Motorcycle gear and accessories are a funny thing. What might be inexpensive in the automotive or boating world is much more expensive when the label “motorcycle” is applied to the same product. This happens a lot with things like waterproof switches, fuse blocks, and auxiliary lights.

Now, motorcycle auxiliary lights come in one of two flavors: “marker” or “running” lights that are used to help other people see the motorcyclist, and lights that are used to help the motorcyclist see better at night.

There are many lighting products for motorcycles. Supposedly, these cost more money than their automotive counterparts because they are smaller and are made of tough-sounding materials in order to survive the harshness of the open road.

For example, Hyper-Whites are a popular, LED “marker” style lighting system. The LEDs are in a waterproof housing, and the kit comes with a waterproof switch. It will run you about $120.00.

Or, you can just buy some cheap-ass LEDs off of eBay for $5 each and a $2 switch from RadioShack and see if they do the trick.
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About a month and a half ago I wrote about the HDE wireless USB infrared remote control that I bought for my home theater personal computer (HTPC). If you haven’t read that review yet, here’s the short story: it sucked.

My dissatisfaction with the remote led me to buy the Lenovo wireless multimedia remote with keyboard, which I bought at half off. The Lenovo is very well built, does many things well, but still had room for improvement. I thought the full retail price was too expensive, and the device needed a backlight very very badly. The device is very difficult to use if you are watching TV in a dim room.

I was given a chance to review the iPazzPort wireless touchpad remote by Unisen USA. I was not compensated for my time in any way other than the chance to mess around with the remote. I sent the remote back after the completion of my three week evaluation.

Originally, I was going to compare the iPazzPort to both the Lenovo and the HDE. But let’s be honest: the HDE is a non-starter. It’s garbage. So how does the iPazzPort stack up against the Lenovo? Let’s take a look.
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If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s redundancy. I also believe that everyone is in charge of their own safety. So when Sedagive? tried out my Mossberg 590 shotgun at the shooting range, I saw an opportunity to cover both bases.

The pump shotgun should be the cornerstone of any home defense plan. It requires practice, but less training than a pistol or a rifle. It is mechanically simple. It is very reliable and depending on the ammunition loaded can be counted on to stop a threat in one shot.

There are two issues people run into when buying a shotgun for home defense. One is recoil, and one is the length of the stock. If there is a large difference between the reach of the occupants, the stock will either be too long for the shorter person, or too short for the taller person.

This was an especially relevant issue in my hone, as I have gorilla arms and Sedagive? is quite short. When firing my Mossberg 590 at the range, she had little problem handling the recoil of 2 3/4″ shells. The issue was reach.

I helped my friend Duke purchase a Maverick 88 12-gauge pump shotgun several years ago. He was facing the same situation then as I was now: he had plenty of experience with shotguns, but his pixie-sized wife was not only new to firearms but had a much shorter reach. He purchased the Maverick 88 as a low-cost home defense weapon, and then spent some extra money customizing it to literally fit the needs of his wife.

When history repeated itself, I turned back to the Maverick 88.
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Here’s a nice problem to have: too many high-definition doo-dads and not enough high-definition ports on your television. That’s the situation I was facing on both of my televisions. I have FiOS TV, an Xbox 360 and an HTPC on both sets. I have two HDMI ports on my upstairs TV, and my downstairs television only has a single DVI port.

I picked up an IOGear 3-Port HDMI switch from Amazon last week for about $25. There are cheaper, no-name switches out there from sellers I’ve never heard of, but I was new to HDMI switches. I wanted to be able to return it easily if there was something flaky about the technology.
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I’ll be honest. I had laptop envy. It struck me pretty hard over the winter holiday, wherein my friends and family spent time cruising the Internet and doing work while all sitting within thirty feet of each other. I retreated up to my office to dink around on my workstation, labeling me both as anti-social and a gaming dork.

There was a problem with joining their mobile computing ranks, however. At the end of 2009 I bought a sweet Lenovo G450 laptop on sale for about 60% off the original price. It was equipped with an Intel dual core processor, 3GB of RAM, and had everything necessary for daily computing. It could play high definition video, had a built-in Web cam for Skyping, and plenty of output ports. I liked it so much I wanted to buy another one.

The issue was that Lenovo (and just about every laptop manufacturer, apparently), was about to transition to Intel’s new mobile processor architecture. That meant the dual core laptops were undergoing deep discounts, and that remaining stock (namely the then-top-of-the-line Core2Duo) was at full price. I waited a few months, checking deal sites and our employee purchase program discounts, but never found a comparable deal.

I resigned myself to waiting for the i3, i5 and i7 machines to come to market, get some age, and then lower in price as the second-generation of ix came to market. Essentially, I was going to have to wait for two generations to pass me by.

