Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/20/this-paper-notebook-is-complet.html
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i love pencil and paper myself but, really? $22.99 for a spiral? is this a parody of craft culture?
But you can microwave it!!! Doesn’t that excite you?
No, me neither.
The BoingBoing shop mystifies me.
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I use Frixion pens for notes and thinking since it is easy to write with them while being erasable. I would use this app if it existed without a need to buy an expensive pad of paper. But I didn’t realize the microwave thing and it reminds me of how faxes on thermal paper would fade into nothingness after some time, which was disconcerting back then. Is Frixion ink unstable and prone to the same thing? Personally I like to think I would scan my stuff in, but realistically I have various notebooks, pads and loose papers from taking notes in meetings or on the train, all written in Frixion.
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Since I didn’t knew about Frixion before this article, I simply did a web search.
They are erasable because their ink breaks down around 60°C, a temperature which can be reached by friction.
Personally, I find the “You save paper!” almost morally reprehensible. It’s not like people use up a notebook a week. Any newspaper subscription or glossy magazine purchase is worth. Not even considering the cost of keeping your stuff in the cloud, which is definitely there.
And practically? I have no use for a notebook which can take only one kind of ink, even if there are multiple colors. I do most of my stuff electronically, especially short notes, but when I do sketch a design on paper, there are usually two or more writing tools involved, like regular ink, highlighter ink, and pencils. Especially when I use an app to track the progress of my work, so I can make an animation out of it or visualize the progress of time in a workflow.
What do they off-gas in breaking down, that’s much more interesting to me. I’m not aware of a lot of inks that I’d want waste products from… floating around in my microwave.
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A solution in hot pursuit of a problem.
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Oh, it was the PAPER that I was supposed to put in the microwave. Well, at least the companion app was erased successfully.
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I’m off Frixion pens. Used them for a while… until I found out that the erasing works by temperature the hard way. By laminating a sketch I wanted to preserve.
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Good point. Though I guess one could either an iron or a hairdryer.
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If you still have the sketch try putting it in the freezer. I am sure there is a temperature of no return but you can get erased frixxion notes back by cooling.
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As it is safe to microwave, this will greatly help Kellyanne Conway to take pictures of it
The various machine vision patterns are technologically kind of cool(there have been a few over the years, designed to make large areas of paper uniquely identifiable without being obtrusive; an interesting design challenge generally squandered by being proprietary and supported only by a tiny, mediocre, ecosystem); but I find the focus on erasability sort of baffling.
The ability to erase is handy because you’ll probably make some mistakes while writing; but isn’t one of paper’s great charms the fact that you can get substantial durability for almost nothing and archival durability at relatively low cost?
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My opinion now is the same as when it first came out a few years ago, which is to say “Meh”.
For the following reasons
- Paper is 100% recyclable
- I don’t need a special app to decipher which icon I’ve checked. I already know where I want to send it and can choose appropriately.
- As others have noted, the inability to use other writing instruments is a huge downside.
- It doesn’t last forever, so I’ll be shelling out another chunk of change to replace the notepad soon enough.
So, yeah, um, no, stupid idea, solution in search of a problem.
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I mean, is using up an eraser such a big issue that people would need to resort to a microwavable notebook?
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It’s for your second set of books out in the container office. You keep them in the microwave on a switch that gets tripped if there’s unauthorized entry.
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It is like Alex Jones shop but for Marxists.
Bringing taint wipes to the comrades!
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That’s actually an idea to be thought through.
I’m somewhat sceptical that an Everlast notebook’s content can be erased completely and permanently, as the post by @Tibune suggests a method for restoring Fixion pen writing.
But: how about treating the paper of any commercially available notebook in a way that it is the very opposite of microwave safe, and use the microwave as a burn box? Add an UPS, keep the microwave on a switch that gets triggered by the burglar alarm and can also be triggered remotely.
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Sounds incredibly complicated. 
I have successfully restored frixion writing using electronics freezer spray.
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