Category Archives: writing

Ranking my fountain pen collection

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I’ve been thinking a bunch about my fountain pen collection lately. I’m up to around 25 pens (I should probably count or something) most of which are relatively cheap ones that I got with the idea of trying a specific thing: a different nib, brand, filling mechanism, body material, size, etc. At this point I know a lot more about my preferences than I did a year ago, so as a “new school year” kind of thing I wanted to record which pens I’m reaching for most and what’s working for me right now. That way I’ll have a record for next year when I want to see if things have changed.

Current Top Pens (S tier, Pokemon style)

A set of 5 founctain pens: Pilot E95S (burgundy), Pelikan Pura (teal with geometric pattern), Pilot Metropolitan (red with geometric pattern), TWSBI Eco (glow-in-the-dark green), Platinum Preppy Wa (blue with koi fish)
  1. Pilot E95S <medium> – My most expensive pen and only gold nibbed one. It gets an emotional bonus for being a birthady gift from my husband. I like the odd pockiet pen shape and it has a consistently lovely writing experience although I am afraid to put sparkle inks in it thanks to my experience with my other pilot pens. I don’t think it’s going to inspire me to upgrade to gold nibs everywhere but I’m very happy to have one for the experience.
  2. Pelikan Pura <broad> – SPARKLE PEN! This is my go-to shimmer ink pen now and I’ve only had it a few weeks so it feels a bit weird to put it here but I love it so much. Beautiful turquoise with a Y/snowflake pattern that reminds me of quilts but most importantly I like the grip more than the one on the Twist.
  3. Pilot Metropolitan <CM> – I really like the way my writing looks with their cursive italic nib, which is smaller than my other stub pens. If I could get a few more stubs at this width I would, it’s a perfect balance of fun to write with but usable even in smaller notebook spacings. I’ve seen it marked as a 1mm vs a 1.1stub but I think it’s more like a .7 in practice? This was one of the first pens I bought (alongside a TWSBI eco) and I still love it. Turns out I’m a big fan of the shiny metal look. Often when not in use this one still sits in front of my computer to look pretty (the rest are in a pen cup nearby when not in use). I still kind of want a bunch of the other colours in the retro pop line.
  4. TWSBI Eco glow green <medium, stub> – It glows in the dark, which makes it better than my other two TWSBI pens. This is one that sits on my nightstand so I can watch it glow when not in active use. It’s really taught me that it’s worth being finicky about getting a colour I like, since it’s functionally the same as my other TWSBI pens but I just love it more. I bought this with a medium nib but am swapping in a stub from my other eco.
  5. Platinum Preppy Wa Koi pattern <fine> – My todo list pen. I like the texture of the pattern under my fingers and the fact that the cap seals so well that I don’t have to worry much about it drying out. I don’t really like fine nibs in general but this one is nice and sometimes I want to write very tiny things in the flip book I use for daily todos.

Except for the Pura (which is very new) these are basically the pens I reach for most often. The Preppy and the Pilot E95S are almost constantly inked, the others rotate in regularly as I’m trying different inks and experimenting with other pens. I usually have 3-6 journal pens and 2 todo list pens inked and if I don’t rotate I’d basically never use any other pens.

A tier pens (as in, second rank)

These pens are good and write well but basically they aren’t as pretty so they don’t get used as often. These are the ones that sometimes go in my purse or on trips with me because I like the writing experience but I won’t be as sad if I lose one.

A pile of "second tier" pens: Ooly Duo (pink/orange), Jinhao Shark (grey), TWSBI Swipe (light blue), two Kaweco sports (dark blue and yellow), Platiunum Preppy Wa (red with gourds), Hongdian (red with maple leaves)
    • All the “less pretty” versions of what I have in my favourite pen list. So that’s my other TWSBIs (an ECO-T and a Swipe), my Pilot Kakuno and Varsity, my other Platinum Preppy. These all write well and consistently and get used sometimes but I’m gonna reach for the prettier one most times. I will give a shout out to the TWSBI Swipe which has a smaller converter instead of a piston so it gets used more often than the ECO when I’m using up ink samples.
    • Ooly Duo <fine?> – These are todo list pens that I impulse bought at the book store. They are refillable on the fountain pen side, not sure about the highlighter side. Great for todo lists, I like the colour, and the one I opened months ago is still going strong with no sign of drying out. Honestly, I’d recommend these to people looking for a fun starter fountain pen for planner use.
    • Jinhao Shark Pen <fine> – Nice todo list pen or purse pen. The shark look makes it especially good as kid distraction purse pen.
    • Kaweco sport (I have 2 bodies and and 3 nibs in M, B and stub) – I like these and I particularly like how easy it is to clean them and swap nibs, and the very small converters use about a month’s worth of ink at my current usage, so that’s nice. They get pulled out for travel and rotated in as purse pens because of their size.
    • Hongdian maple leaf pen <architect> – This is a lovely pen but it mostly loses out to the Pilot Metropolitan because I like it a bit better and they have a similar niche. I should probably get this pen into rotation more; it’s barely been used since I bought it.

    B Tier pens

    These pens are ones I like but have things that irritate me. They get rotated in for specific purposes but tend to get rotated out early because I’m tired of using them.

    Four "B tier" pens that I use but find annoying for various reasons: Pelikan Twist (red), Endless Phantom (black), Monteverde Ritma (blue), Nahvalur Original Plus (sparkle black)
    • Pelikan Twist <medium> – Fantastic sparkle ink pen, but the twisted triangular grip isn’t a good ergonomic fit for me so I actually use this with a gel wrap over the grip if I’m going to write for a while. I did finally have a sparkle get stuck in it but it recovered without needing a full nib cleaning. Still significantly better than my experience with the same inks in my TWSBI or Kaweco pens.
    • Endless Phantom retractable <fude, medium> – Dries out too fast for my regular use. I need a pen that can stay wet for 4 days because I rotate between journal colours, it only consistently stays wet for 2. I may yet find a use for this one because I like the fude nib I got with it, and I don’t have another fude I like except on my dip pen. May just come out on months when I have 2 colours going, or I may accept that it should move down into the forgotten tier.
    • Monteverde Ritma <flex> – This pen is so beautiful and I love the feel of the magnetic cap, but it is SO HEAVY. But it’s really pretty and while I know it’s not a “true” flex nib I really like the way this one can lay down extra ink so you can have fun with sheen and I’ve had some luck with shimmer too. I should probably rotate this one in a bit more often now that I’ve got a better idea of what inks suit it.
    • Nahvalur Original Plus <stub> – Good for travel, but this vacuum filler has such a large ink tank that I get tired of the ink long before I finish it even on a lazy non-full fill. Also, I don’t know if it’s a vacuum filler thing but it seems to dry up a bit mid-writing no matter how open I have things so I have to shake a bubble out of the way every once in a while.

