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I don't do very many vendor/website reviews, I prefer to do product reviews which are more fun, but in this case I felt a vendor review and warning is in order.

Turns out I ordered a few sets of blinds for my house from SelectBlinds.com, and they failed to deliver them. Kind of unsual in this day and age, the site is supposed to be well-liked and trustworthy. Alas, a month went by and nothing. They charged me for the blinds immediately but could not deliver them. When I contact them, they revealed they were having trouble with customs. They do not reveal this when you purchase from them, but their blinds are made in Vietnam, and they cannot get them through custom easily anymore. It's going on 6 weeks, and I have not received mine. They apologized but failed in 3 ways:

- They did not get the product to me in 30 days - I view this as a "worst case scenario". nothing and nobody ever takes that long, but these guys are going on 6 weeks and nada. I believe it might even be an FTC requirement, I don't think they can charge my card and not deliver the goods for this long. I get it that they are having supply chain issues, but that is not my problem.
- They failed to communicate proactively as soon as they realized there was an issue. Big problem here. Transparency is key to trust. They completely lost my trust.
- They failed to offer me a refund. I have initiated a challenge to the charge.Their website still offers not delivery date and the clock keeps ticking.

For all these reasons I am issuing a consumer warning: DO NOT buy from selectblinds.com, they are unable to keep their promises and they do not take care of customers.

Communication, transparency and a refund would have been in order here. As of right now, I am still out of my money and they do not have a delivery date for the product for me. Unacceptable.

It is time to aerate and seed our lawn. Every year around mid September we go through this process to keep the lawn healthy and green and prepare it for next season.

I think the timeclock for the sprinklers also changes to twice a day and shorter interval each time.

I have been shaving my head for probably 30 years, so I've learned a thing or two. I have tried many machines of all sorts, in the end I prefer regular old-school shaving blades, usually from Gillette.

A friend recently recommended the Freebird shaving machine, which I had seen pop up on social media all over the place. I ended up ordering. The shipping was a bit slow, took a surprising amount of time.

Two weeks later, I eventually got the machine which comes nicely stocked with a lot of accessories and can do trimming of the nose, ears, etc. All that is pretty nice, but I consider it secondary.

I will cut to the case, as to the device's performance for cutting hair: I was disappointed. Two main shortcomings:

1) I tried it first on my facial hair. I had 4-5 day long beard, and the Freebird struggled mightly. It started pulling and tugging at my hair, was unpleasant and I had to stop. Sadly, this is a common issue as the spinning blades cannot physically handle the stubble. It's not exclusive to the Freebird, but I was somehow imagining that with all the hype and after decades of research, it would do better that my old machines from 30 years ago. It did not. It was painful.

As a corollary, this picture they have on the homepage of the website where they show a guy shaving his full head of hair with the Freebird, hahahaha, that is absolutely ridiculous. It would take hours and many stops to clean up the machine and a lot of pain from tugging. It does NOT do that. And if he tried on his beard, which I feel the image suggests, that would be devastating and SO painful.




2) Turns out when you shave, all the hair goes inside the heads. And they fill out very quickly, of course, because they are tiny. And so, for my typical shaving every 3-4 days, I had to stop mid way and empty the shaving heads which is a messy, tedious and time-consuming process.

So, net, net, by the time I got done, I took longer than using foam and a regular shaving razor.

Also, the finish was not anywhere nearly as close as a real razor, that is another downside.

Now, I don't hate the Freebird, it's a fine machine. The battery lasts a long time, and if you use it frequently, say every other day, and have the discipline of constantly cleaning it, it works OK, it's an acceptable solution.

But, for me, it fell short of expectations. I would give it 3 out of 5 stars, being generous.






PS: After I wrote this review, I discovered that Freebird started charging my credit card without my permission, and sending me refill blades. Absolutely not needed because I've only used the machine maybe 4-5 times, I would expect the 5-blade head to last longer than that in any case. I tried to understand why they were doing this. I went into the website, and despite not having account and not having signed up for anything, sure enough, they had me listed as a "subscription". I immediately cancelled it. I looked for information and found a thread on reddit with people complaining about the same. Apparently, and deceptively, it's hidden in the terms and conditions when you make the initial purchase. Very sneaky, and borderline scam/fraud. No startup with deceptive practices like this will succeed long term. I cancelled immediately and will never buy from the again, and I will warm all my friends to stay away.

There are a lot of opinions around this, from experts and non-experts alike. Tidal and others are built on the premise that "lossless" audio is better. Even Spotify is finally jumping on the bandwagon and offering lossless quality sound. Apple has had it for years. But can you really tell? There are so many other variables at play, besides the compression: the quality of your headphones or speakers, the computer and/or amplifier, the conditions of your listening environment (i.e. your room), your own age and ears,... I personally believe almost nobody can tell the difference between a 320 Kbps compressed recording and a lossless one in 99% of the situations. This whole "lossless" movement is marketing and hype, despite what the audiophiles will tell you.

If you want to experience it for yourself, try the classic NPR audio test. It's been around for over a decade and it's still just as relevant as it was:

NPR: How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?

I would say I have a good number of smart home features deployed around my house. It's an older home, from the 1950s, and so I have had to add smart features on my own.

Today I will talk about my vibration sensors. I have a few deployed around the house. They do things like tell when when the pool pump starts and stops, when the pool heater starts and stops, or when mail is delivered! Not terribly exciting stuff, but I like the metadata, having a log of events that I can trace in the event of any issues.

These sensors are tiny, and very easy to setup. They work with a gateway and use "LoRa" technology (and not WiFi). LoRa is a form of long range communication (up to 1/4 mile, open air) which allows for operation in larger homes and in areas difficult for other wireless systems, such as basements, separate garages/structures, and even outside your home. It uses 923.3 mHz Chirp Spread-Spectrum long range & low power. They are power by 2 AAA batteries. The brand I use is YoLink. They work well, and I use the YoLink app on my phone to setup and control them. They are also Alexa-compatible.

Below is an illustration of the sensor telling me my package arrived 5 minutes before eBay notified me (which is very good for eBay)

What is cool is that you can also adjust the sensitivity, so that a big truck for example won't trigger the sensor when driving by. I have the mail sensor at 4 on the 10 scale.

You can also configure how you receive the notifications, whether they are push or text or email notifications. Overall, it's neat little system. Reliability seems acceptable but not perfect. When sensors are far from the house they may drop off the network occasionally. If they are within a reasonable range, they are rock solid.