Category Archives: academic notes

Glow Pen! TWSBI Eco (Medium)

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Honestly, I mostly bought this pen because I wanted a glowing pen for October. I usually keep this one by my bed so I can see it glow, rather than in the case with the rest of the pens I intend to use for the month. Perhaps there is a deep psychological insight that can be gained from the fact that I choose to see a glowing fountain pen just before I fall asleep, but honestly glowing things are just cool and I like getting them for myself instead of just my kid. (I have some cool glowing stickers from an artist I like also near my bedside, and I’ve made two quilts that glow.)

TWSBI Eco Fountain pen, glowing just a little in half-shaded light.
Image Description: TWSBI Eco Fountain pen, glowing just a little in half-shaded light.

My daily journal setup is very similar to the travel stationery setup I showed in my travel bags post, so if I left it in the pen case it’d hardly ever get any light! It does mean I sometimes have to walk upstairs to get it if I decide that is the pen I need for the moment, but I can handle that in exchange for GLOW PEN.

From a functional writing perspective, there’s not much new to say about this versus my other TWSBI pens, except that I went with a medium nib this time so this could serve as a replacement for my mystery wood pen. Some kind folk made good suggestions on how I could fix the mystery wood pen when I’m ready, but I’m tired of fighting with it and decided I just wanted a pen that was easier to use. (I still intend to fix it eventually, but I’m waiting until I’m feeling more excited about the experience, so for now the pen is cleaned out and put away.)

The medium nib here is noticeably thicker than on my original pen (see image below), which is closer to the Pilot medium than the TWSBI medium. It might have been a fine nib if it had a label, but it didn’t, so I’m guessing. The bigger nib works for me: as I mentioned previously, it’s ergonomically easier for me if I write bigger and the wider nib helps encourage me to do so.

My green glow-in-the-dark TWSBI Eco sits on a small notebook open to a page where I've written samples from a bunch of different pens/inks. The relevant part is that the TWSBI Eco sample at the bottom is thicker than the mystery wood pen writing at the top of the page, but you can also see samples from a couple of pilot medium nibs (both thinner than the glow pen), a pilot CM nib (similar width to the glow pen but more line variation), and the 1.1 stub nibs from my other TWSBI pens (both thicker than the glow pen).
Image Description: My green glow-in-the-dark TWSBI Eco sits on a small notebook open to a page where I’ve written samples from a bunch of different pens/inks. The relevant part is that the TWSBI Eco sample at the bottom is thicker than the mystery wood pen writing at the top of the page, but you can also see samples from a couple of pilot medium nibs (both thinner than the glow pen), a pilot CM nib (similar width to the glow pen but more line variation), and the 1.1 stub nibs from my other TWSBI pens (both thicker than the glow pen).

I’m really happy with this pen: I love the glow. I can write long journal entries with it just like I do with the stub nibs without any weird hand twinges, and I don’t have to be careful with it the way I have to with my Pilot <CM> to make sure I don’t lose the ink flow. (Though the Pilot Metropolitan <CM> is getting more instinctual as I practice now that I’ve got more compatible ink in it, so the difference in writing with it may be moot eventually.) I’m glad to focus more on what I’m writing than how I’m writing it. I don’t think I prefer the medium nib over my existing 1.1 stub ones, but I like having the variety available when I go to pull a pen out, especially for doodling, so I’m glad to have this one in my collection.

The Glow Pen is a lovely replacement for my original pen and what it lacks in history and character, it makes up in being incredibly easy to use and did I mention it glows? I don’t think I can mention that enough.

Fountain pens make me think a lot about Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, the konmari “does it spark joy?” question and especially a follow-up study I read about the “pretty things are more usable” effect that I’m too lazy to find a link for right now but the gist of it was “sure, Japanese people find pretty things more usable, but surely Israeli users wouldn’t see this effect” but then the results of the study were that even their study participants found the pretty ATM interface more usable and I loved the way the researchers reported this faithfully with such gentle grumpiness about their results. Which is all to say that science says that my love of the glow probably makes this pen work better for me, and I’m happy to lean in to that effect!

