the quest for just-right, parker 92r razor
I bought another safety razor. This is getting ridiculous.
But as ridiculous as this is, I had to do it and I'll explain why.
Okay, Parker 92R safety razor. Let's talk about this.
Actually, before I do that, the four razors I have are the Parker 78R, Parker 60R, Parker 92R, and King C Gillette.
The 78R, a 3-piece style razor, is 2.9oz. The 60R, a TTO (twist-to-open) style razor, is 2.75oz. The 92R, a TTO, is 3.2oz. The King C Gillette, a 3-piece, is 3.5oz.
Opening the head on both the 60R and 92R is the same. Grab the upper portion of the handle, twist the lower portion, head opens. Easy enough.
I wanted the 92R for two reasons. Grip and weight. It is easier to grip the 92R when compared to the 60R. And from what I can tell so far (I've only had it a short time), the 92R's aggressiveness is the same as the 60R, which is mild. I'll talk about the weight more in a moment.
Of the 4 razors I have now, the King C is the mildest of the lot, while the 78R is the most aggressive. This is not to say the 78R is an aggressive razor since it's not open comb, but of this set it is. If you don't know what open comb is, see Parker 68S and 24C. Those are (or at least should be) truly aggressive razors.
The 78R also has the best grip by far of the 4. No question. Second best is the 92R, then the 60R, then the King C. While the King C looks like it has decent grip on the upper portion of the handle, it doesn't.
What I wanted in addition to a TTO with better grip was also slightly more overall weight but not too much. The 92R satisfies that requirement.
As I've said before, with DE shaving, you're supposed to "let the blade do the work". In order for that to happen, you need two things. A decent blade, and a razor with an aggressiveness and weight that agrees with your face.
What I mean by "decent blade" is something sharp that doesn't wreck your face. That may be a Shark Super Chrome, or maybe Astra Superior Platinum, Feather, Kai, BiC Chrome Platinum, Personna, whatever.
The 92R has the grip I was looking for and is roughly a half-ounce heavier than the 60R. Its weight is as physically heavy as I'd want from a safety razor. Any heavier than that would bother me, which is one reason I don't use my King C anymore.
However, I wish it had grip as good as the 78R. If the 92R had a handle like the 78R, wow that would be near-perfection. But that doesn't exist.
What does exist however is the 82R. Same weight and length as the 92R, different handle with straight-line style machining...
...but I'm not getting that unless I feel I need to. I just got the 92R and need to use it for a while before deciding to get anything else. The 92R might be the one I stay with for the long haul. Or not. Time will tell.
casio ae1600h, a big digit square
I'm liking this so much that I might buy one. Maybe.
My current daily wearer is my Casio W735H. Great watch, no question about it.
However, now there's the AE1600H. Comes in black or sand with positive display or gray with negative display.
While I totally don't need another Casio watch, there are four things going for the AE1600H I really like.
First, it's a square. Good.
Second, the digits are giant-sized. Nice.
Third, it has 5 alarms. I could actually use that. The W735H only has 1 alarm and there are times I wish I had more.
Fourth, it has a countdown timer with auto-repeat. That's a feature the W735H doesn't even have. It does have a countdown timer, but without auto-repeat.
What I found from experience is that even though the AE1600H is big and my wrist only a little larger than 6.5", I could wear it. The experience I speak of is that I had an AE1500WH for a brief spell. Going by just the dimensions, that watch should have never fit my wrist correctly - yet it did. And since that one fit, I'm certain the AE1600H would also fit.
Also, the AE1600H is not a heavyweight as it's just 52g. That's only 2g heavier than the W735H.
A square with big digits, all the features I want and a timer with auto-repeat? Yeah, that's the AE1600H.
I might get this one. Also, I dig the fact the seconds are offset and at bottom right. That just looks cool.
people who like rtf should really switch to markdown
If you write documents at all on your computer, this matters.
RTF. That's Rich Text Format, a document file type originally introduced in 1987. Yeah, it's that old. The only reason anybody knows about this format is because of WordPad, the built-in basic document editor in Windows 95 all the way to Windows 11 (but not for long, which I'll get to in a moment). Prior to WordPad, the basic Windows rich text editor was Write.
There are still people to this day who are all about their RTFs, and it's for one reason.
Speed.
Before getting into that, it used to be the way that all GUI document editors were lickety-split lighting fast in Windows. Whether it was WordPad, Microsoft Works (remember that one?) or Microsoft Office, you could double-click a DOC and whammo, it would open right up with almost no wait time. It was great.
Microsoft Works went away, and Microsoft Office over time got slower... and slower... and slower... to the point where if you wanted that lickety-split speed back, you had to use something else. Sure, there was OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but nope, not fast enough.
Then came internet-based document editors. It didn't speed anything up. Instead of waiting for a program to launch, now you're waiting for an internet-based app to load. And if you're required to login just to edit documents along with 2FA authentication, yep, add that to the time you have to wait just to edit a document. Ridiculous. You'd literally be able to load paper in a typewriter faster to get to your document writing sooner.
