“It’s a bit too short.”

This statement has plagued man for time immemorial, especially those of us sharing my exotic tastes and needs.  I am referring, of course, to my predilection for wearing a watch on the outside of my glove on occasion.  This is important so I can monitor the time closely enough to be fashionably late after a long day of riding a motorcycle, skiing, stirring vats of hazardous waste, etc.

Those of you who have tried to wear a watch over a glove realize there are two common problems that arise.

1. Strap length is insufficient (as above)
2. Removing one’s hand from the glove with the watch strapped to it is difficult if the urgent need to say, pee, arises.

If you only really have the first problem, the simplest solutions may be to get a longer strap, punch an extra hole in the tail of your existing strap, or make a non-elastic extension with the spare tail of any old strap you have kicking around (see below for tips).  You may have to retrain yourself to loosen or remove your watch before pulling your glove off, but that’s probably within most of your capabilities.

If you want to be able to remove and don your glove and watch repeatedly in the course of your day like I do, read on.  With the aid of the Swiss Army and a spare dive watch strap or two, both the problems above can be solved in under five minutes without permanent modification to your watch or its strap.

The tools and materials:

Tools: The small (sharp) blade of your Swiss Army knife will do.  An X-acto knife is probably better, and a hole punch to match your current watch strap’s buckle tang would be best, if you’re not an inveterate cheapskate like me.  A pair of nice scissors is easiest to cut the spare strap to length if you go that route.

Materials: Spare donor watch strap with an expandable (stretchy) section: these are commonly available as stock on cheap dive watches (mine was from an Orient Mako) or aftermarket new (~$10) to allow for wetsuit-compression on a dive.  This will be irreparably altered, so consider that before spending too much (any) money.

Make sure the donor strap width is close to your watch’s stock strap’s (or at least fits through your original watch’s buckle without too much slop)

You can use either end of the donor strap, depending on your preference.  The things to consider are the following:

1. If you use the “tail” (long end with holes) make sure the holes fit the buckle tang on your watch’s strap.  You’ll also need to notch out the spring bar tunnel to accept a buckle tang and then install your spare buckle there.  The strap keeper can also be transferred if needed.
2. If you use the “buckle” (short)  end of the donor strap, you’ll need to make a hole or two that fits your watch buckle tang.  Experiment a bit to see where you can punch the hole to allow for a fairly short extension without impinging upon the donor band’s “expandability” This is the approach I used in the pictures.

If your donor strap’s buckle won’t work with your watch’s strap’s holes, you can cannibalize another strap’s buckle that will (mine was from a beaten-up old strap from a Glycine Airman).

Pass your watch’s strap buckle through one of your new extension’s holes, and the other end of the strap through the extension’s buckle and size the whole thing for a secure fit over your glove.  Try it on and pull it off and adjust the buckle positions until the expansion stretches enough to allow you to take the glove/watch combo off and on without the watch flopping around (too loose) or popping a spring bar (too tight).  Trim the donor extension length as needed, and you’re done!

Enjoy the ride.

App store link

The original idea for the app occurred to me when my wife and I were coming up with a name for our (then future) daughter, and I realized that there’s so much more to a name than the basic popularity info and “name meanings” text that all the baby name apps and websites I found centered around.  Nothing out there provided much in the way of real data.  What do people named Julia tend to be like?  Turns out that Julias tend toward filmmaking, professional snowsports, and tennis.  They’re also usually Democrats.

I got started on the app during our daughter’s naps while I was on paternity leave, and the first version of the app was ready for launch 6 months later.

When I showed a pre-release version to some friends one night at happy hour, and they crowded around wanting to find out about their own names and their friends’ names, I knew that I had something special and that it’s an app for everyone, not just expecting parents.  Hence the name, “Nametrix,” which you could view as “Name + Metrics” or perhaps more as a feminine (“-trix”) version of the word “Namer.”

Here’s the latest description in the app store:

Description

Name research taken to another level — eye-opening features you’ll find in no other app!

• “Mason” – More common among scientists… or strippers?
• “Julian” – Republican or Democrat?
• “Ava” – Southern name or Northeastern?
• “Taylor” – More popular as a boy’s name or a girl’s?

