1. An all-black LAMY Safari fountain pen filled with a mix of water, Platinum carbon black, and inkjet printer ink.
  2. A blank sheet of A4, folded in half three times.
  3. My passport.
  4. A fully loaded Secrid card carrier.
  5. A really nice rock. It has been in my pocket for a year. Don’t think about it.
  6. 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.)
  7. A beta of the PinePhone Pro, equipped with dreemurrs archlinux.
  8. A USB drive containing all of my computers’ boot partitions and Archiso.
  • merde alorsMEnglish
    16·
    10 months ago

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

    why do you choose 👆 solution over a commercial ink?

      • etuomaala@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
        8·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • merde alorsMEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

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

        • etuomaala@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          6·
          10 months ago

          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.

                • etuomaala@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
                  1·
                  10 months ago

                  Hm. Thanks for the link. This could help me with my ink mixes. Oh, one thing that annoys me: I wish I had pure CMY dyes without surfactant in them, so that I could change the surfactant level and not make the ink so god damned bloody. But I have no fucking clue where I could find CMY dyes without the surfactant.

              • merde alorsMEnglish
                2·
                10 months ago

                not a “should”, but it would help the nib, i assume, considering the state of the kettles and washing machines &c

                it depends on where you live and the quality of the tap water 🤷