For many years I have been a fan of the standard No. 2 (or HB in the UK) pencil as they always felt comfortable to hold and when you need a few moments contemplation, spend some time with a sharpener. I have love quality pencils like Faber-Castell and Rhodia but I am equally at home with the office version from Staples.

They also appeal to my trying to be more eco-friendly because apart from the lead or more correctly the graphite centre, this is one writing instrument that is fully recyclable. There is however, one problem. However hard you try, you will always end up with a stubby piece of pencil that is too uncomfortable to use but still has many pages of use left in it. I then have the dilemma to either carry on using the pencil until its hurt my hand or recycle what would otherwise be a perfectly useable pencil

I then remembered that many years ago when doing a summer job, there was a guy who used to put his stubs into narrow metal tubes in order that he could continue using the pencil. A search online then revealed the answer to the dilemma – the pencil extender!

These handy tools were originally used by artists who wanted to get the maximum use from their expensive pastel or watercolour pencils but are now widely available for all pencil aficionados. Simply insert your pencil into one of these handy tools and its then it is possible to continue using the pencil down to the last 2-3 cms. The open end of each extender has a metal ring that ensures that the pencil is held securely.

Generally retailing at around £2, not only are they functional, they can be quite elegant too. I purchase two, one with a marble effect and the other with a smooth wood effect. Now I do not have any qualms when I recycle the stub as I know that the pencil is beyond use.

Pilot pens have created an application that lets you “Write by Hand on the Computer”. You use the app to turn your handwriting into a digital font; this can then be used to send personalised “handwritten emails”.

Watch the Pilot Handwriting Demo Video

It all looks very impressive but is it any good? I logged in to www.pilothandwriting.com to give it a try The first thing I had to do was create an account at Pilot Handwriting .Com; this was very quick and easy. I hate have to fill out lots of personal information that is not required and probably only gathered for the benefit of a marketing department to harass me later.

After watching the video I was confronted with the next screen which had no instructions but I figured that I probably had to click on the printer icon.

This I did and printed off the template. Then I filled out the template using my Pilot Capless fountain pen filled with Sailor black ink (for the inkophiles among our readers).

Once the template was filled out there was a choice of using a web camera, scanner or a jpeg to upload the image. Since I did not have a web camera or scanner handy I decided to use a digital camera and upload a jpeg.

The first attempt failed as I had cropped to just outside the black border and there was a message on screen saying that it could not recognise the whole of the template. I undid the crop and put more space around the image which then uploaded without any problems.

Now for the big test did it work I clicked write by hand and copied and pasted this blog post into the screen. Much to my amazement the copy and paste worked. I then emailed it to myself to see what I would receive. I think that i was expecting the handwriting to be in the body of the email, instead it was as an attached jpeg.

Click Image to Enlarge

Once I got over the initial disappointment the result is actually very good. Even if Pilot could not resist adding an image of a Pilot Frixion pen.

I don’t think that it is something I will personally use on a regular basis. But I can see why Pilot Handwriting .Com is becoming very popular.

Has anybody else tried it, or are you thinking of using it? As always we would love to hear from you.

A pen and a notepad are the two things that every car glove box should contain
and most don’t.

It is not something people give much thought too with all the other distractions in today’s hectic world.

Three reasons to carry a pen and notebook in the car?

1 If you are unfortunate enough to be involved in a car accident regardless
of if you are at fault or not you will need to at least exchange details. The more prudent among us would also take notes of the time of day, the other cars registration number, the road name and direction they were travelling in and any witnesses contact details etc.

2. If you get lost and need to ask for directions one mile down the road did they say take the second or third exit at the roundabout. Sure you can rely on the cars Satellite Navigation System if you have one but what if the road is closed and the damn thing keeps bringing you back to the same point in a strange city. (Trust me I still have nightmares over a bad afternoon in Birmingham a couple of years ago).

