- 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.
filled with a mix of water, Platinum carbon black, and inkjet printer ink
why do you choose 👆 solution over a commercial ink?
This 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.
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.
I get the theory of wanting to use CMY inks. I just think it’s weird and a lot of extra work for such a narrow goal. There’s not really any wrong way to use your pens however you want, provided you’re aware of the risks and know that you may be spending more time than it’s really worth.
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.
I only see a pen and part of a spiral notebook.
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?
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.)
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!
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.
I’ve heard good things about the LAMY. Do you find it’s as practical for daily use as say a ballpoint?
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.
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.
