2026-06-05 02:43:01
I got my hands on the Fragrance Mildliner pack for what I thought was a bargain price of £5. If I'm honest that might be about £5 too much but here we go anyway. I sniffed these pens hard.
Soda Blue / Cotton is the worst one by a long shot. It smells like the strongest washing powder you've ever smelt in your life. What I imagine a laundromat smells like.
Olive / Green has a smell but it's very mild, kinda like wet grass I suppose. Almost imperceptible though.
Sherbet Yellow / Citrus is the only good one. Smells like lemons.
Cool Gray / White Bloom isn't good but it is accurate. Generic flower smell.
Beige / Wood smells like mid-range car air freshener and Dusty Pink / Flower Bouquet smells like a cheap car air freshener.
There's no world in which I ever want my highlighters to have a smell, and I'm not a teenager any more so I'm not going to try and taste them to be crowned class clown but I'll use these anyway because the colours are still good.
2026-05-28 03:36:55
At the start of the month Cult Pens, for their anniversary, put up a birthday mystery box for £100. No other information, just choose a nib size and they'll send out a mystery box:
We can't tell you what's inside, because it's a mystery, but we can tell you the contents are worth way more than the price, and have an RRP of at least double.
"One part of my brain knows mystery boxes are a good way for a company to move stuff that isn't selling, the other half wants to buy it anyway" was what I wrote in the Pen Addict Slack. I considered buying it at lunchtime that day but it sold out before I could decide. Then two weeks later it was a suggestion below something else I was browsing on their website, with a fine nib. I usually go for extra fine but fine is also...fine so I ordered it.
It arrived and I was very pleased to get an MP1 as the main item along with some copic paint markers which I would never usually buy (these are £27 for 6?! I'm not good enough at art for that). The full list of items:
I wasn't able to find the purple pen sleeve, the midori stickers, or the Faber-Castell neon pens on the Cult Pens website but by my count, the RRP of all this lot is somewhere around £150.
I didn't realise the Copics were paint ones until I'd already smooshed it on the page like the caveman that I am so I did an art. I call it "Don't Go in the Ocean". These are fun to use and I'm definitely going to use these during this year's Inktober.
The farm eraser set is cute as fuck but I cannot use it. Look at their faces.
I didn't need another metal pencil but the graphgear is bloody lovely. The lil "clunk" when it sucks up the nib bit is delightful.
A Monteverde MP1 has been on my wishlist for quite a while but there's always been something else to buy so it was nice to have it decided for me. Even without looking, I know that a pen called "Strawberry Dreams" would the one I would get anyway. The ink looks much more purple when it's in the bottle but on paper (Tomoe River in this case) it's a stunning bright pink, I love it. The pen itself it nice to write with although my brain keeps thinking I'm picking up a TWSBI Eco and it takes a moment to adjust to the differences in feel.
I think the one dud in this box is the Faber Castell hexo has a nice twist mechanism but the pen itself is ugly and it feels cheap to hold. Not a pen for me.
Overall I'm very happy with what I got in the box. Given what Cult Pens sell I could make an educated guess about which fountain pen I was going to get from a handful so it wasn't that much of a risk. I'm not going to rush and do this every time they do one but I'll definitely consider it in the future.
2026-05-20 18:58:13
Over the past month or so I've sold a bunch of stuff on Vinted and I wanted to know how much I've made but Vinted don't give you that data, at least not in a nice way. They have monthly reports but that shows what you started with and ended with which only works if you don't withdraw or spend anything, which I had.
So I went to the sold page, scrolled the infinite scroll list until it had loaded the months worth of stuff and whipped up this snippet to take the price and title of the item and add it to the clipboard.
list = document.getElementsByClassName('my-orders-content')[0]
items = Array.from(list.querySelectorAll('a .web_ui__Cell__content'))
data = items.map(i => {
price = i.getElementsByClassName('web_ui__Text__text')[0].innerText
title = i.getElementsByClassName('web_ui__Cell__title')[0].innerText
return `${price} // ${title}`
}).join('\n')
copy(data)The output will look something like this which I can then paste into Numi or Soulver to give me a total. Bundles don't have a useful title because that's not available on the page.
2026-05-18 19:43:59
I haven't done a weeknote in a while and this one is packed with links because I've got very behind on all the things including my saved later list. What do you mean you don't have custom artwork for your weeknotes? Weirdo.
First off, I was thinking about Y2K as one does and I remembered that these keyrings were everywhere in 1999. I am somewhat annoyed I missed weeknote 2000 to post this in but here we are.
