It’s been a while since I bought a new fountain pen. This is about the Pilot Custom 823.

Pilot Custom 823

Literally every review I’ve read says the same things: “It’s not a looker, but what a great writer!” I can only resist that kind of consensus for so long, so I bought one. I have the “smoke” color with a fine nib. I ordered it from JetPens  for $270. I’d say this puts it well into significant purchase territory, so I was very excited when it arrived. I’ve been journaling quite a lot recently and was looking forward to spending time with what reviewers call one of the best every day writers.

I’d like to tell you that it was love at first write, but that wasn’t the case. The pen looks fine, if a little boring. I didn’t get it for its looks, so I don’t mind. The pen feels very good in hand, too. This is important. It’s not too heavy or unbalanced, either with the cap posted or not.

It’s a vacuum filler, which is apparently unusual but I’m not sure why, as it’s super easy to fill. It holds a lot of ink, too. This does make it more difficult to switch inks, but I don’t switch often so this isn’t a problem.

So what’s not to love, then? Well, I didn’t love how it wrote. I bought the pen to write with and not look at, so this was a problem. It felt somewhat scratchy and skipped more often than I’m used to. At first I thought of it simply as “feedback” but it was worse than just feedback. It felt dry. I’m left-handed, so any scratchiness in a pen is amplified. This was disappointing.

I thought maybe I had received a bum copy, but I’m loathe to ship things back and wait so I’d try a few things before giving up.

First, I ran it with wetter ink. I typically use one of the quick-drying Nooder inks like Bernanke Blue , but thought something wetter might fare better. I ordered Pilot iroshizuku kon-pecki ink and it was an immediate improvement. Also, what a great ink!

/Pilot iroshizuku “kon-peki”

Then, I spent some time writing in a Midori notebook . Maybe I got an off copy of the Leuchtturm notebook I have been using, but writing in the Midori made a huge improvement.

So the problem wasn’t with the pen, necessarily. It was just a combination of the fine nib, dry ink, mediocre paper, and being left-handed.

Things were much better, but I still wasn’t thrilled with how it wrote. I wondered if maybe the nib was simply too fine. Japanese pen makers’ idea of “fine” is different than that of the German pen makers. Here’s a comparison between the fine nib on the Pilot and that on the Pelikan M400.

Left: Pilot Custom 823 Fine. Right: Pelikan Souverine M400 Fine.

I had to find out, so I ordered another Custom 823, but with a medium nib. After a day with the new pen, I’ve concluded that it’s perfect. The combination of better paper, wetter ink, and broader nib is wonderful. This is my new favorite crew.

Pilot Custom 823, Pilot “kon-peki” ink, and Midori MD notebook.

June 11, 2021 Analog Reply by email

I’ve owned a lot of cameras and lenses.

More than average, I’d say. I’ve of course sold more than I currently own. With few exceptions, I regret selling any of them.

Remember how the Nikon F6 printed exposure data between frames?

Self-portrait with horse head. Nikon F6.

Or how nice it was having aperture-priority auto-exposure on the Leica M7?

Lobster Buoys. Mount Desert, Maine.

Or the Mamiya 6 with its giant square negatives in an easy-to-shoot package?

Self-portrait with eggs. Mamiya 6.

I’ve been thinking about this lately while pondering all of the money I have tied up in various cameras and how infrequently I use some of them. My head tells me to sell everything I’m not using often, but my heart won’t let me. I always, always regret selling camera gear, so I think I’ll hang onto all of it for now. At least until circumstances dictate that I cannot.

May 27, 2021 Photography Reply by email

I’ve never loved editing photos in Adobe’s Lightroom (Classic) . It does the job fine, and it has all the tools one might need, but it’s no fun. I prefer editing with Capture One Pro .

As much as I enjoy the editing process in Capture One, it otherwise feels like working on an island. C1 has no way to sync photos, the plugin/extension options are very limited, and while it works with other editors, it doesn’t do it as seamlessly as Lightroom. And so on.

Lightroom’s ecosystem is hard to beat. It works with nearly everything. I can sync with the mobile Lightroom CC library. It works with every plugin one could possibly want (most notably, Jeffrey Friedl’s and Negative Lab Pro .) There’s no end to the presets and styles available. If I want to do something with a photo, Lightroom is more likely to be able to handle it.

Lightroom’s cataloging is more capable than Capture One’s. Or at least it feels easier to use. I’d prefer not having to rely on a specific vendor’s tool for managing my lifetime of photos, but it’s better than only having them scattered in folders. Believe me, I’ve tried it that way numerous times. It’s liberating, but only for a moment, then it quickly becomes frustrating.

And of course I don’t like having to pay a monthly subscription to Adobe. That said, for $20 a month I get Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Lightroom CC on all my devices, and 1TB of cloud storage. It’s a pretty good deal.

While I’m still looking for excuses to go back to Capture One, I am, reluctantly, back in Lightroom Classic for the majority of my photo management. For now.

May 18, 2021 Photography Software Reply by email

I take all my notes in TiddlyWiki now, and publish most of them to my wiki .

For the past few years, I’ve published my wiki using TiddlyWiki. I write daily, publicly sharable notes there. Private stuff goes elsewhere…or did, until yesterday.

It’s the “elsewhere” part that drove me nuts. I have a private Roam database in which I would track things I don’t want to share. Or maybe I should write it in Org mode . Or Obsidian , or Craft , or or or. The difficult part for me has been that I want to take a note about, say, a new camera purchase. There are two components to it, the information about the camera itself, and information about the purchase. The former is public, the latter is private. This means I create one note in TiddlyWiki and one in, let’s say, Roam. There are dozens of examples like this, and it’s crazy-making. I thought I could manage this using links or copy/paste but it sucks trying to do that. I could also make everything public or private. Neither of these are feasible.

If only I could keep everything in one place, but only publish things I wanted public. Then, a few days ago, Soren Bjornstad came to the rescue with his video, A Tour Through My Zettelkasten .

Wow, other than building an amazing Zettelkasten, Soren has implemented nearly everything I needed in order to go all-in with TiddlyWiki for my own wiki.

A few highlights:

• Public and Private tiddlers
• Sensible tagging and organization
• Override the “copy permalink” feature to substitute public URL when on localhost
• Scripted rendering and publishing of public wiki
• Specific behavior when viewing public vs private editions
• A number of other nice touches

I borrowed some of these and integrated them into Rudimentary Lathe . Now, I’m taking all my notes in TiddyWiki. I’ll describe the process a little.

Editing the wiki locally.

I use TiddlyWiki as a local Node.js app. While one of TiddlyWiki’s great features is that can be just a single HTML file, running it locally as a single-page web app via node.js makes things a bit more flexible. Also, it’s the easiest way to allow for saving changes in Safari. The file structure looks like this:

├── files/
├── plugins/
├── tiddlers/
└── tiddlywiki.info

All tiddlers are kept as separate “.tld” files in the tiddlers folder. Here’s an example:

created: 20201220181044760
creator: jack
modified: 20210505182021507
modifier: jack
revision: 0
tags: Public
title: Leica APO-Summicron-SL 35mm ASPH
type: text/vnd.tiddlywiki

[img[files/2020/leica-apo-summicron-sl-35mm.jpg]]

I prefer primes, so this is the one I've chosen for the [[Leica SL2-S]]. Watching Peter Karbe admit it's is desert-island lens and suggesting it's the best lens Leica has ever produced made the decision a little easier.

I have over 2300 of them currently. Another nice side effect is that git diffs are much more usable on individual text files than on a giant HTML file.

Public vs Private content

Any tiddler I want to be public gets a “Public” tag. That’s it. The export script is smart enough to automatically include all system tiddlers, etc so that everything works.