    Everything Else

    And then there’s… everything else. Cheap pens that broke, things with fine/extra fine nibs that I hated (which is basically F/EF nib except the Preppy and the Ooly pens listed above). Most of these I should just give away, although there’s a couple in there that I haven’t really given a fair shake to because they didn’t wow me after one month (e.g. I should probably give the Conklin Durograph I got on super sale another go, I think it was a bad ink combo that landed it here).

    Things I’ve learned about my fountain pen preferences

    Preferred filling system: Converter. I usually have a few pens going for journal use and use less than 1ml of ink in each pen, so small converters are pretty great for me in terms of switching most of a palette of inks monthly. I don’t have any filling system I hate, though the jury is still out on the vacuum filler.

    Preferred nib: I like having a variety in my journal pens so I can sometimes write fast with an easy medium nib and sometimes take my time with a stub. Turns out I like broad and should probably try a double broad. I hate almost every extra fine nib or fine nib I’ve tried, and I now have enough todo list pens, so I should probably never buy another F or EF unless it’s something really special.

    Preferred size: I really love pocket pens and smaller pens, probably because I have small hands. I haven’t actually had ergonomic issues writing with bigger ones other than maybe my stupidly heavy Ritma but I definitely find myself wanting to go for smaller and lighter.

    Preferred materials: I really love shiny coloured metal. Anodized aluminum, I guess? I thought for sure I’d be more into the sparkly resins since that’s more like my taste in jewellery, and don’t get me wrong, they’re pretty, but I really love the bold colourful metallic pens. Might be partially because resins and whatnot are a bit heavier? Knowing this has helped me avoid buying those fancy benu pens.

    Preferred inks: I like a variety, and prefer saturated colours with less black and blue. I need less shimmer and more shading inks in my collection at the moment, I think, and I’d like to finish a few more samples so I have space for new ones in the box I use to organize them (I could get a second box but I probably shouldn’t). I really like smaller size bottles and samples so I can have more variety, so a lot of my preferred inks are just because they come in 30ml or smaller sizes.

    Preferred Notebooks: A5 size, smaller softcovers. Ideal size is probably under 100 pages. I’m waffling on dot grid vs blank but probably one of those. I didn’t love the more coated iroful paper for journal writing (though it was delightful for playing with inks) but everything else I’ve tried has been good. I’m currently enjoying the Clairefontaine Triomphe notebook I’ve got going. I do wish more notebooks came pre-numbered because I don’t love writing numbers myself but it’s a minor issue. I’ve given up on indexing since it turned out to be minimally useful and not fun for me, but I use the page numbers to estimate how long I have left in a given book and see if I’m writing a lot more or less than usual. I was previously more picky about the quality of the notebook cover itself because it impacted how easy it was to write in weird places (I don’t often use a table) but now that I have a slipcover and writing boards that’s been not such a big deal.

    Special editions: I’ve been trying to avoid getting really into the “collecting” part of fountain pens as a hobby, but looking at my top pens, it’s clear that “pretty” factors a lot into what I love the most, especially in cases where I have similar pens. So it’s good to know that it’s worth waiting for my favourite colour to come into stock or occasionally to splurge on a special edition if that’s the one calling my name. Which isn’t a surprise since one of my favourite scientific results is the “pretty things are more usable even across cultures” one but it’s nice to put it in action for myself.

    We’ll see how I feel about all these preferences in a year or two, but that’s where I’m at right now!

    Getting epubs to show emojis on kobo clara bw

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    For some reason, eink screens work significantly better for me when I have even the mildest of headaches, so my ereader has been an important accessibility device for me since it now means I can read something while I’m waiting for my painkillers to kick in. I currently use a Kobo Clara BW and aside from some weird hiccups that were likely related to my dying hard drive rather than the device, it’s been pretty good. But occasionally, both the fanfic I download from AO3 and the more modern novels I read on the device have emoji characters, and those weren’t displaying. In a lot of cases, they don’t show any indication that they were there.

    I was reminded of this today while chatting with some fanfic people and decided it was time to try to fix it.

    Step 1: install an emoji font on the device.

    Kobo has a nice tutorial for this and it’s pretty straightforwards BUT it turns out that the default emoji font on my laptop (running fedora) is the Google Noto Color Emoji font which doesn’t work on my device. Won’t even show up as a font after I put it on the device.

    Step 2: Find the right emoji font that actually works.

    Thankfully, there exists a b&w version of this font and it’s free to download. I grabbed the “regular” one out of the zip file and installed it. Bam! Font exists on device.

    Step 3: Set the font in the document

    In theory, my Kobo has an option to add in “supplemental fonts” so it’ll try those if the main font doesn’t have the necessary characters. But that didn’t work at all, possibly because the font thinks it has the character and is displaying a blank in the epub file I tested? I really don’t know why except that it didn’t work.

    Setting the emoji font as the main font for the document does work, though, and the emoji displays just fine. It’s… not a great font, though. Lots of giant spaces between words.

    Step 4: ???

    The internet has a bunch of random speculation like “epubs only support 1 font” (which seems unlikely but not actually impossible) so it might be best to merge the emoji into a font I actually like for reading.

    It’s also possible that I could set up some automatic styling of my epubs in calibre that would make the fonts work better. Some people seemed to have ideas about that but a lot of it included styling each emoji and while I’m sure I can write a perl script for it I’m not convinced that’s the best choice. And, again, it requires me to know that there’s emoji in an epub before I transfer it to my device, which I don’t always know when I buy a book or grab a fanfic. I guess I could build a whole workflow to look for them, but it seems unlikely that’s what everyone else is doing? Surely I am not the only person who reads reasonably modern epubs with chat sections in them?

    For now, I have the font on my device and can flip over to it to see if I can see an emoji if I think one is missing, then flip back when reading with weird spacing irritates me. Not the worst, since often I can tell when the narrative has a chat/texting section that might include emoji. But that doesn’t really help when it’s not obvious from context.

