I found this cool little powerplus bee flashlight on the bespaarbazaar for only a few euro. It is tiny but bright and is recharged by turning the handle. One minute of turning gives about four minutes of light and if you want it really bright, you turn it while shining. It’s pretty powerful and very eco-friendly. Not to mention that it saves batteries if you forget to turn it off (or someone nicks it to go play with teddybear in the dark and you find it back the next day completely drained)
I got my daughter (and myself) the cool Automoblox X9X SUV with off-road cladding.
Unfortunately it only lived for ten minutes before a wheel broke off when it fell down her IKEA play table, which is odd since her other Automobloxes survive falling down tables and stairs without any visible damage. it’s probably a production fault on this one. Good luck has it that this is the only Automoblox with a spare tire, so I found way to repair it by removing the spare tire axle and using that instead of the broken one. The easiest way to remove a broken axle is by inserting a screw into it so that it forms a thread inside and then wiggling it gently out. The axles are only wedged in, not glued in apparently.
This is what it looks like after repairs. As good as new.
The broken axle itself was easy to fix by inserting a screw into both halves of the broken axle. It is still fully functional and hardly noticeable that it’s been repaired. The spare wheel still turns and can still be removed to play with. IT’s actually a very good design as the axle is smaller in the middle and a screw inserted into it can grip both parts and fix them to the bodywork. This is what the spare wheel looks like now:
If you’ve read previous entries in my blog, you know I have a creative zen and it didn’t stand up too well compared to an iPod. it has now become my daughters portable Bob the builder player. (She’s 2 by the way)
Unfortunately it hasn’t turned out to be very scratch-proof. The scratches clearly show up when looking at the screen from close by.
It’s ok when looking at it from a little way off though. I think that eventually I’ll have to remove the plastic outer cover completely (or I should have invested in a screen protector like I bought for my iPod.) Come to think of it, that might still be a good idea to do before the display is completely ruined.
It had to happen sooner or later, it was time for another bike upgrade :) This time I added a topeak bottle holder called the modula cage. It’s not a carbon one (even though they look way cooler) but a metal cage with adjustable size to accommodate different bottles or cans. The problem is that my bottle holder is upside down and close to the front wheel so I need something which can support the weight of the bottle when upside down. most carbon bottle holders seem to be designed with only a small stop at the bottom to keep the bottle in. The topeak modula has a a wide bottom and strong aluminium arms. In the coming weeks I’ll test out how well it can keep upside down bottles in. This is how it looks on my bike now:
After having used a wireless doorbell for over a year (and having people push the button without anything happening when the batteries were dead once again) we switched to a grid-fed video system from avidsen. It’s what is called an evolutive system which means that different modules like multiple camera’s can be added to it later on. This is what it looks like from the inside.
Image quality is pretty good, it has six infrared leds for night-time illumination and two way hands free voice communication. You have to speak into the microphone from the outside though as it is not that sensitive, but I suppose that is done to prevent background noise by passing cars to drown out the conversation. power consumption is very good at less than one watt in doorbell mode and twelve watts when the video display is on.
Well, a new mountain bike deserves only the best products, and if it’s environmentally friendly, it’s even better, so I got the pedros total bike care kit 2.0 with bio-degradable products. The brush and chain lubricant differ from those in the pictures used on most online webstores, so here is what is really inside the box.
And to be on the safe side, I got some extra chain cleaner and lubricants for different weather conditions. If my bike lets me down, it won’t be due to lack of maintenance.
Well, we’ve been having some interference of the dehumidifier and kitchen electronics on our tv (you could see specs in the image when stuff was switched on or off) so we decided to buy a monter power filter (HTS-800) and I must admit that the picture quality has even improved beyond what we expected (which was same image, but less interference) I tried taking images of before and after, but you can’t really see it on a digital camera. The image is more relaxed now with black being less fizzy grey and the white images tend to show less flickering. It has a pretty convenient label system built in as well so that you know which plug is inserted in which socket and you don’t pull out the DVD player when you wanted to disconnect the subwoofer for example. Another nice feature is that it doesn’t seem to consume much energy, at least not according to the plugwise system which I use for metering my devices. In fact, it is less than one watt and you don’t feel any heat from the device from electrical waste either. The light bulb under the switch is probably the warmest part of the block.
We also bough this filter for the cinema room to protect the beamer. The image improvement there was less visible though. But then again, that was pretty good to begin with and it’s the LCD itself which is starting to degrade after over 2000 hours with an off-color green tint in the top and bottom where usually the black borders are and a slight color shift where the white subtitles are usually projected. The Philips astaire beamer still offers very good light output on it’s original lamp and we compared it with a 700 hour Benq DLP projector. The DLP is noticeably sharper, but the light output was about equal at five metres distance. However, due to my glasses, I have a lot of Rainbow-effect when looking at DLP-projected movies.
I’m currently using windows live writer to write my posts (hence the speed at which they go online is a lot faster now/ it seems to work great thus far on my vista pc. it’s free software which allows you to edit text like in word and then upload it immediately to the weblog software of your liking (Mine being whatever Erik decides to put on his website : ) ) I still have to look up how to do the categories thingy here, but thus far, I really love this approach.
Ikea has got this new great solar lamp (I’m using it while writing this article as well) . It has very good build quality and the led head itself is made up of sixteen tiny led elements ordered four by four, combined with a fixed focussing optic made from plastic which results in a very even light as you can see in the shot below. It is definitely good enough to read by and makes for an excellent desk lamp or reading lamp in bed as due to the concentrated, but even light area, you can put your book in perfect illumination without having any light spill on your sleeping bed partner.
What I really like is the fact that the solar panel is detachable and can be put in the sun, so that you don’t have to move the entire lamp.
It is powered by the solar block which contains three AA batteries of 1200 mAh and which means that it can be fixed if they ever wear out with pretty cheap 2000 mAh rechargeables or higher quality eneloops or recyko’s. It is very affordable at 20 eruo’s as well. And for every lamp you buy, ikea donates one to Unicef as well. The running time is about four hours, depending on how much light it has seen the day before. It has no constant-output regulation so the lamp will go dimmer near the end of the charge and won’t put you in the dark at once.
I’ve been trying to get a good picture og this squirrel in Planckendael for months now. it’s in the asian part of the park, in the indoor section behind glass and it’s darker on the inside than on the outside so the reflections play hell with the focus. I tried a polarising filter last time, but that didn’t help much. This time, the sun wasn’t as bright and it was early morning. This resulted in the following picture:
