ridiculous dean usa razorback dimebag darrel model
This guitar is ridiculous, but I'm actually glad it exists.
The Dean USA Dime Razorback[ exists in a color called Dime Slime. It is, in all honesty, the ultimate Razorback because it has all the best stuff. Liquid-like paint with real flame maple in the middle that has that "moving" thing going on that plays with light really nicely, 3-piece mahogany set-in neck with ebony fingerboard, dual action truss rod, "pearl razors" fret inlays, Seymour Duncan premium pickups, a highfalutin Floyd-Rose Original tremolo system (yes, the best one), open gear high ratio tuners. And, of course, a custom fit case.
Yes, this is one of those guitars that comes with a Certificate of Authenticity; it is that special.
Why am I glad this ridiculous guitar exists?
Because it's not just another Fender Custom Shop Heavy Relic.
Yes, FCS Heavy Relics are nice. Obviously. But everything on the Dean is modernized, new and so clean you could eat off it.
Since I know some would ask, "Is there anything Fender Custom Shop makes that's clean and not a Relic job?" Yes. See Artisan for fancy woods and Vintage Custom for the super-clean FCS stuff. Those exist.
But I'm also glad the USA Dime Razorback exists too. Not my kind of guitar, but I recognize that from stem to stern, it's the best of everything Dean could put into it.
having a go with platinum safety razor blades
For my most recent shaving adventures, I decided to try a different type of safety razor blade, the platinum type.
The results have actually been pretty good.
Any safety razor blade labeled as "platinum" to the best of my knowledge refers to a platinum coating. The purpose of a platinum coating is primarily for corrosion resistance (as in to prevent rusting). But, supposedly, platinum has hypoallergenic properties, which I take to mean "won't do anything weird to your skin".
My reason for trying a platinum blade was to see if the blade out-of-the-box resulted in a smoother shave or not.
Before getting into that, a few notes about Lord blades.
Lord is a blade made in Egypt. Generally speaking, the lowest cost platinum blade (at least in the US) is Lord Platinum.
In addition, Lord also has some of the lowest cost chrome safety razor blades on the market, the Shark Super Chrome. Yes, Shark is a Lord brand.
I have both of these blades, and no, they are not the same thing in different packaging.
To the best of my understanding, chrome blades dirty up quicker (and show up fingerprints very easily), scratch more easily and do not last as long as a platinum blade does. And yes, I'd have to agree with that assessment.
But does a platinum blade shave more smoothly?
In my limited test from a few shaves, yes.
I do believe the platinum coating actually matters for both smoothness and blade longevity. But then again, that's just with Lord Platinum. Would Astra Superior Platinum be the same or different? Or Gillette Platinum? Or Gillette 7 O'Clock Super Platinum blades for that matter? They all have platinum coatings too.
There is another reason I went with Lord blades specifically, other than price.
Some manufacturers use too much wax in the packaging.
Every new safety razor blade is wrapped in paper. In order to keep the blade in the paper without shifting around and ruining its sharpness, most manufacturers use little wax dots to hold the blade in place.
When you take a new blade out of its paper wrapper, some of that wax is left behind. That wax must be scraped off (usually with the old blade you're about to discard). If you don't do that, the blade won't fit correctly in the razor.
With some blades, sometimes you deal with four large wax dots on the removal of any new blade from its wrapper. Two on one side, two on the other. Sure, the blade is new and sharp, but the extra step of removing all that wax is involved. That gets annoying real quick.
Lord blades (including Shark) thankfully only result in having two very small wax dots left behind on one side of the blade when a new one taken out of the wrapper. The wax is easy to remove and just takes a few seconds.
I guarantee there are some DE shavers out there who sometimes mistake a new blade as a bad just because of all that wax that resulted in a poor fit in their razor.
What happens if wax is left on the blade? The next time you load a blade into your safety razor, watch it as you tighten the head into place. You'll notice the blade is being purposely bent by design. If wax is on the blade, that means a fit flush to the head isn't possible. The middle of the blade will be at a different position compared to the sides.
Clean the wax off first, and then the blade will be properly fitted into the razor.
Have you tried different blades? You probably have. It's probably true other blades you thought were bad actually aren't, and the problem was the wax left on the blade, causing an improper fit.
You don't have to be super-precise about wax removal. Just get the stuff off so there's nothing to unintentionally add height to any part of the blade, and you're good.
Back to the Lord blades, yes, Shark Platinum exists, but the Lord brand was slightly cheaper, so I went with that. I do not know if Shark Platinum is a copy of Lord Platinum or not.
For my face, Lord Platinum seemed to be smoother compared to other blades I have. This may mean I'll try out more platinum coated blades in the future.
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.