Category: Consumerism

Essential shopping at the gun store

by philg

A friend here in Maskachusetts texted us regarding his latest trip to an essential business that remains legal to operate: “No employees in gun store wearing mask.” A bit later: “At another gun store. Also no masks. Cop in here also with no mask.”

An exchange ensued regarding why an excursion was worth the Covid-19 risk:

  • Me: You’re in a gun store because you don’t already have enough guns? How many guns do you think you have at this point?
  • Him: Over 400. My Glocks are getting out of date.
  • Me: Are there actually significant improvements?
  • Him: These are 1/4 inch slimmer.
  • Second friend: Everyone is moving to red dot sights on pistols.
  • Third friend: No, the pistols themselves are stagnant if not possibly retrograde, but the improvements have been in aiming them.
  • Him: These are 3-4 oz lighter than the previous alternative. But [Third friend] is right in that a Glock from 1988 is 98 percent as good as new one.

Separately, what will happen to all of the guns that Americans bought during the BLM protests? There were a lot of first-time gun owners who aren’t committed to maintaining proficiency at the range, cleaning the weapons, etc. Will there be a public health emergency of misfires a few years from now as these guns sit?

Firearms advice from our next president (however briefly he may serve):

(my friends above beg to differ; “Best home defense is 6 inch 300 BLK SBR with 30 round mag with silencer and Aimpoint.” What about Biden’s idea of a double-barreled shotgun? “Those are for clay shooting. No one uses those for home defense. They are for shooting small birds so have 22-inch barrels. And if you saw it off, it is life in prison.”)

Full post, including comments

Fanny pack sales will get a boost from coronapanic?

by philg

Americans have spent months at home, lounging in sweats and stretchy shorts while watching television and/or playing with their phones. Our heroes get off the sofa only for periodic dives into the fridge for waist-expanding calories.

Will we be able to tolerate the discomfort of ordinary pants and belts ever again? If not, how will we carry wallets, keys, and phones? Running pants aren’t adapted for this application. Enter… the fanny pack!

Readers: Will there be a fanny pack (or “waist pack”) boom as soon as we have some need to leave our houses?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Impeller-based top-load high-efficiency washing machines?

by philg

Another day, another appliance failure. It is time to replace a washing machine. The space into which this slots is kind of tight, so it would be good to stay within the 27×27″ footprint that was formerly standard before (a) Americans got bigger, and (b) laundry machines got bigger via front load designs.

There are some top loading machines that still fit the old footprint. Supposedly the latest and greatest are impeller-based and don’t have the agitator spindle in the middle. This is an attractive idea, at least, since it would seem to be better for loading in bulky sheets, towels, etc., and not having them get tangled around the agitator. On the other hand, there are a lot of negative reviews of these machines online.

The dryer duct in our apartment is long and windy, thus making the dryer somewhat inefficient. The higher spin speed of the impeller-based machines is therefore attractive.

Does anyone have experience with this new breed of impeller-based top-loading washing machines? The ones that would seem to fit the space best are from Maytag and GE.

How about front loader versus these new-design top loaders?

Related:

Unrelated: a backhoe and/or laundry service in Anguilla, from 2002…

Full post, including comments

Why aren’t there good fish tank cameras? (underwater in the aquarium)

by philg

Public aquariums have webcams, e.g., from the Georgia Aquarium (funded by Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus and reopened, unlike our aquarium here in Boston).

What about for hobbyists? We should be able to buy a product that goes into the tank, gets power from a USB-C cable, and transmits video back up the cable to a wall wart that then pushes the video up to a server or at least a local computer. This is basically the same hardware as in an $85 Ring Stick Up camera, right, but cracked into a couple of pieces and a little more waterproofed?

Why doesn’t this product exist? Why can’t our fish “go live” on Facebook without a lot of custom engineering?

(And, no, it wouldn’t be acceptable to have a camera on the outside of the tank due to algae growth. Nor is it easy to find that kind of product already packaged up!)

(above: Atlanta’s Georgia Aquarium)

Related:

Full post, including comments

What home security cameras for impending collapse of Massachusetts?

by philg

Governor Baker has now announced that schools in Massachusetts will be closed through June (i.e., until September). There was a hint at the briefing that businesses would also be ordered closed through June in that the order to close daycare for non-essential workers would be closed through June was explained with”to align reopening of child care with the reopening of businesses.”

We have friends who say that Massachusetts has a reasonable chance of descending into looting, home invasions, ATM kidnappings, etc. They’re not very tech-savvy, but they want some outdoor home security cameras that will at least discourage the roaming criminal gangs. What’s a good solution to secure the four corners of a suburban house? It has to be something easy for non-technical people to set up themselves. (And do cameras actually discourage criminals enough to motivate them to move to the next house that doesn’t have them?)

