Miscellaneous Fountain Pen Thoughts

To finish off this series I’d like to share some miscellaneous advice about fountain pens.

Be Careful with Luxury Brands

Pretty much all fountain pens could be considered “luxury” these days. However, specifically be careful with brands that market themselves as luxury. Montblanc is a great example of this. In the last 30-40 years the quality of their fountain pens has declined as they focus on other parts of their business, but they still charge a premium. Vintage Montblanc pens are higher quality and can be had for much cheaper than new.

Visconti is another example. I haven’t personally used one, but they are known for having frequent issues with their nibs (up to the point of not writing at all) and poor customer service.

The fundamental problem here is that you’re paying for the name on the pen and for it to be attention-catching in your hand or on your desk. It doesn’t matter if the writing experience is poor if it’s only used for an occasional signature. If you want to write with your pens, on the other hand, you’ll be unhappy with such a pen.

Interestingly I have not found this to be the case with the Japanese luxury brands Namiki and Nakaya. You are still paying for the name to some extent, but the craftsmanship is better and the pens write well.

Explore Beyond the Common

I got a lot of my initial advice about fountain pens from the r/fountainpens subreddit. It’s a fantastic community and very helpful, but like all such communities it has developed some preferences. Commonly recommended brands get upvoted, which makes new members inclined to purchase the same things, and it snowballs from there. In general the advice is good, particularly for those just starting out.

However, several of my favorite pens are only rarely discussed there, and I found them by chance. The Waterman Carène I saw mentioned when looking at a discussion of vintage Waterman pens. I had never even heard of the Waldmann brand until receiving a Solon in Truphae’s subscription box. I’ve had both of these pens inked since first receiving them. These aren’t rare in the way an uncommon vintage model are; they’re still mass-produced modern pens. But it is unlikely I would have even considered these if I stuck with the standard recommendations.

On the flip side I’ve disliked some of the most popular pens on that subreddit. In particular I’m not a fan of the way the Lamy 2000 writes.

This isn’t to say that you should ignore popular recommendations, they are usually popular for a reason. But once you’ve established your own preferences more, be open to exploring additional options.

Vintage Fountain Pens

In this post I’d like to share my thoughts about vintage fountain pens.

Vintage Isn’t for Everyone

Before getting into what I like about vintage pens, I do want to give some disclaimers.

As a combination of age and more primitive designs, vintage fountain pens tend to be more finicky than modern pens. They’re more prone to leaks or burping ink. Filling mechanisms were much more varied, and some can be quite difficult to clean.

There is mixed information online about the safety of modern inks in vintage pens. Some experienced restorers advocate strongly to only use certain inks (Parker Quink in particular), whereas other experiments have shown no issues. I have generally erred on the side of caution, but this does limit the ink choices when using vintage pens.

Vintage pens also tend to need specialized restoration. While there is a lot of good reference material on this (particularly from Richard Binder) it is a delicate operation. Lots of practice is needed, so you may be better off sending pens to an expert.

Why I Like Vintage Pens

My first exposure to vintage fountain pens was inheriting my grandfather’s Sheaffer Imperial III (circa 1960). I had already been into fountain pens for about a year at that point, so I had some experience with modern pens. It needed quite a bit of work to restore (bringing the Ship of Theseus to mind), but I loved the Triumph nib with the Waverly tip. I now use the pen daily.

This got me interested in doing more research on vintage pens. Fast forward and now about half of the pens I use regularly are vintage. These are the things I have liked the best:

  • Vintage pens were designed to write. Modern fountain pens are mostly the “luxury goods” camp, and are often not good writers as a result. Vintage pens were made in a time when people frequently wrote by hand, and so are easy to hold and use for long periods without fatigue. They often hold larger volumes of ink as well.
  • Vintage pens are made of materials uncommon today (particularly celluloid and ebonite) that have both a striking appearance and are warmer in the hand. I’m a big fan of the stacked celluloid used in Parker Vacumatics in the 1930-40s. It gives more color to a time period often thought of as staid and conservative today.
  • Vintage pens are unique. Due to both smaller numbers being manufactured and a proliferation of small pen manufacturers there are a lot of different pens out there. It’s possible to find pens that are uncommon or even rare today.
  • Vintage pens also align well with the environmentalist aspect of fountain pens – repairing and reusing a high-quality item for decades.

