My Life in Pens (2009) | Hacker News Reader

My Life in Pens (2009)

iamjamesward.com

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Love this. I too have had a passion for stationery for most of my life. To give you a sense of the kind of kid I was: Staples was my favorite store from ages 9-12.

I've been through gel pens and rollerballs and felt tips and every variation therein and thereof. Today, there's only one pen for me (sort of), and that's the Pilot G2. It's smooth, dries quickly on the pages of my always-around Leuchtturm1917 medium, gridded, softcover book, and retains its blackness for years. Notes written ten years ago look as good and as new as notes written ten days ago.

That said, I've been dabbling in the world of fountain pens and fancy inks (Noodler's is awesome) for some time, and though the writing experience is outstanding, I grew tired of walking around with ink-covered hands, leaving my pen home when I fly (which is often), and waiting too long for ink to dry in my notebook.

So back to the G2 I go, as always.

So not to get completely crazy here but about 5 years ago I settled on the Leuchtturm1917 medium, dot grid, softcover notebook + the Pilot Better Retractable ballpoint pen (black, 30000). It's a nice place to be if you want to consider a finer point and a freer page.

Considering the near uniform praise I see for Leuchtturm’s offerings both here and elsewhere, I think I’ll give them a go next time I need to stock up on writing materials. (Go-to notebooks for ages has been Moleskine squared hardcover small ones for the field, Rhodia dotted A5 for the office.)

For field work (workshops and offshore) either a pencil or a Fisher Space Pen does it; office? Mostly a fountain pen, a habit kick started when I was five or so and my grandfather gave me an old fountain pen and told me I’d better learn to write using one, as that would teach me how to write properly. I’m not convinced he was right, but it nevertheless started a life-long love affair with fountain pens...

I used Moleskines in college but haven’t looked back since finding Leuchtterm (almost 10 years ago). I love the numbered pages and softer covers, but the best part is that the lines are MUCH lighter. You won’t regret switching.

Numbered pages is a plus, but I’ve found the Moleskines to be brilliant field companions - there’s always one in my boiler suit’s breast pocket, and no matter how wet it has become, be it rain, seas or hydraulic oil, no matter how greased and dirty my fingers have been, the notebook holds up. I don’t think I’ll ever use anything else for jotting down notes while offshore.

My local dealer stocks Leuchtturms too; I’ll pick up a few next week.

If you like the G2, you should try the Uni-ball Signo DX (UM-151); I like mine in 0.38mm. It's got a lot of the same advantages as the G2, but it feels smoother and more consistent to me.

I was a life long pen and paper freak for all of my notes for personal and professional life.

My goto setup was the Pilot G2 0.38mm pen: https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/527870/Pilot-G-2-Retr...

And the Leuchterm 1917 dotted notebook: https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/notebook-medium-a5-hardcover-2...

The pens have perfect flow, and are thin in stroke for precision work. The paper has a nice texture to it, not rough but not slick.

For quick work, I'd grab sharpies and computer paper, for stuff like quick UI sketches/rapid note taking.

But as of April this year, I've switched to the 2018 iPad and an Apple Pencil and have completely dropped using paper. Being able to find all of my notes on both my ipad and my computer, sketch things up when I'm traveling and send it to my coworkers quickly, and also have all my books and media all in one simple device is just a dream. And in iOS 12, the Notes app is actually pretty great.

It's also a great setup for sketching up ideas to then toss on an Apple TV to share with my team before investing time into making a polished version of something. Idea to presentation in minutes is just awesome.

My only two complaints:

1) the body of the apple pencil is shitty. It's slick and round, I'd prefer a hexagonal body with a textured finger pad and a nice textured surface. This has annoyed me enough to the point that I've actually looked into how to make an alternative barrel for the pencils.

2) I take all of my notes in outline form. I would LOVE an app that captures handwritten notes in outline form, but then adds interactivity like collapsing/handwriting to text conversion/etc while preserving all the format. I realize that's a hard problem to solve, but I'm hoping in a few years machine learning will catch up.

I just made a practically identical switch (down to even the 0.38mm g-2 pens).

What apps have you been using on iPad for note taking? I have tried several and haven't found anything that would fit what I am looking for. The best I have found is Good Notes.

Edit: I forgot to mention In terms of the Apple Pencil body being too slick, I picked this up on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LY38UE5/ref=oh_aui_sear... It's not quite perfect but it's a lot better than vanilla and has a magnet that attached it to the iPad as well.

Nice, I've almost ordered one of those in the past. My idea was to actually remove the original body of the pencil and have a better one 3d printed for it. The cost/effort is probably completely not worth it, but it does look feasible per the teardown looking fairly straight forward.

I use Notability especially since the latest major update to add OCR to handwriting.

How well does it work? Could it preserve indentation during conversion?

I used Good Notes for a while, and it is a great app. However, I tossed the iOS 12 beta on a few weeks back and the updates to Apple Notes makes the pencil a lot better, you get stroke and color controls finally. Since it integrates so well with the desktop version of Notes, made it a no brainer for me.

