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Product Reviews

  • #21
Superthrive is always a popular target, considering its label claims the product's merits are just short of that of the Grail. Whether it promotes "wellness" or "goodness," I don't recall.

I purchased a bottle of it some years back from Peter D'Amato's place and used it when planting bare-root Cephalotus, Heliamphora, and Nepenthes. Those plants that I didn't use the product on, faired just as well . . .
 
  • #22
Stearic Acid
Vestowax
And a simple electro-cooker with a spigot cut into it.
Altogether cost me about $60.

That's right, I make candles.
The cooker was a great bargain. You can regulate temperature, easy to wash, easy to filter etc. Took me relatively short time to melt around... I'd say...500-600 pounds of beeswax I had lying around into bricks, and now I simply melt a little bit, add stearic acid (makes the candles harder, thus less bendable. If you add too much though, they become fragile and literally smash like thin glass when dropped lol), add some vestowax to make them drip-less and that's it.
I make pure beeswax taper candles - 8 and 12 inches long and 8mm wide (like a wooden pencil). Nice and yellow, smell like honey, take around 2.5 hours to burn to about 1 inch stub. So far I made several hundreds (you can make 300+ alone in a day very easily) and already have 3 churches willing to be supplied by me.
The cooker with spigot was a really good deal. Really really easy and convenient to use.
If you ever make candles or soap in small quantities, I'd definitely recommend it.
If, however, you're makings tons of them, go with a large water-bath, it is much better for large quantities. Be careful though, hot water burns :)
 
  • #23
My latest "big" purchase was my Midi synthesizer called the Axiom 61 made by M-Audio ($250), it's a sweet keyboard that has full 2 handed playability. It's not one of those little 29 key "midi toys" (those belong in a nursery) and not an 88 key monster that won't fit in my space. A simple tap on the transpose buttons gives me the extra lower or higher octaves if I want them. There's also lots of extra buttons, pads and knobs that can be synced to the buttons, sliders and knobs onscreen for full hardware control of the software. This means if I twist a knob on the keyboard the sound generating software onscreen changes in real time to add more reverb, distortion, etc. whatever I "teach" the knob to control. Each sound can have a separate program saved in the keyboard so each sound can have the same knob do different functions, depending upon what program is loaded. Using this single keyboard, once all setup, in a live situation would be great.

MIDI is creating music on a computer, so the keyboard itself is "empty" all sounds are created by various software installed in a Toshiba Satellite laptop that I maxed out on RAM (Laptop $400 more Ram $35). This way instead of buying multiple synthesizers to get new sounds, you just buy more software, it's certainly far easier to buy and store a DVD of sound software than another 66+ key keyboard or two. Once in the old days I had 4 synths setup and nowhere to walk!

The only Virtual synthesizer software I've bought so far is the Komplete Synths box set by Native Instruments ($200). It contains Absynth 4, Massive, FM8 and Pro-53. The last two really suck, I am not big on "classic" synth lead sounds. I prefer the dark, ambient and ethereal weird sounds one can get out of an old Korg or Moog synth so Absynth is what I bought the box set for (the box was on sale for the same price as Absynth 4 all by itself) but Massive is pretty cool too even though Massive is more centered on the industrial, techno, house, trance side of things compared to Absynth which is perfect for filmscorish evolving atmospheres that I like to use.

Absynth 4 is an amazing sound creation device. Giving you some 3000 factory sounds for version 4 and all the sounds from version 3 as well, add onto that all the effects you could want to throw at them, the ability to save the altered sound as a new sound name and in a location of your choosing (your own sound directory). And the mother feature of them all the ability to create your own sounds in a number of ways. Using a mouse or pen tablet you can draw your new soundwaves onscreen for the program to translate into "sounds" (oscillation modules), sounds can be generated out of granular synthesis (dots onscreen), you can import .WAV samples and create sounds from those, Absynth can also be used as a stand alone sampler. Given enough time you could essentially create or destroy just about any sort of sound you want with this single piece of software.

Being kind of lazy I don't plan on creating all my own sounds, I want to buy the Virtual Vienna Orchestra software to have some quality symphonic instruments instead of using the synthesized "string ensemble", "woodwinds", "brass" or "violin" which pretty much always suck. I also wanna get Ethno which is a collection of ancient and ethnic instruments such as the Shofar, roman hunting horns, viking drums, african talking drums, gamelans, bag pipes, etc. I dig all that stuff.