(Are their fears justified? There are a lot of programs for government hand-outs, but the free cash is limited to people who are great at filling out paperwork. That could leave a substantial portion of the population in desperate straits. Venezuela went from pleasant to lawless after a severe economic downturn. Why not the U.S.? I guess that is why everyone was buying guns and ammo until the gun shops ran out.)

Related:

  • Wirecutter recommends the Google Nest Outdoor Security Camera, but it doesn’t seem like it is intended for people who want to cover the entire perimeter of a suburban house (more like monitor the front door and driveway)
Full post, including comments

Tokyo Olympics 2020 T-shirts will be discounted or valuable collector’s items?

by philg

Tokyo 2020 has fallen victim to coronavirus. What happens to all of the T-shirts and other gear printed with “Tokyo 2020”? Will these be valuable collector’s items for those with a black sense of humor? Or discounted and/or shredded in favor of “Tokyo 2020 in 2021” (they’re still trying to call it “Tokyo 2020”?)?

Full post, including comments

Our new $1,300 three-hour Bosch dishwasher

by philg

We replaced a noisy 2010-vintage dishwasher with a brand-new $1,300 Bosch that got top ratings in Consumer Reports. The first installer showed up, pulled the old one out, and declared that the Bosch would never fit due to having a “closed frame” rather than the standard “open frame.” He drove back to the Best Buy warehouse and was never heard from again. I made a few measurements and checked the Bosch installation guide, but I couldn’t figure out exactly why there was an incompatibility.

I assumed that eventually Best Buy would refund our money, but that hadn’t happened after more than a month. I decided to call them up. “We were waiting for you to schedule a redelivery,” the agent said, apparently unaware that the Bosch would never fit under our counter. We agreed on a date. The second installer showed up and, without commenting on any particular challenge, hooked up the new dishwasher. Adventures in American consumerism!

The machine works reasonably well and is nearly silent, but it holds fewer dishes than the old machine and defaults to a three-hour (!) cycle time. A Whirlpool from 1996 was much faster and also better at cleaning. The new machine sometimes leaves things stuck onto spoons, etc.

“Let’s Talk about Ghastly Dishwashers” says dishwashers meeting a 2013 standard use only three(!) gallons of water. (The article also says “Trump is a smart politician” so maybe we should verify the rest of the claims?)

We end up doing about three loads per day, so I’m not sure that we’re saving water or electricity.

Separately, I think it is interesting that, in a society that is otherwise uninterested in quantitative noise measurements, dishwashers are prominently advertised with dBA ratings (40 dBA for the Bosch). If people want to know how many dBA for a $600 dishwasher, why don’t they want to know the dBA for the interior of an aircraft or automobile?

Full post, including comments

Feel better about the time you’ve invested in writing documentation

by philg

During a recent rental car excursion I became curious about the USB-C port in the front of the Nissan Maxima. Could one run a laptop from the car, for example? I decided to open the glovebox and read the specs from the owner’s manual. After one year and more than 20,000 miles of rental by perhaps 100 different drivers…

(still in its shrink wrap)

Full post, including comments

Best Christmas gift ideas?

by philg

Who has good Christmas shopping ideas?

The most impressive book that I’ve seen, and one of the few that is a good argument for print, is a 1200-page Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals.

For the man who isn’t woke enough for Gillette and wants a higher-quality shave: Dorco Pace 7 razor. (see my comparison test)

For the nerd who has everything… and wants to back it up, a 16 TB hard drive (just recently available; progress in this area has been slow).

USB-C charger made compact thanks to GaN. (or for the car, since the car companies seem to be years behind on USB-C; or a power strip). Everything will charge much faster!

If the TBM is too slow and its payload too feeble: the newly certified Epic turboprop.

Readers: What are your ideas?

Full post, including comments

Loving the iPhone 11 Pro Max camera; struggling with the case

by philg

I finally managed to carve out 20 minutes to go over to the Verizon store and swap my iPhone X for an iPhone 11 Pro Max (20 minutes turned into more than one hour thanks to Verizon’s 9 Mbit in-store WiFi).

I’m in love with the camera so far. Here are a couple of challenging scenes with the standard camera…

(mostly backlit; note the bearded hipster behind the 3-month-old Corgi)
(tough job watching Head of the Charles)

Verizon sold me a Gear4 Battersea case. It might be tough, but it makes the already huge phone a little too big for a blue jeans pocket. The case buttons are super stiff and make it tough to turn the phone off from the top side button. An Amazon reader says “after using it for a week I noticed that it has extremely scratched up all four sides of my iPhone”. It is so rigid that I am skeptical that it would protect the screen from shock in the event of a drop. The soft silicone cases seem much more likely to be helpful for a drop on concrete. One good feature: The case is thick enough to keep the lenses of the cameras off whatever surface the phone is resting on.

Readers: Do you carry an iPhone 11 Pro Max in a front pocket? If so, what case works well? What about the Apple silicone case? The Verizon sales guy scared me off by saying that it lacked a bezel to protect the screen from a face-down drop.

Full post, including comments