That is, until I saw the Acer Aspire AS 5740 i5 laptop on sale at Costco for $599.99.
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The more reviews I’ve written for Gibberish, the longer I’ve taken to waiting before issuing an opinion. Sometimes I label early write-ups as “first impressions” and leave the review for later days. In the case of the Synergy heated motorcycle gloves by Tourmaster, I waited almost sixteen months to write this up.

I try to ride my motorcycle to work as often as possible. I commuted on a motorcycle for almost eight straight months in 2009. There are two things that can disrupt your average motorcyclist: cold and rain. I tried a variety of insulated waterproof gloves but most weren’t up for the task of commuting at highway speeds. Gloves that kept my hands warm were often so bulky I had a hard time articulating the clutch and front brake levers. All waterproof gloves I tried lost most of their insulating properties once the non-waterproof outer layer became saturated with water.

I tried just about everything before turning to electric heated gloves. I had handguards on my Yamaha FZ6 and BMW R1150R. I had heated grips on the FZ6, R1150R, and BMW K1200LTE. I even have thin silk glove liners to help retain my body heat. If you’re on the bike at 25°F ambient and ride 70MPH that’s 2°F adjusted for wind chill. My commute is at least 40 minutes each way. I needed something else to keep my hands warm, so I turned to the Synergy electric heated gloves made by Tourmaster.
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Here’s the raw truth. My dog Pearl eats poop. I’ve tried adding stuff to the dog’s food to make their bombs taste worse (?) and that didn’t work. There’s a new plan of attack coming online soon, but in the meantime we have to deal with the only thing worse than a dog eating poop: the gas and belching that accompanies it.

Enter the International Veterinary Sciences Anti-Gas pill for dogs. Purchased from Wal-Mart, the pill

is a pleasant tasting tablet specially formulated to promote healthy digestion and curb unpleasant gassy odors.

Does the product live up to it’s claim? Let’s break down the above sentence one bit at a time.
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I’ve gone through a bit of an odyssey with my home theater personal computer (HTPC) setups in the house. I originally hoped to use my Microsoft 360 remote to control the Microsoft Media Center, but I wound up using a cheap USB remote instead.

There are many wireless keyboards on the market, but the suffer from at least one of the following problems:

1. They are very large and not suitable for use in a bedroom environment — they are too big to store on a nightstand or other accessible area.
2. They are too small and don’t have an integrated touchpad or trackball.
3. They have a “touch stick” similar to what IBM / Lenovo embeds on their laptop keyboards.
4. They cost a lot of money, around $80 – $150 depending on the model.

I had resigned myself to using the HDE USB remote for the majority of my needs and then getting up to use a USB keyboard when needed. Then I found a small wireless remote with integrated keyboard from Lenovo. Better yet, I found it on sale at 50% off.
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I’ve spent the last two months migrating towards home theater personal computers (HTPCs) in my house. It’s an effort to simplify my home audio/visual system, play high definition content, and allow for some quick Internet access. Along the way I’ve learned some interesting things, like how important keyboards and on-screen zoom are when you try to control a computer from across the room.

I have a pair of Xbox 360s in my house, and I was hoping to use the Microsoft Xbox 360 multimedia remote to control my HTPCs. The problem was I didn’t have an infra-red receiver on my computers. After searching around on the Internet, the best advice was to buy a cheap USB remote control and steal the “dongle” that allowed the remote to talk with the computer.

I sprang for two remotes by HDE, sold by Amazon.com. They were about $16 each and were eligible for free Amazon Prime shipping. I learned a few more things after they arrived, including that you shouldn’t be cheap with your remote controllers.
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One of the reasons I like zombie movies is that they are conversation starters for disaster preparedness. “What would you do if there was a zombie apocalypse” is a nice science-fiction way of saying, “what would you do if the world went crazy for awhile?” I credit Romero’s Night of the Living Dead for starting my interest in disaster preparedness and how to comfortably survive a disruption of service.

Out here in Virginia, the only things we have to worry about are ice storms, hurricanes, and maybe an odd flood or two. There are “bug out bags” in the house, but the central strategy here is to wait out a disruption of services of up to two weeks. During the first time I lived in Virginia, one of my co-workers went two weeks without power. Her family wound up staying in a hotel, but it was not uncommon for folks to be out of juice for multiple days. When you live in a house powered by all electric appliances, that is a big deal.

So it was with anticipation that I started reading “Apocalypse Chow: How to Eat Well When the Power Goes Out,” by Jon and Robin Robertson. I had hoped that it was the cookbook equivalent of Night of the Living Dead, and that the book would help me evaluate my current food stores and how I prepare them.

Unfortunately, the recipes are too complex and are made up of things an average American house probably doesn’t have. The book violates a few rules of thumb in the preparedness community, and as such Apocalypse Chow has limited usefulness in your preparedness library.
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