Cub Cadet 31AH5IVTB56 Snow Blower

A northern winter will test the mettle of all who live through it, try the souls of the heartiest of boreal warriors and scare away Amazon delivery drivers. The latter is a concern.

Walk-behind snow blowers are as much an element of life in the north as log fires and bear spray. The Cub Cadet 31AH5IVTB56 blower is a machine to give the north pause.

Superbly engineered and flawlessly manufactured, the Cub Cadet snow blower doesn’t just move snow… we’ve become increasing aware that it frightens it. Maneuverable, powerful and a genuine pleasure to operate, it almost makes clearing our driveway a winter sport. Our driveway and subsequent forecourt are well over a hundred feet long – there’s a lot of sporting to be done.

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CME U6MIDI Pro USB MIDI Interface

Easily my favorite MIDI device in recent memory, the CME U6MIDI replaced several barely functional, frequently infuriating devices with one diminutive plastic box that works flawlessly. It’s both a convenient PC to MIDI interface and a sophisticated MIDI router.

We have a substantial number of MIDI devices, and while they can be manually plugged together as they’re required, it’s way easier to leave them all connected to each other and route their data in software. Regrettably, dating back to the late Jurassic period – the mid-1980s – MIDI’s network topography is decidedly limited.

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Yardistry 10 x 10 Gazebo

We have experienced moments of guilt over our Yardistry gazebo. Most of the reviews of this structure have been written by people using it to shelter their barbecues or enhance wedding receptions. We installed ours as a firewood enclosure. The option to hang strings of lights under its eves will be forever uninstalled.

Our gazebo replaces a venerable Canadian Tire temporary shelter, which survived a decade of brutal winters. Admittedly, one of the attractions of a permanent wood shelter was the prospect of not having to assemble it each autumn, reverse the process each spring and sprint for the yard with a broom every time a dozen flakes of snow entrenched themselves upon its roof.

To its credit, the Yardistry gazebo is a seriously robust structure when it’s complete. The process of getting it complete, however, can prove somewhat nettlesome. This is not a kit for the faint of heart, the timorous of limb or the slight of power tools.

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JJ Electronics 6V6 Vacuum Tubes

My Fender Champ X2 guitar amplifier remains among my favorite boxes of technology. Brilliantly conceived, flawlessly executed and cool enough to shatter penguins, it rocks to a degree that would be best measured on the Richter scale. Whoever thought of combining a leading-edge digital effects processor with classic vacuum-tube power output should have been given a corner office and the best parking space in the company lot.

The Champ X2 I bought shipped with Groove Tubes. Guitarists who spend sixteen or more hours a day posting to equipment forums are wont to say unkind things about these devices, but in the real world, they’re not bad tubes. To their credit, they’re substantially better than the tubes manufactured back in the twentieth century, and my Fender Champ played them well.

When the factory tubes in my amp started to show their age… or rather, to sound their age… I came to appreciate that vacuum tubes can be chosen for their sound qualities every bit as much as would be the instruments played through them. Most of the tubes manufactured in eastern Europe sound excellent – not all of them sound alike.

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Korg Volca FM Synthesizer

The Yamaha DX7 was a remarkable instrument for its day, its day being some time in 1983. Unlike other keyboard synthesizers of that period, it generated sounds not by plugging oscillators and filters together, but by actual algorithmic digital synthesis, or “FM synthesis.” The result was the ability to create an almost inexhaustible palette of real and imaginary instruments, rich, textured music and enough special effects to frighten an entire alien invasion.

The DX7 was not without its downsides. It required a lot of head banging, long words and complicated math to fully master; it was expensive, huge and heavy; its keyboard was plastic and a bit nasty and its bronze-age digital to analog converters were fairly noisy and gave everything it played a vaguely electronic edge.

Still, it totally rocked back then.

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Ford 2017 F-150 XL Pickup Truck

The vehicle that cars want to be in another life, that which laughs at weather capable of leveling whole civilizations, a ride so cool as to shatter penguins – nothing is more fun to drive than a truck. The 2017 F-150 is easily the nicest truck to be had.

While it has a box in the back and a wheel at each corner, almost nothing about the current F-150 is quite what it seems. The body, for example, is aluminum rather than steel, which makes the machine substantially lighter than its iron ancestors, and impervious to rust. Actually, the designers of the current F-150 appear to have invoked every trick and incantation they could think of to reduce its weight, which has rippled through other elements of its construction.

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Samsung SSD 850 EVO Solid State Drive

The first hard drives were created by IBM in 1956. The 350 Ramac drive was about twice the size of a refrigerator, and could store thousands of times less data than a current SD memory card about the size of a postage stamp.

