Itty Bitty Rants

Infrequent posts about stuff.

  • A Tale of Three Headphones

    I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I’ve been having a terrible time with various Bluetooth headphones over the past decade or so. The early years were a series of Jabra and Skull Candy low and mid-range sets that generally lasted 6-12 months before failing in some fashion. Finally getting fed up with throwing away money, in 2016 I bought a pair of HeyDay Bluetooth Flat Earbuds in Vibrant Coral for 25 USD at my local Target.

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  • Neeva Alternatives

    I’ve been using Neeva as my search engine very happily for a couple of years now. It was probably one of the best changes I’ve made to my computing habits other than quitting Twitter. The results were good (early-on, only “good enough”) included no ads, and it solicited feedback on the results so that over time the results got better. Much better. Plus it integrated into my own files, so I could do text searches for both the web and anything that I had written privately, all without trying to sell my data to anyone.

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  • Tilt Five First Impressions

    My Tilt Five pre-order finally arrived today and I had the chance to get it out of the box and play with it for a little while and where there are some BIG flaws, it also shows a heck of a lot of promise. I never quite know if making a purchase like this is a good idea or not. I’ve had a few too many really cool toys that I get pretty early and never quite seem to pan out, but maybe this time will will be different, right?

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  • Float Notes

    I’ve had a couple of soda floats the last couple of days with pretty good results. First, Olipop Banana Cream (Review coming soon) is excellent with both vanilla and chocolate ice cream. Well, if you like chocolate ice cream, which I don’t. However the person in the household who did his that way reported general excellence. Second, Pepsi Nitro Vanilla with vanilla ice cream was also quite good. The head was even more creamy than expected, though there was much less of it than I had been thinking there might be.

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  • Pepsi Nitro Quick Notes

    You can be certain I’ll be posting a review over on the soda blog soon enough, but I have a few notes for people about the new Pepsi Nitro sodas already. Pay attention to the pouring instructions, especially step 1: Chill the can thoroughly BEFORE opening! I think they had to strike a balance between enough nitrogen to properly gas the soda but unfortunately it needs relatively chilled liquid to work right.

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  • Weather Station!

    I’ve been playing with getting some outdoor sensors for years now, mostly for Air Quality. I finally made some decisions and this week installed a whole suite of Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 and AirLink sensors! The indoor AirLink got installed first since it was just plugging something in and configuring it, but the weather station went up only a day later. I’m going to need to make some long term adjustments to some of the mounting hardware but it stood up to some pretty good wind guests yesterday so it’s clearly not a completely bad job.

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  • United Sodas of America Retrospective

    I had been looking forward to reviewing these for quite awhile. I don’t quite remember how I had run across the brand but by the time I got around to really checking them out their variety pack never seemed to be available. After checking back occasionally for about a year they were finally restocked in mid-February. It was time! I do really appreciate their commitment to their incredibly minimalist branding. The individual cans are iconic enough to come across as both high end and ironically generic.

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  • Upcoming Novelty Soda Reviews

    I was walking around Maplewood Mall earlier today. As with many suburban malls it can feel like everything changes if you haven’t visited it for several years and Maplewood was no exception. Where that mall used to feel extremely racially white it now felt much less so to me and it was really interesting seeing the difference. Part of that difference was definitely a growth in shops that catered to what I would have called “nerd culture” 20 years ago and included an outpost for the national chain FYE.

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  • Something Bowl Sunday

    I keep hearing there is some sort of big sports event today while I’ve been watching Olympics coverage**. Clearly the excitement must be for the Puppy Bowl? ;-) In any case beer is a big deal for big sports events and I noticed that along with the several non-alcoholic beers that I have previously reviewed over on my soda blog that I had five more in my current queue, so today I have decided to do a NA Beer Review Spectacular!

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  • Soda.Guide Update

    It is finally complete! This afternoon I finished mining my old Twitter feed for all of the soda reviews (and review adjacent posts) and have completed converting it all to the new site. I have been fairly regularly posting new reviews since the spring but converting all 600+ of the old reviews was a heck of a chore, that thankfully is FINALLY complete. Current review count: 707! That’s a pretty big number.

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