Explore the answers to these kinds of questions and more via the user-friendly interface.

Our software has analyzed millions of real people and their professions via Wikipedia and data provided by the US government. View the results right here in unprecedented detail.

A sampling:

Isabella
• Top occupations: Poet, Model, Actress
• Top party: Democrat
• Popularity peaked in 2010
• Most popular in the Northeast
• #2 in popularity last year

Alexander
• Top occupations: Aerospace Engineer, Librettist, Skeleton Racer
• Top party: Democrat
• Popularity peaked in 1993
• Most popular in the Midwest
• #8 in popularity last year

Top names for football players:
#1 Terrell
#2 Darius
#3 Dexter
#4 Donovan
#5 Isaiah

Top names for writers:
#1 Jeannette
#2 Winifred
#3 Sterling
#4 Khalil
#5 Bertha

Archaeologist? Farmer? Soldier? Inventor? What are the top names for those? Check them out in the app.

Altogether, you’ll get to explore thousands of first names, all with detailed popularity info and many with occupation rankings. Real data from real people; no gimmicks, no nonsense.

It’s called Nametrix, and it’s 99 cents.  Here’s a direct link to it.

I created the app when I realized that I could build an app with really interesting name analysis tools that no other apps have.  There are hundreds of name and baby name apps in the iOS app store, but as far as I’ve seen they’re all pretty much the same basic census data plus fluff.

Nametrix’s content is based on census data, occupation data, and political contribution data.  With that, I’ve built what I think are some unusual tools, including these:

• View what occupations are disproportionately common for a given name (e.g., Aerospace Engineer is #1 for Alexander)
• View year-by-year, state-by-state name popularity heat maps, and animate via a slider
• View graphs of male vs. female popularity
• View full name rankings for 1910 through the present by gender

Rate Nametrix in the App Store and/or Like this post if you’d like to support this and future apps!

Here’s the full description from the app store:

Name research taken to another level — eye-opening and interactive features you’ll find in no other app!

• “Mason” – More common among scientists… or strippers?
• “Ava” – Southern name or Northeastern?
• “Taylor” – More popular as a boy’s name or a girl’s?

Explore the answers to these kinds of questions and more via the user-friendly interface.

Our software has analyzed more than 550,000 real people and their professions via Wikipedia and more than 100 years of state-by-state US census data. View the results right here in unprecedented detail.

A sampling:

Isabella
• Top occupations: Poet, Model, Actress
• Popularity peaked in 2010
• Most popular in the Northeast
• #2 in popularity last year

Alexander
• Top occupations: Aerospace Engineer, Skeleton Racer, Librettist
• Popularity peaked in 1993
• Most popular in the Midwest
• #8 in popularity last year

Top names for football players:
#1 Terrell
#2 Darius
#3 Dexter
#4 Donovan
#5 Isaiah

Top names for writers:
#1 Jeannette
#2 Winifred
#3 Sterling
#4 Khalil
#5 Bertha

Archaeologist? Farmer? Soldier? Inventor? What are the top names for those? Check them out in the app.

Altogether, you’ll get to explore more than 3200 first names, all with detailed popularity info and 1200+ with occupation rankings. Real data from real people; no gimmicks, no nonsense.

A Swiss Army knife, duct tape, and a cricket ball can save
YOU tens of dollars!

I like that this blog has offered ideas on how to reduce the use of
batteries (e.g., the vacuum cleaner suggestion).  I am all for this
approach, and have stemmed the flow of lithium into my carbon
footprint by employing only good old-fashioned mechanical power in my
wristwatches.  Sure they’re not as accurate as a quartz watch, (or
your phone), but who needs to know the exact time anyway?  Besides,
being late is fashionable, especially if you’re a municipal bus.  The
problem with a mechanical watch (and a battery-powered one for that
matter) is that, from time to time, one must get inside the working of
it to service or regulate it, and the manufactures have managed to
make that pretty difficult without special tools.  But fear not!