Where to Get Vintage Pens

I’ve purchased vintage pens from two places primarily. I don’t have any affiliation with them, but have been very satisfied with my purchases:

  • Antique Digger: This site tends to have more pens from the big names in vintage pens
  • Redeem Pens: This site tends to have more unusual and uncommon pens

It is possible to get vintage pens on eBay, but you have to be careful as fakes are common (particularly with expensive brands like Montblanc). I’ve generally avoided it.

Finally, check out local antique and thrift stores! Since fountain pens aren’t as obviously valuable like watches or jewelry, you may find some surprises. Plus the hunt is part of the fun!

Up Next…

Up next will be the last post in this series, though (hopefully) not the last time I write about fountain pens. I’ll be sharing some miscellaneous thoughts that didn’t fit well into one of the other posts.

My Fountain Pen Preferences

In my second post on fountain pens I’d like to share my likes and dislikes based on what I’ve tried. Disclaimer though: fountain pens can be very personal, so these are just my opinions. I also have no affiliation with any of the products listed below.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything I’ve used either. I’m just calling out things that stand out either positively or negatively.

Paper

Likes

  • Maruman Mnemosyne: This is my go-to for notebooks. They’re available in a variety of sizes, the paper is a good thickness, and I’ve never had problems with any ink I’ve tried on it.

Dislikes

  • Tomoe River: This is often called out as one of the best fountain pen papers, and it does show off sheen and shimmer in inks really well. However, I find the paper too thin and ink takes a long time to dry on it.

Ink

Likes

  • Pilot Iroshizuku: Pilot’s upscale line of inks are fantastic. They’re available in a wide variety of colors, have great flow, always well-behaved, and come in large, easy-to-use bottles. I have the more Iroshizuku inks than any other brand and it’s my first stop if I want a new color.
  • Birmingham Inks: Birmingham is a small, family-run business making inks out of Pittsburgh. They have a great variety of colors and their inks are also well-behaved. What makes them stand out is that they also have lines of inks designed with a variety of properties: working well on bad paper, permanent and waterproof, and easily washable. These properties are often hard to find in colors other than blue and black.

Dislikes

  • Shimmer inks: Regardless of brand, I dislike shimmer inks. These inks of particles (usually of mica AFAIK) that create a glitter effect. However, in order to get this effect you have to shake up the bottle when filling and then again shake the pen before use, or else the shimmer particles will all have settled. It’s then really hard to clean out of pens and can clog the feed.
  • Noodler’s: I am a little torn on this one because Noodler’s does offer some nice inks, and they’re a great source of inks with unusual properties (such as their bulletproof line which is apparently immune to being removed via lasers). However, there is a lot of inconsistency been batches and some inks behave very badly. While I have a couple I like, I probably won’t buy more.

Nibs

Likes

  • Wavely: Also known as WA, this is an uncommon nib grind with an upturned tip (though less so than on a fude nib). I first encountered this on a vintage Sheaffer pen, and I believe Sheaffer used it commonly. I like it because it makes the nib work smoothly at a variety of writing angles. It is a lot harder to find on modern pens, however. I believe Pilot offers them only in Japan. https://fpnibs.com/ offers it as a custom grind on Jowo nibs as well.

Dislikes

  • Jowo: Jowo manufactures standalone nib units, and is one of the most common nibs you’ll find in pens not made by the big companies that make their own. They work fine and have a good variety, but I find the writing experience to be just mediocre. However, they are nicely interchangeable between pens, and many customizations are possible.

Pens

Likes

  • Pilot/Namiki: Pilot is my favorite modern pen company (Namiki is their high-end luxury brand). I find their nibs to be smooth and consistent at all sizes. They offer a wide range of pens from intro models like the Kakuno or Metropolitan up through the absolutely stunning Namiki models. I’m also a big fan of the Vanishing Point as the best combo of the convenience of a ballpoint with the good writing experience of a fountain pen.
  • Franklin-Christoph: Franklin-Christoph is a small manufacturer of acrylic pens. I like that they break out of the mold of many such manufacturers and use more creative materials and designs for their pens. I also appreciate that they offer a much wider variety of nibs with custom grinds. They’re a great starting point if you want to try non-standard nibs.

