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There are entire sites dedicated to everyday carry (EDC) with some sites focused on flashlights, knives, Atwood tools, etc. You can spend a lot of time and money on EDC "research" :-)

Front pocket (in approx. order of use)

• Cell phone with $20 behind cover
• ---
• Burt's Bees lip balm with a keyring cap
• Victorinox Swiss Army Manager Pocket Knife w/ toothpick on a McGizmo Nano clip (20mm #1)
• Olight i3S EOS LED flaslight with lithium AAA battery
• some inch-wide Gorilla Tape and elecrical tape wrapped around a black Sharpie Mini
• 64 GB USB 3.0 flash drive (Kanguru for write-protect switch; FlashBlu30 but considering SS3) on split ring and metal #0 Nite Ize S-biner
• silicon ear plugs and half a Q-tip in a key fob (approx. same diamater as lip balm, slightly shorter)
• $20 bill wrapped around BIC Mini lighter on a Keeep-It holder
• all connected with other split rings and clips on an older Munroe Mega Dangler
• -

Other front pocket (in approx order of use)

• white LED Photon freedom with car keys on the snap ring
• True Utility TU245 key shackle with 3 keys, #2 Phillips key, grocery card, and Uncle Bill's Sliver Gripper Tweezer
• house key cut on green KeyLights on clip that came with True Utility key shackle
• $20 wrapped around a 0.5 oz (15 mL) Purell hand sanitizer in jelly wrap holder
• all connected with a split ring
• ---
• leather billfold with slots for six cards; cash $1s/5s/10s/20s, bandaids, a hair pin, and Plop Boot Manager on a credit-card sized CD-R
• -

Shirt pocket--you *always* have a shirt pocket, right?

• Zebra Clip-On four-color pen + 0.5 mm pencil
• Monteverde Stylus Tool Pen with ruler, level, and screwdriver
• a handkercheif wrapped around a small (2.5" x 4") Moleskine book

I have the same criteria as you. Have used Bic Classic Fine for years. Very happy.

Which printer maker is not a patent-enforcing-drm-encoding bastard, so that I can toss out my current printers and buy theirs instead?

Bic.

Here's their latest non DRM-ed model: Printer with sample printout

In the end what gets me the most is, even with this HIGH security in effect; some lady was able to casually carry a bottle of hand cream onto the plane without issue

No, they will first sue International Paper, Bic, Dixon Ticonderoga, or Crayola. After all, paper, pens, pencils, and crayons can all be used to make copies of pages of song lyrics or a scene of a movie.

And why stop there? Since blood can technically be used as a writing medium, the RIAA and MPAA will soon take the drastic step of suing every person on Earth with blood flowing in their veins.

These things work wonders on flammables. (Last I check, applications on paper were flammable.) There you have it! Nothing's left but ashes.

What problem cannot be solved with fire?

1. See news item that Dell had released a new flash-memory-based music player to compete against the iPod Shuffle: the Dell DJ Ditty.

2. Note that no picture of said Ditty accompanies news item.

3. Visit dell.com.

4. Note that no picture of said Ditty appears on front page of dell.com, even after several reloads to cycle through random promotional images.

5. Search for ditty in text of front page of dell.com.

6. Note that ditty is not found.

7. Begin to suspect that even Dell is not very proud of this device.

8. Visit apple.com.

9. Note prominent and primary emphasis on luscious product porn of new iPod Nano.

10. Hop back to dell.com and search for Ditty in site-wide search box.

11. Note vague resemblance to a 50-cent Bic lighter:

12. Note footnote attached to claim in Product Highlights that the Ditty can pack 220 songs into 512 MB of memory, roughly twice the songs Apple claims can fit on a 512 MB iPod Shuffle.

13. Follow footnote to see explanation that this storage estimate requires encoding songs as 64 kbps WMA, which bit rate is half that of Apples default of 128 kbps AAC, and roughly equivalent in fidelity to that of transmissions carried over tin cans and string, but which, perhaps, is not a dirty marketing trick, but, rather, a fair assessment, considering that anyone with such profoundly bad taste in industrial design who would consider purchasing this device probably also has such bad taste in music as not to notice that their 64 kbps-compressed songs sound like mush.

