I hated writing by hand, but I got into fountain pens and that really helped change my note taking habits. I mostly write letters, but recently I’ve taken up writing notes during meetings. I loathe doing so, but my FP addiction really helps.
This. FP usage changed my aversion to writing and helped me stay the course on re-training myself to write cursive and move past RSI/cramping. Pilot VP is my goto FP for meeting notes since it’s retractable.
For other left-handers out there, Pigma Micron pens from Sakura are outstanding. They aren't fountain pens, but their archival quick-dry ink doesn't smudge at all when writing with the left hand. They come in varying weights, and I tend to prefer the 05s or 08s. Lots of arts and crafts stores stock them.
I'm right handed, but write from right to left (Hebrew). Smudging is not an issue with any ink, I don't drag my hand over written text. I don't know why people do that.
I usually use Pilot inks, I currently have a dark blue that I've added a touch of old green to. I absolutely love it.
I'll def be looking around. I have some bottled ink already, but this is a huge concern. Hopefully the fine tip has decent portion control. That helps a lot.
You may be unpleasantly surprised. I have TWSBI Eco-T pens in both <M> and <F>, which write similarly to some Japanese <B> and <M> nibs respectively. I would recommend, if you want something with true portion control, to get a Pilot Prera in <F> or a Kakuno in <EF> (or any pen with a Japanese nib), just to check it out. Both are fairly affordable.
Also, given you’re a lefty, you may want to avoid “good paper” for fountain pens. Coatings on the paper that allow inks to “sit on top” of the page while they dry, preventing feathering and allowing the ink’s properties to develop, understandably slow the drying process. In addition, avoid Noodler’s inks. They look beautiful but dry at an absolutely glacial pace—in my experience, up to several days’ time to fully dry (unassisted, in a dry environment) on Midori MD notebook paper.
I’ve used an ECO and while it’s not my favorite pen, I have nothing bad to say about the nib (I believe mine was a fine as well). The way FP’s write can vary dramatically between different inks though. I’d recommend first trying out the ink you have and seeing what about it you don’t like before researching other inks.
Just asking out of precaution, but are you sure this bottled ink of yours can be used with fountain pens? Even if it is, it’s best to be careful with a fine nib (I’ve learned the hard way).
Good to know. TBH I haven't checked. I have some cartridges too (for a different, cheaper fountain pen) but if none of those work, I'll scout for options.
I’m in a long distance relationship at the moment, so one of the things I try to bridge the distance is sending letters! That’s how I got started, but now I’ll send letters to any of my friends (or anyone really) that sends me a mailing address.
One thing I strongly advise when it comes to writing letters with FP ink is to use waterproof/permanent inks. I had to learn that hard way that typical ink doesn’t handle rain well… Diamine just came out with a new lineup of permanent inks which I quite like, but the Platinum stuff (my favorite being Carbon Black) is quite good as well.
That's lovely! I do the same now with a few friends. Postcards, letters, etc.. It's a blast. Just got some Strathmore letter paper too. So much nicer than what I was using.
I have a use case somewhat similar to this where I need to convert the content of PDFs in a non standard format to a specific YAML format. I currently use Haiku for this and am pleased with the accuracy/speed (I haven't tried scanned PDFs yet tho) however I've been thinking about fine tuning a small Qwen model for just this task. I can't yet justify the effort to investigate it but I imagine it could work out.
In my use case for small models I typically only generate a max of 100 tokens per API call, with the prompt processing taking up the majority of the wait time from the user perspective. I found OAI's models to be quite poor at this and made the switch to Anthropic's API just for this.
I've found Haiku to be a pretty fast at PP, but would be willing to investigate using another provider if they offer faster speeds.
My situation was nowhere similar to yours or OP’s, but back when I was dealing with depression a church group I was volunteering with was one of the main factors in my recovery. I met people that really helped me change for the better and helped give me at least a temporary purpose in life.
There were some days when I didn’t want to do anything, but due to my obligations as a formal member of the group I had to show up. This really helped me since it really forced me to get out and actually do something and not doomscroll YouTube Shorts.
I don’t want to make this specific to any religion or belief system, but in my experience groups centered around a place of worship and focused on service are some of the best ways to create social bonds as an adult. There are also other men’s groups that aren’t religious that fit this: Lions Club, Rotary Club, Veterans Outposts.
Yesterday I test ran Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on my MBP M3 Pro with 36GB via LM Studio and OpenCode. I didn’t have it write code but instead use Rodney (thanks for making it btw!) to take screenshots and write documentation using them. Overall I was pretty impressed at how well it handled the harness and completed the task locally. In the past I would’ve had Haiku do this, but I might switch to doing it locally from now on.
Right now I have to wait 10 minutes at a time for the 2+ hour long transcriptions I've uploaded to Voxstral to process. The speed up here could be immense and worthwhile to so many customers of these products.
This is pretty awesome, and at a $3 price point is an auto purchase for me!
As someone else said though, hardware keyboard support on iOS is something that I would really want as I regularly use ShellFish on my iPhone with a USB-C keyboard.
Something that actually matters more to me is font support. I use nerd fonts for my zsh prompt, so an app that doesn't support them is a hard sell. Are custom fonts supported, or at least on the roadmap?
Additionally I just want clarification on your business model. Once I pay now I will get all future updates for free or might I have to pay for them?
EDIT: (Since Ghostty supports it) Does this also support showing images in the terminal via the kitty protocol?
I thought that project got turned into the animated film that got released not too long back? I got the impression JMS was done with B5 after he went back to focusing on comics again with his run on Captain America.
The animated film was said to be a side-by-side project from different budgets (WB Animation versus The CW/WB Television Studios).
I think at this point JMS is trying to keep a diverse income and still do comics as well as TV projects. Even during Sense8, with its Netflix-sized budget, he had comics irons in the fire.
It wasn't conscious or intentional. JMS only realized the connection halfway through writing it.
"It was only when I was about halfway into the act that I thought, "Oh, crud, this is the same area Canticle explored." And for several days I set it aside and strongly considered dropping it, or changing the venue (at one point considered setting it in the ruins of a university, but I couldn't make that work realistically...who'd be supporting a university in the ruins of a major nuclear war? Who'd have the *resources* I needed? The church, or what would at least LOOK like the church. My sense of backstory here is that the Anla-shok moved in and started little "abbeys" all over the place, using the church as cover, but rarely actually a part of it, which was why they had not gotten their recognition, and would never get it. Rome probably didn't even know about them, or knew them only distantly.)
Anyway...at the end of the day, I decided to leave it as it was, since I'd gotten there on an independent road, we'd already had a number of monks on B5, and there's been a LOT of theocratic science fiction written beyond Canticle...Gather Darkness, aspects of Foundation, others." -- Lurker's Guide
reply