There are three common tools we all have at our disposal that will
remove the back of almost any watch with some ingenuity and small
effort (exception noted below).  Oh, and these methods will also work
just fine to get into the backs of similar quartz watches to change
batteries as well.  Make sure you clean your watch backs well before
doing any of the following so crud doesn’t get into the movements and
you can see what you’re doing.

For snap back cases:
1.  Swiss Army knife.  The Swiss make great pocket knives, and, it so
happens that they make watches that are ok too.  So entwined are these
two industries that many Swiss Army knives are designed especially to
open most snap back watch case backs.  Until now, you only knew these
horological attachments as the “can opener” and the “small knife”.
The can opener attachment in particular seems well-suited to fit into
those little notches on the back of snap on cases (examine your case
carefully for the little indent or notch where it’s best to pry, and
cover the back with masking tape if you care if it gets scratched).
Use the point of the bit that cuts into the can, not the little
screwdriver fitting, slide it into the opening notch, press, twist,
and POP.  If that doesn’t work, usually the small knife blade will get
the watch back off, but it’s a bit more dangerous for obvious reasons
(you might break your blade, remove your finger, etc.).  Failing that,
the large blade can work, with even more warnings.  So be careful.

Next up, screw back cases.
1. Cricket ball.  Ok, maybe you don’t have this hanging around, but a
nice soft practice cricket ball (or similar), when pressed HARD
against a screw down watch back and twisted counter clockwise, will
often get the back off quickly and without marring the case.  You can
scar the surface of the rubber ball with a knife and rub it briskly on
a hard surface to heat and soften it to give it more grip (and cheat
on your spin bowling game).  Don’t have a cricket ball or need
something a bit grippier?

2.  Duct tape.  You definitely have this around.  Take duct tape, and
make it into a dense ball, sticky-side out.  When the ball gets to be
about 20% bigger than your watch back (you want the entire back of the
watch to be in contact with the adhesive), you’re ready to go.  Press
hard onto the back of your watch so that the adhesive surface is
sticking well to the watch back, twist counter clockwise, and hope for
the best.  If you don’t get it off on the first try, switch to a fresh
bit of the ball and try harder.  You can also stick a cold pack on the
back of the watch beforehand to try to get the metal to contract a bit
beforehand, but make sure it doesn’t get wet and ruin the tape’s
adhesion.

These techniques have worked to open all the watches I’ve attempted
with one exception.  My vintage Tudor back has never budged.  So there
are limitations, but you might save yourself some tool box space and
money by trying the bodge solutions first…

Is there anything more useless to the modern man than an old pocket watch?  I mean, who wants to be constantly reaching into his pocket to check the time on something that doesn’t make phone calls or play Angry Birds?  I would posit, however, that yes, there are many things more useless than an old pocket watch, among them broken chairs and 1 foot-long scraps of flooring mouldering under your house… but more on those later.

There are times, furthermore, when one would want to be able to tell the time when his (or her) phone or wristwatch are out of reach, or, say, his toddler has smashed his bedside clock into a sad semblance of its former self. That is when useless things, combined with the attention of the universe’s most useful thing (that being, of course, a Swiss Army knife), find a new life.  And who among us doesn’t like to resurrect old machinery from the near death of someone’s sock drawer?  Here is the recipe:

Ingredients

• 1 smidgen broken chair back, well beaten.
• 1 scrap of wood flooring or similar– you can beat that too if you like
• 1 screw hook (brass if you’re classy, brass-colored if you’re me)
• 1 Swiss Army knife, well sharpened with reamer/awl, saw, and blade
• 1 pinch of a penchant for whittling
• A smattering of glue
• Wood finish
• A dollop of antique pocket watches to taste

Procedure

1. Remove an upright bit of the chair back, and shape it to your liking with the saw.
2. Ditto with the floor plank.
3. Whittle/mortise a notch out of the back of the plank so that the chair part fits nicely into it.  Glue/nail/screw the pieces together.
4. Use awl to make pilot hole on upright portion and insert screw hook.
5. Hang antique open face pocket watch on hook, and enjoy endless nights of soothing, hundred-year old machinery rattling away.

Do you have a hunter case watch?  No problem: just omit the whole upright bit and use the awl and your penchant for whittling (and maybe a little glue) to fashion a four piece rest on the top of the plank.

