A few remarks on cheap fountain pens:

Pilot 78G - interesting range of nib widths; the F should really be an XF, while the B is almost an italic; not much ink capacity, though. Excellent quality for the price.

Hero 616 (Chinese, no longer made) Still available, but watch out for the counterfeits. :o Even the genuiine ones are of uneven quality, but the good ones hold a decent amount of ink and write well.

Wing Sung 233 (Chinese, almost vintage, but NOS ones can still be had for as little as $3-$4) These are cheap and a bit flimsy (especially the caps - the clips will break if you look at them) but surprisingly smooth writers with character that hold a decent amount of ink.

(For the timid, I should note that although the Pilot 78G is a cartridge/converter pen, both the Hero 616 and the Wing Sung 233 are both squeeze fillers (poor man's aerometric) which can only use bottled ink.)

When I click the download link, I get a 404 message.  :( Wish I could try it, since it looks very useful.

But who in their right minds would do their terrorist bomb planning, drug deal scheduling, kidnapping details or secret evil megacorp plans on something not opensource?

-f0dder (January 30, 2013, 10:30 AM)

Of course, there aren't a lot of people who are in their right minds. I remember there was a guy in Florida who walked into a police station - to report that somebody stole his cocaine... For somebody like that, maybe Skype is a step up in security. ;)

Edited to add: While I am not one of those people who subscribe to the "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you shouldn't worry about who's looking over your shoulder" theory, I do think, if you care about security, you need to worry about it yourself. Or, at the very least, decide who you're going to rely on. Relying on a government or big corporation to protect you goes beyond naive. For as long as I've used Skype, I've assumed it was only fit for conversations I wouldn't mind showing up on YouTube someday. Some may consider that overly cynical, but the point is that I thought about it. Putting all your trust in some mythical "Big Brother", be it governmental or corporate, is going to get you burned, sooner or later.

Since I'm not doing anything I have any special reason to conceal from the government (beyond a general preference to keep my life private), I'm more concerned with the corporate efforts to assemble data on everyone. Because, even if you "like" the company collecting it right now (and "liking" a corporation strikes me as a naive stance in the first place) you have no way of knowing who it will be sold on to, or how it may be used. And the notion of companies trying to peer inside my head for their benefit makes my teeth itch.