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Unintended but I went a little deep on light bulbs and people the ‘great resignation’.
This is my favorite AAA-sized light to date and the price is silly good.
My first Reylight was the Pineapple AA light in brass. It’s a great light, I have two of them, but I always stayed away from the Mini because the larger version brass feels nice, but sucks to carry (too heavy) and the long standing Titanium version of the Pineapple Mini never spoke to me. I feared I was getting a net negative trade off, so I stayed clear.
Recently though, Reylight came out with the happy middle ground for me: the Pineapple Mini Aluminum, with a battery it is $32. It weighs nothing, and has that 219b goodness which makes it a near instant purchase.
This light is great.
I don’t think the world has changed the way most people think it has, and I think that’s going make for a messy job market at the start of 2022.
This might be the least tactical, but most comfortable backpack I have tried.
During a recent sale, I grabbed the Mystery Ranch Scree 32 bag to use as my emergency bag I keep in my house. I’ve been looking for something in the 30L range, that would be comfortable to wear, not very tactical looking, and was inexpensive to buy. This checked all those boxes, and while I have not used it a ton (emergency bag after all) I thought it was interesting enough to touch base on quickly.
You really should buy only the things you want, not the cheaper version of what you actually want. And other musings.
This is one of the best value lights out there, with three really good LED choices and built in charging.
There’s nothing about this light, on the surface of it, that is compelling. It’s big and kind of ugly looking. But, then you take a closer look and realize that for about $40 you get a light, with a battery and a built in charger.
Oh, and actually it’s three lights in one.
It’s still kind of silly, but the value proposition is getting better and better. The WK30 is a UV/Deep Red/White light all in one package, and it’s actually not that tricky to use it. For the price, this is one hell of a gateway into the flashlight world for a lot of people.
A really great addition to help you find your stuff in the dark. And it’s in stock.
I like to keep flashlights in handy spots, it’s makes them, handy. But the times you need a flashlight tend to be when things are already very dark, which can present issues finding the flashlight. There’s various methods you can take to avoid this: auxiliary LEDs on a light for a low-drain option to find it; glow in the dark materials to help locate; or something like tritium.
Tritium, is awesome for this use, and I snagged a Glow Rhino Tritium Fob (which they are still selling even given the Tritium shortages right now), and have been keeping it on my emergency-by-the-door-light. I love it.
This edition contains much gear talk, and also a reminder to burn those vacation hours.
This is an awesome tech gear organizer and protection folio, and is made really well.
When I started to settle on wanting to take the Mystery Ranch ASAP to the office everyday, I also started looking at laptop sleeves I could use to house my iPad Pros safely inside the bag. The Aer Tech Folio was one I kept looking at, but passing on because of the price and what I perceived as redundant nature of the storage didn’t seem like a good fit.
But I picked one up from the buy/sell/trade of my Member Discord and have quickly taken to this folio. It’s really smartly put together, and although it can be quite bulky, it does its job very well.
A really high quality organizer, which works better in a sling than in your front pocket.
When you start carrying more than just a knife on a daily basis, you find that you will need some method for organizing — so adding a pen and flashlight to my daily carry meant that things were becoming overloaded in my pocket. I need an organizer because this is Houston and there’s not many days of ‘jacket weather’ here where I can easily add pockets to my wardrobe.
I already talked about the Ripcord and Ripcord Mini — both of which are excellent, so today I want to talk about Yellow Birch Outfitter’s PocKit Modern Carry (shown in black on this article) and PocKit PICO Custom (shown below in coyote).
These are both very well made carry organizers, but their bulk works against them for me.
It has taken me many years to figure out what an ideal backpack would even look like, but I think I know what it is — for now at least.
This is a great bag if you never end up wearing it around, but if you do, it will likely bother you.
I thought I cracked it — finally a fantastic everyday bag for the office. Something that blended in, organized well, carried what I needed, didn’t feel too bulky on my body, and most importantly was comfortable to wear. These bars are not high, as I park in a parking garage and simply take two elevators up to my office, but as it turns out — the little things always blow up many of the bags I tested.
That’s the story here: so very close to good, but at the end of the day the DSPTCH Daypack failed itself.
This has quickly become my favorite wallet. Great recommendation Discord pals.
The Micro Soft Shell is the second smallest of the wallets Slimfold offers, with the Nano being the smallest. If this wallet sounds familiar, I reviewed the original Tyvek version here where I ended up switching away. Recently some members of the Discord got this wallet and it looked good in the soft shell material so I figured I’d give it a go.
I’m a big fan of it, and despite my worries about the added bulk from the soft shell material, I actually find it to be really nice overall and much better than the Tyvek variant.
Facebook is one of those companies where everything we find out about it, just backs up the truth that they are a net bad for the world. That said, GSHOCK has some new watches and they seem to be fantastic.
This might be the best sling money can buy, and you only need 32 monies to buy it.
Before getting this sling, I felt pretty confident that my sling setup was really comfortable and maybe even ‘set’. But this sling changed that, after what was an instant buy. The Forager line is not new for Mystery Ranch, but they previously were Asian-market-only, and you could find these slings on eBay and places like that for about $130 or so. Not cheap, not worth it. (The US market got the Forager pocket, which attaches to a hip belt and while nice looking, not that cool for those of us who loathe a hip belt.)
Now Mystery Ranch sells them to the US market for $32. What a deal!
And it is stellar, my favorite sling yet.
Why Private Relay meant I could turn other stuff off, and I explain why we have proved nothing about work from home just yet.
Easy to pack and travel with, incredibly versatile, and surprisingly good.
Hyperlite Mountain Gear’s Versa is one of those sling bags you don’t expect to be any good, and you question because it seems much cheaper than you would expect for a bag made of Dyneema. At $70, it always seemed like a head scratcher: must not be good type of pricing.
I bought mine second hand for a heck of a deal and after using it for some time now, it has proven that it is a value even at the $70 full retail price tag. It is very light, and yet, incredibly versatile.
Mystery Ranch makes some of the best bags out there, but they make a ton of bags so let me help you find the right one.
I have now spent a lot of time testing out various models of Mystery Ranch backpacks (mostly the tri-zip models) and so I thought I would do a quick comparison of how you might think about which is right for you. Here you go, hope it helps someone:
UA21, ASAP, 2 Day Assault, 3 Day Assault CL
You really need to be using Safari’s Tab Groups because I love them. And other things.
Holy shit this is bad advice, let’s fix that right quick.
Over on WIRED, Matt Jancer has an article titled: “The Best Hiking Gear (2021): Backpacks, Boxer Briefs, and More”. This article is not good. There’s so much advice for buying gear in here without any consideration given to what would actually be helpful for people who are looking at this type of guide.
I love hiking and being outdoors and I think everyone benefits from doing it. I also love gear and telling you what is the best, but I also think we need to caveat that. We need to focus on who the target audience is.
Don’t take my word for it, here’s how Jancer starts his article:
If you’ve never done it before, figuring out what to bring might seem like a daunting task, but it’s easier than you might think to stay dry, warm, hydrated, and safe. We have everything you need here.
His target: people who have ‘never done it before’. Ok then: the basics. Not a list for advanced people (which is good, because it’s shit for them too). This is everything you need, and just before that he talked about how it’s not expensive to get going with hiking, good stuff!
His list comes out to $1,024 — so cheap and easy to get started with!