random – Page 2 – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

Mr. Fancy Pants Shirt

October 19, 2015 6:01 pm

I've been needing a new white dress shirt for many months now. The collar on my old shirt was pretty beat up. But shopping for dress shirts is lame so I kept putting it off. As I was considering my need of a new shirt I was thinking it would be nice to have a shirt that actually fit properly, which seemed like it would entail shopping for a shirt and then getting it tailored. That seemed even more lame than just shopping for a shirt.

shirt_1 — My custom shirt from Tailor Store as it arrived from Sri Lanka (minus packaging)

So, as I am wont to do, I did my research. And I found Tailor Store. It is a Swedish company which allows you to order custom-designed and custom-fit shirts without leaving home! You might be thinking that a custom made shirt is going to be expensive. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. Tailor Store offers a poplin, white, cotton fabric for $49. So I figured it was worth a shot.

You can customize every single aspect of the shirt if you want to: fabric, button color, thread color, cuff style, collar style, pocket, embroidery, elbow patches, etc. Despite the level of customization available the user interface is quite good. I'm impressed they were able to keep it as simple as it is. I was just going for a classic white shirt, though, so my design process was pretty straightforward.

But the real convenience is the custom fit. If you put in your height and weight they'll set some starting values for all of the needed measurements and they provide explanations and tutorial videos for how to take each measurement. Jess helped me take the actual measurements to make the final adjustments.

Once you place an order the information is sent off to their manufacturing facility in Sri Lanka where it's custom made and then shipped out. Shipping does cost you though, $20. So the total cost for the shirt was $70. But that's still pretty great for a fully custom-designed and custom-fit shirt.

I placed the order on October 8 and received my shirt today, October 19. Eleven days to have it custom-made and then delivered from around the world is pretty good in my opinion.

And it fits great. I am very pleased with the result. If I had need for more nice shirts I'd definitely order from them again. And since the measurements are already done it would only be a matter of designing a new shirt and placing the order.

shirt_2 — My new custom-fit shirt from Tailor Store (it needs to be ironed)

NASA Apollo Pictures

October 5, 2015 5:40 pm

Last week NASA released a bunch (over 10,000) of original images from the Apollo missions on their Flickr account. They're all Public Domain images so anyone can download the originals and use them for anything they like. I flipped through and picked out my favorites and cleaned them up. I'll probably get some nice canvas prints made of some of them when Canvas Press has sales.

Here are my top 10 after cleaning them up. I've uploaded my full versions so you can download them yourself if you want to make a poster or canvas print or something. Clicking an image will open the full-size version, which you can then save to your computer using right-click -> Save image...

A Light in the Dark

September 28, 2015 7:34 pm

I wrapped an LED around a button battery with a little material to keep it separated so you push on it to turn the LED on. Then we took turns waving it around while camera took a picture with a long exposure.

Heather's work was usually very...nuclear:

We encouraged her to move around more:

I tried to write my name, but my spatial awareness is apparently not great:

Jess did better with her contribution:

Robots versus Zombies

July 4, 2015 2:27 pm

Pretty sure this is how the robots will see the zombies... (just entertaining Heather by playing with the webcam).

Supercharging Slickdeals

March 3, 2015 10:46 am

I've been using Slickdeals.net to discover good deals on things for several years now. Today I thought it'd be really helpful to be able to hide deals from companies that I don't ever buy things from (like Tigerdirect and eBay). A quick Google search turned up nothing, but playing around with Slickdeals revealed just such an option.

Open the Frontpage preferences by clicking the little gear icon at the top-right:

Doing so reveals the Preferences panel which allows you to adjust Category Preferences (on the left) and Store Preferences (on the right).

The Store Preferences allows you to type in a store name and it will provide suggestions for matching companies. Select the match and it will appear with a dislike/neutral/like slider you can adjust.

Any category or company set to "dislike" is hidden. Any category/company set to "like" will result in more deals matching that category/company being shown to you.

This makes Slickdeals even more useful since I can stop seeing stuff from companies and categories I don't care about and instead see more stuff I might actually be interested in.