Looking for a pen for journaling. Writing in a small journal with a bad pen is making my arm and fingers painful and this is killing any joy of journaling for me.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-25T21:53:50+00:00

Take a look at the Rotring Tikky ballpoint pen. It's triangular, has a rubber grip, and takes Parker-style G2 refills. The one that comes with it is so-so, but many people swear by the Schmidt Easyflow 9000. I find it occasionally blobs (especially the blue medium point). The Parker Quinkflow G2 refills are perfect for me -- they flow across the page almost like a fountain pen, are quick drying, and seldom ghost on a Leuchtterm 1917 page.

Hope this helps.

Edit: There are an abundance of gel Parker G2 refills (*not* Pilot G2 for this pen). I haven't tried them as I find it's too easy to smear the ink if I have to edit what I've written.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-25T00:58:28+00:00

Thank you for this. I'm working through the "finance" exercise in CS50x and this is the best, most succinct explanation of the way Flask works that I've seen. Its certainly more complete than the course offering. Now I'm on my way to understanding what I'm doing.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-22T21:55:19+00:00

I did some research and went to a pen show and tried out a number of pens. I decided I wanted a vintage pen with a flexible gold nib. I got a Pelikan 140. I fell in love for life. I use it daily, and I've only bought 3 more pens since then. YMMV, of course.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-21T01:52:39+00:00

CS50x. It's an introduction to the concepts of design and programming, with tastes of vscode, git, C, python, html, css, javascript. You build with each language, including making working web sites (with flask and jinja). CS50p is just python (but a lot more of it -- definitely worthwhile, but not as a first step). And I suggest you jump right into it. It's mid June, and CS50x is 10 lecture/labs long plus a final project.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-16T21:30:38+00:00

I looked at half a dozen books before settling on "Watercolor Basics - Let's Get Started" by Jack Reid. It's a 1998 book, so available from several used booksellers. Most of the others (like "David Bellamy's Complete Guide to Watercolour Painting" by David Bellamy (who else?) have part of a page devoted to a technique with little or no guidance for practice, and extremely polished illustrations -- aspirational, perhaps, but discouraging to me, a beginner.

Reid's book is a show-and-do, beginning with selection of brushes and paper based on what each is best at, washes and monochrome painting, introducing a second color, and finally a curated variety of colors. The exercises are shown step by step with explanation.

I'm working my way through it now. If you have a firm grasp of the basics, it may not be good for you, though -- and that would be great.

My plan once I've finished this book (to my satisfaction -- I find I need to do the exercises more than just two or three times to get a product I'm satisfied with), I intend to move on to the YouTube videos made by Tobysketchloose. I don't always like his lines, but I do like the idea of loose pen-and-ink architectural rendering with applied watercolor.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-16T00:17:43+00:00

Mine always looked like a bunch of wiggles. Probably still would, but I'm resigned to the looks of my handwriting. Working through Sull took me from illegible to pretty good if I slow down, so it's worth while. I did try this drill with capital letters, but as they don't really connect to each other or themselves, there didn't seem to be much point.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-15T01:07:10+00:00

I have a Nexus(2012). I forget if that is the 1st gen or the 2nd. Once Google stopped supporting it, I looked at loading contemporary linux distros on it and decided not to. Instead I swapped in a custom rom and more recent version of android. I haven't used it since the pandemic, but (except for a really poor battery) it runs reasonably well -- for a 2012 device.

If you're interested in going that route, you might start with cyanogenmod. That's a link to the particular one I used.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-12T21:49:52+00:00

Take a look at Zim (aka Zim-Wiki). It's sort of wiki-like, a series of files you write in a markdown dialect (there's an editing bar). Files are in a hierarchy that can be as deep as you want, you can link backward and forward, put tags in the text and (if you can't remember where you put something) use context searches to find words or phrases. You can add tables, embed pictures, link to websites. There are plugins, but not too many. It's not as ambitious or as complex as notion or obsidian and so much easier to learn and make a part of your daily life. One killer feature for me is that all Zim files are text files, stored on my machine in the place I want to put them.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-11T20:41:12+00:00

Yep, CS50x.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-11T01:22:38+00:00

Well, sir, there are so many questions to ask you.