    So… Not sure what my next step it, but that’s where I’m at and I’m going to give up and make some lunch. If anyone has found a good fix for this, I’d love to know!

    Kobo Clara BW showing the fanfic Unknown Number by ZeldaElmo. At the bottom of the authors note there is an emoji character displaying correctly. The rest of the text on the preface page looks weirdly spaced.
    Kobo Clara BW showing the fanfic Unknown Number by ZeldaElmo. At the bottom of the authors note there is an emoji character displaying correctly. The rest of the text on the preface page looks weirdly spaced.

    Fiber Goals 2025 mid-year check-in

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    1

    This year’s goals were as follows:

    1. Revisit Old Goals
    2. Try Something New
    3. Something Stash Something
    4. Game Design

    We’re a bit more than halfway through the year so let’s see where we’re at!

    Revisit Old Goals

    Started strong in January by finishing up a rainbow shawl that had been on the needles for quite some time:

    A rainbow bias knit shawl/wrap of my own design.
    A rainbow bias knit shawl/wrap of my own design.

    I’d intended to release the pattern since I had an old goal about writing patterns but… honestly, I haven’t felt like it, and I focused my time on other stuff that was bringing me joy. But I have a bunch of pattern notes and a bit more time right now so I may publish what I have without bothering to polish it.

    February I worked on an old Beanie Bag kit from Jimmy Beans Wool that spanned 3 months. It was… honestly kind of boring and the pattern had a bunch of mistakes/confusing bits, but I finished one month’s worth and will likely do the other two at some point.

    The first part of the Textures of Nevada Shawl that was part of a Jimmy Beans Wool kit subscription some years back.
    The first part of the Textures of Nevada Shawl that was part of a Jimmy Beans Wool kit subscription some years back.

    March-April-May I finally got around to knitting Wingspan, which was on my “something famous” goal plan but I never made it. It was a pleasant knit once I got into the swing of things, but by the time I finished it was too warm to wear it here so I haven’t really gotten pictures! Here’s one from before it was blocked, though:

    Wingspan shawl knit in a gradient yarn that goes from burgundy to red to orange. It has no been blocked so it looks a bit lumpy and smaller than the final product looks.
    Wingspan shawl knit in a gradient yarn that goes from burgundy to red to orange. It has no been blocked so it looks a bit lumpy and smaller than the final product looks.

    June I took a break from old goals (and focused on writing).

    July I pulled out some gradient balls and made socks for my mom’s birthday (a bit early because the timing worked out), plus I did tour de fleece stuff.

    Blue/green/yellow-green gradient socks using the Affixed pattern from Shoreland Socks by Hunter Hammersen.
    Blue/green/yellow-green gradient socks using the Affixed pattern from Shoreland Socks by Hunter Hammersen.

    Overall, A+ on revisiting old goals. I have a couple more “use kits from stash” ideas but I may otherwise declare this particular goal complete and focus on some other stuff.

    Try Something New

    January started strong with me working on a hexagon blanket, which I’m still working on between other projects.

    February I tried assigned pooling and made the “Shard” shawl by Romi Hill. It was fun and I’ll likely do other assigned pooling patterns!

    Me modeling my Shard shawl (pattern by Romi Hill) knit in Chemknits yarn from valentines day 2024. It's a red shawl with purple "shards" from assigned pooling.
    Me modelling my Shard shawl (pattern by Romi Hill) knit in Chemknits yarn from valentines day 2024. It’s a red shawl with purple “shards” from assigned pooling.

    March-April-May I worked on Wingspan for the old goals and didn’t bother doing new stuff.

    June again was a break from all knitting goals. (I was writing instead.)

    July was mostly finishing up work/travel and I didn’t feel like learning something new.

    There’s probably some more to be done here but… honestly, I’m not sure this goal is playing well with my burnout? I’ve got some tentative plans for learning some bookbinding in August if my kid is amenable so that might be up next. But I think I may just focus on finishing up the hex blanket rather than pushing myself to come up with new things to do if I’m not feeling it. So this goal may be as complete as it’s getting unless something fun occurs to me.

    Stash Something Stash / Write more

    I’d planned to run some kind of stash-focused event about appreciating what you have (as opposed to feeling guilty about what you have, a common vibe in a lot of “use your stash” events) and I got as far as coming up with a nice list of prompts and ideas. But then I realized that… I didn’t actually want to run it. I was burned out on social media and wanted to spend less time on my phone. So I’ve declared this goal as complete as it’s going to be. The prompts will keep if I decide I want to run things later.

    That said, I replaced this goal that no longer fit with a goal of “Write more” instead since it was what was bringing me joy and it deserved some focus and time.

    I’ve done a bit more writing for this blog but the biggest part of my writing this year has been fanfic since I’m having fun. I joined a discord to hang out with other writers in my current fandom of choice and I took part in a prompt challenge (which is why I didn’t knit as much in June-July so I could write). I’m now over the 40k “that’s a novel’s worth” of words since January and I’m pretty delighted with myself.

    There’s something deeply satisfying in the current economic environment about making something that is basically non-monetizable put on a website run by a nonprofit (that I donated to!) and my output only serves to make strangers/new friends happy. And I definitely made a bunch of people happy! (Including my kid, who helped with some ideas in one of my stories.) Also I’m amused that my existing community of open source people and my new community of fan writers are somewhat similar and overlapping nerds. Not a surprise that people who share their creative outputs for free have some similarities but it’s still a delight.

    I expect I’ll keep writing through the end of the year (and beyond but this post is about 2025 goals). I’ll probably join another challenge or two but even if I don’t do more than finish my current story in progress, I feel like this replacement goal has been met *and* it’s brought me a lot more joy than the original goal. And these goals have always been about finding time for things that bring me joy!

    Game Design

    It took waaaaay too long to get approval from work saying that my silly games weren’t going to conflict with my job at which point I was so frustrated with my boss for other reasons that I was intentionally trying to get put in the layoff pool (and I succeeded). But the end result is that I haven’t actually *done* any games stuff beyond a bit of helping my kid learn Scratch programming for his robot. I’m not replacing this goal because I still want to make games, but I haven’t figured out an actual plan yet so that’s on my list for part 2 of the year. So far I’ve got my personal laptop set up a bit better for game work (attached it to the kvm with my big screen and mouse) and I think I might aim to play around with some existing frameworks and make silly things with my kid as a goal for August.

