this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
129 points (89.6% liked)
Everyday Carry. What essentials do you carry on a daily basis?
3209 readers
64 users here now
What do you carry on a daily basis?
Rules
- Post a list of your items
- No Sales or marketing
- No Incivility
- No Politics
- No Inappropriate Content
- Do not ask why someone is carrying a gun or knife
- Do not give unasked for advice regarding firearms or knives, or ask why they aren't carried.
- No URL shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl, etc)/Affiliate Links.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
If I write something down it's usually because I want to remember. Sucks to lose notes/journals/data to sunbeams, coffee spills, rain, leaks, or time.
Well, I can comment on water damage. My printer ink is totally immune, and so is the Platinum carbon black. I don't trust the black in felt tips, but the printer ink would be fine. Probably. My printer ink has a curious property of being perfectly water soluble until absorbed by certain materials including paper and fabric, after which it becomes pretty darned permanent.
UV damage, well, if my ink dyes are the same as in the UV faded inkjet printouts I see taped to the windows of abandoned storefronts, then that will be a problem if I decided to put the pages of my notebook on display in direct sunlight. I've never done that or have been compelled to do it, but never say never, I guess.
That's a good question, though. Have you lost data to sunbeams before, or is this more of a hypothetical?
Yeah I'm in Australia and I left my lab notebook by a window over a holiday break. It was probably getting over 50 C daily and the ink all faded. I don't think it was UV, as multiple pages were damaged, I think the ink wasn't hugely temperature stable.
It wasn't like magically gone, but faded enough that my chicken scratch was hard to read. Between that and water damage at various points I figured I'd just switch before something got fucked up beyond salvaging. Besides, you never know what'll be interesting to future generations. Whether it's a grandkid paging through something to get a sense of who you were or some researcher going through archives. Archivists ink is non acidic, so it doesn't destroy paper over time. Idk whether printer ink is.
Wow, that's awesome! I mean yeah I'm sorry to hear your ink faded in the heat, but at least some good came out of it: that's a whole new mode of failure I didn't know about. Hey, maybe I'll try putting a test page in the oven's warming drawer or something.
Yeah might be worth a test. I assume most modern pigments are probably pretty stable, this was 10 years ago using ink that was 40 years old even then. At a certain point we all just develop idiosyncratic neuroses as a result of experiences :)