Dislikes

  • Platinum 3776: This pen is highly recommended, and I wanted to like it. I’ve now tried a few, however, and each time had a horrible experience with the nib. It was like writing with a needle and the flow was poor unless I used a very wet ink. I also really dislike their converters. The pens are beautiful, but not worth the trouble. I do have a Nakaya (Platinum’s high-end luxury brand), however, with a great nib.
  • Sailor: Sailor makes a lot of different pens, and are particularly known for their collaborations. This is great because you can probably find a pen to match any aesthetic you’d like. The pens are manufactured well, and their converters are pretty good (though small). However, I really dislike the nibs. They are known for having feedback, and it is just too much for me.
  • Lamy: The Safari is very commonly recommended as a starter pen, and the 2000 is often called out as one of the best fountain pens. I do like the Bauhaus design, and the pen bodies are really solid and stand up well to use. However, I dislike the nibs. The sizes are inconsistent (often writing a size or two larger than indicated) and the Safari’s nibs are scratchy. The 2000’s nib is smooth, but it has a very small sweet spot to get this smoothness. Slight differences in the angle of the pen make the writing experience worse. I also found the 2000 to be very picky about ink, with some inks exacerbating the sweet spot problem.
  • Custom Acrylic: Rather than a specific company, this is the trend of small manufacturers or single artisans making pens on a lathe. There is a lot of skill involved, and I don’t want to diminish that. However, I find the acrylics used to be very gaudy, and the pens are often much larger than I like. Because many of these pens use Jowo nibs, the writing experience is all the same. I do own a couple of these, but I can only recommend buying one or two where you like the experience and sticking with that.

Up Next…

Next up I’ll be writing about my experiences with vintage pens.

Getting Started with Fountain Pens

This is a bit of a different post for me. Over the last year+ of quarantine I have picked up a hobby of collecting fountain pens. I wanted to share my thoughts and some resources about the hobby for others that are interested. This will be split across multiple posts.

Why should you not use fountain pens?

Before getting into why I got into this hobby and how someone new could get started, it is important to recognize that fountain pens aren’t for everyone. There are a lot of reasons pencils and ballpoint pens are the primary writing instrument used for decades. While there is a lot to like about fountain pens, they just aren’t appropriate in every situation.

  • You write infrequently. Fountain pens are designed to be used frequently. Most will dry out after a period of disuse (ranging from days to weeks depending on the model). You’re better off with a ballpoint.
  • You don’t want to ever think about your writing instrument. Fountain pens can be somewhat temperamental compared to ballpoints, and writing with one does take a different technique. If want to just grab a pen and not think about it, you’ll probably be happier with a ballpoint.
  • You care a lot about water resistance or other archival qualities. Fountain pen ink is water-based (don’t try and put other kinds of ink in one!). As such most are not water resistant and will fade in sunlight. Ballpoint ink is oil-based and so is naturally water resistant. It’s possible to find fountain pen inks with these qualities, but you will be more limited in your choices.
  • You only use low-end paper (as often found in schools or offices). As fountain pens have become a luxury good, ink manufacturers assume the use of higher-end paper. Many inks will perform badly (bleeding through and feathering) on low quality printer paper. It is again possible to find pen and ink combos to mitigate this problem, but this will limit your choices.

Why did I get into this hobby?

I would describe myself a both a collector and user of fountain pens. I have pens that I don’t usually have inked but that I appreciate aesthetically. However, I journal every day and actively use most of my pens.

When the pandemic started, I had been journaling off and on for a couple years and wanted to start doing it more consistently. I was also taking a lot of notes while working on my master’s degree. I was looking at some journal recommendations online and saw a discussion about fountain pens.

The thing that drew me in initially was the aesthetics of it all. I work on a computer all day, and the world of pens, inks, and handwriting represented something radically different than my day to day work. This is still something I appreciate about the hobby. The pens I like best have a lot of craftmanship put into their making.

I also like writing. I find journaling really valuable for collecting and processing my thoughts and feelings each day. I also find that a handwritten todo list each day helps me stay on top of tasks in a way that a digital one did not. While I tend to prefer blue and black inks, the variety of colors available also gives me another avenue to express myself.

Finally, I appreciate the reduced environmental impact of fountain pens. Fountain pens last for years unlike disposable ballpoints, and bottled ink has very little waste. The collecting aspect of the hobby does diminish this, but I try to be mindful in what I purchase.

