Norwegians, being a sensible people, have the big Yuletime celebration on Christmas Eve. So before I eat myself into a food coma and opens presents with my family, allow me to wish you all the very best for the midwinter holiday – or midsummer, for those south of the equator – with this Australian 1959 Gillette Christmas commercial:
Continue readingWhile I’m feeling better, I still opted not to shave once I transitioned from horizontal to vertical.
Still feeling more than just a bit under the weather, so working on a caveman beard…
Picked up something while on the Go, so no shave today. Just feeling too cruddy.
After several years of not working – the screen being dead – my beloved Psion Series 5 Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) is alive again. It turns out there is still a marked for repairing these neat PDAs almost a quarter century after they were first introduced. So now that it is alive again, let us have a closer look at this vintage tech. This will be a very different review to what I usually do.
Continue readingShave Library is a new wiki dedicated to shaving with a straight, tied to the Sharp Razor Palace forum. There is a lot of good information available on the wiki already, but like all good wikis it has room to grow.
A wiki is – as I’m sure most people know – a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its users. In other words, it’s a fountain of shave gear knowledge everyone can add to.
The site focuses almost exclusively the classic straight, and while shavettes are mentioned there is little to nothing on Gillette style razors to be found. For those of us who prefers shaving with a safety razor, there is still good reads on the site. In particular I’ve enjoyed the DIY-section, since I like to tinker.
I learned about the Shave Library through ShaveFan, who I’ve written a post about before. And now that you learned about it through me, perhaps you should go have a look at Shave Library?
The internet archive has a lot of odd stuff. One of the things I’ve found is a copy of Hobbies Weekly from 20th March 1934. And as I was idly flipping through, I spotted this:
The design is simple, as benefits a tool made from odds and ends. Some pieces of wood, some spare leather – as we all have laying around – and a fe hours of tinkering. No gears, the two rollers were close enough to drive eachother by friction.
I’m half tempted to make this at some point.. not for using, but for the tinkering.
Glancing into my sharps container, I was pondering what I could reuse the blades for. After all the mantra reduce-reuse-recycle makes a lot of sense. I have already reduced the amount of waste from my shaving by shifting to traditional wetshaving. I will recycle a lot of steel when my sharps container is full and I dump the metal. And while I could – in theory – reuse the blades by sharpening them, that is not terrible tempting.
But there is one other use for razor blades, common among soldiers in the past. I am, of course, talking about the so called fox-hole radio.
Continue readingFirst of; it’s 2021 (and has been for a few days), and the annus horribilis that was 2020 is behind us. It is my sincere hope that this will be a better year than the last, and with that in mind let me wish you all “Til árs ok friðar!” – to a good year and peace! I hope your midwinter celebration – no matter what you call them – went well, and that each and everyone one of you is in good health.
Continue readingA new landing was needed for a front door. Planned in SketchUp, all pieces cut and trimmed before assembly. All joints glued, and tacked together before securing with screws. Should last a lifetime.