    More Thoughts

    It turns out this year it hasn’t been *fiber* that was really keeping me happy. I mean, I still knit/spin/whatever but it’s writing and video games that have helped me cope with the burnout and grief (particularly from losing a friend earlier this year, but there’s grief tied up in climate and politics right now too). The fact that fiber wasn’t the perfect solution for this type of burnout makes sense because I needed something that engaged more of my brain and took me away from worrying about geopolitics/work/my deceased friend. I knit to focus my brain but when my brain is spiralling that’s not the right thing to do. I do knit-and-write-in-my-head a lot so it’s compatible with what works to distract me, at least, but fiber hasn’t been as much of a focus for a few months and I’m not sure if that’s going to change. I am wondering if I should stop calling these “fiber goals” next year so I can encompass some other hobbies, though.

    With work as a stressor out of the way for now but more “international move” and “find a new job” stress coming, I’m intending to just roll with what works for these goals in the second half of the year. I *am* really enjoying using my fiber and stationary stashes now that I’m trying not to spend so much money — past me bought some lovely stuff and now I have time to use it. I think doing some game stuff is going to be fun when I sit down and start playing. And I’m really enjoying writing fanfic in a way that I haven’t in a long time, so I’m happy to keep leaning into that too. Last time I was involved in a fandom I presented as an artist, and writing is a different experience, and I’m loving it so much.

    How I reduced my phone screen time

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    I had this idea to do some socks tracking how much time I was spending staring at my phone. A lot of knitters track things like temperatures, but that’s never really interested me, so I set about thinking about data that I’d like to track and could do with relatively minimal effort. (Some people may be good at tracking; I am not naturally inclined to it.) My phone provides me a screen time breakdown, so I thought that would be a good candidate and started taking a look at it to see what colours I’d want to use and what increments of time should represent one row and so on.

    But what I discovered, when I started looking, was that I regularly had my phone screen on for more than 5 hours a day. That seemed like… a lot. I felt a lot the way I’d felt about TV in my 20s: it wasn’t the worst thing ever, but I could use the time for things I’d enjoy more. (Also for getting a PhD, but that’s probably not completely related to my dislike of TV.)

    So instead of setting up my knitting project (which I still haven’t done but probably will eventually), I set about figuring out how to reduce how much time I spent looking at my phone.

    Looking at my data

    Once I started looking at my data, I realized there *were* some extenuating circumstances: I’d often spend an hour with my phone open to a knitting pattern but it’s not like I was actually looking at it the whole time. Sometimes I’d accidentally leave my tea timer on screen for an hour while my tea oversteeped (a tragedy for me as it gets too tannin-y). Sometimes the screen time was due to having GPS navigation on, which, again, didn’t feel like it should count. But some days I really was just looking at my phone that often.

    One of the things that helped the most was having a big widget on the screen of my phone telling me how much time I’d already spent using the device (I put it beside my weather widget where I’d tend to look). I paired this with stickers in my journal every time I went below my target amount of time, so then I found myself correcting if I felt like I’d used too much time for the day already.

    Another thing that helped was just setting the screen auto-shutoff to be more aggressive (30s vs a minute, making it so apps couldn’t keep the screen on) so I wasn’t having it on by accident. That helped me figure out where I was really spending my time, and did reduce my numbers just by itself (and improved my battery usage considerably!)

    Removing low-value time sinks

    My phone actually up and died partway through this project, in a way that I couldn’t carry over all my settings and apps. And that turned out to be convenient for this because I had to make conscious decisions about what to install. But also inconvenient because I lost all my screen time data from before this project so it’s very hard to compare!

    Things that went:

    • Most mobile games. A lot of these have kind of dark-pattern things to keep you logging in each day but once I broke the streaks because I had no phone for a week I decided I could just… not do that. I kept a few but I’m finding I play them less because they just don’t feel as rewarding as my Switch games now.
    • Removed most social media, tuned what was left to have less stuff (mostly turning off boosts for most people in Mastodon, being more aggressive about my filters, unfollowing a few people who weren’t bringing me joy but *were* bringing a lot of posts.)
    • Threw out most of my RSS feeds. I used to follow a lot more news and craft stuff, but the news was making me miserable and the craft stuff was encouraging me to buy supplies I didn’t need. I kept enough so I could be an informed voter for my riding and read my friends blogs, then culled down the rest.
    • Most notifications got turned off. Wow, there were a lot of notifications.
    • Swapped my phone to “flip for silent” and put a pretty case on it so I was more likely to flip it. This doesn’t seem like it should have made a big difference because I already had it in do not disturb frequently, but just taking it out of my pocket and putting it down made just that little bit more friction when I went to “just quick check something” so it wound up helping.

    Finding other things to do

    The big things I wanted to more of were: play actually good games (instead of crappy mobile dark pattern nonsense) and read books/fanfic. So I started actually carrying around my ereader in my pocket and learned how to stuff it with fanfic so I didn’t have to read a whole darned novel when I just wanted to do something for a few minutes while I was waiting for my tea or whatever, and I fell in love with playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on my Nintendo Switch so I started carrying that around in my knitting back (too big for my pockets, alas. Though I did also pull out my 3DS which is more pocketable.)

    An old e-reader with a white cover that has flowers on it, and an Animal Crossing special edition Nintendo switch with green and blue joycons attached.
    An old e-reader with a white cover that has flowers on it, and an Animal Crossing special edition Nintendo switch with green and blue joycons attached.

    It’s kind of goofy to be proud of replacing some of my phone time with looking at different screens, but I am getting a *lot* more enjoyment out of my gaming time, and since I’m not *scrolling* for a tiny screen while holding a device, I can enjoy reading longer stuff while knitting. It’s also been great for connecting with my kid, as we’re currently both playing Zelda games and sharing tips and showing off stuff we’ve done.

