this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024

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Everyday Carry. What essentials do you carry on a daily basis?

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A slightly eccentric physicist's EDC (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Where's the rock? I want to see it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

The exact appearance of the really nice rock is a secret.

(sorry.)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

filled with a mix of water, Platinum carbon black, and inkjet printer ink

why do you choose 👆 solution over a commercial ink?

[+] Lord_ToRA 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Printer 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But 🌈colors🎨

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I like changing colours a lot.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

i need more information :) you can change colours with inks too

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I was looking for a good CMYK fountain pen ink set. Nobody seems to make such a set. I could get a lot of half-solutions that would kind of work, but nothing beats the colour space coverage of a complement of CMY inks that were specifically designed to cover the whole colour space. They're also about 10 times cheaper than fountain pen ink.

(And I got my printer ink for free on top of that from a print shop that just discontinued sales of their manual printer ink refills. The shop was Prink in Oulu, Finland. They probably still have these free refills.)

About six drops of ink and water the rest of the way gives you an entire cartridge of ink. This stuff is super concentrated.

I would use printer ink for the K too, but that's too much of a crapshoot. Too often, the K is pigment-based, and that is likely to ruin a fountain pen. And it's easy enough to find a good neutral black fountain pen ink. That is what the Platinum carbon black is for. It's actually even more concentrated. Just one drop of it divided between two refills makes about a 50:50 grey that I can further modify with the printer ink. For less grey I have to go all the way down to one drop every four refills.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

are you using distilled water or tap?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Oh fuck, should I use distilled water? lol hm... Well, I've used tap water and so far, so good... You think I need to use distilled water, @[email protected] ?

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[–] fujiwood 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I only see a pen and part of a spiral notebook.

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[–] FireTower 9 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I've heard good things about the LAMY. Do you find it's as practical for daily use as say a ballpoint?

[–] PilferJynx 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

FWIW, I've never had a leak with a modern FP.

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[–] UsernameIsTooLon 6 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

More 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (6 children)

There 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.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

O 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!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And very dangerous. If anything happens to my USB drives and all of my many (many many many) backups, they are bricked to me too. My LUKS keys are on that USB drive. And the backups.

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[–] flubba86 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Wait, so you need the USB in order to boot your PC? If you lose the USB, or it dies, you can no longer boot?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Okay, can you show us a writing sample? And what kind of ratio do you use when making that ink-mix?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

30 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

space pen works upside down and it's a ballpoint

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You carry all this shit on rounds? I carry a pen.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Why would a physicist go on rounds?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Because I'm a moron and misread this. Hahah

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

To square things up.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Computer scientist here. I also write with a fountain pen.

[–] Tier1BuildABear 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Me too, is this a thing?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Maybe, 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.

[–] thantik 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If you don't mind living without a camera, yes. I think I might be able to get the camera working, but it hasn't been a priority, because I never used my phone's camera that much even before I switched to the PPPro.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That pen isn't inked, you can see right through the ink window

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah, 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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

OHHHH, I want that pen. I noticed it the week after I got my Safari, and was like, "NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

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