Pilot Elite
I’ve been attracted to the form factor of the Kaweco Sport for a while, though the low capacity of the piston converter is a bit of a turn off. Last year when they released the aluminum body piston filler my attraction increased, but those pens cost more than I want to spend. Then at the end of the year they released a resin version of the piston filler for a lower price, and I found a sale with a good discount during the holidays. I bought one.
I like the pen. I especially like to carry it in the sleeve pocket of my MA-1, because I like the idea of living in a world where people walk around with fountain pens in MA-1s. Be the change you want to see in the world. Unfortunately, I scored that Pilot Vanishing Point on eBay at the end of 2023. That has been my daily writer ever since, and purchasing the Kaweco Classic Sport Piston Filler made clear that the Vanishing Point has ruined me for other pens. Specifically, on two points.
First, the Vanishing Point has an 18k gold nib. The Kaweco Sport does not. Kaweco’s steel nib isn’t bad, but it isn’t gold, and when I write with it I often find myself thinking “I could be writing with the VP instead.” It isn’t scratchy, but it isn’t not scratchy.
Second, the cap of the Kaweco Sport screws on. I journal daily, but that’s the only point at which I am sitting down with the intention to write. Any other time I grab a pen during the day it is to jot down some quick note. The clicky clicker of the Vanishing Point is extremely convenient for that. Needing to take the time (and two hands) to unscrew the Kaweco’s cap is comparatively annoying.
But I do really like the form factor of the Kaweco Sport. I wished for a pocket pen with a gold nib and a non-threaded cap. And then the universe opened my eyes to the Pilot E95S. At 4.7” when capped, it is a little longer than the Kaweco’s 4.1”, but it is still pocket sized. And it has a gold nib. And the cap is not threaded. And it is expensive.
So I went searching on eBay for a used one. I looked periodically for a few weeks and nothing turned up for an acceptable price. But the E95S is a modern re-issue of a classic pen called the Elite. Once I figured out that I should search for “Pilot Elite”, a plethora of reasonably priced options appeared. This is how I came to purchase my first vintage fountain pen.
The pen is everything I wanted it to be. The Pilot Vanishing Point is still my favorite, but the Elite is a close second.
Removing and posting the cap does take longer than clicking the Vanishing Point, but is still quicker than unscrewing anything, and it is immensely satisfying. All the reviews I read of both the Elite and the E95S mentioned how nice the action of uncapping, capping and posting the pen feels. They weren’t wrong. The taper of the body and the steel structure within the cap – a sort of leaf spring – provides the feeling of a smooth, perfect press fit. It is mildly addicting.
The nib is great, as expected. The Elite was available with both 18k and 14k gold nibs. I bought a 14k in fine, and it feels just as smooth and pleasant as the 18k fine nib in the Vanishing Point. Maybe a hair thinner, which makes me want to use a slightly wetter ink. But my two favorite inks are still Noodler’s Heart of Darkness and Noodler’s Army Air Corp, and I enjoy both inks interchangeably in both pens.
The code at the base of my nib is H977. This means the pen was manufactured in Hiratsuka in September 1977.
There are a few Elites on eBay for $30-40. If the pen is that cheap, it is probably one of the steel nib versions that was made in Korea. The Japanese gold nib versions are more expensive, but I found that if you do not care about a few scratches – which, for a pocket pen, I do not – there are plenty of attractive options in the $50-75 range. I think that’s a great deal for this level of quality. I already want to buy a second.
It fits in the MA-1, too.
Long have I wished for a good quality USB power bank with a switch.
Sometimes I want to leave a device connected to the battery, but powered off. Last November I stopped looking for a power bank and instead bought a couple short cables with switches. I plugged one into one of my trusted Anker power banks, slapped a couple ranger bands on there, and have been living the dream ever since.
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good rocker switch.
