Whiteboard Pen Magazines are Useful
Glue your colored whiteboard makers together with duck tape to create a whiteboard pen magazine. If required glue a paper layer around the duck tape to make it non-sticky to the touch. Mark which side is up with an arrow, such that you can always <hold it/pick it up> in the same way.
This more than doubled my color-switching speed, fits in my pocket, and takes <5m to make.
It lasts: When a pen is empty just insert a new one. No need to create another magazine. No signs of degradation after multiple hundred unholstering-holstering cycles in total.
FUUU 754 Standard: I am using RFC2119. The magazine MUST be vertically stacked (like shown in the pictures). The magazine SCHOULD have a visual mark, that is clearly visible when the magazine lays on a flat surface, to indicate the top side of the magazine (like shown in the first picture). There MUST NOT be two or more pens of the same color. It MUST have at least the following colored pens: Black, Red, Green, Blue. Imagine you hold the magazine, top side up, in your left hand in front (like in the below picture). Now from top to bottom the first 4 color pens MUST be: Black, Red, Green, Blue, and the remaining color pens SCHOULD be ordered after hue in HSL and HSV. This ensures that you can index into the magazine blindfolded. For example:
In this case I have orange and purple as additional color pens. The magazine SCHOULD not exceed 13cm (~5″) in length along the stacking dimension, such that it still fits in a large pocket.
Note how any magazine with at least four pen caps can be converted to conform to FUUU 754, as the colors of the caps is irrelevant to this standard.
FUUU 754 extensions M and S:
Additionally the highly recommended M extension requires the magazine to have enough magets attached to the backside such that the magazine can be securely attached upright (pen tips facing down):
It is strongly reccomended to store the magazine upright such that ink flows to the tip, ensuring the pens are ready to write immediately, even when the pen is almost emtpy.
The S extension requires that a single small whiteboard marker is attached to the side. This makes it easy to draw small lines, e.g. for annotations:
Little did they know that he was also known as the fastest whiteboard-marker switcher in the west...
Update History
2024-10-14 Added the “FUUU 754 extensions M and S” section.
I liked this post so much that I made my own better Lesser Scribing Artifact and I’m preparing a post meant to highlight the differences between my standard and yours. Cheers!
The OCD in me objects to the colors not being in chromatic order. On the other hand, if you wanted to maximize visual contrast between adjacent colors, then a sensible order would be black, red, green, purple, orange, blue.
The idea of having a consistent arrangement is that you don’t need to look at your pens to know which one to pull. The ordering is simply such that if somebody copies this idea, then I can visit their house and use their magazine, without looking, in case I forgot mine. Probably low probability.
It’s probably easier to get a consistent arrangement when you don’t chose the arrangement randomly but follow some heuristic like chromatic order or visual contrast. Proposing to standardize something in a supoptimal has less change of success and you end up with a worse standard.
That’s a good point. You are right. I learned something about how to write a good standardisation. Nice!
I think it makes sense to have Black Red Green Blue because of RGB and these are the most common. But after that sorting after hue value make sense.
I updated the OP to use HSL and HSV.