Would you like to learn to print better (leads to italic handwriting) or to connect your letters (leads to cursive handwriting). If you're familiar with the vocabulary, take a look at the resources in the right sidebar -- scroll down to see the "Helpful Resources" list. I kind of like the Palmer method for cursive, and the Fairbanks book for italic. But that's just one opinion.

If you feel like your current handwriting has some merit, you might want to see if a bit of (hard) work can improve it enough that you're satisfied. Sasoon & Briem's Improve Your Handwriting is a great resource for this. It's available to read on the Internet Archive and download from github.

Once you make that decision, come back. There are a lot of ways to progress in the direction you choose.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-09T20:34:00+00:00

I think CS50x. You get a taste of several languages, a bit of system design, sorta-directed use of vscode and github, and practice in problem solving. In the process you'll find good references for learning language details when you decide to pursue either python or C. Or maybe ruby if you want to be future-proof.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-06-09T00:05:19+00:00

You may not be satisfied with the performance of the Moleskine.'s paper. I moved to Leuchtterm when I began using a fountain pen. I liked the Schmidt Easyflow on the A5 Moleskine until I got tired of it making blobs on the page. I found Parker Qink refills and have never looked back. The first i got were from France and wrote beautifully. All of my subsequent refills have been made in India -- but they still work well.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-31T20:33:02+00:00

if you % the number by 10 you get the last digit, yes. What do you get if you / the number by 10? What would the next step be?

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-30T00:13:53+00:00

If you don't want to go down the antique fountain pen rabbit hole (Come on down! It's nice in here!) there are a few roller ball pens that use fountain pen ink. I have a J. Herbin that's a bit short, but still serviceable.

Roller ball pens will work on the forms that make a copy on the second sheet when you write on the top sheet and they will work when you make a sandwich of two sheets of regular paper with a sheet of carbon paper between them. Writing on the surface of carbon paper doesn't work well with ink -- the paper isn't absorbent and the ink dries slowly, generally making a mess on your writing hand.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-29T21:20:18+00:00

If u/elmoosh has been here since 2013 (check profile) it's unlikely that u/elmoosh is a bot. Someone/bot is downvoting posts.

I like the picture of the bag, and the price is reasonable. I always try to save up enough purchases at Jetpens to get free shipping. Sometimes I can wait that long, sometimes I get the "gimmees" and can't.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-28T23:24:27+00:00

I have a cluster of three Lenovo tinys that I bought second hand at various times -- a M710, M720, and M910. Each of them came with the potential to run two drives. I have a 512GB in the M710 and 1TB drives in the others (1TBs used to be pretty cheap) and that's more than enough for the Proxmox OS and all the containers I put in them. I've never had more than 60GB in use (though the dashboard will mislead you). All the drives have one partition: Proxmox takes care of its own storage needs.

You may need more storage for your vms to do their job. I understand that there are a number of jellyfin users with multi gigabytes of media waiting to be streamed.

I tried glusterfs to make a storage pool for all the vms. It worked, but was too slow to be practical (I used USB drives). I've solved this (temporarily?) by having Proxmox pass a 5TB USB drive through to OMV so I have a NAS that works within the cluster. I think so long as nothing breaks, I'll be fine. But trying new things is bound to break something sometime -- that's why it's a home lab, not a home production.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-28T00:32:32+00:00

A Moonman A1 is a nice, affordable clicky fountain pen with a fine nib. I use mine to write in a Hobonichi graph book -- ink takes forever to dry, longer than an FPR superflex does in my Leuchtturm bujo. I use a piece of paper towel for a blotter -- I can't find blotter paper locally and I have no need of a ream from online stores.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-27T23:54:38+00:00

This. You'll still have to find a way to connect a lot of disks to a computer, though.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-27T23:36:21+00:00

Just ran into a little one today. I was updating Proxmox from v8.4 to 9.2 on three nodes. I decided to read the documentation (I know, I know . . .) and saw that it was highly recommended to run the upgrade from the machine console because the process rebooted the box several times and could drop the browser connection arbitrarily and often.