    The amusing thing about switching to my ereader was that it forced me to spend more time on my actual computer to transfer files, which encouraged me to spend more time doing personal writing. You haven’t seen this on the blog yet because I’ve been writing fiction rather than blog posts, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I’m not finishing a novel anytime soon, but I feel like I’m stretching some mental muscles and having fun. So far I’m mostly writing fanfic which is nice because people actually read it. I’ve also found great delight in writing more comments on fanfic that I enjoyed. It’s probably obvious in hindsight, but when you write to tell an author how much you appreciate them a lot of them write back with really thoughtful responses (I know, I know, who knew writers could write) and after all the AI crap I had to deal with for Google Summer of Code this year it’s felt amazing to talk to humans without some chatbot in between. Honestly, it feels pleasantly minorly transgressive to be writing un-monetizable fanfic by hand given the state of capitalism and art right now.

    I haven’t really been into fanfic since the last time I was seriously burned out after finishing my PhD thesis and moving to the US and developing both migraines and a problem requiring surgery. (It was a rough two years as much as it was a great two years.) So I’m reading fanfic again and, no surprise, I’m hideously burned out now because of *gestures at everything*. I’m in a completely different fandom than I was last time and doing different stuff (last time I was an artist!) but it’s still helping me cope with the burnout as well as changing what my screen time looks like.

    Beyond the “let’s just use different screens” strategy, I’ve been reading more books and starting to do some drawing and I continue to knit although I don’t think I’ve done particularly *more* of that since I already knit a lot. I did a decent stint where I was spinnning until March but I’m taking a break on that right now. Now that the weather is nicer, maybe I’ll get some biking time in too.

    So how did it work?

    Well, it’s May 2025 and I started putting stickers on my calendar in January 2025. I’ve gone from “regularly looking at my phone for 5+ hours per day” to “only exceeding 3 hours a couple of times per month, often with extenuating circumstances like being sick.”

    I probably could have gone lower than my new normal of around 2.5 hours on average, but I found when tracked it that all the days I went over 2hrs it included stuff that brought actual connection: chatting with friends or editing and sharing pictures or writing about books. So I’m not inclined to go any lower than that, although I *did* move some writing stuff to my computer so it doesn’t show up on the phone time tracking when i realized how long it took me to write some things on my phone.

    The greatest result has been more connection time with my kid: not because we’re gaming together (we already did that) but because I now am playing the single player games he likes as well. This started before I started really focusing on phone time, back when I bought Echoes of Wisdom for us in the fall, but I’ve been happy to find that the single player gaming doesn’t have to be a “selfish” use of my time since we share some similar tastes in games. It hasn’t really increased our offline time much because the phone screen time was happening when we were both exhausted, but now when I sit and he wants to watch videos after school while he eats his snack and rests for a bit, I’m getting gaming or reading time in instead of scrolling while I wait for him to finish. It’s not perfect — I’m more grumpy about being interrupted during some games than I would have been in boredom mode on my phone — but I think it’s better overall.

    What’s next?

    I feel like I’ve made the habit change I wanted and I’m going to stop putting stickers in my planner almost every day (though they’re weirdly motivating, so I’ll likely keep them for some new habit tracking). I’ll keep the screen time reminders and other phone setting changes I made. I’m not intending to be quite so aggressive about cutting myself off after 2h, but I *have* bought a new game and new books now that I have time for them, and I’ve got a bunch of writing in progress so I feel like I’m at the point where the change will stick.

    I might finally get around to knitting the screen time socks that I had planned, now that I feel better about what the data will show about me!

    Overall, I learned some about my habits and made a good change. Go me!

    Goodbye gold corgi journal!

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    As expected, I finished my bullet journal, just barely managing to fit an entry for Sept 30th, 2024 on the last page. It was started on January 1, 2023, so it lasted just under 2 years. The corgi design is from Kela Designs, and I bought it for myself on the condition that I actually *use* it and not have it wind up in the unused notebook stash.

    A pair of A5 journals and a clear writing board. On top is my new journal, a Rhodia softcover, and underneath is my hardcover corgi journal from Kela Designs. Both are sitting on a quilt a friend made for my wedding.
    Image Description: A pair of A5 journals and a clear writing board. On top is my new journal, a Rhodia softcover, and underneath is my hardcover corgi journal from Kela Designs. Both are sitting on a quilt a friend made for my wedding.

    I’d never actually done a bullet journal when I started this, though I’d written short journal entries on and off since I was a kid. I hadn’t really made much effort in tracking stuff but it seems like such a part of bullet journal culture that I figured I’d try it out, and some of it worked for me and other parts didn’t. It was great treating each month as a new event where I could set up different pages and iterate rather than sticking with a layout preset for the whole year. Those big blank pages also gave me more space for doodling, stickers, washi tape and eventually fountain pens.

    A doodle of a husky dog with hearts, drawn in fountain pen with some pencil for colour. It is surrounded by some red text from a journal entry.
    Image Description: A doodle of a husky dog with hearts, drawn in fountain pen with some pencil for colour. It is surrounded by some red text from a journal entry.

    Mostly my journal is for me and me alone, but in celebration of this one getting filled up I thought I’d share some doggust doodles and other marginalia as a bit of a send off. Most of these were drawn from random cute dog pictures I found via image searches.

    Doggust drawings from 2023. Doggust is a "draw a dog every day in August" art prompt series. Here I've pasted in a dog drawn on a scratch-off note card, and a painting of rainbow spotted dalmations.
    Image Description: Doggust drawings from 2023. Doggust is a “draw a dog every day in August” art prompt series. Here I’ve pasted in a dog drawn on a scratch-off note card, and a painting of rainbow spotted dalmations.
    A doodle page in my bullet journal with fountain pen drawings. It features a corgi, miscellaneous house items, leaves, stars and abstract shapes, a copying of an alphabet/number font, and another small dog and a bulldog.
    Image Description: A doodle page in my bullet journal with fountain pen drawings. It features a corgi, miscellaneous house items, leaves, stars and abstract shapes, a copying of an alphabet/number font, and another small dog.
    A small cartoon potted plant with a happy face on the pot. It is drawn in green and purple fountain pen, and is surrounded by other text in my bullet journal.
    Image Description: A small cartoon potted plant with a happy face on the pot. It is drawn in green and purple fountain pen, and is surrounded by other text in my bullet journal.

    And a bonus: my kid’s first fountain pen drawing! He wanted to try my new glow in the dark pen, although alas I don’t have glow in the dark ink.

    A small smiling sun drawn in green fountain pen by my then 6 year old kid. His first time using a fountain pen!
    Image Description: A small smiling sun drawn in green fountain pen by my then 6 year old kid. His first time using a fountain pen! If you look closely you can see where he made a dent in the paper instead of a line near the top of the sun.

