A Collection Of Special Purpose Tools

A collection of special purpose tools that I would like on my army knife (even if they don’t all fit).

I’d Like A Tea Stick On My Army Knife

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. I’m not a tea snob. I do know that tea tastes better when it is brewed from fresh loose leaves. I realize that to get the best taste, the leaves need room to unfurl as the steep. And I know that tea bags are often filled with stale, low quality leaf dust that bears little of the nuance and deep flavor of the whole leaf. BUT I am also a fan of keeping things simple.

Really, I can’t be bothered to get out the weighing scale every time I want to make a cup of tea. I can’t be bothered to add water to the precise temperature to the leaves (green tea does best steeped in water at below boiling point don’t you know). And I certainly am not going to faff about “awakening the leaves” before each brew. No, I just want to add water to leaves and enjoy some nice tea. Read more »

A Glass Nail File Please!

Yes, yes I know, there is a nail file on my Swiss army knife. But I never use it. I’ll admit, it is heavy duty and could probably last for hundreds of years of shaping my nails, but the more I read about nail health the more I realize I have to take more care when looking after my nails.

The main problem with metal nail files is that they are too harsh for the nail. Rather than gliding over the nail tip a metal file can easily tear the nail, roughening it up and causing it to splinter and crack.

Ugly yellow toenails

The only time I can imagine wanting a metal nail file is if I was undergoing nail fungus treatment for my nasty looking, thick yellow toenails with a topical nail treatment such as Funginix. In this situation I would want to open up the nail layers as much as possible by passing the file back and forth over the horizontal nail surface to allow the antifungal treatment to soak in and eliminate the fungus. But that process has nothing to do with having beautifully shaped nails.

I Love My Blue Pearl Pool Cleaner (I Just Wish It Could Fit On My Army Knife)

Yes, I want a robotic vacuum cleaner on my army knife and I don’t care that it doesn’t fit…

I have a smallish swimming pool that I love. But what I don’t like is the weekly cleaning routine that goes along with owning a pool. I followed some of the guidance over at poolshock.net but still found it a pain every Sunday night to vacuum the pool using my pressure-side cleaner.

But everything changed when I bought my Blue Pearl Robotic Cleaner.

All I do now is plug it in, switch it on, drop it into the water and return a few hours later to a sparkling pool. It’s completely hands free and I don’t have to mess about with long hoses or ambiguous attachments. I also don’t have to worry that I’m overloading my pool filter which is nice as that’s an expensive piece of equipment right there.

I find it unbelievable that manufactures refer to their suction side and pressure side vacuum cleaners as “automatic.” They need far more supervision than my pool robot and the installation is convoluted. I strongly believe that as soon as a pool owner tries a pool robot, there is no going back to other types of cleaner. Really, they are that good. Read more »

What Is The Best Pocket Knife?

Also known as a folding knife or jack-knife, the key characteristic of a pocket knife is that it should be highly portable and able to fit in, wait for it, yes a pocket. When closed they can be carried around safely. Its a generic term that groups together a couple of different pocket knife types which we describe in more detail below.

But before we get started if there is one feature to look for in a folding pocket knife, it’s a good quality locking mechanisms. Using a pocket knife without one is dangerous, even for the experienced knife handler. Locking mechanisms normally fall into two categories: (1) locking-liner (linerlocks) which have a spring loaded locking bar behind the rear tang of the blade when opened and (2) the functional lock-back which positions a stop bar parallel to the blade. Read more »

XML Army Knife Software Bundles And Tools [ARCHIVE]

A simple inference service to experiment with RDF rules.
XML feeds allow for a variety of data manipulation (in fact XML was designed to transport and store data). They can easily be manipulated into other formats like XHTML (an XSL Transformation - XSLT). Learn more here. An example is the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) XML datafeed in the US covering real estate for sale. Of course nothing can really be done if you don't have the datafeed - something that both Nexa and realestatereviewr complain about when it comes to real estate in Central America for example. Other details.
A SPARQL query processor for QDF to support multiple output formats. Read more.
The SPARQL Query Service also includes a simple AJAX client that can be used for running SELECT queries against the service and then integrating them with client-side Javascript code.
The XAK TagSoup Clean-Up Service provides a simple online service to allow on the fly correction of malformed and dodgy HTML documents found in the wild. This allows them to be processed further, e.g. to extract metadata or apply XSLT transformations.