This is why people still use WordPad. RTF is an ancient file format, but that's what WordPad uses, and it's got that lickety-split fast speed that never went away. Everything about it is lightning quick. Quick to launch, quick to edit, quick to save.
WordPad has very little in the way of features, but when you want a document editor that has rich text features that's fast-fast-fast and just works, WordPad is really nice...
...or at least it used to be.
Windows 11 no longer auto-installs WordPad on clean installations of the OS, and you probably won't see it any more at all in future Windows.
This is where markdown saves the day. It's a different way of editing documents, but once you get used to it, you get all the speed back.
Markdown documents can be made using any plain text editor. Notepad, Notepad++, Kate, nano, Vim, whatever. All that needs to be learned is how markdown works. Do an internet search for "markdown cheat sheet" and you'll see what I mean.
After that, all you need is a markdown viewer.
Yes, you can include images. For local images (which is the smarter way to go about it), you can keep things easy just by keeping image files in the same folder you save your MD files to.
There are both standalone and web browser markdown viewers. In Chrome, for example, just go to the Chrome Web Store, search "markdown" and the viewer will be one of the first results. Firefox has it also.
The greatest thing about a markdown document is that no standard program/app is required to edit one. Again, use any text editor you want, save as file.md or whatever you want to name it, and that's it.
You get your bold/italic/strikethrough/whatever, but more importantly you get the speed back that you lost.
In fact, you can load/edit MD documents faster than RTF since there's barely any overhead when using a plain text editor.
Some people like markdown so much that it's the only format they use for documents. When you want all the speed and something that formats text and can include images, you really can't do much better than markdown.
garmin "timeline" feature that's existed for more than a decade
Ordinarily, when one uses a modern Garmin DriveSmart 66 or DriveSmart 76, they see the Recent menu option from Where To? screen and think, "That's all there is?"
No. There's more.
Some wonder if a Garmin navigator has a Google Timeline-like feature. Yes, it does. The screenshot above is from my DriveSmart 76 using the Trip History feature. This is in every 66 and 76, but it's not from the Recent menu option. Instead, you choose Apps and then Trip History, and that's where you find it.
Is Recent different from Trip History? Yes, it's two separate things. With Recent, that's just a quick list of the locations you've navigated to. With Trip History, it shows how many trips you've taken sorted by date, total time spent traveling, total distance traveled, and each entry shows the exact departure and arrival times.
For privacy, yes, you can reset/delete Recent or Trip History or both. When on either screen, the top left hamburger menu is where you access the ability to clear the records. With Recent, the only option is to clear the entire list. With Trip History, you can clear the entire list, or select an individual entry first, and just delete that one.
A victim of poor naming?
Here's the interesting part:
The Recent list has been a feature in every single Garmin navigator going all the way back to 2005 as far as I know.
Trip History has been a feature since 2013, except it wasn't called that. It was called Where I've Been.
If you have an older model such as a nuvi 2597, nuvi 55, nuvi 67, DriveSmart 51, Drive 52 or DriveSmart 65 among several others, Where I've Been is located from Apps. It looks slightly different from the 66/76 Trip History but has the same functionality.
Most people never knew many older nuvi, Drive and DriveSmart models had this feature the whole time, but it's always been there and ready-to-use.
the garmin that handles heat best
When hotter weather begins, I switch over to a Garmin that can handle the heat, because if I didn't, there would be problems.
While my Garmin DriveSmart 76 is oh so nice (it truly is), having a capacitive screen mounted to the windshield during hot summer daylight driving makes me nervous.
This is a followup to what I said here, because it contains some additional info.
The maximum temperature the DriveSmart 76 can handle is 131F (45C) while plugged in, according to the manual. For most of the year, I have no worries about the temperature of the 76, except summer.
I always take the screen of its mount and place out of the sun whenever I park where there isn't any shade and have been doing that for years, so that's not the problem.
It's two very specific driving situations where I get concerned. Slow city traffic and long journey highway driving. In both situations, there are longer periods of time when sunlight is coming through the glass and beating on the back of the Garmin screen. Yes, the A/C is on, but the 76 has a capacitive screen than runs hotter...
...hence the reason I switch over to an older resistive matte screen model, the Garmin Drive 52. True, it's not as big nor as advanced as the 76 and doesn't have voice control. But the speaker is loud enough, the matte screen is daylight readable, and most importantly runs cooler.
A Garmin GPS navigator with resistive matte screen handles hotter temperatures better. It's not that the operating temperature is any better, but rather the screen itself doesn't generate as much heat.
Also, the fact the older matte models have a thicker bezel means there's some extra area for the heat to spread out. It may not look like much, but it counts.
In the way my car is laid out on the inside, I can't mount a Garmin screen in front of a vent because then I can't read it. This means it has to be on the glass at lower left corner.
I have two options. Use the 76 and pray it doesn't overheat and get damaged, or just switch to a 52 and use that until the weather cools down.
The 52 works for me for the hotter months. And yes, I did say before that I use a over-decade-old matte screen model for hot weather driving. While that works and I still could use it, I found that I like the extra features of the 52 (specifically, the on-map Turns list, which is very nice to have).