Instead of, you know, a screwdriver.
On the plus side, I have most of the tools I’d need for an exciting career in dentistry on Isla Nublar.
A couple years ago I scraped all of the pressure cooking time tables from Hip Pressure Cooking into CSV files for storage in my exocortex. For things I cook regularly, I keep my own notes on preferred times, water ratios, etc. But when cooking something new, I find that having an easily greppable, offline database of guidelines is invaluable. Today I moved the CSV files out of my private notes annex and published them as their own git repository.
I’ve previously mentioned my fondness for Rudy Rydon eyewear (particularly with the photochromic laser red lenses). One of the benefits of the Rydons is the adjustability of the temples and the nose pad, which allow for a secure, custom fit. This makes added retention via a strap unnecessary for securing the Rydons on the face, yet I’ve come to appreciate having a retainer attached simply because it allows me to drop the eyewear around my neck when I don’t need it. This offers more security than pushing them up onto the crown of my head or hanging them over the edge of my shirt or pocket, without requiring the hassle of putting them away in a pack.
For this application I’ve come to like the Cablz Zipz Adjustable Eyewear Retainer. I use the 12 inch version. These are made of a coated, stainless steel wire. When you’re wearing the eyewear, the wire sits up off the neck so you don’t feel the retainer at all. When you’re hanging it around your neck, it is thin and light enough that you soon forget it is there (this is also a result of the lightness of the Rydons, of course). The zip allows the length of the retainer to adjust from about 6 inches to 12 inches. At the smallest setting this keeps the Rydons tight on my face, but since that is not what I’m looking for I keep it adjusted about half way. At roughly 9 inches in length, I find that I can easily don and doff the eyewear, and that they sit at a comfortable position on my chest when I’m hanging them around my neck. The “universal” silicon ends of the retainer grab securely on the Rydon temples.
Cablz isn’t the only company to offer this style of retainer.
The Croakies ARC Endless is the same basic idea. I bought one to try out, but found it to be inferior. The silicon ends are significantly thicker and less comfortable behind the ear. I could bend the Rydon temples to account for this extra thickness, but I appreciate that the Cablz retainer requires no adjustment of the eyewear. With the Croakies, the pieces you grab to tighten the retainer are quite small. You’re adjusting the retainer blind by reaching behind your head, so the haptics are important. I found the Croakies difficult to use when wearing gloves. The Cablz adjustment pieces are large enough to be easy to use whether gloved or gloveless.
The equivalent from Chums is the Adjustable Orbiter. It only adjusts from 10 inches to 15.5 inches, which is too large for my needs, so I didn’t buy one to try.
I recommend the retainer from Cablz. It provides a simple but helpful augmentation to my eyeball protection system.
My ThinkPad X260 is entering its sixth year of service. Last year I preemptively replaced the SSD. A few months later I replaced the keyboard after noticing that the space bar would sometimes fail to register. I’ve had no other problems with the machine.
Last month I bought a used-but-basically new ThinkPad X270 for a ridiculously low price on eBay. The X270 was released in 2017, a year after the X260. Both models are basically identical but for the addition of a USB-C port on the X270. The presence or absence of USB-C has no practical impact on my life today, but it seems like a thing that I may grow to appreciate in the future.1
My plan for the X270 is to put it in storage with my old ThinkPad T430s. I’m excited to have a backup machine that is almost identical to my daily driver. If the X260 ever develops a problem, I can pop the SSD out of it, move it to the X270, and continue on with my life. While the T430s is still a great machine that is perfectly capable of doing everything I need a computer to do, switching back to it would be much more disruptive due to its different form factor and power setup. The T430s is now a backup to my backup.
The X260 and X270 both represent Peak Laptop to me. Not because I can’t imagine ways to make them better, but because, since their release, no laptop manufacturer (including Lenovo) seems to have been able to release anything as good, much less better. These machines are everything I need a laptop to be, and I’ve yet to feel limited by their performance. While the X260 shows no signs of its age, I’m happy to have the X270 staged for transition if it ever becomes necessary. Perhaps in another five or ten years the industry will have figured out how to improve on these machines and I’ll feel a desire to upgrade. Until then I’m done buying new laptops.
The X270 came with two 6-cell batteries. Combined with my existing batteries, I believe my collection is now complete. The original battery from 2016 is still healthy, which I think can be largely attributed to TLP’s battery charge thresholds.
I purchased a pair of Zensah Compression Leg Sleeves in 2008 after reading about them at MilitaryMorons. This was when minimalist running was beginning to take off – Born to Run was published the following year – and I found that the sleeves ended up being a valuable part of my transition to less supportive footwear.
The story I was sold in various wilderness medicine courses was that compression aided recovery because it constricted the blood vessels, raising the percentage of oxygen delivered to the area, which in turn speeds muscle regrowth. I understand there is some debate about whether this explanation is accurate but, whatever the reason for it, there seems to be no debate that compression aids recovery and performance.
I still use my 12 year old pair of Zensah sleeves. They’re not a piece of equipment I reach for frequently, but they’re invaluable when I do use them. If I’ve been pushing myself on runs – or, in the Before Times, if I had a hard training session at the boxing gym – there’s nothing better than the immediate comfort I get when sliding them on. Because I don’t use them often, sometimes I’ll forgot that they’re buried in the bottom of my sock drawer and I’ll go a couple days with discomfort in my calves that I can’t get out with a roller or massage ball.
Prior to buying the Zensah sleeves, I would occasionally accomplish the same thing with 3M Vetrap. It works, and is worth having around for splinting (the self-adhesive property makes it superior to the classic ACE elastic bandage), but wrapping and getting the tension just-so is more of a hassle than just sliding on the sleeves. Vetrap is also not as comfortable as Zensah’s material, which is both breathable and moisture wicking.
I’m not sure how one is expected to use a computer without the ability to view and manipulate the file system. For the past few years I’ve solved this problem with Amaze File Manager which is a simple, open source file manager that in a world of sane defaults would be entirely unremarkable.
The story concerns a police detective, his yakuza brother, and their series of poor life choices. Everything about it is very well done. The show is described as “cancelled”, but the first season is a complete story and, as excellent as it is, I think continuing with the characters in a second season would only lessen the experience of the first.