As a useful helper, each tiddler displays a “Publish this tiddler” checkbox to make adding the tag easier, as well as serving as a handy indicator of private vs public status. The export script updates one of the configuration tiddlers so that the published version doesn’t show this checkbox.

I can’t tell you how huge this is. Not having to choose the tool or app for new notes is so liberating. I can now write and link freely with everything and can still share most of it publicly.

Hosting

I’ve never used Github Pages for hosting any content, so thought this would be a good opportunity to try it. Basically, I keep a separate repo of the public version and pushing to that repo automatically publishes it. Super easy to set up.

Publishing workflow

Soren was kind enough to share a version of the script for publishing his wiki (publish.sh), which I’ve modified slightly. Here are the highlights.

PRIV_FOLDER="rl-wiki"
PUB_FOLDER="public-wiki"

FILT='[is[system]] [tag[Public]] -[[$:/plugins/tiddlywiki/tiddlyweb]] -[[$:/plugins/tiddlywiki/filesystem]] -[prefix[$:/temp]] -[prefix[$:/state]] -[prefix[$:/sib/StorySaver/saved]] +[!field:title[$:/sib/WriteSideBar]]'

WIKI_NAME="index.html"ext_image_folder="extimage"

“FILT” is the tiddlywiki filter for determining which tiddlers to include (and exclude). The [tag[Public]] bit is the key to the public/private thing.

Then we export tiddlers based on the filter and settings above.

"$(npm bin)/tiddlywiki" "$PRIV_FOLDER" --savewikifolder "$pub_wiki" "$FILT"

Next, generate a single HTML version of the wiki and copy over the separate image files..

"$(npm bin)/tiddlywiki" "$pub_wiki" 
    --render "$:/core/save/all" "$WIKI_NAME" text/plaincp -r "$pub_wiki/output"/* "$pub_ghpages"cp -R "$PRIV_FOLDER/files" "$pub_ghpages"

Isn’t TiddlyWiki amazing!?

Finally, we commit and push the public wiki to Github…

if [ "$1" = "--push" ];
then
echo "Pushing compiled wiki to GitHub..."    
cd "$pub_ghpages" || exit 1    
git add .    
git commit -m "publish checkpoint"    
git push
else    
echo "Not pushing the wiki to GitHub because the --push switch was not provided."
fi

And voilà!

A few nice odds and ends.

Soren’s “Reference Explorer”, seen at the bottom of individual tiddlers, replaces my handmade backlinks display. His is much fancier. I removed a few tabs I don’t use, and may exclude the tags at some point. I conditionally exclude the explorer from my Daily Notes pages. (anything tagged “DailyNote” hides the explorer.) Another nice tweak is that if I add a “refexplorer-hide” field to any tiddler and set it to “true”, the explorer is not shown on that tiddler. Nifty.

TiddlyWiki comes with a button for copying a permalink to each tiddler. The problem with that for me is that when I’m running the wiki locally, permalinks look like this

http://localhost:8080/#CommandLineInterface, which obviously won’t work. Soren’s version of the button replaces localhost:8080 with the live hostname, e.g. https://rudimentarylathe.wiki/#CommandLineInterface . This saves me a ton of copy/paste/edit hassles.

Putting it all together.

When I’m ready to publish, I open a terminal and type prl (for “publish rudimentary lathe”)

prl is a script…

#!/bin/sh
cd ~/Sync/rudimentarylathe./scripts/publish.sh --push

That’s it.

I wish more people would spend time getting to know TiddlyWiki. It’s amazing. It’s a Quine , which makes it ridiculously flexible and powerful. And yet it’s very simple. It’s also a free, local-first, easily-distributable, storable, backup-able single HTML file.

TiddlyWiki is fun, fancy, and
future-proof. I live there now.

May 8, 2021 Software Writing Reply by email

I’m exhausted. I think it’s because I haven’t been working in more than a month and my brain has had too much free time to “figure stuff out.” (Yes, I know how it sounds to complain about exhaustion while not having a job!)

