Blog

  • EAGTAC MX3T-C Review

    I recently bought an EAGTAC MX3T-C LED torch. This is a review of it. For technical details see http://www.eagtac.com/product/mx3t-c.

    First up, it gives an excellent light, which after all is its main purpose. The beam is very clear and clean on all settings – no dark rings or dim patches. On the brightest setting, the range is allegedly half a kilometre, and I can believe that. However, most of the time I don’t need the brightest setting; the two lowest ones are fine for my everyday use.

    The controls are simple – one button turns the torch on at the lowest setting; consecutive presses cycle through the brghtness settings (five in all). The second button turns the torch off if it is on, or on (at the brightest setting) if it is off. The second button can also be used to flash the torch – any press longer than (I’m guessing) half a second acts as a momentary on, and releasing the button turns the torch back off. Double-press it and you get a strobe light! Not that useful for me, but you never know… Finally there is a tailcap button, which works exactly like the second button.

    The build quality seems superb. The whole thing looks and feels really well-constructed, though it does take a bit of effort to get the tailcap off and on. But you want a tight fit if the thing is to remain waterproof.

    The belt holster is very solid, suitable even for wide belts, and grips the torch firmly. You would have to be upside down for the torch to fall out, and even then probably not unless you thumped the holster.

    Some niggles:

    On full brightness the body of the torch gets very hot, to the point where it becomes difficult to hold. This is a disadvantage of the short barrel, but is only an issue if you are using the higher settings for longer periods. On the lower settings the heat is no problem.

    The tailcap switch – which is probably only there so they can call the torch “tactical” 🙂 – is a bit pointless on a torch this chunky.

    Good though it is, the holster probably should have a strap so that the torch cannot fall out, even if you are upside down. And a clip as well as the belt loop would make it easier to use the holster casually.

    The torch would benefit from having somewhere to attach a lanyard – a suitable slit in the tailcap and maybe a metal loop attached where the tripod fitting goes. When holding it in your hand there is no room for anything else.

    The torch has no flat spots on the casing, so it rolls easily when put down on any surface.

    It doesn’t come with a charger; you can use any 2A USB charger though, and these days most people have plenty of those.

    These are all minor issues; overall this is a good torch at a good price. I plan on getting a small tripod so that I can use it as a floodlight if I need to.

    See also this article 🙂

  • Ten thousand lumens

    I was given a Hitachi cordless drill about fifteen years ago. It came with a big torch. When the 1AH NiCd batteries it came with faded too far, I replaced them with newer 3AH batteries. This year they finally began to give up too, and I decided to get a New Torch.

    (more…)

  • Corncobs and beeswax

    My brother is a seed breeder, and years ago he gave me a big bag of shucked maize cobs – several hundred I’d guess. He said they were good kindling. They are – if you light your fires with old diesel, the way he does 🙂 While they do burn well, they take a bit to get started.

    (more…)

  • Life lesson – woodworking

    Our woodworking teacher in first year high school told us in our first lesson to treat the bandsaw with great respect.

    He started it up. The blade blurred up to speed; the whole thing stood taller than a man, and hummed with purpose. It was like it had woken up, come alive…

    He whipped a lamb shank out from behind his back and shoved it onto the band in one movement. There was the smallest “zzzt” sound. The bandsaw didn’t even slow down. Its sound didn’t change. He turned it off and it whined into silence. He held up the stump. The other half lay on the sawbed. The silence extended.

    He said “that could have been your finger, your wrist or your arm. Do not fuck with this machine.”

  • Restarting Discord in Ubuntu after unsuspending

    (Update 2025: Sometime in the last year, Discord stopped dying after unsuspending. So I’m not using the technique in this article any more. Actually, I’m not using Discord any more 🙂 But the solution used might come in handy in other contexts, so the article remains.)

    Discord does not survive suspension on Ubunu Linux (20.04, anyway). This has been the case for several Discord versions now. Searches suggests that it is stumbling on something in the NVidia drivers when the system wakes up. Here’s a solution that doesn’t stop Discord dying, but does restart it automatically it when you unsuspend.

    (more…)

  • ssh, LocalCommand, “!args”…

    Did you know that if you press “~” then C while in an ssh session, you get access to several useful commands? You can set up new local and remote forwarding, or stop existing forwarding, all while the connection is still running. From inside the session. But one little-known fact is that you can also run arbitrary local commands too.

    (more…)

  • Secure passwordless root backups with rrsync

    The Problem: You need to access a remote system with rsync to back it up. But some of the files or directories you need to back up need root permissions to read. You need to automate the backups, so you can’t use a password or passphrase. But you really don’t want to allow passwordless logins to the remote, and especially not as root! So what to do?

    (more…)

  • Why sharing passwords is a Very Bad Idea

    I think the following policy should apply to company user accounts (not personal ones like Facebook or Google accounts, but accounts at workplaces). The bigger the workplace, the more important these are:

    1. Access should be given to named individuals only.
    2. Account names should be based on individuals’ names.
    3. Credentials should not be shared.

    (more…)

  • CreateNSW doesn’t like what got created

    CreateNSW is a NSW government agency that is supposed to promote creativity. But when one of the beneficiaries of a grant made through Screenworks, a charity CreateNSW supports, made a fairly pointed video about climate change, CreateNSW stepped in to demand it be taken off the Internet – in this case, taken off Facebook and removed from Instagram.

    (more…)

  • A clean Firefox profile every time

    Sometimes, you need a fresh Firefox. One that is exactly as if you had just installed it. Nothing cached, no cookies, clean. Or perhaps you use different Firefox profiles, for different purposes, and don’t want to have to install all your favourite extensions and configuration changes every time you create a new profile. This post describes one way to achieve both those things. While this post tells how to do it in Linux, you could certainly adapt the methods for Windows or whatever. All you need is Firefox, a way to start it, and a scripting language.

    (more…)