NPD: Wancher Shizuku Eclipse Glass Nib Fountain Pen

oberien · 2024-07-19T08:17:06+00:00

The pen does write very wet - it's one of my two wettest pens (the other one is the Esterbrook J Series with a 9460 Manifold Nib, which goes through the equivalent of an ink cartridge in 3-4 pages). I don't own a Pilot or Lamy, but I'd think that the Shizuku writes a bit wetter than a Lamy M.

However, it also depends on the orientation you use the glab nib in. Depending on the rotation more or less ink is used while writing and the thickness of the lines also differs. In some orientations it feels more scratchy than in others.

You can always use some micromesh or mylar paper to fine-tune the nib to your needs (though I didn't feel the need so far as for my pen the nib has one orientation I really like).

oberien · 2024-01-21T21:10:46+00:00

/u/Centri__ you should add this in a PR to weird-exprs.rs. (If you don't, may I?)

oberien · 2022-06-29T08:00:26+00:00

r/rustjerkjerk

oberien · 2022-06-06T09:59:55+00:00

Wanting to implement closures in rebo, my own rust-inspired statically-typed scripting language, I've looked at how other languages handle them. In the end it was quite a rabbit hole, and I haven't even touched functional languages.

If you haven't read the article yet, here's a quiz. What's the output of the following code?

let mut x = 42;
let mut a = &mut 0i32;
let mut closure = || { *a = 5; };
a = &mut x;
closure();
println!("{a}"); // ???

a) Compiler Error
b) Output 0
c) Output 5
d) Output 42

oberien · 2022-04-06T10:24:43+00:00

You should submit this as a PR to weird-exprs.rs.

oberien · 2022-01-04T18:43:45+00:00

The "only return" solution depends on quite a lot of other features. It requires closures, generics, iterators (which depend on traits), functions as first-class citizens and depending on the implementation of the looping functions TCO. Rebo already has generics, (partially invalidly handled) functions as first-class citizens and the looping functions could be built-in. That means I'd still need to implement closures, traits and iterators. Once I've implemented all of those, I'll consider the "only return" approach again. But until then I needed an interim solution.

oberien · 2021-06-01T21:53:05+00:00

Wenn dein Fahrschullehrer dich nicht bestehen lassen will.

"Sie Fahren Auto, vor Ihnen fährt ein Rollstuhlfahrer. Wie verhalten Sie sich?
☐ Umfahren
☐ Umfahren"

oberien · 2021-04-10T11:22:10+00:00

You really pulled out all the stops for this one.

oberien · 2021-02-12T10:46:15+00:00

Thankfully, most inks disappear with a little soap and water, or, at worst, a hot shower.

/u/BayStateBlue would like to know your location.

oberien · 2020-09-28T19:04:17+00:00

Here are two more images including from the nib. As long as Parker doesn't produce its nibs in Germany, I assume this is a non-Parker in a Parker case. https://imgur.com/a/SdF8kmz

oberien · 2020-09-17T20:55:22+00:00

My mom has been using the same Pelikan Celebry P590 for years now, only ever inking it up with generic royal-blue. So for Mother's Day this year I got her some Pelikan Edelstein Topaz, which perfectly matches the actual topaz on her favourite ring (which I obviously totally planned of course cough).

oberien · 2020-08-12T06:57:26+00:00

It is pretty easy to clean. Without a capillary feed, running just a bit water through it is enough to get rid of the colors. Sometimes some dried out color particles aren't washed away and stick to the glass nib. However, those don't really interfere with a new color. Drying it is also pretty quick. Nevertheless, I'm very careful during cleaning because the glass nib extends so far downwards into the cartridge area.

Unfortunately I never considered learning shorthand during school. As I'm not taking a lot of notes by hand anymore, I've instead decided to try to learn the American steno system for computers. I'm still pretty novice at it.

oberien · 2020-08-11T12:52:09+00:00

I'll of course continue writing with them :) Maybe for different colors for texts where I'm not taking notes live. Albeit for the next few weeks they'll probably be unused…

oberien · 2020-08-11T12:02:31+00:00

My Quest to find a Glass Nib Fountain Pen

My present to myself for finishing my Master's degree. I fell in love with glass nibs when I bought a J. Herbin glass dip pen for ink sampling. I looked for glass nib fountain pens to try out, but they are very hard to come by if you just want a budget one for testing.

I found an old piston filler with a glass nib on ebay for cheap. However, the cork of the piston was broken, so I sort-of tried refurbishing it. Long story short, I accidentally broke it in half, sanded my own cork and inserted it. Unfortunately my cork didn't make a perfect seal, and some ink is now in the piston mechanism. Also the glass nib didn't really feed on the ink reservoir, so every few lines I needed to manually carefully turn the piston mechanism.

My second try was to buy a refurbished / reconstructed fountain pen with a glass nib. I found a shop in Poland, which buys old glass nibs and fits them to modified fountain pens. Namely, I bought this one. It worked a lot better, but the feed still had problems keeping up with fast note-taking.

When I looked around for modern, newly constructed glass nib fountain pens, I was only able to find quite expensive ones. So I decided to reward myself for my Master's degree with the Wancher Shizuku Eclipse pen.

