Category: gadgetry.

castle frostbite. gadgetry. technology. writing.

how do you say “feng shui” in danish?

Three of the most dangerous words in the English language: “Legitimate tax write-off.”

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We took some time to redo the office in the back of the house last weekend.

I’ve been using the standing desk I got at the Borders going-out-of-business fire sale two and a half years ago, and it works just fine as a computer workstation, but it’s not the best work desk, at least not for my purposes. I write longhand a lot and then transcribe into the computer, so I need quite a bit of elbow room. In the past, that meant I had to do a lot of moving around between two different desks, one for handwriting and one for computer stuff.

Well, thanks to amazing Danish office technology, now I can do both at the same desk. I got an adjustable standing desk from ErgoDepot. It has a lot of working surface (it’s an L-shaped table top that’s roughly six by four feet on the long sides), and it moves up and down at the push of a button via electric motor. You can move it as low as 25″ and as high as 47″. Now I can set the desk to fit the task at hand, not the other way around.

And man, just look at that thing, with the spotlights above lighting up the work surface. It looks like it’s straight out of a goddamn IKEA catalog*. It looks like the space of a hip, professional writer dude who totally knows what he’s doing. In other words, the space of someone who isn’t me. But think about how much easier it will be for me to fake competence now.

*It’s not Ikea. I know this because the instructions were crystal-clear and it only took me twenty minutes to put the thing together.

 

 

gadgetry. masters and servants. wicked sharp.

*snikt*

benchmade

Back from the shop: my well-worn Benchmade 2550 automatic folder.

A few months ago, the automatic opening feature turned itself off by way of the mainspring snapping in half. Due to the stupid-ass federal law on shipping switchblades across state lines, I couldn’t send it back to Benchmade to get fixed, so I tossed it into a drawer and forgot about it for a while. Then I mentioned it on Facebook one day, and thanks to reader and new friend Michael (who is a police officer and thereby authorized by Federal law to receive such dangerous contraband in the mail), the 2550 has been serviced and returned to my (entirely legal) possession.

The switchblade law is an example of what happens when people who don’t know anything about a subject craft a law on it, with only newspapers and movies as a source for information. The Switchblade Knife Act of 1958 was the result of some hand-wringing hysteria on the part of suburbanites who thought that “Blackboard Jungle” and “Rebel Without A Cause” were documentaries.

The following is from the Wikipedia entry on switchblades:

In 1950, an article titled The Toy That Kills appeared in the Women’s Home Companion, a widely read U.S. periodical of the day. The article sparked a storm of controversy and a nationwide campaign that would eventually result in state and federal laws criminalizing the importation, sale, and possession of automatic-opening knives. In the article, author Jack Harrison Pollack assured the reader that the growing switchblade “menace” could have deadly consequence “as any crook can tell you”.[17] Pollack, a former aide to Democratic Senator Harley M. Kilgore and a ghostwriter for then-Senator Harry S. Truman, had authored a series of magazine articles calling for new laws to address a variety of social ills. In The Toy That Kills, Pollack wrote that the switchblade was “Designed for violence, deadly as a revolver – that’s the switchblade, the ‘toy’ youngsters all over the country are taking up as a fad. Press the button on this new version of the pocketknife and the blade darts out like a snake’s tongue. Action against this killer should be taken now”.[

The state laws on knives are as byzantine as the state laws on firearms. A knife that’s legal for me in my home state to own and carry would make me an instant felon, were I to cross the border into MA with it and get pulled over and frisked. For some reason, I can be trusted to walk around in New Hampshire with a switchblade or a locking folder, but residents of Massachusetts would turn into homicidal delinquents if they did the same. And while NH has no restrictions of any sort on knife carry, the Federal act makes it illegal for switchblades to be shipped across a state line to anyone but a licensed dealer, police, or military.

I don’t blame Benchmade–they’re just following the pointless law. For what it’s worth, Benchmade service is really good. They fixed the spring, bent the pocket clip back into shape, and re-sharpened the knife, all at no cost save shipping. But it’s ludicrous that they can’t ship my own knife back to me directly, despite the fact that it’s 100% legal to own and carry in my home state, just because a bunch of stogie-smoking old white dudes got their bloomers in a wad after watching “West Side Story”.

 

castle frostbite. gadgetry. technology.

beams of light.

Castle Frostbite just got a major Internet upgrade:

fiberspeed

 

I opted for the 50Mbps down/25Mbps up package, and as you can see, Speedtest says we’re getting pretty close to that. Our DSL line was 1.5Mbps down/0.75Mbps up, so this is a significant jump in bandwidth.

And look at that latency. It’s a thing of beauty.

gadgetry.

carputer.

I used a dedicated Magellan car GPS in the Grand Caravan (a.k.a. Frostbite One) for years, until I got a new iPhone and found that it made a better GPS than the dedicated unit. That worked pretty well for a while, until I upgraded my iPad mini to a 3G/LTE version and figured that a 7.9″ screen would make an even better GPS.

And boy howdy, does it ever.

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Let me tell you that an iPad mini with a cellular data connection makes a ridiculously useful car computer. I use the iOttie dashboard mount, which is rock-solid. Most of the time, the iPad is in GPS mode via the MotionX GPS app. (Safety disclaimer: I only use the screen for navigation purposes and to switch music while I’m driving, not to browse the Intertubes or do Facebook updates at 65MPH on I-89.)

Other things I can do in the car now: stream Pandora to the car stereo, listen to my iTunes music or audiobooks, use the iPad as a dash cam via the rear-facing camera, look up stuff online (only while standing still,  see above disclaimer), and basically do everything else I usually do on the iPhone, albeit on a much bigger and easier-to-use screen.

The iOttie mount is not only extremely sturdy, but also easy to operate. Getting the iPad in and out can be done with one hand because the little arms that secure it are spring-loaded and actuated when the back of the iPad is pushed into the mount. I hook up the iPad to the USB charger in the 12V socket because the GPS location services are really battery-hungry, and because it’s nice to arrive at your destination with the device fully charged.

It’s not as elegant as a built-in vehicle GPS/entertainment screen in the dash, but I highly doubt that any car manufacturer offers a factory solution that has more capabilities. And this carputer is detachable and goes from car to backpack in about three seconds.

This future: I like living in it.