WL Designs Blog

Many thanks to my girlfriend for giving me this Lamy Safari pencil to compliment with my fountain pen. Decided to write a short review on both pens.

The Lamy Safari fountain pen is the most recommended entry level pen, selling for HKD 220 (~USD28). I’ve began my quest for the right fountain pen when I got my first Moleskine. I’ve googled for a few reviews and they all agreed that the Lamy Safari does not bleed nor feather on Moleskine paper.

The reports are indeed correct, no bleeding or feathering with Lamy ink cartridges. I’ve tried writing on Moleskines, Rhodias and even MUJI notebooks, all with good results.

However there is one thing I don’t like about the ink. It does not look as solid as my rollerball pens. I guess another brand of ink would have more solid blacks. Lamy also sells a converter which allows bottled inks to be used.

The converter did not come with any instructions. I’ve asked a sales representative and she taught me how to use it. Would post the instructions later.

I haven’t tried other fountain pens, but the Lamy Safari serves its purpose very well. It’s relatively cheap so you won’t worry about scratching it. The ABS construction is durable and won’t scratch as much as the aluminum variant, Al Star.

Whether you like the large clip is a matter of taste. I personally like. Considering the Safari is a design of the 1980s, it looks quite good.

The fountain pen is a reasonably priced pen, but is the pencil? Retailing for HKD150 (~USD19), the Lamy Safari is not just an overpriced pencil with good looks.

The grip is triangular shaped making it comfortable to hold. The large clip is functional. The weight is just about right. The pencil just feels different from ordinary pencils. It is smoother to write with. But don’t expect too much from the attached eraser.

When you think of the pencil as a German engineered pencil which is functional and matches its fountain pen counter part, it is not as expensive as you think.

Lamy Safari products are available in a lot of places in Hong Kong. Your local stationary store might carry a few. Also, Logon, Prints (Times Square and Harbor City) and Apita are selling it. The last time I checked, only the Harbor City Prints and Apita have extra fine nibs. The other retailers usually carry nibs ranged from fine to broad. Apita is doing a back to school promotion and there’ll be 10% off Lamy products.

Went to MUJI today to buy something for Hayashi and see what I can get. Bought quite a few things.

I got Hayashi a MUJI fountain pen and an aluminum pen case. The fountain pen looks very sexy. Aluminum barrel, rhodium plated nib. MUJI only released the pen in fine nib and provided only black ink. However, you could use standard ink cartridges with it, such as Mont Blanc cartridges. I’ll let Hayashi be the first one to hold the pen so photos would come later.

Got myself some other stuff as well. Bought this nice acrylic photo frame. MUJI acrylic products are usually overpriced with the exception of this one.

I’ve been thinking of so many ways to prevent my Lamy Safari from picking up scratches. If I just throw it into my soft pen case, it’ll get scratched very soon. My aluminum barrel pencil is seriously scratched after a year of use. So I bought this hard case which fits 2 Lamy Safari fountain pens and a pencil.

Needed a memo block on my desk. Wanted to by a Rhodia notepad before. I’ve seen people peeling off the cover of Rhodias and using them as memo blocks. But I want something which costs cheaper so I got this. One third the price of a Rhodia, three times the page count.

The paper quality of these notepads are not the best, and in fact quite poor. But it serves its purpose as rough work paper. I love to use their B4 and B5 sized pads to draft my programs and designs.

It’s about time to stock up stationary. I’ve been using the Rhodia notepads and love the paper. Now CitySuper carried Rhodia Black notepads and they look wonderful.

Hayashi sent me some Moleskine notebooks and they are great. Minimal and functional. However my Parker Vector roller ball pen feathers and bleeds a lot on Moleskine paper. After a bit of research I got this Lamy Safari, voted by the Stylus Magazine as the 2007 best pen under USD100.

Industrial design. Form following function. The pen takes proprietary ink cartridges, available in every color found on a rainbow. A converter is available so you can use your own ink. I got the fine nib and light blue ink.

Haven’t used a fountain pen before so I don’t know how this one is performing. As a fountain pen novice, I find this one a pleasure to write with. Fountain pens have the wet feel just as roller balls, but they do not bleed or feather as much.