Cloning Backup Drives
Continuing with the theme of replacing drives, recently I decided to preemptively replace one of the external drives that I backup to via rsnapshot – or, more specifically, via cryptshot. The drive was functioning nominally, but its date of manufacture was 2014. That’s way too long to trust spinning rust.
rsnapshot implements deduplication via hard links. Were I to just rsync the contents of the old drive to the new drive without any special consideration for the links, it would dereference the links, copying them over as separate files. This would cause the size of the backups to balloon past the capacity of the drive. Rsync provides the --hard-links flag to address this, but I’ve heard some stories about this failing to act as expected when the source directory has a large number of hard links (for some unknown definition of “large”). I’ve been rsnapshotting since 2012 (after a pause sometime after 2006, apparently) and feel safe assuming that my rsnapshot repository does have a “large” number of hard links.
I also do not really care about syncing. The destination is completely empty. There’s no file comparison that needs to happen. I don’t need to the ability to pause partway through the transfer and resume later. Rsync is my default solution for pushing files around, but in this case it is not really needed. I only want to mirror the contents of the old drive onto the new drive, exactly as they exist on the old drive. So I avoided the problem all together and just copied the partition via dd.
Both drives are encrypted with LUKS, so first I decrypt them. Importantly, I do not mount either decrypted partition. I don’t want to risk any modifications being made to either while the copy is ongoing.
$ sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda old
$ sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb new
Then I copy the old partition to the new one.
$ sudo dd if=/dev/mapper/old of=/dev/mapper/new bs=32M status=progress
My new drive is the same size as my old drive, so after dd finished I was done. If the sizes differed I would need to use resize2fs to resize the partition on the new drive.
If I was replacing the old drive not just because it was old and I was ageist, but because I thought it may be corrupted, I would probably do this with GNU ddrescue rather than plain old dd. (Though, realistically, if that was the case I’d probably just copy the contents of my other rsnapshot target drive to the new drive, and replace the corrupt drive with that. Multiple backup mediums make life easier.)
Window Film Flood
I have mentioned previously that I prefer the flood lens on my Elzetta Alpha. My primary use case for an EDC light is lighting up a room – or the dark recesses behind furniture. Neither case calls for a spotlight with a lot of throw.
Last year I decided to finally allow myself to buy a ZebraLight headlamp, which I had been jonesing over for years. I knew I wanted one that ran on 18650 batteries, and I knew I wanted a warm temperature. The final decision required to land on a specific model was whether I wanted a lens with flood or a lens with throw. Unlike an EDC pocket light, with a headlamp I was pretty sure I wanted something with throw. My use case for a headlamp is to light up the ground a ways in front of me, not what is already right at my feet. Before finalizing my decision, I did a bit of searching on the World Wide Web to see if anyone else out there had a good argument against my inclination. They did not. I bought the H600c Mk IV.
However, what I did find is that a lot of the flashlight nerds buy lenses with throw, and then make them more floody by applying window privacy film. Specifically, the D-C-Fix “Milky” film was preferred. I thought this sounded great. Get your torch with a lens that offers nice throw, put a film cutout on there if you decide you want more flood, rip off the film when you decide you want more throw. Rinse and repeat.
I’ve been using my ZebraLight headlamp for 10 months now and haven’t covered the lens with the film once. For my applications, the throw lens is perfect.
But I did try using the film to cover the standard throw lens on the Elzetta Alpha. I switched back and forth between that and the flood lens a bit and decided I preferred the standard lens and film combination. Compared to the actual flood lens, it is just a little less floody, with a little more throw and bit more of a spot. I’ve been rocking that for the past 10 months, and I’m still really happy with it.
The moral of the story is that, if given the option, I probably won’t buy a flood lens again. Using the film lets me purchase one lens and play in whichever world I want. Also I’m afraid of commitment.
I spent the afternoon at this year's rare book fair.
In contrast to last year’s fair, at this event I only spotted one Ed Abbey book and maybe 3 or 4 Steinbecks. Instead the strategy shifted to the Beats. Plenty of Ginsberg, Snyder, and a first of Naked Lunch that tempted me.
One booth had a pile labelled “assorted tabloids” in which I found a copy of Search & Destroy No. 4. I took a photo of it, knowing that Vale was tabling somewhere in the Zine Fest section. When I later found him I showed him the photo and told him that when your own work shows up at the antiquarian fair, it means you’re old.