Resources

Note that I have no affiliation with any of the products or companies listed below.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/ is my best recommendation for resources and information about fountain pens. It’s an active and friendly community with a lot of good resources on the sidebar.

https://www.penaddict.com/ has a lot of pen and ink reviews along with various stationery and paraphernalia. Their top five list is also a great starting point when buying your first pen.

https://www.jetpens.com/blog/How-to-Write-with-a-Fountain-Pen/pt/271 is the guide I followed when learning to use a fountain pen for the first time.

https://mountainofink.com/ has tons of ink reviews and is my first stop if I am considering buying a particular ink. They also have a good overview of the various properties of ink.

In terms of buying anything, I recommend either Goulet or Anderson. They’re both small, family-run businesses with good prices and a wide selection. I don’t have a local store like this, so I buy online. Do check to see if you have a local store though, there are many throughout the United States.

Do not buy from Amazon. Aside from general concern over their business practices, fakes are common.

My Starter Recommendations

The resources above have some starter recommendations. This is my take on what I like best as a starter tier. These recommendations may not work for everyone. I’d encourage doing your own research using the resources above and others before committing to a purchase.

  • Pen: Pilot Metropolitan. These are inexpensive yet rock-solid pens available in a wide variety of colors. I would recommend a fine or medium nib first. The only downside is that the converter doesn’t hold much ink.
  • Ink: Pilot. Pilot/Namiki Blue and Black are standard colors, and the Iroshizuku line is higher end and has more color choices. I would highly recommend trying samples first as it makes it easier to experiment with different colors.
  • Paper: Maruman Mnemosyne. They offer notebooks in a variety of sizes and the covers stand up to use well. The paper is well suited to fountain pens without being really thin.

Go Slowly!

Don’t go wild with buying pens and inks at first. Particularly on the r/fountainpens subreddit you will see posts from people that spend hundreds of dollars and buy dozens of pens and ink without having tried anything. Inevitably this will lead to disappointment and wasted money. Like many hobbies based around equipment, “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” is a real concern and can lead to buying things for the sake of buying. I find the best way to combat this is to be really honest with myself about what I want out of a particular purchase. Does it fill some need or is it just the goblin brain shouting “Ooh shiny!”? It’s also helpful to wait a few days before making a purchase to see if you still want it.

I find that around $200 is where you stop finding improvements in the writing experience. Beyond that you are paying for a brand name, a particular aesthetic, or the craftmanship. These are valid reasons to purchase a more expensive pen, but I wouldn’t recommend this until you have established your preferences. Buying a really expensive pen that you dislike is one of the fastest ways to turn yourself off on the whole experience.

Up Next…

Next up I’ll be writing up my likes and dislikes in what I’ve tried.

Modernizing my Emacs Configuration

I’ve been using Emacs for well over a decade at this point. Over the years my configuration for Emacs has grown and evolved. I’ve always appreciated the ability to change basically any aspect with some Lisp, and I am an inveterate tinkerer.

The end result of 10+ years of tinkering was an Emacs config that, while functional and tuned to my needs, was hard to understand and change. While I have changed it continuously over the years, I had not revisited the basic structure of my configs since Emacs 24 shipped ELPA in 2012. As such I decided to undertake the effort to modernize and reorganize things.

Previous Setup

My Emacs configs were previously split up across several files:

  • ~/.emacs: The core init file. Here I would enable various packages and set configuration variables.
  • ~/.emacs.d/elisp/keyboard-shortcuts.el: Here I would define any custom keybindings, both global and for specific modes.
  • ~/.emacs.d/elisp/mode-hooks.el: Here I would define custom hooks to change the behavior of various modes. Any add-hook call using built-in hooks went here too.
  • ~/.emacs.d/elisp/functions.el: Here I defined any custom functions other than mode hooks.

This setup was basically unchanged since I first split up my original .emacs file (probably circa 2010 though I don’t have the git history from that time). This did have the advantage of mostly making sense to me for code organization. If I wanted to add something new or find an existing setting, it was easy for me to know where I would have put it. The downsides were basically everything else.

In particular I had the following problems:

  1. No real structure. While finding the right file was easy, within that file there was no real organization. While I tried to group related things together, this did not work out in practice. Finding a particular setting was a matter of searching. In a couple cases I had redundant settings because I missed that I had configured something previously.
  2. Configuration sprawl. The settings for a particular package were not always in one place. Complex packages, like Helm, had configuration spread across all the files listed above. This made it hard to understand how I had configured each package.
  3. No documentation. My Emacs configs had been built up organically over years, and I was not always good at documenting why I did things. I had started keeping the configs in git around 2009, but for various reasons I won’t go into here my current history only goes back to 2014. Consequently I had many settings where it was unclear whether or not it was still useful or important to me. This was exacerbated by configs accumulated from past jobs that were no longer relevant.
  4. Not up to modern standards. The Emacs community continues to evolve the best practices for configuration. I was more active in the community during undergrad, but had fallen away from it since. As such I was still using patterns from almost a decade ago. In particular I wanted to address using ~/.emacs.d/init.el in favor of ~/.emacs and using use-package for package management.

