I’ll definitely have to try Sharpie’s new Liquid Pencil when they come out in September.

John McPhee’s article on on fact checkers is fascinating. For one thing, I had no idea Japan launched paper incendiary balloons that were carried all the way to the US on the jet stream:

The Japanese called the balloons fusen bakudan. Thirty-three feet in diameter, they were made of paper and were equipped with incendiary devices or high explosives. In less than a year, nine thousand were launched from a beach on Honshu. They killed six people in Oregon, five of them children, and they started forest fires, and they landed from Alaska to Mexico and as far east as fifteen miles from the center of Detroit. Completing the original manuscrip of “The Curve of Binding Energy,” which was otherwise not about Hanford, I wrote half a dozen sentences on the balloon that shut down the reactor, and I turned the piece in. If Wheeler’s story was true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. I hoped it was true. The rest was up to Sara.

I recently discovered that four quarter-inch (1/4") neodymium disc magnets ("rare earth" magnets) will not only fit nicely inside the body of a Bic pen, but they are strong enough to hold both the pen and a shopping list to my refrigerator:

Perfect! The list and the pen will always be right where I want them. And I can just use scrap paper for lists instead of buying ridiculous magnetic notepads. I had disc magnets on hand, but I bet a cylinder magnet would be a great choice as well. You might have to trim a bit off the ink sleeve to make room for the magnet in the barrel, but as I mentioned on my Earth Pen post, this has never caused me any leaks, so trim away.

I really liked my Fisher Space Pen, the key attribute being its size: it fit comfortably in the side pocket of my jeans. After I lost it, I really liked my second Fisher Space Pen too. After I lost that one, I thought for a minute before buying another. Did I really care about anything but the size? Had I even once used my Space Pen to write underwater or in the cold vacuum of space? No. To the tune of $15 a pop, did I want to go $45 in the hole to Fisher? No. So here's what I did:

Got myself a dozen of these Bic pens (something like $0.35 each):

Took one apart and cut off around two-thirds of the barrel (cut through the "d" in the "med USA" part of the label):

Lined up the ink sleeve with the remaining part of the barrel to see how much I'd have to remove, then snipped it off (even cutting through the inky part, I've never had any leakage - YMMV):

Assembled, it's as small as a Space Pen, and not as smooth and shiny, so it's less likely to slide out of your pocket (and if it does, who cares?):

With the cap on the back it's long enough to hold comfortably, even with big hands:

I've gone through four or five of these, and have never had a leak. Even though you lose some ink when you trim 'em down, they still last for a good long time.

True, the next time I'm on a top secret mission and my nemesis tries to kill me slowly in a vacuum chamber and my only hope is to write a note on a piece of paper and hold it up to the plexiglass telling the buxum heroine how to turn off the machine I'll be completely hosed, but I'm willing to take my chances.

I recently upgraded my machine and had been too lazy to replace Windows Notepad with the vastly superior Notepad2, but I just can't live like this any more. Here are instructions for completely replacing notepad.

UPDATE: Okay, neither method worked. Windows XP is like the liquid metal Terminator. You punch it in the face, but your fist goes right through, it reforms elsewhere, and then rips your arm off for your troubles and beats you to death with it. Trying these instructions next.

UPDATE 2: No love. I tried the batch file and everything. I don't seem to have a "ServicePackFiles" directory. While I was searching for it I noticed that damn Microsoft dog reads his book backwards, though.

Great, not only is a dog helping me search, the fucker can't even read.

UPDATE 3: Ah ha! While I didn't have a ServicePackFiles directory, there was a copy of notepad.exe sitting in c:\i386. When I included that in the batch script, that finally did the trick. So here's what worked for me:

1. Download Notepad2.
2. Unzip Notepad2.exe to somewhere.
3. Rename it to Notepad.exe.
4. Create a batch file in the same directory as the renamed Notepad.exe with these contents:

   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\WINDOWS\System32\dllcache
   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\i386
   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386
   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\WINDOWS\System32
   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\WINDOWS

5. Hit "y" then ENTER quickly in succession to confirm all the copies.

That should do the trick. If it doesn't, and if none of the other links above do the trick, you have my permission to weep quietly. Only other thing I can suggest is searching your whole drive (don't forget to allow searching of system files) for *notepad*. Add any locations you find to the batch file.

No guarantees, of course. You never know what's going to break Windows forever. Follow at your own risk.