As an experiment, I’m going to live the month of May in “Easy Mode”. This means I’m going to solve problems with quick, obvious, easy solutions. I’m going to use the easy-to-use tools. And I’m going to make various processes as easy as possible.

Examples? Sure!

• Roam not Emacs
• Lightroom CC not Photo Mechanic and Capture One
• Things not Org mode
• Day One not Org Journal
• WordPress not Hugo
• Streaming music not FLAC/MP3 files
• Netflix not Plex
• Books not Kindle
• Walks not Workouts
• Mac not Linux

It could be argued that some of these are backwards, but this is where I’m starting, and the gist is: nothing fancy for a while.

May 1, 2021 Workflow Reply by email

reMarkable is Sleeping

I’ve been using the reMarkable 2 tablet for almost three months now. I’m often asked what I think of it. The short answer is this:

I use the reMarkable tablet every day. I love writing on it, but it won’t be replacing my paper notebooks.

If you are thinking about getting one, I have no reservations recommending that you do. The hardware is very nice and the experience of writing on it is terrific. It’s not exactly like paper, but it does feel analog. It feels “real”, unlike using the iPad and Apple Pencil, which feels like writing on a computer screen.

Here are what I’ve been using it for:

• Morning pages. I don’t write morning pages as a practice, but I often open a new page first thing in the morning and make marks on it.
• Brainstorming. The reMarkable is great for sitting down, away from the computer, and thinking something through. Sketches, scribbles, and a few notes are a perfect use for the tablet.
• Drafting blog posts. I’m drafting this very post using it.

A common thread here is that they’re all throw-away notes. I have not been using the reMarkable for things I’ll want to reference later. It’s great for raw materials to be used later in some other format, but less so for long-term notes. I find that it’s still too much trouble to quickly jump between notes on the reMarkable. Swiping from page to page is slow, and getting to an overview of a notebook’s pages requires tap, wait, tap, wait, tap, and wait. This makes paging around in a notebook rather cumbersome for certain things.

I use the reMarkable nearly every day, but only a little. It spends most of its time sleeping.

I keep a paper notebook open on my desk, not the reMarkable. The reMarkable wakes quickly at the touch of a button, but a paper notebook never sleeps.

I use paper for:

• Personal journaling. Nothing beats paper and a nice fountain pen.
• Tasks and quick notes. This is my lightweight version of bullet journaling.
• Jotting things down. Phone numbers, names, anything I need to remember.

As great and convenient as digital tools like the reMarkable are, there is one thing about paper notebooks that I never want to live without, and that is the artifact itself. There is no substitute for a shelf lined with full notebooks. I can pick one up today, or in twenty years, and easily skim around in it. No digital format, as convenient as they may be, can replace that.

April 30, 2021 Gear NoteTaking Reply by email

Here’s my star rating system for everything:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Loved it!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was good
⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was OK
⭐️⭐️ I didn’t like it
⭐️ Hated it

With me, everything gets 3 stars by default. Books, movies, photographs, everything: 3 stars right off the bat. I always assume that this new thing or person or conversation will be OK at the very least. This applies to more than just media. It applies to people, too. Sometimes I’m disappointed and end up with 1 or 2 stars, but more often than not I’m surprised and delighted and my opinion of something or someone goes up rather than down.

Too many people seem to start out assuming everything and everyone only deserve 1 or 2 stars. They expect to dislike everything by default. This doesn’t seem healthy to me. Why go out of your way to look for trouble?

April 29, 2021 Misc Reply by email

toy-story-toybox

…skip any definitive conclusions, as we know you might change those at any time. ????

@ron on micro.blog

Ron was referring to my still-forming opinions about the reMarkable tablet, but he could be referring to any number of things. I have a reputation for frequently changing up my process/tools/systems/workflows/what-have-you. This reputation is not unfounded, but for some reason I feel the need to explain (defend?) myself.