14. Sit back and recall, with tremendously smug satisfaction, a decades worth of tech industry punditry holding that superior design would never get Apple anywhere, and that Apple should instead, you know, be more like Dell.

They make pens too

If it is not a default and their open-ended character creation engine allows players to bring to reality envisioned characters, so be it!

I hope they don't realize that paper and pen will let me "design characters that are virtual copies of its own superheros, including 'The Incredible Hulk'.

They might seek unspecified damages against International Paper and Bic.

It's all a question of relative value. You can get profits selling something at a low price, or you can sell a similar item at a high price.

But you must always make sure your customers get the value they expect for the price. For many Linux users, Microsoft Office seems to be either too low-value or too high-price.

sure this site will be /.ed soon....

Oh, and it seems it's spelt "Tipp-Ex", not tipex. Here's the official site.

I have a collection of the classic Bic Cristal ballpoint pens. They've been around for 50 years, are almost indestructable, work on almost any surface, and cost just about nothing. Come in four fancy colours as well.

Maybe biased based on geographical location... anyway, Ballograf ball-points and Staedtler pencils - 2B for drawing, HB for writing and sketching.

Yeah, I have a keyboard and a graphics tablet, but this stuff is still as convenient as ever. Never runs out of batteries.

There is even some kind of superstition. For example, I always carry the blue Staedtler pencils with me. They're always pretty sharp. There's a bunch of green Mitsubishi pencils on my desk. They're never sharp. (Hope their cars are better.) Maybe this has something to do with the general availability of pencil sharpeners though...

Someone else elluded to this point but I wanted to elaborate... where does the $$ start, and where does it stop? Look at global economics. My dollar will go everywhere!

So, I just bought a Bic pen. Blue, medium ball.
The money I used went to Bic, which went toward software licensing for BICWORLD web server which is IIS which is a Microsoft product.

So... MY$$ -> BIC -> MSFT -> Benevolence -> Al Queda -> Terror

Best not spend money. Of course that would ruin the US economy and the terrorists have won. So spend the money to stimulate the economy but then the people in the US will drive their SUVs more...

Nothing left to do. Might as well move to a cave but then your landlord is likely to be a tall guy named Osama. We are screwed!

The morons are using a background containing solid black [lib.oh.us] when essential text on top of it is black.

Looks fine to me, but then I long ago decided that I knew my preferences better than any webmaster and forced my color scheme.

They use a number of different typefaces on pages, creating a non-uniform look, which slows down reading.

Same thing. Looks fine here.

The icons [lib.oh.us] are unintuitive or unclear. What does the icon for local history and genealogy represent? Looks like flying hot dogs to me.

I do agree, but I think that using icons on websites is just annoying anyway. I've never seen an icon at all that I think is a good idea. It's much easier to just have text links (unless you're catering to a non-English audience, perhaps, but this is a local US library). They have the text right next to each icon -- is it *that* hard to tell what's what on that page?

They link to pages that are under construction [lib.oh.us] without indicated that such is the case.

Uh..yeah? So?

From a technical standpoint (unless you have some layer of stuff that preprocesses your static pages), that's a *much* better system. If you update a page, you shouldn't track down every link to said page -- hell, they could be anywhere on the Internet.

I do agree that the fact that they used Tux on an FP site is a bit funny, but what's more likely is that the guy got all of the Tux stuff from a cheapo Web clipart collections (looking for "computer" stuff), and didn't have any idea what it meant. This isn't like the library blew zillions of dollars hiring techies...

They use ALL [lib.oh.us] CAPS [lib.oh.us] for a publication where emphasis can and should be marked in other ways.

The ALL CAPS bit is hardly that egregious. Yes, it's not the ideal mechanism, but the idea is to make a short bit of text clearly stand out and still be readable, which this successfully does. Sure, a professional publisher would get twitchy because it violates some "rules" that are reasonably-well grounded...but big deal. It does the job, which is what matters.