Academic notes #1: “‘Passwords Keep Me Safe’ – Understanding What Children Think about Passwords “

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This is the first of what might be a series of posts about academic research I’ve read/watched.

Today’s talk is called “‘Passwords Keep Me Safe’ – Understanding What Children Think about Passwords” from USENIX Security 2021.

This is the first large-scale study of kids and passwords and the results don’t seem too surprising (in a good way; you really want this type of study to be a baseline for future research). Children, like adults, don’t always make the best password choices even when they can parrot back the “right” answers about good password behaviour. The perception of the value of passwords changed between age groups in a way that seems to line up with cognitive changes and life needs.

I thought the sharing stuff was interesting. The researchers commented that password sharing starts around middle school, corresponding to when kids develop the sort of relationship where secret-sharing is how you build connection. And sure, that’s not an unreasonable explanation. But I remember sharing passwords in high school and my big motivation was that the school provided no way for us to communicate or share data, so we had to share passwords if we wanted to leave each other notes, share programs we wrote for each other, etc. And honestly, that’s not too different from the reasons adults share passwords: no way to share permissions or access. Heck, even as a full fledged security professional, I have a bunch of shared accounts with my husband entirely because there’s no way for us both to get logins to certain things like our vacuum cleaner. So… sure, secrets are part of it. I definitely didn’t share passwords/locker combos with folk who I didn’t trust. But I strongly suspect that usability is as big a factor as social secret sharing for many kids, unless school systems have gotten a lot more flexible than I remember.

Also interesting to me: elementary school kids tended to use more all-numeric passwords. My pre-reading child only knows the password for keypad locks, which is numeric. Is he going to use that as a password when he gets older? Probably. Do elementary school kids mostly have phone numbers and birthdays memorized any more?

The conclusion was that there was space to teach kids more about passwords, which is probably true, but I found it interesting how much kids already knew about them at a superficial level.

I’d love to see a study on security questions and younger kids, thanks to a group of kids I know who broke into a lot of their middle-school classmates accounts to see if they could. (They were pretty successful and not particularly malicious) A lot of the common questions are pretty guessable at early ages.

I’d also *really* like to see a study on teaching kids to use password managers, since “using one password for everything” was on the list of bad behaviours. I took part in a usability study on password managers ages ago and it wasn’t so good back then, but they’ve improved a lot. I expect I’ll have to teach my kid how to use one eventually… especially if I want him to use the annoying shared robot vacuum password.

Academic notes series

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I mentioned in my previous post that I was feeling a bit weird about not really being connected to the academic world any more. I’m still sorting out how I feel about that and whether I have any long term plans, but I thought it might be nice to listen to some talks and write about them. I used to maintain a blog called Web Insecurity where I put public notes about the stuff I was reading but I got out of the habit after I graduated. So this is sort of the continuation of that, updated for “tired mom to a pre-schooler in a pandemic” levels of effort.

Ground rules:

  1. I’m not an academic any more, so I’m going super casual here: I’m going to watch a talk, probably not read the paper, and definitely not do deep due diligence on related work. (I am happy to have people point out interesting related work if you think I’d like it!)
  2. I’m going to prioritize conferences/publications with open access because I’m hoping some of you will read/watch the same things and have thoughts to share in the comments here.
  3. I’m going to do like I do with book reviews and aim for kind. Peer review defaults to constructive criticism but I’m not part of that process in this context so I can just highlight stuff I thought was interesting and largely ignore stuff I didn’t.
  4. I haven’t decided how often I’ll do this or how long I’ll keep it up yet.

It also bears reminding: My opinions and thoughts are not necessarily shared by my employer. This is a personal lifelong learning project and is not part of my day job.

Anyhow, first talk notes coming up in a separate post!