> I would LOVE an app that captures handwritten notes in outline form

Some form of org-mode notation plus handwritten notes would be a killer app.

"All these things make me unhappy. But why? Stationery is supposed to be used. They’re functional objects. It is my tragedy."

I love that quote. I have the same problem with notebooks. For some reason I'm convinced that you have to do a perfect job when you are filling out a notebook. Even though, logically, that doesn't make any sense. People that do perfect things typically have practiced more throwing away things than I would consider likely.

It might be worthing buying a notebook with the intention of ripping out pages and scribbling nonsense in it.

The crossed out bits are the most important part of the notebook.

From last month; I have started using a new notebook in rough not-rigid way. Do not want to write date at top? No Worries, write anywhere. Do not feel like a left-aligned list? No problem. Not want to completely fill a page? Just leave it & start a new one.

This is, i would say, a bit of liberating from using Bullet Journal & Workflowy styles :)

Can relate. Bought a brand new notebook but am still scribbling notes on scraps of paper instead because I don't want to sully the pristine pages.

Something about the unlimited potential of an empty notebook - it could be the place for my magnum opus or my record of important insights which I would look back on for years to come. Don't want to mess it up with some random scribblings. And so it sits, pristine and unused, challenging me to create something worthy of it.

I keep two notebooks: an A5 one for TODOs that has a specific structure, and an A4 one for whatever, that has no real structure, though I do tend to fairly reliably fill them page by page from front to back. (Both cheapish, nothing fancy - always spiral bound though.) I've found this helps avoid any hesitation when wanting to note something down. I just reach for the larger notebook, find some space somewhere, and write.

Over the last several years I've aspired to improve my sketching/drawing skills so this post caught my eye. It's the first of 3 and this one focuses solely on "pens" he used as a child. Parts 2 & 3 are more germane to my circumstances.

I like his writing style - his "voice" - and so poked around some of the other articles and, wow, what a feast! Interesting topics and the perfect length for my increasingly ADD-addled brain. Not to mention the design of blog is quite well-done (perhaps it's a WP template though...?)

I'd not heard of James Ward before but he's now on my reading list.

Thanks for sharing!

He has a book “Adventures in Stationery”. Sitting around my home office, started but not finished (too much travel on my side)

Kinda surprised no fountain pens were part of the journey.

Me as well. I don't think a life in pens is complete without experiencing the world of fountain pens.

I have always loved fountain pens. But I am currently using a mechanical pencil(Staedtler 925-25-05) only. I guess fountain pens are not suitable for note taking and drafting and maintenance makes using them a luxury for me. Mechanical pencils provide fewer options but still a great joy of writing experience(but nowhere near a proper gold nib pen).

Pens and pencils are a favourite topic of mine. Since the article is mostly about cheap mass market ballpoints, I'll take the liberty to mention some of my favourites too.

* Uni-Ball Jetstream: Just about perfect as far as I'm concerned. Comfortable, ubiquitous and works every time. Stylish, yet unassuming.

* Ballograf Epoca: Very common in the Nordics. My favourite specimen has a light metal barrel (aluminium, I assume) with what seems like a rosewood grip and button. Most ones are plainer with plastic barrels in retro colours. A design classic with refills easily available in craft and hardware stores.

* Parker Insignia: A slightly fancier one, though not really a true luxury pen. I inherited a couple of these from my grandma who always had a good eye for stationery. One is a half of a matching set with a mechanical pencil, in aluminium and brass. The other is branded paraphernalia for a facility maintenance company she was doing printing work for.

* UNIX Ballpoint: The only one of these I don't have on my desk at the moment. Nothing really notable about this one but hey, it's made by Unix. How could I not like a Unix pen?

Waiting for a "my life in keyboards" post ...

Pencils for me. Hi Uni HB is what is mostly use. There’s just something about writing using something made of only three natural things. This pencil isn’t cheap either.

My favourite pen to date is the Zebra Sarasa[0]. It's a gel pen, but it really doesn't smear and 0.7mm nib means you're still writing sufficiently sharp.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Zebra-Pen-46871-Retractable-10-Count/...

This reminded me of an old website from about 10+ years ago. The guy would review artist pens, and would include a drawing of the pen, and whatever else he felt like that day.

Really nice website. I enjoyed reading it, does anyone remember what it was?

I'm pretty sure 90% of the pens i've ever used or owned were bic. I'm not sure if i've ever really used berol pens. My writing's pretty messy so I've looked for a couple decent pens for my notebooks and such but that's about it. I like anything where the ink doesn't run and that helps me write more clearly. Some pens are definitely better than others.

That Wikipedia article about crayon colours though....the author wasn't lying...that is an amazingly detailed list with hex and rgb values for just about every crayon ever made. The standard colours also have hsv values and there's detailed history for everything. It makes me want to setup a bunch of colour palettes based on all the different crayon sets.

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