Best Shave EVER

For decades I was a dedicated blade shaver and over the last few years most of the time I just ran a set of clippers over my cheeks and went with the scruffy look. I have fairly sensitive skin and I wear a long goatee. The last time I tried an electric razor of any kind (an expensive German model) it grabbed a hold of my facial hair and STUCK to my face. I was quite worried about a repeat of that disaster with this new razor from Philips Norelco.

I was pleasantly surprised to find I could get right up against my goatee without any hair grabbing problems. The razor went through heavy stubble with ease though it did require a bit more pressure than I initially expected. The first time I used this I had to go back and reshave but that was just the learning curve and not the fault of the razor.

In the instructions it does warn about skin irritation while switching shaving methods and I must admit I had some irritation. It was more pronounced on the softer skin of my neck and under my chin and less on my cheeks. The irritation wasn’t severe and went away in a reasonable amount of time.

You can use the SensoTouch 3d Electric Shaver dry or with shaving gel/cream. I’ve tried it both ways and I must say I LOVE using this razor with my shaving gel the head glides smoothly and it seems to result in an even closer shave.

My only complaint about the shaver would be the position and maybe the size, of the trimmer. It’s a bit small and awkwardly located behind the shaver heads so it’s a bit hard to see what you’re doing clearly.

Cleaning the unit is a breeze even when using shaving gel. Rinsed under warm running water then opening the heads to rinse out the clippings and residual foam. Alternately you can also use the Jet Clean System which is as simple as it gets. Place the razor in the unit and push the button on the front of the Jet Clean System. The razor moved in and out of the included cleaning solution, then dries and charges itself.

This package also includes a separate charging stand (which shares the cord with the Jet Clean System), handy travel case and a small cleaning brush along with the bottle of cleaning fluid for the Jet Clean System.

Five Stars

“You will receive your reward within the next 5-6 weeks”

My coupons which supposedly went into the US Mail service two days ago will now, somehow, take a mind boggling 5-6 weeks to wend their way across the country to my house! 5-6 weeks?! Does their three legged delivery tortoise have alzheimer’s?!

FIFTEEN to TWENTY business days for something that has SHIPPED?! Does shipped mean something different on the Coke-a-Cola planet than it does on mine? Where in the world could something be put in the United States Postal Service and take THAT long to get to Florida, Western Mongolia? Did they staple my coupons to the back of a three legged tortoise? WTF?!

First and foremost let me say that the artwork in this graphic novel is delightful. Subtle tones done in a watercolor style and a marked lack of clutter makes the art very easy on the eyes. Too often artists try and cram as much detail into a piece as possible. Here, in ‘Koko Be Good’ each panel plays like a painting.

The story is another thing. I did thoroughly enjoy the book, but found the beginning to be a tad confusing. There’s not real ’start’ to the story. We more or less swoop in from above to observe a time and slice of life involving several people. Jon who’s confused about his choice to move off to Peru with a girlfriend it feels he hardly knows. Koko a wild street kid fighting off the verge of adulthood and responsibility and Faron a young boy, friends with Koko, being brought up in a broken and abusive home. We really don’t get much deeper into their lives than that even with over 300 pages to work with.

The ending of the book felt forced, rushed and left me feeling like I missed something. I wasn’t expecting a typical ‘boy loses girl, boy finds new girl’ ending but they way it played out was odd and something of a let down.

All in all it’s an amusing, extremely well drawn and colored, story that could have done with a bit more depth but still stands out as something well worth reading.

Four Stars.

Gibson tries too hard to be funny, often holding the joke up in the reader’s face and practically yelling; “This is funny, isn’t it?!”, instead of letting the humor work itself out in the book. It feels more like he’s gone back over an earlier version and tried to shoehorn as much comedy into it as possible. The author has talent, don’t get me wrong, and with some polish and some practice and maybe a little less heavy of a hand I think it’s safe bet that he has a good chance to turn out some fine writing. Unfortunately ‘Stuff of Legends’ feels more like a parody OF fantasy novels than a novel on it’s own. Sadly it’s not an ‘Airplane’ quality parody but more a ‘Scary Movie IV’ quality. I blame Hollywood and their incessant and increasingly bad parody movies..

I honestly didn’t like the majority of characters in ‘Stuff of Legends’; Eliott is a twit, a fifteen year old who still plays with dolls and acts more like an 11 year old girl seeing her favorite boy band at the mall than someone growing up in the places and settings of this novel.
Kess is an immortal elf (why are elves immortal?) who is Eliott’s baby sitter, this relationship is never fully or reasonably explained, who is also something of a twit giving magic far too powerful to a child who has no connection with reality.
Jordan the Red I somewhat liked. He’s grumpy, retired and just wants to be left alone. Unfortunately too much of the “LOOK THIS IS THE FUNNY PART” bits revolve around his character.
The rest of the players in the book are just filler to get the story from point A to point B, unremarkable, two dimensional, forgettable.

