Nicola Dale works from 'Not so firm as faded ink' and other things.
http://www.nicoladale.com/not-so-firm-as-faded-ink.html

The Ink Spots!

Nothing beats blasting a bandit in the face with a powerfist when the Ink Spots are playing.

From teh Interwebs in case you're thinking the octopus is being abused:

SEATTLE (Reuters) - A giant male octopus caught on cell phone video scaling his glass display tank at the Seattle Aquarium and reaching several tentacles over its open top has sparked Internet speculation that the massive mollusk was trying to mount an escape bid.

But aquarium officials say the octopus, named Ink, was not attempting a jailbreak in the video, which has gone viral on the Internet, but simply learning to embrace his new home with all eight arms.

"It was not an escape attempt," aquarium spokesman Tim Kuniholm said of the video, in which Ink inched his way up the cylindrical glass tank to squeals from onlookers. "It's a new exhibit and the animal was exploring his boundaries."

A Seattle aquarium employee later put Ink's arms back inside the case, and a so-called "evening cap" was fastened on top to help keep the curious fellow in place, Kuniholm said.

"Octopuses are very inquisitive by nature, and in this case ... Ink is an overachiever," he said.

Ink is one of two new giant Pacific octopuses on display at the aquarium. Found in Puget Sound, they are the world's largest species of octopuses, weighing on average about 90 pounds (41 kg) and measuring 20 feet (6.1 meters) across.

Kuniholm said the two male octopuses are kept in separate homes at the aquarium because the species is solitary by nature, with males and females coming together only to mate during their short 3-to-4-year lifespan.

In the next year, Ink will be released back into the wild as part of an ongoing education and conservation program for the species, the aquarium said.

(Reporting by Victoria Cavaliere; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Sandra Maler)

Hours? Just scribble over the permanent ink with a regular whiteboard marker and it comes off.

Within a couple weeks, I expect the kids who made this video to be tracked down and lynched by a mob of rampaging janitors from around the world driven mad by hours of scrubbing permanent ink off whiteboards.

Their leader will be the quiet sort, no one ever would have expected to crack, except he worked at a school where the dean was a militant feminist and the kids didn't have the artistic chops to manage a cat so just put whiskers on a dick.

In the end, though, it all might have been worth it.

What they're showing certainly is ridiculous, but I'd be pretty happy with a monochrome green projection. That said, in all likelihood some sort of flexible OLED patch or wrist band would probably be practical long before this is. Probably even some sort of fluorescing tattoo.

I do like the possibilities of short throw pico projectors combined with machine vision for user interfaces though. You could take Newtboy's dual projector concept and have something the size of a couple marker pens that unrolls like a scroll, with the screen in the middle.

When it comes down to it, though, what I really want right now is something about the size of a smartphone, with minimized thickness an e-ink display and a limited feature set (phone, text, e-mail, and basic web surfing), the whole design optimized for battery life and performing just those four functions adequately. An easily replaceable battery would be nice too.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

From the little I know, the intent is to penetrate to about the middle of the outer skin layer, below the layers that shed but not so deep you can't see the ink anymore. It's a fine line.
There is degradation of the image from skin shedding, worse from sunburns, but for normal people it's not so bad that the image erases, only lightens and 'spreads' so it's not as crisp. At least that's what I've heard and seen from friends I know with many tattoos and from watching TV shows and reading books about it, I have none myself.

so someone school me.

Those needles don't look like they're penetrating much at all. how come all that ink doesn't wear away when we inevitably shed skin cells either through sunburns or just the passage of time?

What I got from this discussion is, this font could save ink-usage but won't save any trees.

Too bad he didn't use his Ryman Eco font on his arms and save some ink there.

The tank mods are added by retailers and print shops. You're right about how the system works -- the lines run from the big tanks and are inserted through a hole drilled into the carts small reservoir.

One issue with that is that most cartridges have a software page count that is used to tell you that the ink is running low / empty after a certain number of prints. So, along with the tank install, most shops will put in an aftermarket chip or PCB that resets or bypasses that counter.

For the other question, I think that Thailand still relies on printed documents more than in the US, but it is going down. I undoubtedly have a somewhat skewed opinion on things since I am a teacher, though. I teach 18 different classes of roughly 40 kids once a week, with a worksheet or some other printout being used nearly every week -- so I probably burn 700+ pages each week through my school's copy machines. Then I teach smaller private classes at home, with maybe 100 or so pages a week on my own printer(s). I have one inkjet with those tanks installed, 2 mono lasers, and 1 color laser... So yeah, I probably am a much heavier user of printed stuff than your average person.

I think I'd have to see it in actual printed form to judge the readability accurately.

BUT, in terms of readability on a display, like the 40" 1920x1080 LCD I'm watching on ... it is quite poor in my opinion. I have a feeling that it would work much better in ink on paper.

33% ink savings sounds pretty good, assuming that the readability on paper is better than a display. That being said, encouraging printer manufacturers to have a more sane approach to refillable ink/toner reservoirs would have a better/bigger impact.

Here in Thailand, where respect for patents / IP is low, (SE Asia is notorious for fake manufactured goods, pirated "soft" media, and hardware hacks / bypasses) I'd guess that around 90% of inkjet printers sold have a tank system glued onto the side with ink lines running into the cartridges from big CYMK reservoirs. I never buy new cartridges unless the print head gets damaged/worn out -- instead, I just buy cheap LARGE bottles of the different ink colors and refill the reservoirs. (Image link of such a setup HERE)

That kind of mod would be a gray or black-market item in the West, but here the laissez-faire attitude about such things has some positive effects. At least, for a consumer (like me), or someone concerned about the environmental impact of all the waste packaging for ink carts (like the dude in this video).

My point is that when people print photographs, or pages with large graphics, this font is saving 0% of 90% page coverage. So my logic is that his contribution to saving actual ink is very small. Plus most of the ink I lose (personally) is because the cartridge dries out over time.

Besides that, the font ONLY makes sense on a printed page, where it looks like a normal font after ink bleeding, etc. On screen, it looks like shit. And can't take advantage of sub-pixel-font-rendering employed by every modern OS on LCD displays.