twist cap, it looks awesome.
2
Nice! I am using the same pen!
1@etuomaala For the record, if you posted multiple images, they're not visible to me on Mastodon. When I've done the opposite, posting to Lemmy with a Mastodon account, multiple photos aren't visible to the lemmy users either.
1Oh, neat, Mastodon! I didn't know for sure whether this was reaching Mastodon. I only posted the one image. I didn't know I could post multiple images. Now, I know not to try, for compatibility reasons.
1