3. You are in the local supermarket car park putting the shopping in the car and run into an old school friend that you have lost touch with. You are really pleased to see them and want to swap contact details.

The choice of pen is also important.

Any pen is better than no pen at all but the main reason that you are carrying a pen and notebook is in case of emergency or the unexpected. So the choice of pen has to be one that is ultra reliable and will write in all conditions.

I personally carry a Uni- Ball Power Tank which is a fantastic pen for this purpose it has a pressurised refill that allows it to write in extreme conditions. The Power Tank will write in temperatures as low as -20 degrees Celsius, horizontally
and upside down as well as on wet paper. It will even write in outer space just in case you have an extraterrestrial encounter.

Another option is to carry a Fisher Space Pen but these are a lot more expensive and are they really worth the cost. If you would like to see what we think read our comparison review The Uni-ball Power Tank: Better than the Fisher Space
Pen?

If you carry a pen and notebook in your glove box or if you can think of any other reasons why it is a good idea we would love to hear from you.

From 9th August 2010 until 3rd October 2010, Pilot are giving away a free iPhone with 24 month contract every week. For entry and terms please visit:

http://www.pilotpen.co.uk/iphone/

We all have to take notes, whether for work, school or just daily life, so Lifehacker poses an excellent question to readers on that topic: Do you prefer to take notes with pen and paper or on a computer?

For those of us who love using pens, the idea of relying on a keyboard to record all of our thoughts and information might seem a little alien, but there apparently are plenty of people who choose to do it that way. At least 23 percent of the respondents in Lifehacker’s poll said they go with typed over handwritten notes.

The website of the popular For Dummies series even has a page dedicated to, yes, “Notetaking on the Computer.”

From the site:

Writing notes by hand can be such a pain that more and more people are taking notes on the computer.

We say (only half-seriously) shame on them for making such outrageous – and patently untrue – claims! Sure, it can be a little difficult to keep up with a fast speaker when trying to scribble down everything by hand, and your fingers can start to cramp during a long session of furious notetaking, but it isn’t a chore, by any means.

Nifty at Notebook Stories pointed the way to another person arguing against the use of pen and paper in favour of a smartphone, of all things, for note-taking. Writer David Pierce says he uses his phone exclusively, entering random ideas into applications like Evernote or Simplenote.

I’m a writer, and I don’t carry a notebook around with me. Heck, I don’t even carry a pen. Do people even use those anymore? Pens. So old school.

To which Nifty says, “SACRILEGE!!!” And we add: Can you really even call yourself a writer if you don’t carry around even one writing instrument? C’mon, everybody needs a pen…can your smartphone take notes in the rain, like the Power Tank can?

Fortunately, a more balanced approach prevailed among the nurses at AllNurses.com. Responding to a poster who asked whether she should take notes in nursing classes by hand or by laptop, the general consensus seemed to be that the best way is to take notes by hand, then later transcribe and organize them on a computer.

In the Lifehacker poll, 38 percent (as of Tuesday night) said they preferred handwritten, and 38 percent said a combination of handwritten and typed notes.

Your Tiger Pens blogger takes a lot of notes. It generally breaks down like this: Any note-taking done while out and about is with my G2 or B2P on a little reporter’s pad. At home, there’s a little cheapie pad from Staples by the phone with a stick pen for quickie notes like phone numbers or appointments, and on my desk is usually a legal pad with a rotating assortment of pens, currently a Signo 207, for taking notes while online.

If I’m on the phone taking notes, I open up Notepad in Windows because I can type much faster than I scan scribble, making it easier to keep up with what the other person is saying. After seeing something recently about Microsoft OneNote, I opened up my copy, which I’d never done in the couple of years that I’ve had it. It was just a brief glance, but it looked useful, with different tabs for different types of notes and drag-and-drop capability. (Now, though, there’s a OneNote icon in my system tray every time I boot and it won’t stop appearing.)