Or perhaps it’s easier to describe what I’m not doing:

I am not looking for the perfect tool or system. I simply like to try new things.

Many people seem to assume that I’m wasting time constantly searching for some better, more-perfect solution. I don’t believe that’s it at all. I’m not wasting my time, I’m having fun!

Let’s look at note-taking and cameras as two good examples.

I don’t need any new note-taking tools. I don’t need a different process for taking notes. I don’t need to take “smarter” notes. Note-taking is a solved problem. If I want to write something down, I open a text file and write it down. Now, that could be done using Vim or BBEdit or Emacs or whatever. Doesn’t matter, as long as what I’ve written is in a text file and I can find it later if needed. This would be different if I was an academic or an author working on a novel, but I’m neither of those.

However, I’m fascinated by how other people do things and the tools they use. I love seeing how different tools solve different problems for different people. I love novelty. This is why I started using Vim in the early 2000s when BBEdit worked just fine. I’d heard so many people rave about modal editing with Vim that I had to try it. Turns out they were right. Modal editing has informed nearly every text-editing decision since I learned it. One can’t dig into Vim without also hearing about how great Emacs is. I tried and failed to get into Emacs a few times, but then Spacemacs came along and made it easy for Vim users to adapt. Then Doom replaced Spacemacs because it was simpler and faster. And one can’t use Emacs without running into Org mode. Then Roam showed up and made automatic backlinks a thing, and I loved that. I still do. In fact, I still enjoy using all of them: BBEdit, Roam, Vim, Emacs, Craft, Obsidian, Logseq, Mem, iA Writer, Ulysses, and on and on. Hell, I still use paper about half the time.

It’s the same with cameras. I want to experience them all; big, small, cheap, expensive, old, new…all of them. I have or have had some of the (objectively) “best” cameras ever made. (And no, the best camera is not the one you have with you if what you have with you is a shitty camera.) I don’t make photographs for a living, so it’s incorrect to describe a camera as “just a tool.” For me, cameras are toys! Sure, I look for the ones that work well with the way I like to take pictures, but they all have good and bad qualities. I like trying cameras with varying combinations of those qualities.

This all happens because I want to try the things I read about. If someone writes passionately about something they use, whether it be software, hardware, or process, I want to try it for myself.

But let’s be clear, I don’t need any of it beyond a basic text editor and, say, my iPhone.

All this stuff is like a giant toy box. And much like Andy in Toy Story, sometimes I find a new favorite toy. This means that old favorites get left in the box for a time. Then one day I re-discover an old favorite and out it comes. There need not be anything “definitive” about it.

Old friends

April 28, 2021 Gear Reply by email

It feels like the entire world (or at least my corner of) is consumed by the “how” of note-taking. Tools, workflows, processes, backlinks, and on and on. Obsidian? Roam? Paper? I read it all. It’s fun and interesting and there’s no end of things to distract myself with. A distraction is all it is.

None if it really matters, though, and yet we endlessly split hairs and wring our hands and gaze at our navels over irrelevant minutiae. It’s exhausting. I’m not one of those people who wear “I never change my system” as a badge of honor. I can’t seem to stop. I’m too curious for that. FOMO and all.

As an attempt to extract myself from this loop, I’ve decided to stop taking notes for a while. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop writing. Writing isn’t note-taking. Nor is journaling. I’ll still do that. That’s what all of this is supposed to be for, isn’t it? But I won’t be jotting down my recent thoughts about minimalism or digital record-keeping or the details of a conversation I had with a colleague or how much I paid for the wrench I just ordered.

No more Roam vs Obsidian vs Tinderbox vs Org mode vs The Archive or what-have-you until I stop obsessing over which is better or more private or more open source or if it uses the right kind of Markdown. No more worrying about whether I’m taking “smart” enough notes or if this one should be “evergreen” or not. How long should a zettel be, anyway?