They use single line breaks [lib.oh.us] instead of paragraphs, which makes it very hard to read.

This is true.

It doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that they will never keep static pages like this [lib.oh.us] updated, which will lead to large portions of the site being useless.

True enough. However, from what I can see, this is a library staff doing the work. This is not a company with a budget to hire a bunch of programmers and whatnot. I doubt anyone there has significant scripting knowledge. For the resources available, this is hardly awful.

I think the reason that I'm reluctant to criticize the site is that many sites that are considered "professional" do a far worse job than this one of holding to the spirit of HTML. They use Javascript for regular linking, they force pixel-level layout, they embed Flash bits all over. Going to this site reminded me of lots of mid-90s websites, when people still gave something of a shit about what HTML looks like. You've done a good job of finding issues with the website, and I suppose I'm a bit biased in favor of it. But even so, I wish more websites would look like this again, instead of some "professional" websites.

There's been some improvement. Designers have finally learned that websites should resize, that people don't all have Javascript/cookies/Flash on (and use fallbacks), that users are *not* going to change their resolution to view a website, that hierarchies are good, that images of text (instead of just text) are bad, that massive amounts of tables with tons of links are bad...when the initial move away from simple, HTML-2.0-ish sites started, I wasn't that thrilled, but it's started to come back around.

Som examples of sites that I really don't like (though they're considered "professional" and major sites):

ICQ. There's a lot of, uh, *stuff* on the main page. This "massive amounts of stuff on the main page" motif has survived multiple redesigns.

HotBot. Lots of stuff, ugly color scheme (which appeared after the Wired purchase of HotBot).

Sony. Nobody likes rollover menus.

RCA. Rollover menus from hell.

Kraft. Nonresizeable (and wide), rather bizarre news format (which also limits them to four news items).

BIC (Yeah, the guys that make pens). All the effort of rendering fonts into an image so that you can make a website look unreadable.

Kleenex. When I go here, I want to find out how much lotion is in a given tissue, not look at a bunch of Flash crap.

So here's why I like their website. It renders cleanly in older and text-based browsers. It's fast and small. No Javascript or pop-up menus are present. It doesn't tell you to change your resolution. It provides actual email links (i.e. you don't have to go through a form). It's fairly easy to find what you want, and the immediately useful information (library hours, telephone numbers) are right on the front page.

There are, as you've found, some issues. But I'd far rather read their website than any of the big, "professional", heavily-funded websites that I listed above.

Frankly, the only popular website that I really think has good design any more is Google, which has a team that's fanatically committed to a spartan, light interface. Everyone I talked to said that it looked out of date or old when everyone else was going bigger, flashier, and more bitmapped...and now, look who's on top. :-) People *like* simple, fast web pages, not big monstrosities.

It's true that the guy didn't say Flash, so I probably misread it. I just see the one website in a long time that gets back to the basics, and I see tons of people slamming it...it comes off wrong.

Lemme check out your own website...I'm guessing that we'd differ on some of the things you did as well.

You use frames -- I firmly feel that frames are a bad idea, and after a four year love-hate relationship (i.e. designers loved frames, viewers hated them), they pretty much went away. As such, you have to slap a "this webpage is better with browsers X, Y, and Z at the bottom of your page.

You complained about hard to read icons, yet your own site has a block of six quite unidentifiable icons. Sure, you can run the mouse over them to get the text, but then they partly cover up neighboring icons. So I pretty much end up moving the mouse over an icon, moving it away, moving it onto another one...repeat six times *just* to find out what the links on your site are.

You apparently did the ford.se site, according to your CV. This is Flash only.

You use Javascript for normal links

Your poetry page has a miniscule frame that makes it extremely difficult to read any text.

On the upsite, your site *is* accessable with older browsers, even if it's a little annoying to click through frame-related links.

Everyone has the elements that they find valuable in a website. I rather like theirs. :-)