If you really want to learn how to take notes, Gordon at One Man Writes has a simple and effective note-taking system that he uses for business. He breaks notes down into action items, questions and information, with little shorthand symbols for each that help him scan his notes and decide what items to transcribe and which ones to add to his Remember the Milk account.

So, which is it for you…pen, keyboard, or both?

If you’re a person who enjoys good pens – and really, who doesn’t? – then it’s a shame not to do as much writing as possible. A great way to do that: Start and maintain a journal.

Every day, you’ll get to spend a few minutes savouring the feel of your favourite pen in your hand, laying down fluid, sleek lines of ink on richly textured paper. Those are sensations we get to experience too infrequently these days as it is. Plus, your writing, both the content and appearance, will get better with all that practice, guaranteed.

Besides, our brains are like hard drives. They can only store so much data before it starts getting corrupted. Go ahead, try remembering what you were doing on Feb. 8, 2000. Better yet, try remembering what you were thinking and feeling that day. Not there, is it? That’s the beauty of a journal. It keeps all of that information right where you can easily access it, and pass it on to your loved ones, if you wish.

If you’re unsure of how to get started, not a problem. We’ve got some suggestions.

1. Find yourself the right journal. You might be more likely to stick with your journaling if you had to spend a little money on the journal. Any stockist or office supply store will carry them, or you can order online from any number of outlets. In fact, there are so many choices, it might be easy to get confused.

We recommend that you start with one of the two most popular types, the standard Moleskine or the Rhodia webnotebook. The Moleskine is available in black and red, and the Rhodia in black or orange. Both have elastic closures, inner pockets and hard covers (although the Rhodia “leatherette” is a little sturdier and has a better feel to it). You can get them with ruled or unruled pages.

The Moleskines are a favourite of people who journal, but the Rhodias seem to have a reputation for being a little bit nicer all around. The Inkophile has written a brilliant Moleskine vs. Rhodia review that may help you make your choice.

2. Choose a comfortable, smooth-writing pen that you can use for extended periods. Personally, I recommend the Pilot G2 Pro in black with 1.0 mm refill. It feels good in the hand and writes a thick, bold line, giving the words in your journal a sense of gravity. The broad tip writes a little wetter than usual, but dries relatively quickly. Overall, the G2 just can’t be beat for smoothness and reliability.

That said, however, there are many other pens that would do quite nicely, including a few Uniball models. Particularly, the Uniball Signo 207 in .07 mm or the Uniball Jetstream Premier in 1.0 mm. The nice thing about them, aside from the great gel writing experience, is that they use Super Ink, which is supposed to be acid-free and fade-resistant, so your words will stick around and hopefully still be legible many years from now. Sandscribbler has written an excellent, comprehensive review of journaling pens at his site (you’ll see he’s no fan of the Jetstream, though).

You also might want to add a little colour to your journal from time to time, and Uniball has a some nice pens for that, as well. When I’m writing something I want to emphasize, I’ve got a pack of Signo Gelsticks that I use. The pens come in purple, pink, orange, red, green and two shades of blue.

If you’re a fountain pen person, you may want to stick with the Rhodia webnotebooks because the Moleskines have a reputation for feathering with fountain pen ink. They also tend to have bleed-thru with wet pens, as Inkophile’s review demonstrated. You can check out Journaling Arts for a display of Fountain Pen Friendly Journals.

3. Create a journaling routine. Now that you have your supplies, you need to set up a time and place to do your journaling. Having a set routine will help ensure that you stick to it. The key here is to make it easy because the easier it is to do, the more likely that you are to actually do it.

Choose a place to keep your journal (and make sure your pen stays with it) so that it’s always in the same spot, somewhere you’ll see it before you go to bed and close to where you will do your writing. At the same time every day, turn off your cell phone/TV/computer, put on something comfortable, make yourself a cup of tea and go to your writing spot to spend a few minutes gathering your thoughts and putting them down in your journal.

