If you like smoked meats, then, well I guess we can be friends. But not everyone has the room for a big wood-fired smoker or the time to tend the fire for a long cooktime. For convenient home smoking and consistently delicious reults, the Masterbuilt 30-inch Electric Digital Stainless Steel Smokehouse might just be the solution for you!
A week ago, satire site The Onion posted ‘Nation’s Female Joggers Know They Will One Day Be Assaulted, Buried In Woods’, where women acknowledge this as simply part of the circle of life. All fun aside, as fall arrives it’s a good time to step back and remind ourselves of the need for enhanced safety on shorter, cooler days. I wrote about early morning running tips in the first part of spring as I started to see more people emerging from their winter cocoons, and now as school is back in session and the mornings are darker it makes sense…
Hydration is a problem for everyone – office workers deal with dry environments from conditioned air and need to increase fluid intake to compensate. Athletes bodies use it more quickly and it is easier to get into a very dangerous place. As fall marathon season starts it is important to separate fact from myth to keep hydrated and safe. Through the years there have been a number of articles and guidelines put out about what we should drink, when we should drink and how much we should consume. Most of these have been pretty rough guidelines, and can generally be…
My wife and I love to go camping … our boys, not so much. And when I say camping, I am not referring to an RV with TV and microwave and air conditioning! I mean a tent. One of my memories from tenting with our boys last fall was the ‘tech huddle’ in the public bathroom. There were four outlets, and all of the teens would go hang out to charge up their stuff in the evenings. So I was intrigued when I saw the Goal Zero Katabatic solar powered tent over at Wired. The tent is being sold through…
This weekend I completed the inaugural running of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon Marathon. The race takes place on the Pine Creek Gorge just outside of Wellsboro, PA. As noted, this was the first running of the race, which always means watching organizers work out the bugs in the system in real-time. I had gotten a couple of obscure comments from one of the leaders of a local running club group on Facebook, so I was watching what happened over the course of the pre-race and race-day events. It was a race and a weekend that left me conflicted in many…
During this week’s Press Preview of the 2014 Toyota Tundra and 2014 Toyota 4Runner, we had a chance to spend some “quality time” in different models of each truck. And while we spent some time with the trucks on nicely paved roads, we also had a chance to go off-road with both vehicles. The event took place on the grounds of the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Farmington, PA, a gorgeous resort set on 2,000 wooded acres in the Laurel Highlands of Southwestern Pennsylvania. Here’s a small taste of what it was like off-road in the 4Runner. Toyota had a series…
In January we brought exciting new firearm news with the TrackingPoint precision guided rifle technology. Read the news release here and read about their iPhone game here. The TrackingPoint technology allows rifles to be amazingly accurate up to 1,000 yards. The precision guided XactSystem allows shooters to tag a target, track it and fire the round making perfect shots despite moving the weapon slightly. The same sort of technology is used in fighter jets ensuring only the intended target is engaged. This is exciting technology that can only be found from TrackingPoint. The company was not satisfied with democratizing the…
Have you ever stood in your driveway waiting for your GPS to find satellites whereas your phone was set a few minutes earlier? I have done it many times, as has pretty much anyone who has both a GPS watch and smartphone! The realities of power, cost and space make it hard for GPS watch makers to have the same capabilities as a smartphone. To deal with this, Magellan introduces the Echo – let’s take a look! The Echo isn’t like other GPS watches – because it isn’t a GPS! Instead, it is a specialized Bluetooth receiver that works with…
The LifeProof case for the iPhone 5 is a terrific way to keep your phone safe from life’s bumps, bruises and mishaps. In addition to all the other protection it offers, the LifeProof case is waterproof. That means you can dump it in the toilet or leave it in the rain and feel confident it will still work. But what if, for example, you are spending time at a lake and don’t want to worry about your phone getting wet? Moreover, what if you want your iPhone safe from water damage AND able to float? That’s where LifeProof’s LifeJacket comes…
I am just coming back after a week-long ‘vacation’ … and I have a marathon in THREE WEEKS! I learned about and signed up for the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon Marathon just before vacation, and at that point it was still June, and the race was at the end of July, so I looked at it as weeks away. It wasn’t until we got back from vacation that I really thought about it – and realized that my next marathon is only 10 weeks after the first. Plenty of time to make sure I’m ready, but not a lot of time…
Anyone who reads my posts knows I love to hunt and love to shoot. In fact, I just received my first custom rifle built by my best friend. My next firearm goal is to have a tactical rifle built. Since tactical rifles have rails, many accessories and other items can be added making each firearm unique to the owner. Of course, there are plenty of scope options, lights and lasers and other cool stuff to add to the rails, but what about for a geek like me? For those of us who love technology and gadgets added to everything we…