Reorganization and Cleanup

The first step I undertook was to clean up and reorganize my configs. First off I did two basic things:

  1. Move my ~/.emacs to ~/.emacs.d/init.el. This was nothing more than moving the file.
  2. Remove unused settings. I had accumulated configuration for various programming languages from past jobs and projects. If I wasn’t actively using it, I decided to rip it out. I’d likely want something new anyway if I did come back to it. I know I didn’t get everything unused here, but I wanted to at least remove the biggest offenders.

This got my configs to a slightly cleaner place. The next step was to reorganize into new modules. My goal was to pull as much as possible out of init.el and put everything into a small number of new modules. I settled on the following structure:

  1. appearance.el: All configuration related to changing the Emacs UI
  2. base.el: Core Emacs configuration independent of any particular mode or workflow
  3. editor.el: Core text/code editing configuration
  4. modes.el: Specific configuration for various modes
  5. work.el: Any configuration specific to my work setup that I didn’t use for personal projects.

I started out just reorganizing things. Once I got everything into the new locations, I took another pass to clean up unused settings, since the new layout gave me a fresh view of things.

The next step was to start using use-package. This is a very nice library that solves several problems with Emacs package configuration:

  • Automatically installs missing packages
  • Standard layout and location for package configuration
  • Defer loading certain packages for faster startup

This was a somewhat tedious process of going through each (require 'package) in my configuration and converting it to use-package by moving all the related configuration into use-package’s structure. Once I had done that I took a pass through my list of installed packages in package-selected-packages to confirm they were all explicitly loaded, and removed everything unused. Altogether I think I removed ~20% of the packages I had installed previously and got my Emacs startup time down to ~1.5 seconds. I don’t usually care about this much since I only start Emacs once a day, but this was a big improvements from the 5-10 second range it was in previously.

You can see what all of these changes looked like if you compare afcc501c15d05200e39b5e833854d9f12b3c7c1a to 3c43236132c45b1d022bc4917dccf25ad0b743c7.

Originally I was going to stop with this new organization. However, I felt it hadn’t totally addressed the documentation problem, so I decided to keep tinkering.

Org-Babel

As I had been researching the changes I wanted to make to my configs, I came across many people online who used org-babel to structure their Emacs configuration. I was attracted to this because org-mode provides good structure, is well-integrated with Github, and allowed for more detailed documentation.

This did mean I needed to redo the structure of my configs yet again, but since I had cleaned things up in the previous move, it was much easier this time around. To begin, ~/.emacs.d/README.org is now my core init file. ~/.emacs.d/init.el becomes just a single line:

(org-babel-load-file (expand-file-name "README.org" user-emacs-directory))

Almost all other configuration goes into README.org, with two exceptions:

  1. ~/.emacs.d/early-init.el contains some settings that need to happen at the very start of loading (mostly GC/performance related).
  2. ~/.emacs.d/custom.el is managed by the built-in Custom system. I don’t use this directly, but the package manager does. I don’t want these messing up my core configs and there is nothing I care about in them, so they can go in a separate file.

org-babel allows mixing org-mode markup and code. I used org-mode’s standard headings and list to structure and organize the file. My actual config goes into code blocks. A simple example of this looks like so:

Next I disable the toolbar, scrollbar, and menu as I find them unncessary:
#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
(tool-bar-mode -1)
(scroll-bar-mode -1)
(menu-bar-mode nil)
#+END_SRC

Everything between the BEGIN_SRC/END_SRC lines is actual Emacs Lisp code that makes up my configuration.

Results

All in all I’m happy with the results. You can see the final project at https://github.com/ajsquared/home-osx/tree/master/.emacs.d. There’s more I could do here, like linking to package documentation or adding more detailed reasoning for each setting, but I don’t think this is particularly pressing. I now have a much more well-structured and explainable configuration, and think it is also much more easily shared.

I’d definitely recommend the org-babel approach and use-package to anyone who uses Emacs.