Remember, don’t treat it like a chore. This is something you want to do. Don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day…you’ll start to dread it.

4. Write, write, write. The first thing you need to write in the inside cover is your name and the date you started the journal. When you get to the last page, go back and put the ending date. That will help you keep them organized when you start filling up journals.

For your very first entry, you might want to explain a little about where you are in your life at that point, why you’re starting starting a journal, and what you hope to accomplish with the process. That way, anyone you allow to read your journal in the future will have a better understanding of the context.

Then, not sure what goes in your daily entries? Start with the 5 Ws – who you saw and spoke to that day, what you thought and did, where you went, when you did it and why. Obviously, you just want to pick the significant moments, rather than a chronicle of your entire day. Finally, add an H, for how you felt about the events of the day.

At some point, you’re going to sit down to write and realize that you’re stuck and don’t know what to say. When that happens, write that you aren’t sure what to write, then keep writing down whatever pops into your head, until you get unstuck. Sometimes you have to prime the pump to get it flowing.

There’s no set length for how much you have to write. The story takes exactly as long as it takes. Just say what you have to say, then stop writing. It might be a few paragraphs, or it might be five pages. Sometimes, the most powerful feelings can be described in a sentence. When Teddy Roosevelt’s wife died, he wrote only a large X and the words, “The light has gone out of my life,” in his journal.

Again, if you miss a day, or several, or even a few weeks or months, don’t get down about it. Just go back to your journal, write a little recap of what’s been happening while you’ve been gone, then keep going day to day.

Hopefully this is enough to get you started. Good luck, and happy writing.

We’d love to hear from any of you who are just start journals, or those who’ve been journaling for years.

Due to a recent attack on our blogs here from a virus that seems to be affecting a lot of people, we worked hard for a few days cleaning our machines and re-writing data on our server, but what if you are infected too? How should you get rid of it, well this is a detailed guide which should hopefully help you to remove it in a few hours rather than a few days.

Obviously the quick way to do this would be to re-upload the whole website again after first deleting everything on the database, but this won’t work for sites that are updated on a daily basis since some information could be lost due to time lapses on backups. So what if you can’t use this method?

A massive help to us during this attack was Kaspersky Antivirus which seemed to find viruses’ that Norton Antivirus didn’t, surprised? This isn’t the first time Norton has failed on us personally around the office too. So first step is to download that onto your computer and update it, restart your PC then keep repeating this process until its databases are up to date.

The next part for us in removing the virus was downloading all our files on the database with Kaspersky turned off (if it is on you will lose files from your website that will be hard to recover afterwards) then making a copy of this and storing it in a different location, one will be used to backup certain files and the other to find the viruses for us, just so we can see how the virus is reacting.

Next you’re going to want to re-enable protection from Kaspersky, then right click the folder being used to scan with and choose to scan with Kaspersky, depending on how big your site/blog is will depend on how long it will take, but patience will you give you the results that you could be dreading.

Infected? That’s unfortunate but here is what to do now, you should now have a compiled report from Kaspersky which will include file paths to the viruses, hitting the “View detailed report” button then “save” in the top right corner will allow you to print this information off.

After printing you should now be able to go through the files on the other version of the download that wasn’t scanned (the previous one will have files removed after scan) and delete all that are infected (Follow the paths indicated by Kaspersky) and scroll right to the bottom of the file once opened (We found it was files with the extension .JS and Index files that was mainly infected) and you will see a script tag with a random string of numbers placed there, all you need to do is open that file and then delete the bottom few lines with the script tag.

Once you have gone through all files which could be up to about 200 or more you should try re-scanning them just to be sure then scanning your computer to make sure it is not on there either, when you are finished re-upload the core files of Wordpress by simply downloading the newest version and unzipping it, then overwrite the data already on your blog by just making it “Overwrite all” through your FTP client.

