FiiO F9 Pro Mini Review

Figure 1: What I Bought In short : I could have bought the FiiO F9 Pro’s instead of the Shure SE215’s. I recently had both of my Shure ear bud / in ear monitor setups break on me. To say I was a bit pissed off is great understatement. Thankfully they are within the warranty period and I shouldn’t have to pay for fixes. I’ll be posting about that later hopefully. [Read More]

Satisfactory (A Game Review)

Figure 1: A screenshot of my day to day factory Full Disclosure I am not affiliated with any company, website, organization or similar behind the items in this post. I found the game Satisfactory through my Steam recommendation queue, thought it was worth trying and ended up playing it for a week. This post contains my personal thoughts and impressions. Just a human with some thoughts to share that are raw, uncut and outside influence free. [Read More]

Tamoe River Redux

Figure 1: The Test I’ve never kept my love of Tamoe River Paper (link) a secret. I’d have posted about it specifically but I’ve never really had anything to say beyond an ultra mini review of ‘This stuff is AMAZING, BUY NOW’. It’s the perfect loose leaf paper: cheap, thin, easy to work with and translucent. It doesn’t do great with wet inks or pens, but I’m ok with that. [Read More]

The Noun Project

The Noun Project (link) is one of those rare websites that’s simple, useful and full of good stuff. I’d have written a super long post extolling how much I like this site and have used it over the last few years but I think I can condense it to a few sentences. ALL of the icons I’ve ever needed exist on their site, they have a great ‘Pro’ licensing scheme that won’t break the bank and you’d be hard pressed to find something missing from their catalog. [Read More]

Monteverde Tool Pen (Grumpy Opinion Within)

Figure 1: The Pen I recently picked up a Monteverde USA Tool Pen Inkball (link). The pen is, uh. One of the worst pens I’ve laid hands on I cracked the box open, discovered there were no ink cartridges or adapters and… it didn’t get better once I ordered a converter and some standard international mini ink cartridges. NOTHING I’ve tried for ink cartridges or adapters fits in this pen. [Read More]

Tools Matter

I wish they didn’t but the unfortunate truth is that tools do matter. It doesn’t matter what discipline we frame this up within. Tools Matter. QED, EOF, return 0. I bring this up because a lovely human I know via the internet voiced their distaste for writing recently. After talking to them for awhile it seemed like the tools they were using were less than the best for their needs and writing style. [Read More]

Small shops, makers and artisans

Analog Fun Lately I’ve been heavily focused on all things analog. Writing supplies (pen/paper/pencil), shaving hardware, belts, jewelry, etc. It’s been a very fun journey but along the way I realized something that may not be obvious : the ‘mass market’ effect is real and tends not to produce ‘high quality’ goods anymore. ‘Unique’ is also becoming an oxymoron. Mass Market / Mass Production I can go to Amazon, Google, others and do a search for something like, say, a ‘razor’ and a nice, very long list of products will materialize from thin air. [Read More]