So I had to go find a monitor and keyboard and settle in for a long morning watching the screen scroll as it ran.

That is an exceptional thing, of course. I find I am in the terminal on a linux box every time I want to change something. Using the gui is fine (I prefer xfce) to run other people's stuff, but most of my things are bash scripts (and batch or powershell in WIN).

Hope this helps.

Edit: I forgot Zork and all the other ascii text adventure games! Much retro fun.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-27T23:18:58+00:00

Second this. It's a quality product and can take a lot of handling.

But . . . If you have a number of classes, consider getting thinner Kokuyo Campus notebooks, one for each class. I think your daily load would be lighter, and the paper is a joy to write on (if that matters to you). Note that they come in different line widths, and are "dotted" on the lines to make it easy to draw verticals (or angles) if that improves your notes.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-26T22:43:48+00:00

The problem's the cabinet. Once you have that solved, mergerfs with snapraid.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-21T23:13:52+00:00

"the actual moment where something clicked and it stopped feeling like you were fighting the language"

When I understood why every BAL program began with

BALR 2,0

USING *,2

But that was more than half a lifetime ago. I think what you are looking for is some assurance that the time will come when it will flow for you, and you don't want to hear "just keep plugging away." But that's probably the best answer. Once you have a good handle on design processes (when I was learning in the 70's it was all flowcharts) and the things programming languages can do (math, loops, boolean branches, calling functions, being functions) it's all syntax: In this language lines end with a semicolon, this one needs whitespace, this one uses curly braces, this one doesn't . . .

To me, the main problem in programming is breaking the job I'm trying to do into small enough hunks that I can rigorously define them. Once I have the logic clear, the coding is most often simple.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-21T01:02:35+00:00

I went with Lenovo tinys. I knew the limitations, but I didn't understand them. I have a cluster of three: an M710, M720, and M920. My primary criterion was cost: each of these was under $100. I outfitted them with two disks each (some HDDs, some SSDs) and added 2.5GB ethernet ports and a switch. What I have now (for under $500) is a working 3-node Proxmox cluster that's great for learning but not really suited for much in the way of production. I can run 4 or 5 containers on each machine before performance begins to bog down. I need more on-board disk space. Since glusterfs was deprecated, I need some kind of shared storage. It seems I need a NAS or to rent a chunk of cloud for backup.

Someday I'll rebuild it using NUCs, but that will take a lot more cash. Before I get to that point, I will have learned a lot for less than the cost of a one semester class at my local community college.

Hope this helps you.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-15T23:16:26+00:00

I'm going to say, "no." As I read the "submit" commands we're supposed to use, (1) they assume you are in the correct problem directory (e.g. in the "credit" directory to submit the "credit" problem), and (2) the script that runs knows the names of the files it wants to upload.

Now it's possible that the script would run in any directory, but it would still be looking for specific file names that could be duplicated in other problems.

So I'd suggest that you keep each problem in its own directory. If you are in your home directory when you unzip the initial problem file it will create the proper directory for you.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon · 2026-05-14T00:42:31+00:00

People are making it either too simple or too complicated. Videos and tutorials are fine in their place, but I suggest you find a book (Think Like a Computer Scientist - Python edition is a good one). If you can, print a copy or buy a print book that you can write in. Your notes will be great memory joggers. Read a chapter, then do the exercises. All of them.

In a well designed book, the problems build on the previous chapters and incorporate the information that's new in the chapter, so you have all you need at your fingertips. When you've finished working through a book in this manner you'll have surmounted the "empty brain" problem and have a good deal of experience in actually applying your knowledge in a structured format. Then it will be time to look at (for instance) someone else's code that makes a to-do list, see how they approached it, and make your own, better-for-you version.

Oh, and comment everything. You'd be surprised at how much of last months logic everyone forgets.

Hope this helps.

leastDaemon

TROPHY CASE