Restoring tmux Sessions

I’ve been a big fan of tmux since I started using it in 2014. I use it locally for multiplexing my terminal, and in combination with mosh it’s also fantastic for work on remote servers. My main issue with it is losing my sessions when a box restarts. Luckily there’s plugins for tmux that solve this problem!

Prerequisites

  • tmux (brew install tmux on OS X)
  • TPM (tmux plugin manager). See https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm#installation for installation instructions.

Setup

There are two plugins I recommend: tmux-resurrect and tmux-continuum. tmux-resurrect enables saving and restoring tmux sessions manually, while tmux-continuum saves automatically and allows for automatically restoring from the last save when tmux is started. To enable these settings, add the following to your ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum'

set -g @continuum-restore 'on'

Usage

With this configuration, there’s no need to do anything manually. Your tmux sessions will be automatically saved every 15 minutes and automatically restored when tmux is started (e.g. after a reboot). You can manually save with prefix-Ctrl-s and manually restore with prefix-Ctrl-r if desired.

Note that this won’t restore running applications. tmux-resurrect has an optional configuration for doing so, but I’ve left this off for the time being.

HTTPS Support

I didn’t keep up with my promise to blog more regularly from summer 2016, but it’s a new year and I’m giving it another go.

To start things off, I decided to finally enable HTTPS for this site and my separate site for short fiction. Even though these sites are low-traffic and don’t deal with any sensitive information, it’s still a good idea to support HTTPS. See https://www.eff.org/encrypt-the-web for some background on why.

I had looked at doing this when I first started running this site,  but at the time it was a pretty tedious process. Today it’s straightforward, even though I’m on shared hosting.

First I needed to get certificates. I chose to use Let’s Encrypt, since it’s free, highly automated, and a joint, open effort. To actually interact with Let’s Encrypt, I installed the Acme PHP client on my web hosts. This tool allowed me to obtain the certificates via one shell command:

php bin/acme issue --domains andrewjamesjohnson.com:www.andrewjamesjohnson.com --path /home/andrewja/public_html:/home/andrewja/public_html --server letsencrypt

Then I modified the .htaccess file to redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

And that’s it!

The only piece I don’t have totally working is automatic renewal of my certificates. I’ve got the renewal happening on a cron but it’s not yet updating the one used by the site.

Bugs with Non-Alphanumeric Credentials for AWS

I've recently had a chance to be working with AWS and S3 and encountered a somewhat frustrating bug that I wanted to share. I was using boto3, an AWS SDK for Python. I had created a script that would list the EC2 instances that make up an EMR cluster. It worked fine with my credentials, but another user would be a SignatureDoesNotMatch error every time. We spent a lot of time comparing the environment setup and permissions on the two accounts, but everything lined up. We started guessing a little more wildly when we noticed that my AWS credentials (AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY) were entirely alphanumeric, but the other user's were not. My first thought was that there was some kind of encoding error, but I had no luck with that. After some searching I found this longstanding bug with the same issue. As it turns out having non-alphanumeric credentials can cause this error and has for at least a couple of years. The only fix is to regenerate the credentials until getting a set that is entirely alphanumeric.

I later ran into the same signature error trying to distcp some data from HDFS to S3, but I knew what to look for this time. HADOOP-3733 is a very similar issue to that in boto3, but this is fixed in Hadoop 2.8.0.

This was a troublesome bug for me, so hopefully this post helps someone else who encounters the same issue.

Blogging More Regularly

It has been a while since I have written anything substantial here. General busyness with life and work have kept me from getting around to writing anything. However, I am going to try and blog more regularly going forward. Starting out I'm going to try and post something once a week and see how that goes.

Writing Setup

For my first post in this attempt I am going to talk a little about my writing setup.

I've found that I really like distraction-free writing tools as opposed to a standard text editor or word processor. Being able to focus only on the text helps keep me in the zone. I've tried a few of these and I've come to like Ulysses the best. It's less minimalistic than some others that I have tried but has a lot of really useful features. You write with Markdown, which I'm already familiar with, and it has great export functionality. It also syncs via iCloud so I can work on either my iPad or my desktop computer.

I used to write exclusively on a computer at my desk, but I found this an impediment. If I have an idea of something to write about I don't necessarily want to go sit at my desk to put down the words. Instead I'm now usually using a keyboard attached to my iPad to write. It's a little smaller than a full-sized keyboard so my typing speed isn't up to par yet, but it's great to be able to sit on the couch and write.