Wed 07 May 2025

Partially for the sake of my daily doodles, which I've been posting to the Fediverse, and also because I've been learning the Persian alphabet, I recently purchased a small USB pen digitizer, the "One by Wacom," by Wacom (great branding 😄).

For those of you not familiar with digitizers, think of a small iPad, except without the screen. It's just the pen input portion, and you look up at the screen while holding the pen down onto the pad. Is it less intuitive than using an iPad or a USB tablet with its own screen? Yes, it honestly is. But it's not that bad, and it's infinitely better than trying to draw with a mouse, not only because you're holding a small-and-light-pen, rather than a large puck of a mouse, but because mice only track a single point in space, and are not aware of rotation, which really messes with drawing. I know, because I recall trying to turn an ordinary mouse (one with a ball, if you can remember those) into some kind of poor-man's tablet by disabling mouse acceleration and attaching an partially opened paper clip onto the side as a kind of pointer to help trace drawings. I read about it in a magazine when I was a teenager, probably MacWorld. It did help with tracing, but it was still very inaccurate, precisely because the mouse has no way of knowing when it's being (inadvertently) rotated in your hand.

So anyway, I've had a tablet before, and enjoyed using it, so the fact that it's not an iPad (haha) isn't a big detractor to me. I initially tried it with Inkscape and Krita, then relented and used KolourPaint (an MS Paint clone), until I remembered the excellent pen-oriented note-taking application, Xournal++. It's great both for notes and for sketches/doodles, and it's vector-based!

The One by Wacom does have good pressure sensitivity and overall accuracy, as far as I can tell, although I don't believe it has tilt sensitivity, which I don't actually mind.

I got the small size, with a 152x95 mm input area (it's 25.4 mm to an inch, I'm not going to make it any easier on you than that. This is one case where the metric units are incontrovertibly superior, get over it ;)

I do rather wish I had splurged a bit more on the larger device with the 216x135mm input area, but it was more expensive, and I recently found that if you hold it at an angle (by resting it against the front of your laptop, for example), the lip of the device isn't nearly as annoying, and the size is generally fine.

I do have two criticisms of the device, though. One, it's USB Micro.
In 2025.
For 40USD.
Are you kidding me.

Cheap boogers. The second is that while the device has a little cloth tag/loop on the right with the Wacom logo on it on the right, the tag is juuuust too small to fit the pen itself into. I seriously thought the loop was there to hold the pen in a convenient place, but nope, it's just there for (say it with me, boys and squirrels!) — BRANDING!

So, there's absolutely no convenient way to store the device with the pen, let alone the USB Micro cable (which we've all now gotten used to NOT carrying around), so I just pack up the device, pen, and cable into the box it came in, and carry the whole thing in my backpack, like a faux over-sized paperback of disappointment.

Overall, it's still a decent little device, but not exactly affordable, and not nearly as excellent as it could have been with some decent storage options and a USB-C port.

Update

Just FYI, I found that the pen does fit quite nicely in the loop/label. You just to have to insert it blunt/butt-end first, not point-first.

While I've enjoyed using it for the past month, I am looking forward to getting a "yoga"-style laptop with a pen, as the main disadvantage of using an input tablet is that you can't really tilt the tablet to get a more comfortable writing/sketching angle.

100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 26

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Linux Non-religious post