While I don't think all of these truly "replace" the premium ones they claim to, I'm always down for new ways to browse fonts and Font Alternatives is pretty nice.
Oat is a new UI library without any crazy dependencies.
YouSky by Ross Wintle is a fun "one person social network".
Alex always has excellent posts and this one, The bare minimum for syncing Git repos, is no different.
Chris' AI policy is excellent.
a genderless burger experience via Keenan
This guy cracks spray cans and makes little scenes inside them.
Incidental Music Player looks fun.
Disable Apple Creator Studio update popup in iWork
Walkman.land is the shit I'm here for.
I was able to use FontCrafter to make a font from my handwriting, something I did many years ago with a different service. This was initally a bit finicky but it had some updates and worked perfectly after that.
Slide Ventura. Love it.
My buddy Ben made the Legami Friends Pen Reference inspired by the Mildliner site. It's so good.
Fits on a Floppy - A Manifesto for Small Software. "Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline.". YES.
Ask an Astronaut takes all the questions ever asked of astronauts aboard the ISS and uses a local AI model to search and find them for you.
ReKindle is a website as an OS for Kindles with a web browser.
Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions. Jim is very smart and this is worth your time.
AirPodsSanity solved an apparently widespread issue where MacOS will set AirPods as the microphone input which ruins the output sound quality.
Another app called Paper but it looks nice.
Journal Helper has a bunch of printable pages for your journal.
5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
Delivering a dynamic hexagonal world map in just 10kb. This is the kind of shit I'm here for. Proper web stuff.
KeyPad is "a Mac app that lets you use your Mac keyboard and trackpad as a bluetooth keyboard and mouse". Smart.
Pica, a MacOS font management app
How To Make A Blockbuster Movie Trailer. I come back to this every few years because it's so good.
Golden tickets. Old tickets with cool fonts.
Another Day Closer to the End. A webapp for doing those "X is closer to Y than Y is to now" type things.
2026-05-14 03:03:06
This is, in fact, another post about how many colours of Mildliners there are but it should be the final one of this format. Last week I posted about the Mildliner mix colours in which I said I was going to look into redoing my Mildliner reference site and I've done just that with version two.
That right there is the mildliner colours. Now let's talk about the mildliner colours. Can we talk about the mildliner colours please, Mac? I've been dying to talk about the mildliner colours with you all day, okay?
Version two of the site includes:
While looking for something else I noticed on this page on Zebra's website[1] that they say there are 42 colours which is one less than the 41 I was aware of. I looked through the list and none of them seemed unfamiliar so I started writing them out one by one until I found it — deep gray, which I had overlooked on my first pass, is a new colour that only exists in the Mildliner fine pens. I had misidentified the deep gray as dark gray in my review — I got really close to noticing and then didn't:
[...] all the cap colours match with the exception of dark grey where the cap is much darker on the fine one than it's standard counterpart.
Version two of the site has been a bunch of work to find out all the information - Zebra has different information depending on the country so it's been hard to trakc down some of it. I'm still looking to find out the Japanese product codes of the Mix colours but I'm hoping I'll have mine by next week to confirm that. I also believe the Dot and Stamp markers don't exist in the Japanese market so they don't have the product codes.
I'm pretty happy with the whole site but the "All Colours" section is my favourite — each colour shows, with custom icons, which pen type the colour is available with. Fun fact: Gold and Apricot are the only two colours that are available in every pen type.
Mildliner Reference Version Two
2026-05-09 18:58:44
A couple of weeks ago Ben was kind enough to send me a 3-pack of Mildliner Mix pens — two-colour highlighters made by Zebra. This led me down a path of looking for the second set called "Cool" but the price of shipping meant I would have been paying ~£5 a pen which I wasn't willing to do.
Then this week, as I am want to do, I went over to Stationery Pal (that website is riddled with ads just a heads up) and they had a big banner on the home page about a ten pack of Mildliner Mix so I ordered them immediately. And if my maths is correct, ten is more than six, which is how many I was aware of until that moment. This was the image they had which I downloaded so I could update the Mildliner site.
I started adding them to the site and noticed that one of the colours I already had, Red and Gold, isn't going to be in the pack I ordered. I went back to Zebra's website and there's no mention of these additional colours, just the original six. So eleven is the number.
I'm down a rabbit hole now thinking about rebuilding the reference site, working out how many of the dot and stamp marker versions there are, and if there's a secret extra one in the brush versions like there is in other ranges. Very normal stuff.
