Massive toebox. I can move my feet to a very comfortable width in the slick bag. My British Army bag is very restrictive in this regard, far too narrow at the foot end. I hate to think how restrictive it would be with boots on.

In terms of size, there is no contest. The Slick bag wins in almost every area.

When it comes to weight, again there is no contest whatsoever. The army bag is significantly heavier than the Slick. Its like comparing a desktop computer to a netbook. Slick bag is so light. Definitely replaces the army bag, no question about it.

This morning, on a hunch I tried V’s USB battery charger thing. He got it as part of a deal with 2 camera batteries. The device is a clamp with a folding USB socket on one end and has two pins that can be moved to make contact with the battery terminals.

When connected correctly to the battery, a green LED on the USB plug lights up. A red one comes on when charging so you know it is working.

Writing on the bottom:

Input DC 5.0V +- 0.25V

Output DC4.8V +- 0.05V MAX 500mA

Suitable for charging original mobile phone batteries from manufacturer

Neat little device. Contemplating creating an urban possibles pouch of sorts with a few bits of useful electrical nicknacks like the charger.

The nylon bag the kit came in seems pretty substantial. Enough room for the whole system to fit in with a bit of room to spare (more considering the tarp can squash up pretty small). The resulting package is a lot smaller and – more importantly – a lot lighter.

The pegs I find to be pretty naff to be honest. They are made of nylon which is a lot less…flexible than my aluminium pegs but they lack the sharp point to penetrate the earth. A lot of earth accumumates between the ridges which I find undesirable, however they do keep the tarp in place very well and take quite a bit of effort to remove which is a good thing.

The poles is a nice idea. I feel that they could be improved somewhat but I can’t say how. Something is lacking. I may go down the route of using hiking poles (for those that don’t know, the tarp has measurments on it for optimum pole length so you can use whatever you find in the field so long as it is the right length).

The tarp itself I am unsure of. It is ridiculously light (311 grams, 11 oz) which is a major plus but I’m not sure if it is worth the cost. It also feels very thin and I am scared of ripping it (especially due to the cost). Hopefully extensive field testing will eliminate my fears and doubts.

After a small amount of consideration after reading some reviews and watching videos I decided to get Bushcraft Northwest’s BCNW-O1 knife. I am not a knife guru at all (this is my second knife) but I love it to bits.

Mike, the proprietor of the store, is a very cool guy, keeping me updated throughout the transaction and even attempted to get the shipping lower. Excellent customer service, go buy something from him.

I cannot go much further without a criticism of the delivery people. USPS and Parcelforce, you suck. 4 days to cross the atlantic, WTF?! Also, HM Customs, die. Die you thieving bastards. Charging me import duty and VAT, for what? So the government gets to fund things I do not agree with? Again, die. Parcelfarce can also die for their clearance fee.

Vitriol off.

I was surprised at the weight of the knife. Heavier than I thought. Does have a lot of steel though. 3.9mm full tang. Fits in my hand wonderfully. I especially like the thumb scallops, great idea Mike.

I also love the scandi grind that the knife has. Most knifes I have seen have 2 bevels which makes sharpening more difficult in my opinion. The scandi grind makes sharpening very easy, just put the whole bevel on the stone and go.

The leather sheath is also very nice. Seems to be very strong and holds the knife securely. The firesteel holder also holds my firesteel snugly. Neither are likely to come out without direct effort to do so.

I do have a criticism of the sheath though. Due to me being a gear whore, I like the functionallity and appearance of PALS webbing. The sheath does not feature that and I think it would make a great addition, of course being leather, this would be difficult.

Due to the lack of PALS, I put a loop of paracord through the belt loop and suspend the knife on a carabiner.

Aside from that fault, the whole package is very nice. A joy to use. Still need to give it a proper workout and a proper razor sharp edge but soon I will be in the bush having fun.

For heavy beards: subdues the strongest stubble.
Men with strong facial growth need an equally strong shaving cream which acts gently. Razorantium beats strong stubble by softening it until it bends over and yields to the razor’s blade, offering no resistance. It does this with linseed gel, cocoa butter and beeswax so that the stubble gets it right at the roots but the skin stays soft. Hairy blokes should all try this.

Sounds good to me. First impression was strange. It claims to be unscented yet there was a peculiar smell, reminded me of bacon which is especially weird since Lush only use vegetarian and vegan products.

To use you simply slather the paste all over your facial hair, work it into the roots and then shave off. It does not lather up which got me at first. They advise using one of their citrus products to help remove the hair and cream from the blade but hot water suffices. The main disadvantage to the cream is it means you have to clean your razor more often (pretty much every shave) but the time saved in lathering more than makes up for it.

First off, I will say that I ran the beta in a virtual machine on my laptop and not on a physical machine. This did limit the review a lot and made the whole experience very slow. The network interface was not supported by either Windows or Virtualbox which obviously prevented me from doing a lot of stuff.

Windows 7 doesn’t come with a lot of software that is useful to mainstream folk. There are a lot of utilities for admin type folk but I seriously doubt your average Joe is gonna play with the iSCSI utility. Generally the preinstalled software is limited to the games (yay, solitare) and some misc stuff like the sound recorder. Compared with Ubuntu which comes with a full office suite, chat software, scanning tools, graphics stuff and a voip app.

I will say one thing. Win7 does look somewhat nice. A bit flashier than what I’m used to. Whenever I use Windows, I set it to the classic theme. That option has aparrently been removed. What has been added is the new taskbar which a lot of folk like. I don’t. In fact. I don’t like the whole limited to one bar thing that Windows has used since 95. I find the Gnome way of 2 panels (fully configurable by the way, able to have up to 4) to be far superior.

In summary, looks nice, not a lot of useful software. Think I’m gonna stick with Free Software operating systems which respect my freedoms.

Flash player was the hitch. Took over 2 hours to download 3.8mb. That is pretty bad. Once it was finally installed, all was good. Upgrading a running system is always gonna be interesting. Things change before you. Like Firefox. I launched it and found that it looked shinier than it used to. Some of the panels had a glossy effect to them. Not sure if it is a theme but it looks good. A yellow bar appeared suggesting that I find out about my rights by clicking on the button. That launches a new tab with the url of about:rights which basically says you can modify and redistribute the firefox code but not the icons. Another bar appeared a while after asking me to restart firefox due to some other upgrades which is a nice feature.

Gnome, in my chosen theme, looks pretty shiny as well. Nautilus has tabs! That is awesome. No more multiple windows!

Transmission (bittorrent client) has also had a polish. The web interface is no longer a seperate addon but is built in which could be useful for folk wanting to check up on their downloads from elsewhere.

I do have a criticism of Transmission though. There is no tray icon to minimise to. I have to keep the main window up to download which is not a good thing. Not sure if it is a bug or not. Thats about the only bad thing I have found so far.

Pidgin has also been improved a bit. Has support for the Live Messenger personal message things. Still no webcam support.

One of the new features is a usb stick creator which allows you (as the name says) to create a bootable pendrive with ubuntu on it. Aparrently lets you store documents and whatnot on it, might be useful. Wonder if it will let you use non ubuntu isos.

Overall, the upgrade has been good. Not had a proper poke around yet but nothing major has broken.