Thinning your wallet for comfort and convenience

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If you’re like many men, your wallet has been making a divot in your backside for a while if you haven’t decided to use a front pocket.  I’ve gone through a few iterations, but this time I took the advice of a friend and tried the all-ett wallet.  It’s billed as the world’s thinnest wallet, and it really does deliver.

There are several versions available, and I chose the inside ID wallet in nylon.  It goes for $19.95.  They also have a leather version,  and there are actually a bunch of different formats including some passport wallets.

Ok, first of all some proof that it’s thin:

Thickness ranged from .060″ – .121″

Yes, I actually own a digital caliper.  Rather handy when you’re checking out the manufacturer claims that the wallet is just 1/8″ thick.  They were spot-on.  More measurements are shown below.

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Body repair with Crazy Glue – liquid bandage roundup

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I tend to injure myself a lot due to my many hobbies and general poor coordination.  That means I tend to stock a lot of repair items (and keep my several med kits up to date – but that’s another topic).  One of my favorite items are non-typical bandages.  From finger wraps to the Nexcare waterproof bandages (which stick like crazy once you have them on, but if there is water or oil where you put it on it won’t stick at all!) to the liquid bandages, they all have their uses.

On the other hand, good old Crazy Glue has some pretty distinct advantages.

Let’s break down several alternatives for my most recent hard-to-fix problem, a split on the tip of my thumb.  When my skin gets dry and rough, I occasionally get a split on my fingers where the skin just cracks open.  It isn’t a convenient place to bandage, and even if you do any movement causes the crack to flex.  Some choices:

  • Bandage.  Comes off, gets wet when you wash you hands, etc.  Not too great.
  • New Skin liquid bandage.  What?? No, seriously never buy that stuff.  It smells toxic and burns.  Why would I put that on my skin?  Why do they even sell that stuff anymore?
  • Nexcare liquid bandage  – spray.  Too wide of a spray for this application, but great for scrapes.
  • Nexcare liquid bandage – drops.  Hard to find; I got it online.  This is basically medical grade Super Glue, and works well anywhere but my hands.  My hands are too high-use I guess.  On my split, this stuff broke apart too quickly and I had to re-apply a few times a day
  • Nexcare skin crack care. I haven’t tried it, but it might be a good choice.
  • Band-aid single use liquid bandages.  I loved the single applicator packs that I could put in med kits, but they disappeared.  The new ones require the dropper bottle, and aren’t rated as well.
  • Crazy Glue.  This was the winner for me this round.  I squeezed the crack together (not wanting the glue to touch my exposed lower layers of skin) and it held it with the plastic-like crustiness I expect from these kind of glues.

Of course, Crazy Glue is what I used last time because it was all I had at work.  I guess I didn’t really need to waste any time with the other alternatives.

By the way, I settled on Crazy Glue rather than Super Glue, because Cody Lundin talked about using it for cracks on his feet (he doesn’t wear shoes) in his book 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your *** Alive. I highly recommend it.  It also talks a lot about building your own survival kit, which is pretty important if you ever need it.

Disclaimer – I haven’t evaluated Crazy Glue for medical safety.

Star Wars Pocketmodels are fun

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Ok, this is hardly a project since most of the work has already been done by others.  These are, however, very fun and cheap as well.  I’m talking about the Star Wars Pocketmodels from Wizkids.  I’m late to the game – these were discontinued a few years ago.  However, Target and Amazon (not to mention eBay and other sources) are now unloading them cheap.  You can get the Ground Assault packs (2 model cards, dice and playing cards) for $1 at Target.  You can also pick up the classic ones (from the original trilogy) to get the ships.  I also opted to get an X-Wing pack from eBay because I was particularly interested in having an X-Wing.  There are several series, so poke around to find the right one if you are looking for something specific.

Here is what a model card looks like:

And, once you punch out the pieces and put them together they look like this:

I actually don’t care about the game, I just like putting the models together and putting them on my desk.  I appreciate the quality engineering that went into them.  The pieces snap out easily, they snap together as they should, and they look sharp.  They’re so much better than the tissue paper and balsa wood model plane that I broke and never finished as a kid.

On another note, I gave a few of these to children of friends and they were entertained for hours thinking these were the coolest things ever.

I’m going to pick up more next time I see them.  They may not have been a good deal at $4/pack, but at $1/pack they’re a no-brainer.

Continued internet issues, but faster in-house speeds

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Even after flashing the old router to DD-WRT, the internet issues continued.  I bought a new WRT54G2 router to replace the old WRT54G, and flashed it to DD-WRT to match the other one.  I now have two WRT54G2 wireless routers as my network (the other one is the access point).  However, the internet issues continue, and I can only conclude that it’s my internet provider.  Not much chance that will be easy to fix.  Their tech support will always hold the position that it’s not on their end.

I did enable the daily reboot of the router (under Administration->Keep Alive).  At least there’s some sort of refresh every morning before I get up.  There are less internet hiccups, so I think I’ve cleaned things up a bit.

On the plus side, after switching to the new router I have drastically increased the speed to my laptop.  In DD-WRT you can do a ‘Site Survey’ under Status->Wireless.  It shows you what channel all of the other networks in your area are on, and I discovered that some new networks had popped up in my neighborhood since I last looked, and they were all on channel 11.  Time to move!  I have no packets with errors, and my speed in both directions is greatly improved.  I’ll call that a success.