    While half of the “bullet journal method” wasn’t for me, I’ve found that I do love the dot grid format, and I’ve got a new journal set up to go for October now! My post about auditioning new bullet journals can tell you about how I chose my new notebook, and I also talked about the calendar part of my bullet journal journey in I hate the “future log” of my bullet journal. So this time I’ve got a smaller calendar and a listing of my fountain pens/inks for October!

    A beginning of the month page in my new journal, featuring halloween themed stickers, a small calendar, and a list of pens and inks. There's a green TWSBI Eco fountain pen with a glowing green cap propped against the next cream coloured bullet journal page.
    Image Description: A beginning of the month page in my new journal, featuring halloween themed stickers, a small calendar, and a list of pens and inks. There’s a green TWSBI Eco fountain pen with a glow in the dark green cap propped against the next cream coloured bullet journal page.

    I’m excited about my new setup and thankful for my first journal for the past two years together!

    I hate the “future log” of my bullet journal.

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    One of the ideas from the “bullet journal” method that never really worked for me is the “future log” one. The idea seems solid: you need a space for writing stuff that’s coming up but maybe not in the current month or week or however you divide your journal. It’s a solid idea and it was very handy. But every time I actually looked at it, it felt… messy? hard to read? It bothered me more than I expected when stuff I jotted down wasn’t in order. I didn’t like not being able to immediately see if there was a conflict in dates I was jotting down. I made it a bit better for myself last year by reading through this future log blog post for inspiration and adding mini calendars into my journal so I could circle or highlight dates and stuff.

    My 2024 "future log" with mini calendars and notes about upcoming things of interest beside it. The entry for April 2024 is shown and it lists the 12th as no school, 18-29 as Gnome MKAL14, and 26 as Romi Clue #1.
    Image description: My 2024 “future log” with mini calendars and notes about upcoming things of interest beside it. The entry for April 2024 is shown and it lists the 12th as no school, 18-29 as Gnome MKAL14, and 26 as Romi Clue .

    But I still didn’t love it. I knew this was something I’d be iterating on again with my next journal. And then after deciding to try one that was considerably smaller than my old 2 year monstrosity, I faced another problem: this journal was likely going to last less than a full year, and it might even last less than my kid’s academic school year. (See choosing my next bullet journal for more about why I chose that.) I was almost certainly going to need to write out a future log now and then another one in probably 6 months.

    A pair of A5 journals stacked one on top of the other. The top one is green and features a gold corgi on the fabric cover, and runs 160 pages. the one underneath is blue and has only 64 pages which are also thinner than those in the big journal.
    Image description: A pair of A5 journals stacked one on top of the other. The top one is green and features a gold corgi on the fabric cover, and runs 160 pages. the one underneath is blue and has only 64 pages which are also thinner than those in the big journal.
    Another view of the same two journals stacked one on top of the other. In this case the photo is taken edge-on and you can see that the bottom journal is approximately 1/4 the width of the top one.
    Image Description: Another view of the same two journals stacked one on top of the other. In this case the photo is taken edge-on and you can see that the bottom journal is approximately 1/4 the width of the top one.

    I spent a lot of time drawing dots in my current journal and measuring and trying to figure out how to fit usable calendars into the future log, and wondering if I was wasting my time if I wrote in a full academic year calendar into the small journal.

    A page in my bullet journal with dots and initials for days of the week written in different sized grids.
    Image description: A page in my bullet journal with dots and initials for days of the week written in different sized grids.

    As August rolled around, suddenly people were talking about Hobonichi and other beloved planner systems that would be coming out in the fall. Two years of bullet journal have taught me that I like having variable length entries and not having empty days glaring at me when I didn’t feel like writing. But I love the idea of pre-printed planners and I used them for many years, so even though I knew they weren’t the best fit for me right now, here I was reading about entire systems that I knew I’d never buy. I could claim it was some sort of planner research (and indeed, I do get good ideas from these articles sometimes) but mostly it felt like the stationery nerd equivalent of reading trashy celebrity magazines. I just couldn’t resist.

    Eventually, I came back to the idea of the Traveler’s Notebook. As I mentioned in my post about auditioning notebooks, I love the whole vibe of their system: reusable cover, relatively cheap inserts and accessories so you could customize your experience. I tried out the passport size thinking maybe it could be a travel notebook, but it was too small and to this day I’ve only really used it for testing pens. (It’s got nice paper and it’s a good size for that, though. I may actually keep it as a pen and ink testing notebook so I’ll have a nice collection of writing samples.)

    I was somewhat convinced that the regular sized Traveler’s was going to be too tall and still not wide enough, but I’d learned a lot from getting the tiny notebook. What if I got an undated calendar insert in the bigger size and tried it out? Rather than getting frustrated with the whole “future log” setup, I could just have a monthly planner that went with my bullet journal. The info would be organized the way I wanted it, and it would hopefully be small enough to tote around with my new, smaller bullet journal. And I could quit drawing dots in my notebook trying to make it work.

    Lucky for me, I actually prefer my year to start in September, so the timing was good. (Look, I have three degrees and a postdoc — most of my life that’s been the “real” beginning of the year and with my kid in school now it’s when I get the biggest pile of new dates to write down too.) So I picked one up in August before the planners dropped. This might have been an attempt to head off the temptation before I went and bought something that I knew deep in my heart wasn’t going to suit me.

    A Tom Bihn A5 ghost whale pouch containing a Field Notes larger black notebook, the Traveler's notebook Monthly calendar (cream coloured), my blue/turquoise future bullet journal, a pikachu mechanical pencil and an eraser in a plastic case with a kitty face and ears.
    Image description: A Tom Bihn A5 ghost whale pouch containing a Field Notes larger black notebook, the Traveler’s notebook Monthly calendar (cream coloured), my blue/turquoise future bullet journal, a pikachu mechanical pencil and an eraser in a plastic case with a kitty face and ears.

    I was delighted to find that the monthly book fits comfortably in one of my A5 Tom Bihn ghost whale pouches — the measurements made me nervous that it would feel tight around the zipper but it doesn’t seem to be a problem since nothing in there is too thick. I’ve written about how I use the ghost whale pouches for travel, and when I’m not travelling that one of the A5 pouches lives either in my knitting bag or my purse/backpack. The goal is eventually to have my bullet journal in there on the regular once I switch to the smaller one, so I threw it in so you could see the size differences in the picture.

