Archives for 2012

Bear and Son Balisong Trainer

2012/08/10 By staze

For years I’ve had a passing interest in “flipping” or playing with a balisong/butterfly knife. Living in Oregon all my life, I was well aware of Benchmade and their extremely high quality Balisongs. Alas, they’re also quite expensive, and they don’t make a trainer anymore. =(

So, a few months ago I started looking at trainers, and how they ranked. From most of what I saw, the Bear and Son BC114 got pretty good reviews, and was darn affordable. So, a few weeks back, I purchased one off eBay, and waited.

When the “knife” arrived, I was pretty pleased. The build quality seemed good, though the punch job on the “blade” was a bit sloppy (the tang side had obvious punch press slop. nothing my Dremel couldn’t fix). The play on the handles was non-existant (and still is, but I’d imagine that’ll change as the pins stretch), but the pins also seemed overly tight. Thankfully, some White Lightning fixed that as well.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, I suck at flipping. But that’s the point of the trainer. And I have gotten better. Now, I don’t know how long the knife will last, but given the parts, I’d guess I should be able to “fix” anything that breaks. The “blade” should last forever. The pins may break, but I should be able to replace them with screws. The handles I’d guess I’d just try to fix with some JB Weld.

All and all, pretty happy. I wish I could have bought it locally, but when I went to the local knife chain store (Excalibur Cutlery and Gifts) they were sold out (and a bit expensive, but I’m all for local economy).

[xrr rating=4/5]

How to disable Chrome’s Print Preview in Chrome 20+ (on the Mac)

2012/08/04 By staze

Google introduced their Print Preview functionality back in the Chrome 15 days, and until Chrome 20 or so, you could go into “about:flags” and turn it off. In Chrome 20 or so, they took that option away. Now all the threads online are full of “just use the “Command-Option-P” crap ((Google seems to think Adobe had the right idea when they created their own Print dialog, when in fact, it’s really stupid. Augment the dialog, don’t replace it with something completely different than every other app)). While I rarely print, I do frequently “Save as PDF”, and I find the process, and output much easier/better using the system dialog.

But! It’s still there. Just not easy to set via the GUI. So, open up a terminal, and paste in the following:

defaults write com.google.Chrome DisablePrintPreview -boolean true

And then quit and relaunch Chrome. Enjoy your native print dialog.

Thanks to the Chromium Admin documentation here. I knew this had to be there still for all us admin’s that want to enforce this stuff on labs, etc.

UPDATE: Google (Chromium) have killed this ability as of Chrome Version 39. This makes our lab environment very annoying as printers show up as “mcx_0”, etc. Not their actual names. Sad.

The Dark Knight Rises

2012/07/30 By staze

The Dark Knight Rises, as a friend put it, was more like a sequel to Batman Begins than a sequel to Dark Knight. Yes, the story largely took off from where Dark Knight left off, but in Gotham, it’s been 8 years, so the connections were tenuous. The movie SEEMS to feature Bruce Wayne more than Batman (similar to Begins), and the “league” features the over-arching meta-nemesis. Casting was overall very well done, though largely from previous Chris Nolan cast members. The movie does not fall into the constant action trap that many other action movies do, and much like begins, is more based on story than action (like Dark Knight, which often seemed like Action punctuated with story).

After seeing the movie again, I still stand pretty firmly behind what I wrote above. And I actually feel Rises may have a greater re-watchability than the previous two movies. There are plenty of in-depth reviews online, so I won’t go on anymore. It’s already taken me over a week to write out this review. =)

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

« Previous Page