I tried pencils but I find text written pencils to be too faint. I find it uncomfortable to read. But pen writes text in bright blue color which is more pleasing to read.
You have to read up on "Lead Grades" used in Pencils; use 2B or 4B (or higher) to get dark, clear and smooth writing. Another factor to choose is the "Lead Diameter"; use 0.7mm(ballpoint fine)/0.9mm(ballpoint medium) for thicker lines.
Oh Man! I went down this rabbit hole quite recently and hence have plenty of information (Note: always check reviews first on Jetpens, Amazon and Youtube ;-)
My current favourite is the classic Tombow Zoom 505 series - https://www.tombow.com/en/products/zoom_505/ Not too costly, well made, elegant and professional looking. I have the Rollerball (i.e. water-based ballpoint), Mechanical pencil and Multi-function pen all in Black.
Multi-function pens (which have 2 or more ballpoints and a mechanical pencil) are another must have (I limit myself to 2+1). Buy a good professional looking one (eg. Cross/Zebra/Pentel/Rotring etc.) rather than the cheap plastic ones (they look ugly).
Many of the OEMs who actually manufacture the pens but which are sold under other well-known brand names are now releasing them under their own name. Two of them are TWSBI(Taiwan) and Penac(Japan). You should check out their offerings.
Finally, always check the offerings from Japan (Amazon.co.jp and Jetpens are your goto sites); they make some of the best and most innovative stationery.
I for some reason don't like the Parker Jotters as they are too thin for my fat fingers. Also the blue color of the ballpoint is too much on the purple side and gives me a headache. I too have one but I don't use it much but I still love it ;-). I am aware of their Gel lines but not sure whether they work for the Jotter.
>Finally, always check the offerings from Japan
I love the Japanese offerings but I don't get much in India. For eg Pentel has its factory in India but manufacturers limited set of models. I love Pentel pens btw but I am not satisfied with its offerings in India.
I am currently using Uniball Signo retractable UMN 207. Although the build and the ink is very nice it skips a lot and I am not sure whether it is because the ink is not designed for Indian weather or paper quality. I do see people having complaints with skipping but not much. I have ordered some UMN 307s and have to see how it fares.
>Many of the OEMs who actually manufacture the pens but which are sold under other well-known brand names are now releasing them under their own name. Two of them are TWSBI(Taiwan) and Penac(Japan).
I am thinking of buying the TWSBI as I really love its unique see through styling. I was thinking of purchasing a Lamy though. I am afraid to use Fountain pens as I work in harsh environments and I am not sure how it will fare but then again our ancestors were using these pens with ease. :-)
>If you are a Fountain Pen connoisseur, you should know that India has a large number of Artisanal Specialist Fountain Pen makers
Yes I am aware but the problem is I think they they import their nibs and just make the body of the pens. Somehow I don't feel like buying this Frankenstein and would love to buy the complete product if they make it.
Make sure that you are not confusing "Parker Jotter" with "Parker Classic"; they look similar (the stainless steel ones) but the latter is thinner which many find uncomfortable. And i replace the blue refill with a black one as soon as i get one.
You can find Japanese offerings on Amazon India and if needed, get it directly from Amazon Japan (i do both). You can also contact the resellers (who import from Japan and sell on Amazon India) directly for a better deal. For example, you can get the Tombow pens from https://www.foremostindia.com/
You should also check Aliexpress. I came across a rollerball pen which can be refilled like a Fountain pen which is neat.
Finally, your quote
>Yes I am aware but the problem is I think they they import their nibs and just make the body of the pens. Somehow I don't feel like buying this Frankenstein and would love to buy the complete product if they make it.
This is quite the wrong way of looking at it. These guys are very good and are optimizing their product based on their available skills. Making a nib requires metallurgy, high-precision CNC etc. which as small specialized Artisans they cannot afford to setup. So they focus on what they are good at (this is exactly similar to specialized Artisans in Germany and Japan; you find entire video series on Youtube; eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5dekz26Kdw). For example, i have a Tombow pencil sharpener where the plastic body is made in Vietnam but the blade itself is made in Germany!. If you are a Fountain Pen guy you should definitely get one or more of this.
Finally, i should note that a lot of branded Pens are manufactured in India; eg. Parker Pens are manufactured by Luxor India and exported.
>Make sure that you are not confusing "Parker Jotter" with "Parker Classic"
I don't think so. It is a "Parker Jotter Standard CT Ball Pen".