    I left it in the knitting bag for a week to see if it stuck out or got destroyed by the other things I carry. Typically I carry my knitting bag around the house with me so I can work on my knitting project or read my book no matter where I happen to sit or what activity my kid wants me to do, so it often contains large library hardcovers or other things that might squish a little monthly planner. But it survived ok in the bag with the ghost whale for protection, so on to the next phase of actually setting it up!

    A full spread of the calendar showing March 2025 with a large section marked off in washi tape for spring break (March 24-24) in Oregon.
    Image Description: A full spread of the calendar showing March 2025 with a large section marked off in washi tape for spring break (March 24-24) in Oregon.

    The calendar itself is a little less wide than I’d like because the whole book is less wide than I’d like (they call it an “A5 Slim” sometimes), but it’s reasonable enough that I’m wondering if I should forgo my usual calendar spreads in the bullet journal and just use this for my daily tracking as well. I find looking at the calendar almost daily helps a lot with me keeping track of stuff so it’s not all just me being started by notifications on my phone, and maybe it would be better to be opening the whole calendar book? I’ve duplicated the calendar for September in my current bullet journal so that it matched my other months, but I’m likely going to finish my current bullet journal this month so I may go the other way and not duplicate in October and see how I like it. I can always change my mind again in November.

    A detail view of part of my October 2024 calendar, showing the BSidesPDX conference marked with some black washi tape and halloween marked with a pumpkin sticker.
    Image description: A detail view of part of my October 2024 calendar, showing the BSidesPDX conference marked with some black washi tape and halloween marked with a pumpkin sticker.

    I’ve written out a whole academic year calendar through to June and transferred the rest of this year’s “future log” onto calendar pages. I had some fun using a dip pen and some ink samples to add some different colours once I ran out of pens that I had inked right now — I hadn’t even thought about calendar colours as a use for a dip pen but it was nice to have the option without cleaning out a pen.

    My dip pen sitting on a paper towel beside some ink samples.
    Image Description: My dip pen sitting on a paper towel beside some ink samples.

    As an aside: a recent email missive from the place where I bought my ink samples mentioned their church involvement and made me question whether their values align with mine. A little bit of research says they’re heavily involved with an anti-LGBTQ+ church, so I’ll probably be buying my next round of ink samples somewhere else. Thankfully I had another company I wanted to try out for samples anyhow! But I’m sad to have learned some not so fun pen world gossip as a side effect and now I have a list of brands to probably avoid unless things change.

    Anyhow, back to my future-log replacement calendar:

    Yet another closeup of a calendar spread, this time done in purple ink with a few days marked with purple washi tape.
    Image Description: Yet another closeup of a calendar spread, this time done in purple ink with a few days marked with purple washi tape.

    I’m glad to find that the “regular” size isn’t so tall that it can’t survive in my bag, and I’m *very* tempted to go get the leather cover and actually try using the whole system. I still kind of want the extra width of a larger A5 and maybe I could find similar notebook systems that work with that, but even though I’m no longer much of a world traveller the whole branding of the Traveler’s Notebook just appeals to me. I want to be that person sitting in foreign cafes writing journal entries and sketching, even though I’m more of a “bike to the park and knit” kind of person nowadays. But maybe I could bike to the park and write sometimes? Or take nicer sketch notes at my next conference? Now that I know that it’s not going to feel unreasonably huge, it’s probably only a matter of time before I start grabbing more stuff to match.

    For this bullet journal’s lifetime, though, it’s going to be two slightly different sized A5-ish notebooks in a pouch.

    I think the next step for using the calendars is going to involve stickers and more colour. I know colours and cuteness will always help me enjoy a system more, but these little boxes are so tiny that it’s going to be challenge to find some stuff small enough to fit in there. I’m glad I had small enough washi tapes already! And the tiny stickers I have from pipsticks that I use as a reward for flossing will fit on there if I decide not to use a separate tracking calendar in the bullet journal. But it’s time to go digging through the stash and maybe figuring out some targeted purchases for tiny colourful things. I did already pick up a 13-day halloween countdown from Stickii that I’m hoping will have some tiny stickers, and I may have to open it starting at the beginning of the month so I can use some spooky stickers right when October starts!

    A stickii halloween countdown set in a black box made to look like a tarot deck with "The midnight tarot" written on it in shiny blue text as well as a clock, ghosts, skulls and decorations. It is sitting on a cyberpunk themed washi sheet also from stickii, and a copy of The Doodle Knit Directory by Jamie Lomax, which includes colourwork knitting motifs for a variety of seasons and themes.
    Image description: A stickii halloween countdown set in a black box made to look like a tarot deck with “The midnight tarot” written on it in shiny blue text as well as a clock, ghosts, skulls and decorations. It is sitting on a cyberpunk themed washi sheet also from stickii, and a copy of The Doodle Knit Directory by Jamie Lomax, which includes colourwork knitting motifs for a variety of seasons and themes.

    I’m hopeful that I’ve found a valid solution to my “future log” problem and I’m prepared to play around with it over the course of the academic year and hopefully as I blow through a new bullet journal. I’m also kind of excited that I finally found an excuse to find some new-to-me sticker artists, since the artists I support right now tend to make bigger laptop-sized things. (Though I do have space for a few on the planner cover if I can ever decide which ones to use.) I’m feeling a lot better about this solution than I was about both my previous attempts at a future log, but I still expect to tweak things a lot before I finish this planner!

    Auditioning my next bullet journal

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    I’m loosely auditioning new notebooks to replace my bullet journal. So I pulled out my fountain pens and inked up a few contenders that I hadn’t tried yet and here they are with the ones I’d already sampled:

    A set of 5 notebooks open to a pen testing page showing handwritten samples for 5 different pens in different coloured inks. The pens themselves are sitting on the bottom right notebook.
    Description: A set of 5 notebooks open to a pen testing page showing handwritten samples for 5 different pens in different coloured inks. The pens themselves are sitting on the bottom right notebook.

