battery, edc, review, gear

Impressions of the Preon P1

I use two Fenix LD20 lights mounted to my handlebars via Twofish Lockblocks as headlights. An old TAD-branded JETBeam Jet 1 MkII is mounted on my helmet. As a result, whenever I have my bike – which is the majority of the time – I have a light. When I’m not around my bike, I tend to be left in the dark. I do carry a Photon Freedom Micro on my keychain, which is a great little device, but no replacement for a hand-held torch. A more substantial light has not been part of my on-body EDC for a few years.

Last month I decided to change that. I wanted to find a small, unobtrusive LED light that I could carry in a pocket. My JETBeam helmet light is powered by a single AA battery. While the height on that light is about right, I felt the diameter was too large for what I had in mind. I decided to look for a light powered by a single AAA. Two options presented themselves: the Maratac AAA Rev 2 and the Foursevens Preon P1. They both have similar specifications and both seem to earn equally positive reviews. The Maratac light is less expensive and features a knurled body, as opposed to the Preon P1’s smooth body, which made me initially favor the Maratac. Unfortunately, both lights are twist-activated. One of my requirements for any light is that it can be activated with one hand. That necessitates a clicky tailcap.

A review of the Preon P1 on ITS presented a solution. The Preon P1 is compatible with pieces from the Preon P2, which is a double-AAA flashlight that does have a clicky tailcap. I could purchase a replacement Preon clicky tailcap and install that on a Preon P1 to get the light I wanted. The Preon P1 and the tailcap cost $45. That’s a lot for a small light, and quite a bit more than the $25 price of the Maratac light, but it would make for a system that fit my requirements. I chose to purchase the Preon.

Preon P1

I have been carrying the Preon P1 for a couple weeks now. At a height of about 3 inches and a diameter just over half an inch, I can clip it in my pocket and completely forget that it is there until I need it, which is exactly what I was looking for. All the various modes of the light can be cycled through by clicking the tailcap, although I don’t particularly care about them – I only use the light with its standard output setting.

The clicky tailcap could be improved. I’m accustomed to tailcaps being inset into the light slightly. The Preon tailcap juts out from the top of the body of the light, which I think increases the chances of it accidentally being clicked on and draining the battery. It also has an amount of free movement in it. The button can be depressed about halfway before it actually hits the clicky part of the mechanism, which makes the button feel a bit loose. I don’t know that this affects the functionality of the tailcap, but it does make it feel cheaper.

Preon P1 (AAA) vs JETBeam Jet1 MkII (AA)

Despite the less-than-perfect tailcap, I’m happy with the light. The runtime isn’t incredible, but that’s acceptable for my use. I intend to use the light only as a backup to those on my bike. When the battery does die, I just throw it in the charger and install another Eneloop. If you’re looking for a small EDC light, the Preon P1 is worth consideration.

micro

The Atlantic has an interesting article on the American manufacturing boom.

They focus on General Electric, who found that moving some manufacturing back to the US has resulted in better and less expensive products.

So a funny thing happened to the GeoSpring on the way from the cheap Chinese factory to the expensive Kentucky factory: The material cost went down. The labor required to make it went down. The quality went up. Even the energy efficiency went up.

battery, micro

I finally purchased a programmable battery charger.

I went with the Maha PowerEx MH-C9000 that I mentioned last year. Since purchasing the charger a couple weeks ago, I’ve been geeking out about batteries. I’ve labelled all of my Eneloops and started a database where I log the purchase date, capacity, and other information. I’ve put the database in git so that I can track the performance of an individual battery over time. The database is on GitHub.

micro, blogroll

Vuurwapen Blog is one of the only firearm-centric blogs that I subscribe to.

Andrew’s reviews and analysis are intelligent and refreshingly concise, particularly when some people feel the need to put out 45-minute videos in order to communicate 3 minutes of content. Unfortunately Vuurwapen Blog will no longer concern guns. Fortunately, Andrew will be writing about firearms at LuckyGunner Labs and Vuurwapen will still be around to focus on other topics.

admin, twitter

Leaving Twitter Behind

The web has been moving more and more towards a centralized structure. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Flickr are all examples of this. To me, it is a disturbing trend. It’s bad for the internet as a whole, and on a more personal level is damaging to individual liberty and freedom. Lately, I’ve been making a stronger effort to forgo these services.