Later hard drives got much smaller, more reliable and highly adept at parking a lot of gigabytes in a small space. However, modern hard drives work in pretty much the same way as an original 350 Ramac, with electromechanical read and write heads moving over the surface of a spinning disc – or a stack of multiple discs in newer drives. There are upper limits to the speed at which a hard drive mechanism can operate, and as such, how quickly data can by written to and read from one.

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GE Bright Stik LED

It probably doesn’t matter whether you prefer the light cast by traditional incandescent bulbs, as most governments have outlawed this iconic element of luminescent technology… or are preparing to. Governments love greenwash.

At least where we live, our far-left silly party government has also successfully mismanaged the local electricity grid to the point where power is too expensive to keep using incandescent bulbs.

For a long while, the only viable alternative to incandescent lighting was compact florescent bulbs, which while more efficient than their glowing ancestors, are really quite nasty. Every one of those little monsters comes with its own supply of highly toxic mercury, just waiting to mess with your central nervous system if you manage to drop it. While possessed of theoretically long lives, most of these things are made cheap in China, and their actual working lives are rarely much better than the incandescent lights they replace – despite their costing ten times more.

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Guo Grenaditte C Flute

The Guo grenaditte flute resembles a traditional silver flute – somewhat – and it plays enough like one that most flautists will be able to make it rock with a learning curve not to exceed thirty seconds. This said, it’s a remarkable instrument and way more fun than may be legal where you live.

Traditional concert flutes are typically made of silver… unless you bought a really cheap ‘n nasty steel flute with silver plating. All other things being equal, flutes sound better as whatever they’re made out of gets denser, hence the preference for metals such as silver, gold or platinum in their construction.

There are several drawbacks to the metallurgy inherent in traditional flutes. They tend to be a bit weighty to hold for protracted periods… oh, and they’re mind-numbingly expensive, which can be an issue.

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Stihl MS 250 Chain Saw

This could well be the perfect chain saw. I’ll allow that there’s a degree of disconnect in the idea of perfection in a machine that’s so superbly destructive.

In its most rudimentary sense, a small chain saw is an elegantly simple device, and this being the case, you’d wonder how it is that most of them appear to have been designed by lesser primates to be used as rustic coffee-table decorations. Especially if you got one on sale, the majority of the world’s chain saws typically prove nearly impossible to start, genuinely impossible to maintain after their first year in this world and rabidly homicidal toward their owners.

The Stihl MS 250 is remarkable for its being none of the above. Superbly designed, flawlessly manufactured and a joy to use, it does things to wood that lesser saws can only dream of.

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Alcatel Onetouch A392A Cell Phone

It entailed no mean effort to convince the sales-rodent at Wal-Mart that I really wanted something other than a smart phone. “You understand it can’t run apps,” he reminded me for the fifth time as he reluctantly applied a magnetic key to the security device that locked the packaging for the Alcatel Onetouch. I resisted the urge to reply that my toaster can’t run apps either, but that it succeeds in performing the function for which it was purchased with commendable success just the same.

“It’s just a… y’know… phone,” he said with obvious dismay.

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Dell OptiPlex 3020 Desktop Computer

Dell makes seriously excellent computers, and were it not for the nettlesome process involved in actually obtaining one, we’d likely own more of them. The previous occasion of our doing so – and thereafter spending several turgid weeks in Dell hell while our order was lost, found, charged, uncharged, lost some more and finally delivered way later than we’d been promised – caused us to vow that Dell hell would freeze before we bought another Dell system.

We recently decided that sufficient time had elapsed to give the dudes of Dell another chance, on the assumption that they must have smartened up as they’d have long since put themselves out of business were it otherwise. We needed a new desktop computer, Dell was having a sale and there was magic in the air.

The exact nature of the magic in question remains a subject of some debate.

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Snark SN-8 Instrument Tuner

Clamp-on digital tuners have been among us for some time, and most of them work reasonably well. The Snark SN-8 tuner, however, absolutely nails the technology. It’s so quick as to be clairvoyant, flawlessly accurate, impossible to deceive even if it finds itself tuning next to a 787 taking off and easy to read. It also looks cool.

While Snark makes a number of tuners which are ostensibly intended for use with specific instruments – a guitar tuner, a bass tuner, a violin tuner and so on – the SN-8 appears to care little for these distinctions, and happily tunes anything it’s affixed to. It took a bit of head scratching to find a way to clamp one to a fiddle – horizontally across the bottom of the peghead works nicely.

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Mahindra eMax 22 4WD HST Compact Tractor

This machine is almost too much fun to be legal, and it can do all sorts of really useful things while it’s making itself enjoyable. It’s well built, expertly engineered and, with a rich palette of available implements, it’s capable of becoming just about anything that one could ask of a small tractor.