You probably have a certain level of automation that you enjoy in your home already; perhaps you use a smart thermostat, or maybe you have a home alarm. The cool thing about home monitoring and automation is that it doesn’t matter how old your home is, there are products that can be added at any time which will modernize it, making it as self-regulating and automatic as you want it to be. People who own travel trailers and campers don’t necessarily have the same options. Sure, you could drop $500K on a new top of the line travel bus with…
Spring time in Texas is hot; we do not really have seasons, just hot and not so hot. We are deep into the spring turkey hunting season, and some days it is just unbearable. I hunt with a bow, so that is done in a pop up tent blind. Turkeys can see extremely well, so I wear a long sleeve black shirt and black ninja mask. Of course I always wear my snake boots and long pants. The blind is basically an oven. I recently heard about people turning ice chests into an air conditioner on the go and decided…
How many of us have been at a grocery store and been disappointed with the variety and quality of produce? How many sandwiches or other dishes have been befouled with limp lettuce or a feeble yellow-green-pink tomato? It’s no wonder kids (and some adults) aren’t too keen on vegetables. What to do? One solution is to start your own garden, especially an heirloom garden. The term “heirloom” is still often debated, but for the purposes of this post I’m going to loosely define the term to mean an openly pollinated plant that breeds true to its parents and is not…
My World Geography class was discussing Africa last week, and the subject of electricity seemed to interest them. There are parts of Africa that are not connected to an electrical grid, so alternate forms of power are a must. A student found an article explaining that 80% of Kenyans do not have electrical service and that they primarily light their homes with kerosene lamps. Long story short, a start up company is now offering solar setups that can run a small house with a pay-as-you-go model to be affordable to the rural residents. Read the article here. My students were impressed…
We’ve all seen those first-person action videos of guys and gals flying down the slopes, jumping out of planes, or slashing through the whitewater on their kayaks. These videos are entertaining and provide the viewer a peek at exactly how it would look if you were risking your own neck out there, without all the danger and adrenaline. The problem with these videos, however, is that you can only capture one angle on the action, unless the camera is behind held in hand. Oregon Scientific is looking to change this with their new Oregon Scientific ATC Chameleon camera, the world’s…
We first broke news of TrackingPoint and their Precision Guided Firearm system during this year’s CES. The system is a custom-built rifle and scope combination that makes long-range shooting much more accurate. Using the XactSystem, shooters tag, track and hit their target with pinpoint accuracy. TrackingPoint has just released Precision Hunter Lite which allows iOS users to experience their revolutionary technology. The free application is basically a first person shooter that replicates the Precision Guided Firearm experience. Using the head’s up display, users practice utilizing the XactSystem to successfully make ethical shots at extreme distances. Users choose their quarry then…
Over the last week I have heard a few stories about runners getting into a bit of trouble with the elements, and reflecting on how hard it is to interpret hypothermia warning signs … when you are the one who has gotten into trouble. One veteran runner had a ‘stomach emergency’ mid-run which led to too much exposure, and the inability to get warm. Fortunately there was a nearby gym where he stopped and called his wife to collect him. He noticed that he had a hard time operating his phone, and while driving home she remarked that the scary…
This week marked the 35th anniversary of the Blizzard of ’78, and as a result we have seen some of the iconic images from that storm on web sites and social media. I have a few pictures that I’ll share here. The other day it was snowing – pretty snow floating to the ground and coating everything. I snapped a picture with my smartphone camera that went to our photo stream, and my wife saw it and remarked that it was a pretty shot … and that is likely the only attention it will ever get. And as snow started…
I’ll admit that the first time Kev slipped his headlamp on to go do something outside in the dark, I smirked. Why not just carry a flashlight? Why go out of your way to look like a coal miner or a caver? I’m being facetious, of course. I totally understood why he would want to be able to do things outside handsfree, but there’s no getting around the fact that wearing a headlamp makes you look a little silly. Only, you are the one getting the last laugh. If you have a headlamp on, it’s like you’ve grown an extra…
It’s time for slightly embarrassing admissions here at Gear Diary: I can personally vouch that when I was in college (hmmpty-hmmph) years ago, I learned that it is possible to smuggle an entire eight-pack of 8 oz. Little Kings Cream Ales into a movie theater stashed within the various pockets of a denim jacket. I mean, have you seen the price of concessions at the movies lately?! Unfortunately, I can also verify that when you drape said blue jean jacket around the back of a theater seat, there is a very high probability that at least one of those little…