    My current bullet journal (the one in the upper right) is a lovely book from Kela Designs. It’s going to run out of pages in a couple of months (maybe sooner if I keep messing around with drawing doggies for doggust). I really love this journal but it’s pretty thick and heavy (160 pages, 160gsm bamboo paper), and I want something thinner that I’ll carry around more and also something that’s closer to 1 year sized for me rather than the 2 years it’s taken to use this one. My desire for a smaller page count has cut me off from a bunch of the more solidly built hardcovers so I’m pretty much just looking at softcover notebooks this round.

    Currently the winner is the one with the ivory coloured paper which is from Rhodia (bottom right). Paper’s a bit thicker which makes it closer to my current notebook than the others shown here. While I wonder if the ivory colour is going to go terribly with my stickers, I think I’ll like it for writing and washi tape. It’s also got a slightly rubbery cover that reminds me a lot of the Pentallic notebooks that were my daily travellers for years when I worked at UNM and could pick them up from the campus store. The appeal of this one is a much smaller page count than most A5 dot grid notebooks. It clocks in at 32 sheets / 64 pages, so it’s way thin and I’m not committing myself to 2 years of the same notebook the way I did with my current journal.

    The tiny bottom one is a passport-sized one from Goulet that’s meant to fit into the Traveler’s Passport system. I *love* the idea of the system with a leather cover and ever-changing inserts, but the Traveler’s comes in two sizes and I was pretty sure they were “too big” and “too small” but my brain wouldn’t let go of the idea of trying it out. Thankfully the refill notebooks are pretty cheap so I could try it out without actually buying a cover. The paper is nice, but the size is definitely no good for my bullet journal needs. I’d been thinking about it as a travel journal option but holding it in my hands (not even writing in it!) I took a different notebook on my last trip so… it’s probably not a winner for me right now. I’ll likely toss this tiny one into my purse to see if I use it, and I might try the larger size at a future date because I really like the idea of being able to get some pre-printed calendar notebooks, but I may have to accept that while the concept is good they just don’t have quite the right dimensions for me.

    Middle left is my latest travel notebook from Field Notes that beat out the passport to get taken on my last trip. It’s big enough that I could work out knitting charts in it, but I didn’t love it with fountain pens and wound up using pencil and gel pen. Since both of those are less potentially risky for travel anyhow, I’ll likely keep it as my travel companion. But it’s not making the cut for bullet journal replacement outside of that.

    Upper left is from Clairefontaine. I got this one to see if I liked the paper, and I do! I also was surprised by how much I liked the wider lines for writing, as they work really well with my thicker fountain pens. I also tried sticking it in an a5 ghost whale pouch (from Tom Bihn) and carrying it around in my knitting bag and found that it was a winner for weight and size. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten kind of hooked on the dot grid thing over the past year and some of my habits and tracking rely on it, so after trying it out for a while I decided to buy the Rhodia notebook that’s likely the winner. But I really like this notebook and I’ll find another use for it!

    A set of 5 notebooks closed so you can see the covers. In the upper right there is a thick green A5 one from Kela Designs with a corgi on it. Lower right is a Rhodia A5 softcover in blue. Bottom middle is a smaller passport sized one from Goulet pens. On the lower left is a black Field Notes one, also mostly A5 slzed but smaller than the other 4. On the upper left is a Clairefontaine notebook with a cyanotype illustration on it, also a5 size. There is a test tube sitting on top of it to help you see how much thinner it is than the green notebook beside it.
    Description: A set of 5 notebooks closed so you can see the covers. In the upper right there is a thick green A5 one from Kela Designs with a corgi on it. Lower right is a Rhodia A5 softcover in blue. Bottom middle is a smaller brown passport sized one from Goulet pens. On the lower left is a black Field Notes one, mostly A5 slzed but smaller than the other 4. On the upper left is a Clairefontaine notebook with a cyanotype illustration on it, also a5 size. There is a test tube sitting on top of it to help you see how much thinner it is than the green notebook beside it; it’s probably more than 1cm thinner.

    I noticed at Powell’s that the Leuchtturm 1917 also comes in a smaller softcover with a smaller page count, so I may try that out in future. Honestly, I might have impulse bought it if they’d had it in a colour other than black. But by the time I got home and looked up what other colours were available, I convinced myself that I should start with the Rhodia that I already bought, so I’m trying to force myself to wait until I actually need a replacement (or they go on sale, I guess?).

    Also, look at me with those fountain pens! I went from one pen that I found in a drawer to 5 (although one is a disposable one, and the other 3 are relatively cheap). Thankfully my current notebook has nice enough paper to accommodate me in this journey into fountain pens and pretty inks. I’m having a lot of fun!

    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!

    2019 Fiber Goals

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    I think these past few years of setting fiber goals has been fun, so here’s what I’m thinking for this year:

    1. Learn steeking. I’ve already signed up for a class in January so hopefully this one will be easy! It’s been on my to-learn list for a while.
    2. Document better. I haven’t been good about this since February last year, which not coincidentally is when I went back to work. I take pictures but haven’t been blogging or updating Ravelry. And I’ve got two patterns that I could maybe release this year, if I ever write them up.
    3. Finish another sweater. I’ve got one for me started but hibernating since early fall, and I’d like to do another toddler one. Plus I have others planned!
    4. Play with mini skeins. I’ve swapped out my yarn subscription for the year to one that’s monthly mini skeins with no project, and I want to play with designing for them. Maybe I’ll finally make that Christmas in July advent calendar I keep thinking about? (I know someone who might be willing to work on it with me so I’ve got to knit up some designs asap!)

    Here’s to a new year!

    Choosing secure open source packages

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    I wrote a pair of blog posts for work that came out last month!

    Many developers don’t feel qualified to make security decisions. In many ways, that’s a perfectly healthy attitude to have: Security decisions are hard, and even folk with training make mistakes. But a healthy respect for a hard problem shouldn’t result in decisions that make a hard problem even harder to solve. Sometimes, we need to recognize that a lot of architectural decisions in a project are security decisions, whether we like it or not. We need to figure out how to make better choices.

    The posts are about how to do very simple security risk assessments on open source packages, so you can make more informed choices about what you include in your code and get a sense of what makes a library look scary to security folk. They’ve got lots of real life examples of things we’ve seen, good, bad and embarrassing, and there’s a nice scorecard at the end that you can use to help you do quick assessments of your own. There are even some cat memes included!

    I’m pretty proud to be able to share some of the things we’ve learned about open source security risk with the greater world and these posts fall in the category of “things I’ve made” so I thought I’d link them here. Hope you like them!