Author Archives: ordinal

Smena Cosmic Symbol

At some point I will probably do a post just listing the small collection of cameras that I currently have – which will hopefully not grow at the same rate as the fountain one did – but this post is about a cheap camera that I recently picked up on eBay for around six quid, [...]

Ilfosol and shutter speed: a note on new interests

Anyone following me on Twitter or G+ might have noticed an increasing number of references to black and white photography. This is not unrepresentative of my current interests – while obviously I still love fountain pens and ink (who doesn’t? those without souls, is the answer) I am starting to take an interest in film [...]

Expired Kodak Tri-X Pan film packaging

Before the recent announcement on Kodak and bankruptcy, I had already ordered these two packs of expired Kodak film on eBay – two rolls of 35mm and five of 120, influenced to a great degree by the terrific box that the 120 comes in. The latter film expired in 1972. I look forward to shooting some with the Lubitel 2 that I also ordered, when that arrives.

Two broad nibs – Platinum #3776 music, Lamy 2000 B

Platinum #3776 with music nib One of the few types of nib that I don’t – or didn’t – own and might actually want to use is a music nib. I can’t even read music, let alone write it, but to summarise, a music nib is a type of stub designed to have a particularly [...]

Two very dark Diamine inks – Eclipse and Denim

Two months between posts is really not acceptable. It is not as if I have a shortage of un-remarked-on pieces of stationery. On the other hand it is a huge cliché of infrequent bloggers that they pop up to say how awful they are for not having made an entry, and then don’t make any [...]

The Allan’s Journal – pocket notebook par excellence

I recently finished using a small Allan’s Journal as a daily journal. In the end I decided not to buy another one to replace it, but that wasn’t because it was bad, just simply a few aspects of it weren’t quite what I was after. The Allan’s Journal looks rather like a Bible in construction, [...]

Back to basics – still use my first Safari

Even given all of the pens and inks that I own, the one that I most often find myself picking up is a Safari with an F nib, with Noodler’s Black.

Leuchtturm Jottbook

I recently acquired three small softcover A6 notebooks made by Leuchtturm, a Swedish company that I’ve seen more about recently, and already own a few notebooks from. These are called “Jottbooks” – they’re around the same size as, and fit a similar niche to, the pocket Moleskine cahiers, Field Notes, and the Clairefontaine “Life Unplugged” [...]

Noteshelf 4 – stop me before I cliché

The problem with writing a review of the new Noteshelf 4 is that I keep accidentally adding the sort of awful clichés that bad tech bloggers always use. It’s ahead of the curve! Leaves the competition in the dust! Best in its class, bar none! Argh! I will try anyway and you can slap me [...]

SNYS v0.41

I noticed that SNYS was having trouble with Lion, and I think some of the later Snow Leopard security updates, and wasn’t able to spawn processes properly. I’ve updated it so that it is able to do so. (Basically this just involved re-saving the script as a new application in Applescript Editor and then copying [...]