During the year that I took off from blogging, I maintained a steady presence on Twitter. When I decided to relaunch my blog, I knew I wanted to integrate Twitter-like microblogging into the site somehow. Looking over my Twitter history, it was clear that I was predominately using the service for one thing: sharing links. There’s no reason that I couldn’t do that on my blog. In fact, some of the earliest web logs were simply lists of interesting links.

I rarely participate in conversations on Twitter. I find it to be a horrible medium for that. Conversations that begin with microblog posts can be handled with any blog comment software (and I think the resulting experience is much improved over what Twitter can offer). If you use Twitter to contact people and start conversations, a blog probably won’t work for you. (But there’s a great distributed social networking platform out there that you might want to look into. It’s called email.)

Initially I considered adding a new model to vellum for microposts. When I thought about what a micropost is and what I wanted to do with them, I decided that modifying vellum was unnecessary. I’ve seen some people claim that microposts don’t have titles, but I think that’s incorrect: the primary content is the title. In addition to the title, the micropost needs a place to include the URL that is being shared. Why not just put that in the post body? The URL can simply be pasted into the field, ala Twitter, or included as an anchor tag contained within a new sentence. All that I needed was to uniquely style the microposts.

I decided to place all microposts in a new micro category. Posts in that category are then styled differently. This allows the user to quickly differentiate these short microposts from the more traditional, long-form articles. It also helps to represent the relationship of the title and the rest of the post.

With this in place, I no longer had a need for Twitter, but I still wanted to feed all of my posts into the service. I know some people use Twitter as a sort of weird feed reader, and I have no problem pumping a copy of my data into centralized services. As it turns out, there are a number of services out there that will monitor a feed and post the results to services like Twitter. I started out with FeedBurner, but this seemed like overkill as I had no intention of utilizing the other FeedBurner offerings (giving up control of the namespace of your feed is another instance of the craziness associated with the move to a centralized web). After some brief experimentation, I settled on dlvr.it.

This accomplishes everything that I was looking for. All of my blog posts, micro or not, are now on my blog (fancy that). I retain ownership and control of all my data. Everything is archived and searchable. I’m not depending on some fickle, centralized service to shorten the links that I’m trying to share. People who want to follow my updates can subscribe to my feed in their feed reader of choice. My activity can still be followed in Twitter, but I don’t have any active participation in that service.

I’ve found that not attempting to restrain myself to a character limit is like a breath of fresh air. Previously I was able to share links only. There was little-to-no space left over for commentary. Now I can include my thoughts about the link being shared, whether it be a book that I’m reading or a news article that piques my interest. This is more satisfying to me, and I think results in a more meaningful experience for those who are interested in my thoughts.

Since moving to this system, I’ve only launched my Twitter client two or three times. I’ve found that I don’t miss the stream. I never followed too many people on Twitter. Many of those whom I did follow maintain some sort of blog with a feed that I subscribe to. Some don’t. That’s unfortunate, but if your online presence exists solely within a walled garden, I’m ok with not following you.

micro, run, footwear

The wear pattern on my running shoes indicates good form.

The ball area is worn down to a far greater degree than the heel, which demonstrates that the shoes are not inhibiting my natural form.

Running Shoe Wear Pattern

micro, books

Currently reading Escape the Wolf by Clint Emerson.

The book is in a similar vein as Gavin de Becker’s The Gift Of Fear (a book I strongly recommend), but with more acronyms and typos. Clint Emerson focuses on external awareness more than the internal awareness discussed by de Becker. There are some good tidbits in it, but overall I would award the book a “meh” rating.

micro, gear, blogroll

I've had a critical opinion of soft-shells for a number of years.

While I still maintain that their versatility and environmental appropriatedness is limited, I have been coming around to their use a bit more over the past year or so. I have a pair of pants that I am quite smitten with and have been considering giving a jacket another shot. Over at Cold Thistle, Dane Burns recently completed a series comparing different soft-shell jackets and their appropriateness for climbing. Now he has published a selection of reader comments that were elicited by the reviews.