Have both an open face and a hunter-case watch?  Make the upright hook and the rest.  You could use both your watches as a state of the art dual-time zone watch.  I think Rolex sells models to tell time in two time zones for thousands of dollars, and you don’t even get to break a chair to get one (just a jewelry store window).

There are several techniques for drying a hydration pack’s bladder, though none of them are very quick — typically hours or days. If you want to store your hydration system or don’t want to risk mildew / bacterial growth, you’ll need to speed up the drying process.

I considered using a hairdryer for this, but anything more than mild heat is best avoided, and drying the drinking tube would be tricky. So I had a better idea.

It occurred to me that I could once again use an air compressor (I have a Makita MAC700) to make life easier.  With this approach, I was able to completely drain and dry the drinking tube in about 10 seconds, and drying the bladder took about 5 more minutes on top of that.

Here’s the process:

1. Empty reservoir bladder.
2. Purge hydration tube with compressed air, and continue spraying until dry (about 10 seconds).
3. Drain pooled water from reservoir via a combination of compressed air and shaking.
4. Put a clean, lint-free rag in reservoir, and spray it with compressed air to move it around.  Repeat with a few more fresh rags until all droplets are gone.
5. Dry remaining surface moisture with compressed air.

Since I wasn’t going to use the hydration system again in the near future, this was a better alternative to storing the bladder in the freezer until the next use.  Here are some other alternatives if you don’t have a compressor or don’t need fast drying:

• Purchase or make a drying hanger
• Purchase a ZEROGOO fan
• Use a fish tank air pump
• Use a hairdryer on cool setting
• Manually dry it with pipe cleaners and cloth

It’s called Lullaby Lyrics, and it’s free.  Here’s a direct link to it.

I figured I’d create the app when I realized that I could remember few words to any lullabies, and there wasn’t a nice and quick way to access lyrics on my iPhone while attempting to calm my baby daughter.  Made-up lyrics are fun and all, but it’s nice to have some real verses at the ready.

Rate Lullaby Lyrics in the App Store and/or Like this post if you’d like to support this and future apps!

Here’s the full description from the app store:

Lyrics for lullabies, plain and simple. Quickly access the words to your favorite lullabies, formatted for your iPhone.

Tag your favorite songs for instant viewing right when you need them. Navigate quickly and easily between songs — keep baby entertained!

Lullaby Lyrics features a curated selection of 20 popular songs and counting. Send us your requests!

FEATURED SONGS

• All the Pretty Little Horses
• All Through the Night
• Amazing Grace
• Are You Sleeping?
• Baa Baa Black Sheep
• Brahms’ Lullaby
• Down to the River to Pray
• Hush, Little Baby
• I Gave My Love a Cherry
• Kumbaya
• Lavender Blue
• Michael Row the Boat Ashore
• My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean
• Oh My Darling, Clementine
• Rock-a-bye Baby
• Skinnaramarink
• Sleep, Baby, Sleep
• Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
• Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral
• Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

All songs are in the public domain.

Turns out that it was possible to eliminate the buzz pretty quickly, and all it took was a few drops of glue in the right spot.  A similar fix would probably work for most of the fans out there that have a slight rattle / vibration / buzz.  Read on for the details of my quick bodge.

Car wheels often have little metal weights glued or fastened to the rim to balance them and provide a smoother ride.  Wheels that haven’t been balanced can cause noise and vibration.  Unbalanced aircraft propellers can cause similar vibration and noise problems, so I figured that I needed to balance the fan blades.

For my fix, I took these steps:

1. removed the front shroud from the fan (comes off easily without tools) and pulled the plastic fan blade assembly off the motor spindle
2. put the blade assembly on the end of a bamboo skewer, and spun the blade a few times in each direction, observing which part of the assembly was on top when it came to rest
3. estimated the average of those points, and put a drop or two of glue in the back of the assembly in that location
4. repeated steps 2 and 3 until the assembly no longer came to rest in a predictable position
5. let the glue dry, and reassembled

It worked!  The buzz is gone, and there’s now just a gentle whirr.

