What’s a podcast without a little t-shirt love? The Erasable podcast is offering a t-shirt on Teespring. Available in both men’s and women’s cut. $22 each. Three weeks left in the campaign so get your orders in soon.
Video: Leigh Reyes’ Feathers by Twilight Singers
Leigh Reyes of My Life As A Verb put together a lovely video of her pen strokes along to the lyrics of Feathers by The Twilight Singers. Lovely.
Link Love: Inky Overload or is it Overlords?
Article(s) of the Week:
- At 92, Seattle’s Last Typewriter Repair (via Seattle Times)
A shoutout to Tina at Fueled by Clouds & Coffee for the tip. Tina creates gorgeous watercolor drawings with fountain pen ink. Definitely worth a peek!
And, in contrast to the recent “pens are dead” tirade,
- Creative Types From Manolo Blahnik to Milton Glaser on Their Favorite Writing and Drawing Instruments (via NYTimes)
Pens:
- [Guest Post] Pilot Custom 74 Fountain Pen Review (via Ed Jelley)
- Esterbrook Dip-Less Pen and #7550 Firm Extra Fine Nib (via Fountain Pen Quest)
- Retro 51 Tornado Touch (via From The Pen Cup)
- Pilot Knight Fountain Pen Medium Nib (via Gourmet Pens)
- Diplomat Traveller Fountain Pen (via Pens! Paper! Pencils!)
- Muji Fountain Pens (via Modern Stationer)
- How to Fix an Air Bubble in an Ink Cartridge (via Office Supply Geek)
- The five pens in your daily carry (via Fountain Pen Physicist)
- Kickstarter Pen Projects Watchlist (via Pen Pursuit)
- Pilot Falcon (via Pen Pursuit)
- Pilot Choose gel ink pen 0.7 green (via Pens! Paper! Pencils!)
- Sailor Pro Gear Colors Series Fountain Pen Orange Barrel M Nib (via Clicky Post)
Inks:
- A Comparison of Green Inks (via The Pen Habit)
- Comparison of 73 Bottled Fountain Pen Inks (via Unroyal Warrant)
- Kaweco Palm Green ink (via Pens! Paper! Pencils!)
- Sailor Kobe Inks Tamon Purple (via Write to Me Often)
- Pilot Iroshizuku Ina Ho (via Alt. Haven)
- Graf von Faber-Castell Hazelnut Brown (via Fountain Pen Quest)
- Private Reserve’s American Blue (via Inkdependence)
- Kaweco Elite Fountain Pen (via My Pen Needs Ink)
- Sharpie Metallics (via All Things Stationery)
- Montblanc Jonathan Swift Seaweed Green (via Inkdependence)
Pencils:
- Staedtler WOPEX Eco Pencils (via Office Supply Geek)
- A Proper Pencil Sharpener (via All Things Stationery)
- The Blackwing Slate: The pencil-optimized notebook (via Woodclinched)
Paper & Notebooks:
- Paper Notebooks Explained (via Jet Pens Blog)
- Clairefontaine Triomphe Stationery (via My Pen Needs Ink)
- Marie Curie’s Radioactive Notebook (via Notebook Stories)
- Ardium Classic Notebook (via Office Supply Geek)
- Rhodia Ice Pad (via The Pen Addict)
- Requested: Fountain Pen Friendly Sticky Notes (via Rhodia Drive)
- Nock Co. “Dusty Blue” DotDash Note Cards (via Clicky Post)
- Baron Fig Confidant (via The Newsprint)
- Tomoe River Paper Review (via FP Geeks)
Other Stuff:
- Nock Co. x Dudek Modern Goods Idea Dock (via Modern Stationer)
- Bostitch Executive Stapler (via My Supply Room)
- Does Writing Things Down Make You Smarter? (via Rhodia Drive)
- The Handwriting of Type Designers (via The Cramped)
- D.C. Pen Show 2014 Recap (via Gentleman Stationer)
- Isaac Asimov’s Typewriter (via To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth…)
Video: Why Write by Master Penman Jake Weidmann
Why Write is a sixteen minute Ted Talk from Master Penman Jake Weidmann waxing poetic about the love of penmanship and writing.
(Shoutout to Fountain Pen Physicist for the link as I hadn’t yet seen this!)