I’m willing to bet there are lots of smart, productive, happy people around that take very few notes and aren’t missing anything. I would love to be one of those people.

April 12, 2021 NoteTaking Reply by email

When I started using Roam, I found the way it handled backlinks to be a revelation. Other software does backlinks, but Roam’s implementation made it feel new. Suddenly, backlinks felt necessary.

I started writing everything in Roam’s Daily Notes, and I’d link things by putting brackets around each word or phrase that I thought I might want to review later. I made lots of links. After a while, I noticed that many (most?) of these linked words and phrases would end up as empty Roam pages containing nothing but backlink references.

In effect, what I was doing was creating saved searches.

I noticed something similar in my TiddlyWiki at rudimentarylathe.wiki . The automatic backlink references at the bottom of each note were in most cases links from one of the daily notes, and this ended up as a collection of backlinks like “2021.04.10 — Daily Note”. Not very helpful. Would I be better off just searching for the topic in question? I think so, so I recently changed the note footer on the wiki to do just that. It now shows a list of “tiddlers” with the most mentions of the current tiddler and also those with titles containing the same word. You know, like saved searches.

I’m starting to question the value of automatic backlinks in my notes. I still want them, but I’m not sure I need them the way I thought I did. They no longer feel necessary, but are they useful?

I started thinking about this again after re-reading Sascha Fast’s post, Backlinking Is Not Very Useful — Often Even Harmful . I had an adverse reaction to the article when I first read it. I thought it was mostly sour grapes because Roam was eating The Archive’s lunch. I read it as, “The Archive doesn’t have automatic backlinks, so they must be bad and you don’t need them!” There was this right in the first paragraph:

Automatic backlinks are not only automatic when there is software that is showing them for you. If you create a backlink apparatus by habit it is still automatic. The automatization software would then be in your head

That felt like some rationalization gymnastics right there. I looked up “automatic” and it said, “done or occurring spontaneously, without conscious thought or intention”. A habit of manually creating links still involves conscious thought and intention.

And then the article went on to try and cast automatic backlinks as “linking notes” vs manual linking as “connecting knowledge”. I thought that was a bit of a semantic crutch.

Here’s another stretch…

Just think a moment about how difficult it really is to use the internet and its web in a productive way. The single most productivity-destroying problem with using the internet is the temptations link provide. The same is true for your Zettelkasten if your link structure is not well-groomed.

To compare the distraction of links on the internet at large to those within my own writing in a curated Zettelkasten doesn’t seem at all relevant.

I was looking for problems with the article going in, and I felt that I found them straight away, so I skimmed the rest with a jaded eye and a bad attitude.

I may have overreacted.

Now that I’ve spent a year building my notes using tools that make backlinks easy and automatic, I’m coming around to Sascha’s point of view. I have hundreds of empty “pages” containing nothing but backlinks. There’s no context, no color. No knowledge. It’s just “linking notes”. Here’s Sascha’s closing comment:

Backlinks are a perfect example on how features of software not only can be useless but actively harming you work by redirecting your attention towards to the superficial belief that you need to place links, instead of trying to connect knowledge.

I still feel that “harmful” is an exaggeration, but I better understand his point now that I’ve had some time with it.

The answer to the title of this post is, of course, “It depends”.

Many people use the term “zettelkasten” for any old pile of notes. But for a true zettelkasten, one containing notes specifically intended to help garner and build one’s knowledge over time, automatic backlinks aren’t as useful. Explicitly linking between ideas and notes and providing context for the links is much better.

For other collections of notes, though, automatic backlinks can be very helpful, even though they aren’t functionally much different from saved searches. For example, I keep notes about people I know. Having backlinks created automatically whenever I link to “Mom”, for example, is a nice way to see all of the times I’ve mentioned her, right there next to my notes about her. This, for me, is very useful. Hi mom!

April 10, 2021 NoteTaking Software Reply by email