Category: Articles

I haven’t owned a soft shell jacket in a very long time, and a lot of that really is due to the fact I first wore them when they were new — and thus not that great — and I ditched them because of those compromises from the originals. There’s two types of soft shells out there: fashion (aka Finance Bro shit with company logos), and serious outdoors jackets.

I had written soft shells off completely, as I thought they were all fashion bullshit — a compromise not worth owning. But my interest was piqued again when I started reading more about the modern variants.

Then I went to try out the Gamma in person, to help a friend looking at options who lived far away from an Arc’teryx store. What I found surprised me, and a week or so later I bought the Gamma hoody for myself. It’s been one of the best purchases I have made for outdoor/hiking wear — and I wear it often.

It’s very good.

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Since moving to back to an area where carrying your own tote bags for items you purchase is not only recommended, but largely assumed, I’ve been on the hunt for the best packable tote bags. There’s loads of these out there, so here’s what I am liking so far.

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Note: these were provided for review.

Pioneer Carry asked me a while back if there was anything I’d like to check out from the brand in addition to the backpacks they’ve been sending over, and I focused in on the Zen Zips which are a pair of tiny little pouches. They had been out of stock, but recently Pioneer Carry was kind enough to send over these cute little pouches, and I’m glad they did.

This a fun and quirky, and a great thing to have on hand.

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It’s been about a year now since I went really deep on my home server setup, replacing a lot of what I used to pay for with open source, self-hosted, systems which sit right next to me in the office. So I thought I would take a moment to talk through some of the software, and the hardware — what worked well and what didn’t.

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This was an interesting year for gear in a lot of ways — so I thought I would wrap up the year commenting on different gear categories and how they felt over 2025. In some ways there’s a lot of good out there, but in far too many other ways, it was disappointing.

I’ll go category by category.

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I was looking to hit a free shipping minimum and tossed in a 50th Anniversary Edition of the Wickron Long Sleeve Tee from Montbell — this is their standard active material which can be found in many variants across the lines of clothing Montbell sells. I’ve been using it for many weeks now, and thought I’d share some quick thoughts.

Generally, there’s better options on the market than this.

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