Device mini-review: One by Wacom

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.


100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 26

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


A Toast to the Prolific ones

Tue 06 May 2025

A screencap of the "toast" scene from The Wolf of Wall Street

I wanted to take some time out today to acknowledge some folks on the fediverse that are remarkably prolific, just for fun.

Prolific blogger — Rubenerd

Oh holy moly. This fella has words. Lots of words. Many very fine words. Just look at bro's output for 2024:

~ $ curl -s https://rubenerd …

Category: Life Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Beauty Computing Entertainment Federated Services FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Productivity Social Media Writing

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Why I love Markdown

Fri 11 April 2025

...
...
...
Because it's cool! But first, a brief history of writing in the digital age!

Some History, or: I have ADHD and we're all aboard the unnecessary detail traaaaaainnnn!......

The very first computer I had at home was an Apple ][+ that my mom rented for a computer class in university. The …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Humor Linux Non-religious post Philosophy Productivity Retrocomputing UNIX

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Blog Questions Challenge: Technology Edition

Thu 10 April 2025

I saw this update to the "Blog Questions Challenge" format on jnv's blog, and without reading* it first (in order to not taint my own answers — I will definitely go back and read his), I thought I'd write down some of my own thoughts, for fun.

*I used curl …

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

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Responding to The Linux Cast's Vitriolic Diatribe

Fri 14 February 2025

The Linux Cast is one of my favorite Linux youtubers, as he usually posts very interesting videos and isn't afraid to share his off-the-cuff opinions of things in the Linux world, yet is usually not toxic, unlike some of that space's more infamous members.

He published a slightly ranty …

Category: Humor Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Computing Entertainment Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Humor Non-religious post Polemic Social Media UNIX

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The Case for AVIF

Thu 13 February 2025
Disclaimer: Right off the bat, I am NOT an imaging expert, a compression expert, or really an anything expert. I'm just speaking from my own experiences as a relatively ordinary user of image formats.

When I was a young-un in the early, early 90s, PICT was the day-to-day image format …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Federated Services FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux Non-religious post Philosophy Productivity Retrocomputing Social Media

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Loops is... interesting

Sun 02 February 2025

I, like many, have taken an interest in Daniel Supernault's new Loops video service.

Unlike many, I'm not so much interested in a FOSS, Federated clone of TikTok, YT Shorts, or Vine. I honestly don't care for that kind of media. I don't object to the format (other than …

Category: Entertainment Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Entertainment Federated Services FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Non-religious post Non-technical post Social Media Video

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"Online" documentation should be offline

Thu 30 January 2025

I'm noticing a troubling trend among FOSS projects, even terminal-only utilities: no manpages (or a 1-paragraph useless one), barely any help screens, and a link to a wiki site like a github page or "readthedocs."

The thing is, the whole ethos behind so many terminal utilities is a hearkening back …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload BSD Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) FreeBSD Linux Non-religious post Polemic Productivity UNIX

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