The world it’s written into is a mishmash of mythologies & geographies never quite saying it’s ‘Earth’ but at the same time mentioning Egypt and other locations on our planet. Also, one of my biggest pet peeves, the book brings modern things into a fantasy setting. Using ‘cool’ from the 1950’s, the dollar as a monetary unit and going as far as to mention CPR just feels weird in a setting with swords and dragons.

Three Stars.

Update (even before posting I update!): I just realized they have a large print version of the novel and get this! There are six copies and my just placed hold is only the fifth in line! WOO!

The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV is also a multimedia device supporting multiple image, video and audio formats. Audio through the unit’s single speaker is a bit tinny and slightly underpowered. At full or nearly full volume it’s not all that loud. The unit does have a headphone jack and the addition of a set of decent buds or headphones will improve audio quality quite a bit though there are no bass or treble controls. It comes with a clear plastic screen protector and be warned, if you remove it getting it to lay perfectly flat again is nearly impossible.

Along with the headphone connector the TV also has a single Micro-SD memory card slot. I purchased a 2-GIG card to test this device with. I do not know, and the manual does not say, if the TV supports the newer, larger SDHC style cards. The device has NO user accessible internal memory.

All input and control are accomplished via two buttons on the face and a four way directional button set. The buttons are stiff and I found, with my thick fingers, that manipulating the directional arrow buttons was a bit hard to do with accuracy.

My unit, which is white as opposed to the stated black, arrived with a USB cable (which I have not used) an AC adapter/charger, an external antenna and a peg/tab stand on a lanyard. I found attaching the lanyard to the unit (you’ll likely lose the stand otherwise) to be a complete pain and required a bent pin to accomplish.

Television Reception:
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV has a built in rod antenna which feels very fragile and easy to bend. The antenna also has a swivel base so care must be exercised when pushing it back into the unit. The included external antenna has a nicely long cord so it can be positioned easily for optimal reception. For the sake of reference I live approximately 80 miles South East of Orlando Florida on the coast. Using the built-in antenna, indoors, upon initial setup the channel scan was unable to find any stations. Plugging the external antenna in resulted in around a dozen channels being found during the setup scan. The 320×240 LCD screen images are crisp and sharp. Colors are vibrant and clear and I was pleasantly surprised at the adjustability of the picture including brightness, contrast, tint and color mode. Moving the television while watching TV should be avoided as the picture will often freeze and breakup. I was quite happy to find that one of the stations I do get is a 24/7 local area weather channel. During Florida’s frequent power outages due to severe weather and hurricanes this will be invaluable.

Video Playback:
I loaded over a GIG of video files onto my Micro-SD card to test the Tivax’s ability to playback video files. I chose a mixed batch of AVI, MPG, WMV and MOV file formats. WMV files are not supported at all (oddly the unit DOES support WMA audio files, go figure) and the support for the other formats was hit or miss. Approximately 60% of the fifty or so video clips I’ve tried to play were supported, but the rest just returned an error. Those that did play did so quite well. Picture quality was good (dependant, of course, on the quality of the videos) as was the audio playback. Perhaps they’ll release a firmware update for the unit to add further CODEC support.

Audio Playback:
As I previously mentioned, the system’s speaker is quite tinny. Don’t expect great quality sound from it. It’s not horrible but it could be better. I tested several dozen MP3 files on my Tivax including low (80 kbps) and very high (320 kbps) bit rate files as well as variable-bit rate encoded files and it played all of them without a problem.

Image Playback/Slide show:
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV supports JPEG, PNG, GIF and BMP image formats. Images display crisp and clean with bright and true colors. Landscape oriented images display best and while you can rotate images that are portrait oriented there is a distinct quality loss during rotation. Images can be zoomed in on with multiple levels of zoom.
The slide show feature is nicely configurable. The delay between images can be set or turned off for manual page turning. The transition effect done while changing images also has many options. The Tivax will also play any MP3 files in the same location as the images as background music during the slide show. I actually couldn’t find a way NOT to have this happen if the audio and video files were mixed together on the memory card although the volume can be set to zero this will surely use more battery power even with the volume down.
One feature which I liked, but was not mentioned in the manual, is the ability to set one of your own images as the startup ‘logo’.

Power:
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV comes with a built in Lithium Ion battery which they state can be recharged approximately 500 times.
I found that their claimed charge durations were quite accurate. Watching Digital TV with the volume set to around 75% I was twice able to watch for a bit more than three hours before the unit turned off. I loaded several hundred large image files onto the memory card and set the unit to running them as a slide show (silent) and was able to achieve just over six hours of playback before the battery died. MP3 playback resulted in similar results of around five and a half hours of continuous play.
When charging there are NO indicator lights showing that the unit is charging nor any way, short of turning it on, to tell if it has fully charged. There is also no on screen low battery warning. When my battery was depleted the unit simply shut itself off.

Finally:
This is a nice unit and far more than just a digital TV set. A padded case would be a nice option. I’m going to try some of the smartphone cases to see if any fit. I really don’t want to scratch or damage the screen. The external antenna while mildly magnetic really needs to be weighted and/or have a clip attached to it. It is rather light and hard to keep in place.