After the upload you should have access to the wp-admin area now, to gain access just go to http://www.WEBSITENAME.com/BLOG/wp-admin.php replacing “WEBSITENAME” with the name of your site and “BLOG” with all the extensions that lead to the blog, the main bit is adding the wp-admin.php and the end. You should now see a familiar login page.

We did have preventive measures and various security plugins which seemed not to work so we found that the best thing for us was to go to the tab on the left called “Tools” then “Export” this should give you an XML file that will keep all your posts and data still available, this should be kept on your computer for the time being.

Next is the gruelling task of wiping the data off the server that you have fixed and deleting the database off the server that is being used, once finished you can create a new database and once again upload Wordpress and this time upload your theme, you should still have all the images used (From the backup made at the start) which will also include all your style sheets, so now you just re-upload these on the server and you should be good to go. For reinstalling Wordpress I would suggest using this guide here which was written by Wordpress.

After all is well with your styles and image, you just need to re-upload that XML file you download earlier by going to tools again and this time “import”.

With a few other adjustments to the blog, like filling out SEO details you are now back to normal with a nice and clean blog, time to tell people that can visit you again!

Happy Blogging!

Back home from the holidays and trying to decide whether to send out a round of handwritten thank-you notes?

Of course, we highly recommend it. Thank-you notes only take a few minutes and are all but guaranteed to make your friends and loved ones feel a little extra post-holiday warmth. Plus, they give you yet another excuse to break out your favourite pens for a little inking.

But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what some others have been saying:

Geoffrey Parker, great-grandson of the founder of Parker Pens, told the Wall Street Journal that he believes thank-you notes are critical after receiving gifts.

“It’s common courtesy,” he says. “If someone does something for me, I need to acknowledge that.” Mr. Parker sometimes thanks a gift-giver or party host with a phone call, email or text message. But he believes that these modes are “insufficient” and always follows up with a handwritten message. “As these modern electronic devices become more common and overused, they become cheap,” he says.

And Parker doesn’t just send simple or plain notes, either. He told the Journal he writes his thank-yous with a broad-nibbed fountain pen (using royal blue ink) on special card stock so that they make an impression on the recipient. The note should take as much thought and effort as the original gift, he said.

San Francisco blogger Amy Graff wrote in The Mommy Files that she decided to have her son and daughter write notes thanking family members for their Christmas gifts . It took her 5-year-old son at least a half-hour to scrawl “thank you for the dog” to his cousins, who’d sent him a stuffed basset hound, prompting Graff to wonder whether note-writing was worth the time.

And then an email arrived from one of the cousins: “We received the thank-you notes…They are soo special. Those little notes make the whole family smile!! So sweet!”

The thank you for the thank you was enough to nudge me to find time for another thank-you-note-writing operation.

Besides, sending those notes might just be in your own self-interest. One of Graff’s readers responded to her blog with this insightful little bit:

Once I realized that my nephews/nieces didn’t even call to say, thanks, I cut myself some slack and stopped sending gifts. whew.

Not used to writing thank-yous? Don’t worry, it’s simple. The note doesn’t have to be long. Just remember that this is a person who did something nice for you, so now you would like to do something nice in return. Keep a cheerful tone, greet the recipient, make a little small talk (“hope your family is well”), mention the gift and how much you like it, say “thank you,” and close with sincerity.

Diane Gottsman’s tips on writing thank-you notes is an excellent guide for those who would like to include a little more detail in their letters.

Ever had a pen you couldn’t use because an air bubble was blocking the ink? The ever-inquisitive OfficeSupplyGeek successfully tested a unique, but exhausting, method for removing the bubble. By the way, if you don’t read @OSG, you should. His pen reviews are fun because they’re always one part review, one part kitchen science experiment.

The end of the year seems as good a time as any to clean out all those old ink pens that you aren’t using and find a constructive use for them.  The Inkophile suggests donating your surplus pens to schoolkids in Africa.