It also has a name that virtually no one in North America has heard of, and as such, it seems somewhat exotic and sophisticated. I like to think of it as the Jaguar of heavy machinery.

The Mahindra eMax 22 4WD HST is, in fact, a product of The Mahindra Group, which turns out to make more tractors than any other manufacturer on the planet. It’s probably one of the smallest machines they build, but sometimes small is cool.

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Canadian Tire 37-1112-2 Temporary Shelter

This review is unlikely to be of much interest to readers outside Canada, as it’s only in the land of moose, flat beer and preposterous taxes that is to be found that most ubiquitous of institutions, Canadian Tire. As its name might imply, Canadian Tire is a Canadian retailer that sells tires. However, it also sells just about everything else.

If it bolts together, plugs in, rotates, flashes, disassembles, dries in no time or requires replacement every fifty-thousand miles, it’s available at Canadian Tire. Perhaps more to the point, there seems to be a Canadian Tire store within driving distance of every Canadian south of the arctic circle.

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Generlink MA23-N Generator Interface

Electric power is only as reliable as the utility providing it, and considering that electric utilities are increasingly the province of politicians rather than engineers, you could probably get better odds for an IPO to develop transparent rhinoceroses. Especially if you live outside town, dependable power isn’t something you really want to depend on.

Only the arrival of your bill is certain.

Our electricity is backed up by a Generac standby generator, and while these things are convenient and usually pretty trustworthy, they can be a bit time-consuming to get parts for when they do decide to start throwing sprockets around. More to the point, backup generators run on propane, and while they’re technically conventional internal combustion engines, they’re decidedly weird ones. Keeping them running under difficult circumstances is something of an art.

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Black Rock Cider Kit

Few activities are as rewarding as brewing your own drink. We’ve been making wine for years, and occasional batches of beer. Aside from tasting better than most of their commercial cousins, our home-brewed beverages get past some of the most extreme government cash grabs in the western world. Our pols have devised more layers of alcohol taxes than can be easily counted.

Home-brewed hard apple cider is a somewhat more elusive drink than either wine or beer. For some time, we got by with tinned apple juice and wine yeast, and the results were largely drinkable. This said, the process of commercial canning clearly upsets the sugar balance in apple juice, and getting the resulting brew to taste like proper cider was challenging.

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Zwilling 8-Inch Euroline Stainless Damascus Chef’s Knife

Bob Kramer has a cool day job. He makes knives, and then he makes big bucks selling them through his web page. He’s a master blade smith – not an honorary title – and he’s spent years learning how to make knives that stay sharp.

Making steel from which edged weapons are crafted – or edged kitchen implements, in this case – is an art that dates back several millennia. Discussions of serious knives usually get around to something referred to as Damascus steel… which is more or less what Bob Kramer and other master knife makers create. The “more or less” aspect of Damascus steel arises from few experts on the subject being able to agree exactly what it is, or exactly how it was made.

The original process of creating Damascus steel has been lost in the dust of ages, although a number of contemporary researchers and craftsmen claim to have rediscovered it.

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Moroso 89560 Tire Pressure Gauge

Keeping the tires of your vehicle correctly inflated will potentially save you some cash at your local gasso, save you still more cash when your tires last longer and possibly even save your life. Incorrectly-inflated tires don’t handle as well as they should, especially in the sorts of extreme conditions that contribute to highway fatality statistics, and they can fail catastrophically.

All this having been said, keeping the tires of your vehicle correctly inflated might prove a bit tricky if you attempt to do so using the inexpensive tire pressure gauges available from big-box retailers. Costing about ten dollars and banged out in their countless thousands in China, low-end pressure gauges are often shockingly inconsistent. Their readings can vary considerably, finding themselves perturbed by temperature, pressure and even the number of times they’ve been used.

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Sangean DAR-101 Digital Audio Recorder

If a machine this sophisticated had been built back when tape recorders had actually involved tape, it would have weighed about as much as a refrigerator, and been almost as large. Despite it’s diminutive size and unthreatening price, it’s a remarkably capable recording device. However, beyond its laudable technical specifications, it has been designed with an admirable degree of forethought and prescience, to allow it to record all manner of things.

As nearly as I could determine, Sangean spends most of its time building sophisticated radios. The Sangean DAR-101 appears to have been created to record radio transmissions. This is hardly it’s best trick, however.

If it talks, sings, beeps, squawks, barks, plays, enunciates or howls at the moon, this recorder will listen to it, digitize it and store it in flawless, easily-accessed digital audio files. More to the point, it will do so using an intuitive tape recorder-like interface that could be easily mastered by three out of four bricks, and some liberal politicians.

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