>You can find Japanese offerings on Amazon India and if needed, get it directly from Amazon Japan (i do both). You can also contact the resellers (who import from Japan and sell on Amazon India) directly for a better deal
Won't this be too costly due to import taxes?
>These guys are very good and are optimizing their product based on their available skills. Making a nib requires metallurgy, high-precision CNC etc. which as small specialized Artisans they cannot afford to setup.
I think Ratnam makes the complete product. I must say that I am not much into Artisanal pens though. Similarly I am not much into funky anime type colored pens from Japan. :-)
>Finally, i should note that a lot of branded Pens are manufactured in India; eg. Parker Pens are manufactured by Luxor India and exported.
I don't like Luxor very much. I think there are quality control issues with the Parker pens as there is a lot of rattling in their jotter pens. I researched and found that it is not universal and was pretty pissed off as the Jotters are not cheap. Another reseller is Linc who are resellers for Uniball and they don't care about what they are selling. Similarly Pentel has a measly collection even though they have a manufacturing plant in Gujarat.
In my school days I used to use a Hero Fountain pen (Currently Shanghai Hero group) which was pretty good and my daily driver. My mother still had her beautiful Pilot pen from the 70s which I started to use later. I also sometimes used to use my classmates Butterfly pens too. I bought a Hero fountain pen in 2008 and it was horrible. Not sure what happened to it.
My last straw with Protonmail: I created an email account in Protonmail. Used it to send and receive emails as usual. Then one day suddenly their "algorithms" suspended my account because the "algorithms" found that my account was being used for abuse. That was the end of Protonmail for me. Back to GMail. I know people lose their GMail accounts too. But in the last 17 years, I had 0 issues with GMail and 1 issue with ProtonMail and that 1 issue disrupted my life for a while.
I now find me asking: What is a good reliable email provider out there? I know I can host my own email in my own server under my own domain name but on HN we have seen articles about people losing their domain names too. Is there truly no good way to have permanent email address?
I have used tutanota, which is a competitor of protonmail. Not one problem.
I don't use Google mail or Yahoo mail or any of those because they scan your emails all the time and sell the info in a heartbeat. What would you think if the Post office let people scan your physical mail before you received it? Why should Google or Hotmail? Nasty.
I have reviewed and read on this topic for a long time.
It is extremely unrealistic to operate your own self-hosted emails. There are all kinds of problems with this direction.
One is that it is very difficult to even find an app to do this. Then you have to set it up, which is very difficult.
You have to always be updating your self-hosting, as it is a very much a security nightmare.
Then you have to worry about blacklisting. Companies like Google or Yahoo might blacklist your self-hosted mail server for various reasons, like you are not up do date or listed with trusted email provider associations, and a whole bunch of other things - so basically, you cannot send or receive emails from the most popular email systems, so good luck with that. And then you have to somehow try to get unblocked from them, and welcome to that nightmare, right? It could take weeks and you won't be getting emails.
Nobody should self-host unless they are crazy expert at it, and who even has the time to do that?'
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Here is what some people write about self-hosting:
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The key to reliable delivery from your server is to go through a relay like Mailgun. You can accept email directly, that's not blocked, but sending out needs to go through a relay. So your stack will look something like dovecot, postifx, and spamassassin, maybe raindrop for the UI." So right - need dovecot, postifx, spamassasin and raindrop. What a nosebleed to learn all that.
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Sender reputation and RBLs.
Summary: Large providers spend a lot of effort fighting spam, and that includes tracking where email comes from and blacklisting untrusted sources. They use a combination of publicly available blacklists (the RBLs) and also their own secret algorithmic sauce and assign you (where "you" == your MTA's IP address and also your domain) a reputation score. If your score is too low, your email gets rejected and your recipients will never see it. There is often a complex process to try to get your email un-blacklisted—it means arguing with individual RBL maintainers, or begging Microsoft to please let your email through.
Sender reputation is also affected by whether or not you're implementing a whole suite of other technologies in addition to SMTP—most importantly SPF and DKIM, and probably DMARC at this point as well.
tl;dr - if you're writing your own smtp implementation, you almost certainly won't be able to email anyone at a major email provider.
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The base protocol is simple, but the flexibility of configuration expected by real-world users is quite challenging and the scar tissue of dealing with broken or semi-broken clients and servers (e.g Microsoft Outlook) builds up over time. Virtual domains, rewriting rules, forwarding rules, see Postfix's wide variety of configuration options, lookup tables (and table backends) for just a small taste of the complexity.