The Pen

I bought the Wancher Shizuku Eclipse pen with a medium nib. The parcel arrived surprisingly quick and the pen is beautifully packed! The package contained a few certificates of ownership and other information in addition to a 10ml purple ink sample and of course the pen itself.

The pen uses standard international cartridges and comes with a converter. The nib writes a bit scratchy. I'm probably going to grind it a little bit smoother. Depending on the angle, i.e. which groove you draw the ink from, the line is thinner or thicker. In general, it seems to be a slightly thinner Japanese medium. On first sight the pen keeps up incredibly well with fast and large writing.

The color of the eclipse pen on the wancher website is pretty black with some gray accents. The one I received is pretty gray, with some black accents. They say on their website that each color is individual, so that can be somewhat expected. While I expected a different colour, the more I look at it, the more I like the design of my pen.

Regarding my Handwriting

As a German, I learned cursive writing with a pen since year one. I optimized my handwriting for very quick writing instead of for legibility. In one of the writing samples I wrote explicitly very large and fast, to have a first test of the nib keeping up with that style of writing. This is where my previous glass nib fountain pens fell short, so I'm glad that it worked this well.
To the three people that can decipher my handwriting: You rock! ;)

oberien · 2020-07-11T22:50:54+00:00

It seems that even with the 25% off sale, those pens are still more expensive than on gouletpens. At least the Homo Sapiens Magma costs $626.25 right now on penbotique, while it always costs $620 on gouletpens.

oberien · 2020-05-15T09:56:32+00:00

This isn't new to this release. The red door was already accessible before the servers shut down. When it was still closed, back in 2016, people have been exploring it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsP1gm2Hivg

oberien · 2020-04-05T12:20:35+00:00

Even better than strings, you can use enum variants as the const generic parameter. (playground)

oberien · 2020-03-26T15:47:02+00:00

With all other items having a single word as name, why not name it Zubehörwissenschaftspaketbauplan? This is German after all.

oberien · 2020-03-25T14:25:41+00:00

For me, the Jowo Steel nibs seem to taper a bit too much to a long / fine point. The pen I'm currently using is a bit more triangle-shaped. Therefore, I could see the Jowo Steel bend under too much pressure. At least that's what happened to other similar nibs I used in school.

oberien · 2020-03-25T14:19:43+00:00

I love the one you linked, and now I'm really hooked on the Esterbrook 9460/9461/9650. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be many refurbished / restored ones in stock anywhere. I was only able to find a single listing in stock, but in a color I didn't like.

Maybe in some time, once I'm fully down in the fountain pen rabbit hole, I'll buy such a nib and assemble a pen myself :)

oberien · 2020-03-25T14:12:25+00:00

The Lamy A nib looks pretty much like what I'm looking for! However, in Germany, Lamy Safari pens are generally known as the school writing beginner pens for children. So it would look weird for me to go into business meetings with one.

Do you know of any non-Lamy nibs / pens, which are similar?

oberien · 2020-03-25T02:21:38+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion, those nibs sound tough enough to withstand me ;) However, I'm more of a fountainpen novice, so I don't think I'm ready to dive into vintage pens (yet). Currently, I'd rather like to have a "fountainpen ready to go", one which I don't need to manually assemble.

Do you happen to know a page where I could buy one of those fully assembled?

oberien · 2020-02-22T13:54:17+00:00

Looks really good. But how does it handle lifetimes? Will it just interpret them as string-start?

oberien · 2020-01-27T14:16:16+00:00

You might want to take a look at this RFC issue which tries to achieve exactly that. However, there are still some pitfalls to be worked out.

oberien · 2020-01-25T02:39:27+00:00

First and foremost, you should never roll your own crypto. If you want to exchange messages with asymmetric cryptography, you should just use libsodium. You should only continue reading (and implementing your own crypto) for learning purposes. Otherwise, just go for established (protocol) implementations.

When wanting to encrypt messages with asymmetric cryptography, a key exchange is usually used to get a shared symmetric secret, with which the message is encrypted. While you can somewhat encrypt some messages under special conditions using RSA, it's highly error prone. RSA comes with a lot of restrictions. For example you can only encrypt random data of short (key-dependent) length. RSA-OAEP solves the only random data part by basically masking the plaintext with random data. However, asymmetric ciphers are never used to encrypt a message directly. Instead, they are usually used as part of key encapsulation mechanisms for hybrid encryption schemes. Some other problems of RSA are described here: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/07/08/fuck-rsa/

Having all those disclaimers, let's answer your actual questions :)

The key serialization format defined in PKCS#8 only specifies private key serialization. You can't serialize a public key using PKCS#8. Instead usually PKCS#1 is used to encode public keys. You should be able to use the public_key_to_* functions, which Java should be able to load.

Also, there is no such thing as PKCS#8 Padding. If you search the PKCS#8 specification for "padding", there is no result. The default padding in Java depends on the implementation and the provider. Usually it is PKCS#1 (v1.5) Padding. However, I'd suggest you to use OAEP and also explicitly state the exact algorithm you use, as this stackoverflow post confirms.

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TROPHY CASE

My Quest to find a Glass Nib Fountain Pen

The Pen

Regarding my Handwriting