But of course I'm still having trouble getting my recording software (Ableton Live 6) to recognize the Axiom and play nice together (the Ableton software even came with the Axiom for god's sake). It says it's sees it but it won't pick up midi info when I play the keys... So until I figure out this strange loop, I can only play with the synths in stand alone or "live" mode, no recording. I can't wait to finally start doing some recording with the amazing film score sounds I can get outta Absynth. My old dark ambient project from the early 1990s (Cernunnos' Woods) is easily put to shame in comparison to the realms of spectral atmosphere I can create with this!
 
  • #24
One of the best books I've read recently: The Army of the Republic. Copied from my Amazon Vine review:

Project Mayhem on Steroids - 5/5 stars

I don't know where to start. I was completely blown away by this book. "Army of the Republic" is similar to "Fight Club," only bigger, grander, and more organized. Everything in "Fight Club" is in this book, with the biggest difference being the other viewpoints in a revolution.

While reading, we follow along from the first person viewpoints of a militant, a civil protest organizer, and a CEO. I am normally not a big fan of first person, but Cohen does it with such style and appreciation for the characters and their interwoven lives that I had to be impressed. Every viewpoint and every chapter was engaging. Once I hit the halfway mark through this book I could not put it down.

The beginning of "Army of the Republic" starts off with a masterful tone that sets the stage for the rest of the book. This book does seem to model what I would expect of a revolution in the pacing. There are times that are so high octane while others are more subtle, but still loaded with undeniable scenes that only promote the entire world and the civil unrest in that world. Furthermore, like a revolution, the books ramps up the intensity and doesn't let go. It truly is explosive.

I was engaged for every minute that I had this book in my hands. So you want a revolution? The rest is up to you.

xvart.
 
  • #25
For those really interested in reading reviews, you may want to check out Epinions. I find browsing around there great fun and always check out potential buys there first. Here's a link to a list of my reviews for anyone interested.
Will keep it in mind. For serious reviews I, of course, would urge people to go out and look at multiple sources and places that specialize in this sort of thing. This here I suppose is more for the personal feel and making connections.
I love to read reviews before I purchase something. Even though they aren't always accurate, when there's a significant number of people sharing an opinion, (places with only 1 or 2 reviews are almost random - these reviews are often shills) I find I can get a decent feel for something. When checking out books, Amazon has a decent approach. For electronics, cnet works pretty well as they have an official review where they provide their testing results as well as reader reviews. Any other places that have good reviews?

IIRC, there is a camera review site that is fantastic (but have not been there for a while)...

Currently looking for an N-router and it seems most of them have at least some fleas.... & my prior favorite - Linksys, seems to have gone downhill a lot since I bought my last one ....
 
  • #26
Any other places that have good reviews?

Several years ago a good chuck of the serious review community at Amazon got fed up with some of the changes in reviewing and deleted all their reviews and posted them at Epinions. I've never used it, but I guess it is a credible review site for a lot of people. In fact, many people would post the same review at Epinions and Amazon, and then Amazon did a crackdown and wouldn't allow posting reviews at other sites.

It might be worth a look.

xvart.
 
  • #27
It might be worth a look.
I checked it out earlier & it seemed difficult to peruse the reviews efficiently. In addition, it seemed that most of the products I looked at had a low number of reviews - which always makes me suspicious. I'll try again with a few specific products....
----------------
Later add - at least for electronic stuff, the cnet & amazon reviews appear to be an improvement over the epinions.....
 
  • #28
"whats the most annoying thing you can do on terraforums (and get away with?)"
\
I wish I was here for that! I would've posted my 14-page paper on the origins of Nepenthes (written for writing class, teacher said we could write about anything we wanted, didn't know what he was getting himself into :D)
I recently got a Canon powershot SX110 digital camera, cost $270. The 10x digital zoom is amazing but I find that the pictures run a bit noisy, especially in high ISO levels. Macro is great, and the face recognition feature is helpful. It seems like it needs a high level of light to operate though, like most digital cameras. When taking a picture in low light you really need a tripod, or you can use the flash.
 
  • #29
Another place that has great reviews is <a href="http://www.consumersearch.com">ConsumerSearch.com</a>
 
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