I’ve read that the Lamy nibs are a size bigger than that of other makes, with fine being what actually is medium and medium being what is broad. The fine nib I have writes lines of the width as ordinary ball pens on inkjet A4 paper. If you are writing on a Moleskine, I would recommend an extra fine nib. Not because they feather, but because Moleskines have narrow lines.

I got the Safari in hope of it not to bleed on Moleskine paper. I used Lamy ink cartridges and it does not bleed or feather at all.

The colored tags are from MUJI, they compliment so well with the black.

The Parker Vector roller ball is made of stainless steel and coated with matte black epoxy and is discontinued. Now Parker only makes these pen in plastic or stainless steel with a black plastic end. I’ve tried searching on eBay and other sites and this version is no where to be found. Theres a few at my local stationary store if you need it.

Five months since my previous post. I’ve just bought a new MUJI cabinet and my desk looks quite different.

Got a black dealer chip from Hayashi. Two Baileys bottle. A refill bottle filled with diluted rubbing alcohol. Changed the photos. Close up of the cabinet below.

The cabinet came with dividers so I could keep my stuff organized. Top drawer keep things I leave home with. A ring, card holder, iPod Touch, a money clip. There’s also Moleskines and my iPod Nano with e4c at the back.

Second drawer holds some small electronics such as the Apple remote, bluetooth headset and card readers. Second compartment holds lint free cloths for cleaning camera and monitors. Third compartment holds earphones. The other compartment would hold some cables.

Third drawer holds stationary and 2.5″ hard drives. Now, I’m looking for a desk lamp made of metal. I’ll redecorate the left side of my desk.

It’s time for a desk clean up.

Bought a document holder and acrylic photo frame at Muji.

And now it looks so much better.

That refill bottle contains 50% rubbing alcohol, which I use to clean stuff, especially the notebook monitor. Cusano cigar box holds playing cards, earphones and cables.

Kung Hei Fat Choi! Wish you a prosperous New Year! There are a lot of traditions related to the Chinese New Year, which apparently people use as an excuse to spend some cash.

The New Year is the Year of the Mouse. So a new mouse would be nice. My brother got this Razer Diamondback mouse. The mouse works perfectly with the exactMat. I was thinking about getting an wireless Might Mouse for myself, but I’m really not sure if Bluetooth is 100% harmless.

Two days prior to the New Year is the day for cleaning. Nothing requires special attention except the iPod Touch. Dust was trapped inside the hard case. I had to clean it.

The Chinese pronouciation of “shoe” sounds somewhat similar to the word for “rough/unlucky”, thus getting new shoes is to be avoided during the festival. If a pair of new shoes is needed, it has to be bought before the new year.

There is something special about leather shoes. Shoes are the least visible part of your outfit, yet it has the biggest impact. If you can match a pair of leather shoes with your outfit, then everything would get along and you’re set. Canvas shoes are now for rainy day, sports shoes are… oh, I realized I don’t have any sport shoes.

The pronunciation of “hair” is similar to that of “prosperity”, so an haircut is to be avoided. If necessary it has to be done before the New Year. I left my hair growing for like 6 months, and it was too long. So I had a haircut, which at first I was very uncomfortable with the short length, but then I’m used to it now.

The Chinese is extremely superstitious. The sound of “book” sounds the same as the word for “losing”, and new books have to be avoided as well. I got myself this ADA Nature Aquarium Book 2008 Concepts and Products. Takashi Amano is a real master in aquascaping.

New Year new password. Interesting. There was a minor problem with the servers of the hosting I’m using. I see that all webpages hosted on the shared server I’m using was hacked. Well they say it is a problem with my PHP pages, but then I have another account on their servers which holds only pure HTML pages, and was hacked also. The funny thing is that, after they implied that it was my PHP pages to blame, they offered this solution:

“To stop this hacking there is one simple solution, login to Cpanel and change the cpanel password to something strong and the password should be more than 20 characters, the password should have special characters, small letters, capital letters, numbers. For e.g. like this: ds2211tH@@!Ghj765%$%^$ns%43HT*&@@#!g3Fsz”

The response suggested that changing the password is the ultimate solution. However, a secure password does not enhance the security of my PHP pages. This implies that it was not a fault in the PHP page.