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A good starting point is being able to receive mail. Running an SMTP server that listens to the internet but only relays mail for your specific domain is fairly easy, and should work out of the box. That means, if you own example.com, and set up the correct MX record, and listen on port 25, people can send you emails immediately. Actually, even without an MX record, if you just have a standard A record, that is enough. In a pinch, I've done it. Perhaps it has gotten harder in the last few years.
Tools like Docker and Ansible are great for setting things up quickly and reliably, but if you really want to understand, there are plenty of tutorials on setting up an MTA on Linux, or FreeBSD.
And, if you want a simple "dropbox", there are modules for php and nodejs that will run a simple SMTP server that you can hook into. It can be useful for embedded devices. A long time ago I worked on an interactive installation where anyone was able to interact with by simple sending an email. The server portion was about 10 lines, after including the server module:
It was deep behind a firewall too, but I just used ssh with the -R option to a VPS on a public IP address pointed to by our domain name.
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nstall postfix and configure main.cf and master.cf to use mandatory tls required. Set tlsa record and dane. Spf, dkim and test the server. And use firewall that bloks shitty country asn's.
Also configure dovecot and set dnssec to domain. There is a online mail testers. It will work like a charm.
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So my take is: what a horrible nosebleed all of this is. Unless you are already an expert in it. But if not, who has the time to monkey around with this stuff? I have a degree in Computer Science, but I have better things to do with my life. Especially since there are so many other better options.
If I try to search something within the page with Ctrl + F that also causes the whole page to re-render and display "loading ..." and "rendering ..." progress bar.
I wish I could limit the use of Internet to 1 hour per day. Like the olden days in the early days of internet.
Internet was given in our university for only 1 hour per day. It was possible to live in this manner even when I used to do programming. All programming documentation was available as PDFs or downloadable copies. I remember the MSDN documentation for C++ could be kept on the local machine. For Python I used to keep a PDF copy of the tutorial and reference i think.
These days I don't know anymore if that style of working will still work. Software has become so complex and error messages have become so many and so complex that I think we need access to internet all the time while programming. To see resolution to strange errors in Stack Overflow or on GitHub issues.
I wish all software developers did not assume that I am connected to the Internet all the time. It will be good if we can have a world where local-first internet-optional style of programming is still there.
I often do work without direct internet access and it's painful at times. PDF documentation is wonderful, but when that's not available I sometimes save entire websites. Other useful things: dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, world maps, reference books. It was surprisingly difficult to find a free dictionary file.
Overall it's not very different, just inconvenient at times, and the lack of distractions is nice. I echo your wish for local-first programming.
At the beginning of lockdown last year I thought it would be a fun projects to build a doomsday-type local internet. Just a raspberry pi with it's own AP hosting various offline version of reference websites.
I thought it would be pretty low effort: maybe a few scripts to crawl some websites and then a few scripts to spit out html. I never got passed acquiring all the references. Most of the available stuff is from over 10 years ago. Wikipedia's convenient snapshot are from 2008, the dictionary files I found seemed to be based on Merriam Webster from 2009 and I couldn't find a good reference for scientific unit conversions just to name a few.
In the end I shelved it since it was going to be much more than quick project. But I must say that i'm impressed with Gutenberg project on how they provide an option to download all their books.
I came here to say the same thing. A lot of the discussion with modern languages focus around syntax. Why not use a Lisp which has very minimal syntax and focus on solving problems instead?
Do you have an opinion about Common Lisp? I know that Scheme is more minimal and cleaner but since you recommend Scheme I want to know what your opinion about Common Lisp is.
Not the OP, Common Lisp relates to the genesis of IDEs alongside Smalltalk, as such it has a very good developer experience, alongside native compilation, which can only be fully appreciated when using the surviving commercial offerings.
Yes, I answered the question from a very different angle (Pascal or Lua) but my motivation was also avoiding the learner from drowning in syntactic details. Scheme would be even better than that.
I hated Python 2 because it did the Wrong Thing with integer division (it didn't cast to floats), so my attempts at simple scripts just didn't work.
I reencountered Python at a data science course that was somehow mandatory for my masters in ODE numerics. It has a HUGE availability of standard and third-party packages, so you can be INSANELY productive. I'd write in Brainfuck if it was the only way to have like Pytorch and giotto-tda and networkx and fastapi in the same room.
What is the full story behind this? How did it happen? Was it a domain hijack? Did someone forget to pay the bill? Do I need to worry about this for my domains?
> How about file-like objects in python? Many file-like interfaces are necessarily stateful.
Still the state and the functions that operate on them can be separated out. Right? No reason why the state and the functions need to be tied together inside a class.
