The Brooks Review

I saw a comment the other day about ’thin devices’, where the author was complaining about the compulsive drive of tech companies to make devices ever thinner. This is not the first time I’ve heard this, and can usually be heard each time an iPhone comes out with an ever thinner new model.

The reason for thinner devices is rather obvious and is two part. The first reason for this drive is that thinner devices seem impossible. Go and look at either a new iPad Pro, or MacBook (Pro or not) and tell me they are not impossibly thin, and that’s even before you consider the amount of things you can do with these devices. If you are reading this on an iPad, stop and take any and all covers off of it and hold the device in your hands — really look at it and feel it — and you will immediately know the truth.

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In the world of MOLLE laden products there’s no shortage of “admin pockets” or pouches if you prefer. A quick search on Amazon will give you a plethora of options, but one of the best out there is Triple Aught Design’s OP1. I’ve long stayed clear of it as I thought it was either too small or too large depending on the reason why I was looking at it.

I picked one up a few months ago to give a whirl, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by it.

Continue reading: Triple Aught Design OP1

Note: This bag was sent to me from Piorama as a review sample.

It’s been hard for me to miss knowing about this bag, it seems that the A10 Adjustable duffle bag is everywhere I look these days. It is an intriguing bag too: expanding to double the size, with both a shoulder strap and a backpack strap setup. I’ve also not read any bad things about the bag, so I jumped at the chance to test this bag, and test it I have.

So far it’s been on three trips with me, and I’ve sent it through the bag hell which is checking it for a flight. Even after all of that, I still have a bag which looks nearly new, so let’s talk about this bag.

Continue reading: Piorama A10 Adjustable Bag

There’s been a lot going on with tablets in the past few weeks, with a new Microsoft Surface Go coming out, as well as Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab S4 Tablet. Let’s take a look at all of this.

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I got a KR1 – Kid Ruck in last week and had a chance to take a look at it. (Also, you might want to hurry, there are fewer than 40 left at the time of writing.) This is not a review, but rather my initial impressions of the bag, since I won’t have had enough time with it before the school year to weigh in on it more.

Continue reading: GORUCK Kid Ruck Impressions

One of the sets of organizational gear I picked up was smaller and more unconventional pouches from Triple Aught Design. Specifically the BC4, BC8, and S2 pouches. The first are designed specifically to carry the battery cases that Triple Aught Design sells, and the latter being made for a flashlight. These aren’t really made to hold general items, as much as they are for specific items, but that doesn’t mean they can’t hold other things.

I’ve been playing with these as possible quick access and organizational pouches on the internal MOLLE webbing of my GR1s, so let’s take a look at these.

Continue reading: Small Triple Aught Design Pouches for Bag Organization

As I mentioned in my post last week, I wanted to follow up with what worked and what didn’t on my road trip, so here’s a smattering of gear related thoughts, both mini-reviews and thoughts on what I should and should not have packed.

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What follows is a random selection of notes around my thinking of packing and prepping to leave for a road trip with my family. I’ll follow this post up after the trip to see how accurate my guesses were about stuff. Do note that most of this I know is unnecessary, but it became a rather interesting thought exercise for me, and so I chased it down. I also have intentions of doing many longer road trips, so planning this out for this first smaller one seemed like it would help in the long run, and eliminate ‘what if’s’ as well as helping better inform future endeavors.

Continue reading: Pre-Road Trip Planning and a Select Look at Stupid Things I Insisted on Packing

My grandfather on my father’s side would go on drives for seemingly no reason. Often he loaded up my grandmother and would drive around the Olympic peninsula. That’s roughly 5-6 hours of driving. He’d do it in a day, and at least a few times a year. He’d also drive anywhere he could for vacation, flying was a last resort for him.

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Looking through the archives here, I realize that I have never fully written about the GORUCK Field Pockets before. I’ve been on a bag organization kick, which I’ll have a longer post about later, so now seems like a really good time to codify what these Field Pockets excel at, and where they stumble.

Continue reading: GORUCK Field Pockets

I have, generally, done a very poor job resisting the pull of smaller and smaller keyboards. I really like mechanical keyboards, and I truly think that the Vortex Pok3er platform is amazing. The rabbit hole gets deep, I’ve added custom GMK Carbon SA keycaps (about $180), a matching short braided USB cable ($20), a walnut wood case with wrist rest integrated ($50). Yeah, it gets expensive.

Continue reading: The Vortex Core

It’s been a while since I wrote an iPad Productivity Report, but here we are with a fresh set of characters. Some big things have been going on in iPad world from rumored new device sizes, to software releases and announcements. Let’s dive into it all.

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It has been a while since I’ve reviewed a knife which is made to be an everyday carry blade. The reason has been simple: I found the Chris Reeve’s Small Sebenza 21, and it is perfect. I do mean that, I’ve been using that knife a lot, and it really is perfect. But based on some very strong reviews I picked up this Massdrop collaboration the ‘Gent’ to see how it stacks up.

The Gent is (as far as I can tell) “produced” by Massdrop, designed by Ferrum Forge, and made by WE Knives in China. It’s basically super weird, so from here on out ‘Gent’ is what we are calling this knife, but do know there’s some stuff around how it got made.

The long and short of this knife: had I found this before the Small Sebenza, I would have crowned this the perfect knife. And given the price, it would not be absurd to make the argument that it is a better everyday knife than the Small Sebenza — as much as it pains me to write that.

Continue reading: Massdrop x Ferrum Forge Gent

Down the rabbit hole we go.

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Last year, a friend mentioned that he thought it would be fun if myself, a mutual friend, and all our kids went camping. That’s 3 dads, and 5 kids, this year from 4 to 8 years of age. All of us have varying levels of camping experience, and we all brought along a ton of gear. I made a short video about this last year, this year I’ve decided to write up some thoughts on the highlights of the gear I took, and some items we needed.

Continue reading: Camping With Kids – Gear Thoughts, Season 2