I haven’t written about the shipment of Tally-Ho Fan Backs and Cigar boxes from Hayashi yet, which arrived in the 3rd week of January. First thing I noticed was that the package was opened by the customs, and they opened a deck of Red Fan Back for inspection.

What I like the most is this Cusano cigar box. It holds 6 decks of cards perfectly with room for a pack of desiccant. It looks very cool on my desk, besides my Macbook Pro.

Starting from the bottom: Wynns in blue and red, Tally Ho Viper and regular decks in red, black and blue, all fan backs.

It’ll be quite some time before I have to buy new cards. Thanks to Hayashi.

After watching Smoking Aces, Ocean’s Thirteen and the Casino Royale opening, I’m trying to do some Las Vegas based designs. As I’ve never been there, I don’t really know what it looks, and all my reference materials are movie trailers, photos of Las Vegas and playing cards. By the way, Dave acted as a double in Smoking Aces for the card tricks.

Last night I had a walk in Las Venturas of the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas game. But that strip is so poorly designed. There is no Vegas feel in it. Then I found out that there is a game called Rainbow Six Vegas, and I knew it would be a great source of inspiration after watching the trailer and review.

I don’t gamble, but I somehow like the feel of Las Vegas. I’ll see what I can get from the game. And If the time allows I’ll go to Macau during the Chinese New Year for some more inspirations.

I said earlier on my Xanga that if Steve Jobs did not replace the Macbook Pro in Macworld 2008, I would buy an iPod Touch to thank him. He didn’t, and I bought it.

The case is the Speck SeeThru Case for iPod Touch. They have several colors, I chose red as it would work with my theme. One thing I don’t like about the case is that larger headphone plugs (eg. Shure ones) won’t fit.

It was a headache to work with something unfamiliar. It took me a whole evening to figure out how to downgrade the firmware, how to jailbreak it, how to install iPhone apps, how to patch stuff, etc.

The iPod Touch has to be conditioned for the theme to look good:

1. Downgrade to firmware 1.1.1 (YouTube guide)
2. Jailbreak by going to jailbreakme.com with iPod touch.
3. Install Summerboard
4. Install Customize
5. Install iPod Customize Fix (to use full size iPhone dock themes)
6. Install Dock Icon Reflection Removal
7. Install PureFTP-d

Items 3-7 could be found in installer.app. For the downgrade, PC users should hold the shift key when clicking the update firmware button in iTunes (refer to the YouTube guide). Mac users should hold the option key.
I designed a wallpaper for the lock screen. I used the color themes and graphics from the 2008 countdown. The graphic resembles an king of spades design.

I’ve been trying different designs for the the past few days. I tried to see if I could use elements from the court cards.

I used the Orb from the king of clubs to design a few wallpapers. Here are two of them:

It doesn’t look very nice when applied as a theme.

I got the icons from a theme called Mystique. It is a nice theme, and I decided that I should work on that. I change the background color to green, and it looks perfect.

I’m still thinking of other designs, as I want to have elements from playing cards, especially the court cards. I was thinking about the flowers the queens are holding, the ace of spades design and a kaleidoscope effect of the back design. Suggestions are welcome.

Received the Wynn decks last Thursday. The weather was so humid (9x%) so I did not use them. I took them out on Saturday when it got drier (7x%), but then they are all warped due to the previous exposure to humidity. They warp so seriously that when I cut the deck, there’s a 2mm gap between the packets.

To fix the decks, I pressed the decks with 11kg of weights during the day and stored them in a sealed container with 300g of desiccants at night. After 3 days of treatment, they look better now.

The decks are printed on Bee stock, with the Bee ace of spaes design. The stiffness of the cards are perfect for cuts and sybils. However, the finish of these cards are a bit rough and thus don’t fan very well.

The blue deck:

The red deck:

The faces have a deeper red than normal cards. A normal Tally-Ho card was put below the Wynn to show the difference.

On the box there is a window to view the bar code printed on the cards. The bar code is used by casinos to keep track of their decks.

The Wynn decks are great for flourishing. I was practicing the molecule 1 & 2 with them, and they hold together so well. They won’t bend like normal cards when performing sybils as well.

I would recommend this. It’s sold out on Dan and Dave already, you might want to try Kardwell and Gamblers General Store. They charge a high shipping cost for international orders though.