Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things...
I’m often asked “Whoa, that’s a cool <thing>, where did you get it?!” — instead of having to find and send people individual links, I decided to finally put links to my favorite things all in one place – here!
This is simply a rack mount kit to allow mounting a FortiGate 60E in a rack, keeping things a bit tidier. I’d mauch rather that they provided an actual 19″ rack device, but this isn’t bad.
This small electric screwdriver is great for travel, and also for things like removing PCBs from inside machines, opening cases which have lots of small screws, etc. It is very similar to the Dewalt DCF680N2 Gyroscopic Screwdriver – you press the button and turn it slightly clockwise or conterclockwise. A small accelerometer detects this and turns on the motor in the correct direction, and increases or decreases speed based on how much you turn it. It takes a few minutes to get used to, but makes things like putting Ikea furniture together so so much nicer.
These safety glasses are great – they are ANSI Z87.1-2010 certified, and come with a comfortable gasket which cuts down on the dust and grit which other classes seem to collect. They also work nicely with the 3M corded earplugs – having them connected directly to the ear pieces makes you way more likely to actually use the hearing protection, and so is well worth the money.
Speaking of protective gear, the Miller TIG gloves are really nice:
They have a nice high wrist protector (I kept ending up with some space between my old gloves and my welding jacket. This would rest on the edge of the workpiece and bite me!) and a padded palm. They do run a bit small, and need some breaking in to become nice and soft.
This is a crazy little widget. You plug basically any component into the ZIF socket, and push the Go button. It almost instantly identifies the component, and graphically displays it and the values. Zeners, MOSFET, resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, you name it, it identfies it. It is a hugely impressive little thing – it isn’t always perfectly accurate, but for quick “What’s this thing / what’s the pinout?” type questions it’s brilliant!
This is a cheap-n-cheerful solder reflow oven – unfortuntely it is basically useless until it has been modded — luckily the good folk over at UnifiedEngineering have released new and impoved firmware and a nice set of instructions over here. These take around 30 minutes to complete, and make the over work really well. Unless you have them lying around you will also need a DALLAS 18B20 DS18B20 TO-92 3 Pins Wire Digital Thermometer Temperature IC Sensor
This is the best travel adaptor I’ve found anywhere. It rolls up into a nice little package, and has a “universal” travel adaptor tucked inside the hole. The wrap-around cord is a reasonable length, the circular shape allows for multiple wall warts to be bplugged in, and the 2 built in USB charger spots work well.
I really like the Roost Laptop Stand for travel – it raises my laptop and changes the angle so that I don’t hurt my neck nearly as much – I use it with an Apple Magic Trackpad 2 and Apple Keyboard. While a little bit bulky, it is worth the space in my luggage. For some trips though even this is slightly too much, and so I’ve recently started using the Tendak Portable Laptop Stand
I make an adapter cable to go from the proprietary Ferrari battery tender to the CTEK charger connector (actually, the Ferrari branded chargers are the cheap CTEK ones with a different sticker). CTEK makes many different chargers – the CTEK MULTI US 7002 12-Volt Battery Charger is my current favorite.
… and I could make an entire section on Ubiquiti Networks, but for now, I’ll just mention the “Ubiquiti Networks Unifi 802.11ac Dual-Radio PRO Access Point” — these work incrediably well, and are really easy to install, manage, etc.