I’d always been a little wary of bleeding brakes as it sounded like a tricky process (“have one person pump the brake pedal while the other person controls the bleeder valves, release the pedal slowly, make sure there are no bubbles…”). Moreover, the more thorough job of a brake flush (replace all the brake fluid in your car) sounds intimidating and something best left to the dealer or independent shop, which would like to charge a lot for the task given the “special equipment” required.

It turns out, though, that with an air compressor, some tubing, and a modified brake fluid reservoir cap, it’s actually surprisingly easy to flush the brake system on most cars, not to mention bleed an individual corner.

The key to this “power flush” or “power bleed” system is a brake master cylinder reservoir cap to which you’ve attached a male air tool coupler. You’ll need to drill a hole in the cap and secure the coupler to it, sealing with a rubber washer or silicone.  In my bodged-together cap, I didn’t achieve a perfect seal, but it turned out that it didn’t really matter — my air compressor was able to keep the system pressurized enough regardless of the small air leak in the cap.

After you’ve topped up your brake fluid reservoir, you install your new, bodged-together cap onto the reservoir.  You then dial down your air compressor’s pressure, attach the compressor to the cap, and run the air compressor at 10-15 PSI.  Voila!  Your brake system is now pressurized.  Flushing is just a simple matter of draining fluid at each brake until it runs clear (being sure to add more fluid to the reservoir as necessary).

There’s an excellent write-up of the details at bimmerforums.com.

For an E46 BMW, I used this equipment:

• Makita MAC700 Big Bore 2.0 HP Air Compressor
• Anchor polyurethane air hose
• Dorman 42035 Master Cylinder Cap
• ATE DOT 4 brake fluid
• Coupler, rubber washer, steel washer, and nut from hardware store

In any case, if you have an umbrella, there’s a good chance you’ve misplaced several of its predecessors.  HodgeBodge reader Ross in Boston sent in this trick that might help — read on for the details.

Ross has this to say:

Being absent-minded, I tend to leave umbrellas on the subway seat next to me.

At work, we get a lot of marketing swag. Inevitably, the swag includes a cheap little aluminum carabiner.

I put a carabiner on my umbrella (umbrellas usually have a nylon loop on the handle) and problem solved: I clip the umbrella to my laptop bag or even myself during the commute. No more lost umbrellas. Also, at work, I clip the partially open umbrella to a metal post on my IKEA desk (so the umbrella is suspended over the edge of the desk and hanging) and the umbrella dries out.

P.S. – I do own an umbrella, the GustBuster Metro, which has a clever venting system to cope with the light rain + strong wind combo we sometimes get here.

I uncovered the solution in this thread on nasioc.com, a Subaru owners’ forum.

All you have to do is push a bungie cord’s hook into the latch mechanism in the underside of the lid/hatch, and it’ll be secured until you release the latch.  My preferred approach is to use a solid steel ring or steel carabiner (available at Home Depot or maybe your local hardware store) and feed a lashing strap through that and the ring to which the latch would normally attach.  Easy and secure!

It’s pretty interesting stuff.  It doesn’t have a sticky surface; instead, it just sticks to itself.  So much so that you have to be really careful when you apply it, which involves stretching it to 2-3x its original length (it’s stretchy and rubbery) and overlapping it with itself as you wrap.

According to the marketing of some of the major brands on Amazon, it was originally used on military aircraft.  It’s waterproof, air-tight, removable (no residue), flexible, and not ugly like duct tape.  Unfortunately, all that means that it’s fairly expensive.  The kind I have, F4 tape, is currently $14 for a 36′ roll.  Another popular kind, Rescue Tape, is pretty similar.

I’ve already used it to

• repair a leak in an exterior drain pipe that I’d previously assumed I’d need to replace,
• insulate and provide strain relief for my electric lawnmower’s cord (I’ve run over it a few times…),
• serve as a gripping surface on our Medela wrench, and
• provide a seal for a makeshift miter saw dust port to vacuum adapter.

Given that it’s waterproof, flexible, and doesn’t leave a residue I’ll probably start bringing some with me for emergency repair on backcountry ski trips and maybe camping as well.