Recent Articles

I’ve always been a monocular nut — I don’t want spotting scopes, telescopes, or binoculars as they are all too conspicuous. Give me a nice discrete monocular, and I feel like 10 year old me spying on a world in the most obvious way ever. So something like that.

I have a lot of fun carrying a monocular in my bag, or on hikes, even when traveling. Being able to make out something a bit more clearly, it’s worth it. But not all monoculars are made equally — as any photographer will tell you, when it comes to ‘glass’ you get what you pay for.

Maven is trying to buck that trend a little (and they are not the only ones) attempting to offer high quality optics, for more reasonable prices. To check out what they are making, I snagged their CM.1 Monocular which is a large 8×32 optic.

I’m a fan, but it is large.

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Shortly after I published my original review of the Filson Journeyman Backpack, I sold/traded off the backpack. While it’s an item I loved — at the time, I was convinced that it wasn’t something I would keep using, and I had found something better. It didn’t take a few weeks after I parted ways with that bag to start regretting the decision — I wanted to own it, but would I use it?

I had no idea. After all, the Heritage line of the GORUCK GR1 is a much better backpack similar to the Journeyman — and I love that Heritage GR1, so why go backward in carrying comfort? I was pretty torn, but I found a great deal on a well-cared-for Journeyman and snagged it. And then I started to use it a lot. As in, more than my Heritage GR1 was getting used. And then, perhaps, I bought a second Journeyman for color variation or something.

As I’ve thought and used it more, I felt it was time to talk about why I love this backpack, despite its apparent flaws and high price.

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I had been traveling with a pretty basic setup for water: buy a water bottle at the airport, carry a few water purification tablets for emergencies, and call it a day. I never really had a ton of issues. But I have some pretty annoying/comical stories of the shit I have done because I was in the hotel room, had no bottled water available, and didn’t want to drink the tap. But that’s for another post.

I started to look at what I might pack to take care of my water needs on a much more manageable level. I knew I wanted a filter, so I started looking at what filters out what and decided I needed/wanted something that handled both bacteria in the water and viruses. That quickly narrowed the search and led me to buy a Grayl Ultrapress (16.9oz). Grayl makes a few variants of these — the differences are predominantly the capacity and the materials. The Ultrapress is akin to carrying a slightly skinnier Nalgene bottle, with about half the capacity.

I love this so much; I own several of them — and highly recommend them. So let me tell you why this is a stellar filtration bottle.

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I’ve always waffled on buying a Laulima light — they look amazing, but the larger lights seemed like they wouldn’t offer something I would use over my HDS, and the Hoku is a twisty, so it was out. Recently-ish, they came out with the ‘Slim’ lineup of lights, which run off a 14500-sized cell — these are fantastic looking. I snagged a Malihini Slim in Titanium second-hand, and I fell in love.

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After I tried the CAP1 and fell in love with it, I wanted to try the CAP2 so I could see if Evergoods was able to capture that same magic twice. They weren’t, but the CAP2 is a pretty unique pouch in the marketplace, so before you rule it out, let me tell you what it is and isn’t.

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I’ve seen a few stories/articles about people unexpectedly loving the Filson Duffle Pack. This is one of Filson’s few Nylon offerings, and is pretty unique among those offerings at that ( meaning: it’s not just a Nylon version of something they make in their classic materials). The Duffle Pack is firmly a travel bag, and it’s one of those dual-purpose travel bags: offering a shoulder strap and backpack straps.

After snagging one to try myself: yeah, I get it, this is a really good bag — not my thing, but certainly better than similar offerings from Tom Bihn and others.

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This is the third part of my ‘Three XYZ Collection: Budget to Luxury’ series of posts (part one, part two). The idea is simple: building a three item collection for a given category, which should cover almost anyone — and doing it in three price brackets.

Let’s get started with flashlights.

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A while back, Filson sold a set of ‘Carry-On’ bags, and this was among the offerings (I am not certain of all the sizes, but I know there was a large too), this is the Small Carry-On, often referred to as ‘Style 240’. It’s a hybrid bag: bit of a briefcase, a bit of a field bag.

I snagged one as I thought it was a Field Bag, but with a zipper — I was wrong. And this is why I am keeping it, even though it duplicates a lot, because it is a shame this is not sold anymore.

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I was running into an issue: I keep my work iPhone and personal iPhone in the same front pocket, and one of the two will always scratch the other one. Specifically, the hideous camera bump, and metal trimmed sapphire lenses, will scratch the screen on the other phone. To combat this, I kept my work phone in a case to buffer the camera block from my personal phone — that only slightly solved the issue.

I decided I needed to make a change, and this phone case drew me in with the allure of something sumptuous to carry. It’s not a particularly convenient case, or perhaps even stellar, but I truly love using it — it’s pretty good.

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