The Overcast Podcast App
To help me get through my days, staring at pixels on a computer screen, I listen to a lot of podcasts. For the last few weeks, I have been bouncing back and forth between three different podcast apps for my iPhone: Overcast (Free, unlocked all features $4.99), Pocket Casts ($4.99, for iPhone/iPad or Android) and Instacast ($1.99). Why would I have three podcast apps installed at once? I was trying to figure which one I actually prefer.
Each app offers a similar experiences and all are an improvement from Apple’s default Podcast app. After futzing around with all three, I found myself deleting Instacast first as it was the least intuitive feeling to me. It was the first podcast app I purchased after I became annoyed with the Apple Podcast app and the first to fall short for me. I love the looks of Pocket Casts but in the end, despite aesthetic superiority, there were a few things that forced it out of the running.
I’ll cut to the chase and tell you which one I prefer and why.
Overcast is my favorite podcast app at the moment, though I still find myself stumbling around the app a little. Here’s a few reasons why I’ve chosen it over the others.
- Overcast has feature to speed up the podcast. It helps to shorten pauses in speech and make a podcast a bit more brisk. Very handy. Audio can also be sped up a lot which sounds like everyone had WAY too much coffee, but not like Mickey Mouse. Overcast also has an EQ voice booster which helps podcasts that may not have the best sound quality.
- There is a web-based interface which lets me listen to podcasts at my computer rather than on my phone at work. It spares my data plan, phone battery and I only have to subscribe to the podcast once (not have to maintain an additional subscription in iTunes for desktop listening). Playlists don’t carry over to the site but being able to listen to podcasts in my wi-fi-free office without getting throttled by AT&T is excellent.
- I like that I can adjust the quick forward and quick back buttons. They are clear to understand and easy to use. Some of the other apps have the double arrows associated with fast forward and rewind which are less clear to me that I’m jumping 15 or 30 seconds in a podcast. I don’t often need to rewind a podcast all the way back to the beginning.
- Under “Playback” there is a sleep timer and/or play episodes continuously or one-by-one.
- Overcast is free. I appreciate that Overcast is willing to offer this app for free to entice people to try it and listen to more podcasts. When they find the app useful and easy to use, users can unlock all features for $4.99. I upgraded the app immediately.
- Overcast uses Twitter to recommend podcasts based on what people you follow are subscribing to. The more people who use Overcast, the more recommendations. It seems a lot of my followers/folks I follow listen to the Pen Addict and Erasable. I’m shocked!
- In the download queue, there is a switch to toggle between using cellular data for downloads and not. Which is handy that’s it’s not buried in a preferences or settings menu somewhere.
- My one big gripe is I wish that sliding to the left would provide a “mark all as played” option. I keep deleting podcasts thinking I am deleting an episode.
The more I use Overcast, the more I like it. If you haven’t tried any podcast app other than the Apple Podcast app, I recommend trying Overcast. If you have your own favorite podcast app, please leave a note in the comments.
Giveaway: Lamy Starter Kit
Our fine sponsors, Pen Chalet are giving away the perfect fountain pen starter kit: a Lamy Safari, a bottle of Lamy ink and a Lamy LZ24 converter.
The giveaway entries will be accepted through this week until Monday August 18th at 9 PM Pacific time. Enter early, enter often! Be sure to go over to Pen Chalet to enter the giveaway.
Pennaquod: The Pen Blog Searcher
Ian from Pens! Paper! Pencils! has built a site called Pennaquod specifically designed to seek out and find posts on pen-related blogs. It features a custom search tool that just searches from within the pen community. So, if you’re looking for genuine pen blogger reviews, this will streamline your search results. This is particularly handy if you know you recently read a review for “Pelikan M205” but cannot remember which site it was on. This will just search from the pen bloggers listed and bring back the results. Easy peasy.
Ian has set this site up as a tool for the community and is not making any profit from it. Thanks for the efforts, Ian! This is going to end up being my go-to search engine since all I ever search for is pen-related.
The list of sites used to compile the results is also super handy as it may lead you to new pen blogs.
If you’d like to have your site added to Pennaquod, use the contact form on the site to submit it for consideration.
Think maybe pencil pals can be added too?