Archive for October, 2020
What’s With the Fountain Pens?
It’s simple. My brain remembers material better when I hand write notes rather than typing them. My hands get very sore when writing, though, so… fountain pens, since you don’t apply pressure. It’s essentially painting ink on the page.
Yes, they can appear snobby. Yes, they’re (relatively) expensive. Nonetheless, they’re works of art, they write beautifully, and they help me do better work, and that’s good enough for me.
My current favorite is the TWSBI (pronounced TWIZ-bee) Diamond 580 filled with Caran D’Ache Hypnotic Turquoise ink.
Yes, I do still need to work on my handwriting.
Weather Camera Sunrise on Molly’s Birthday
The weather camera caught a nice sunrise on Molly’s birthday.
[Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi HQ Camera, 6mm lens]
Did I Get Punked by Advertising?
I always say advertising doesn’t work on me. Unfortunately, I’m wrong. There are specific instances where advertising seems to work on me:
- When I’m watching a sporting event, and a commercial plays for a restaurant I already like, it might work and I’ll order from that place.
- Fountain pens – I’ll get email from a purveyor of pens, ink, and paper, from whom I’ve already purchased and had good experiences, saying, “come look at these new products…” Yeah, I’ll sometimes spend money. Lookin’ at you jetpens.com, gouletpens.com, and levenger.com.
- Electronics-related email, YouTube vids, or Adafruit learning guides and I’ll drop coin for the shiniest new bits – my last indulgence was an I2C PM2.5 particulate matter sensor – oh, yeah.
In following YouTube fountain pen videos in autoplay mode while I do other things, like work on wiring a prototype satellite (I’ll write more about that later), I ran across a young woman (@studyquill) who is unnaturally organized. When she was in high school she wrote a successful book on study habits. As someone who is unnaturally disorganized, I started to pay attention, and eventually subscribed to her channel (in spite of some annoyances).
Hold that thought. They other key piece here is that I have a 2018 iPad Pro 12.9″ (I hear people mumbling, “of course you do”) and I’m exploring ways of using it effectively for taking notes and making drawings (those of you who know me well enough are laughing). I use ProCreate for fumbling artwork and an app called Concepts for note-taking. Concepts is supposed to be a drawing program like ProCreate, but it works for my style of note-taking, which means it supports fast color switching for color-coding my notes, endless canvas, and adjustable splines for drawing and writing. I also got an Apple Pencil, which I always thought was kind of a dumb gimmick until a graphic artist friend said he used the pencil every day and couldn’t work without it. Ok, so I tried it (spoiler: get one).
The one thing that bothers me is the pencil slides on glass like it’s on… well, glass. Very slippery with little tactile feedback. That’s annoying but I thought that’s just what it is.
Here’s the confluence of these random-seeming threads.
I was watching @sutdyquill and she had a sponsored video (here we go – the advertising tie-in) wherein she talked about the slippery-glass problem (which I have). The sponsor was a successful KickStarter project called “PaperLike.” It’s a tactile feedback screen protector for the iPad. Apparently, it provides just enough tip drag to feel like paper, or at least like not-glass. Phil immediately drops coin on paperlike.com for one.
I would say advertising worked.
Since then I’ve seen one negative review, but I have that gut reaction that it was designed to get people to buy a specific alternative product, so I take that with a huge salt-lick of salt.
Whether I got punked by advertising remains to be seen.
ScatterShot 
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