Lose power for a couple of days with a fridge and freezer full of food, and you are looking at hundreds of dollars of spoiled groceries and a mess waiting for you. The Blackout Buddy Emergency Power Supply is a slim, automatic battery backup built to prevent exactly that, keeping your refrigerator cold through an outage with no generator, no fuel, and nobody home to start it. I have run one at our place in Michigan through a couple of outages this year, so here is how it performs and who should have one.
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- Written by: James Hills
Ugly Stik turned 50 this year, and the brand marked the anniversary with a spinning combo priced to match: $50 for the rod and the reel together. That number lands between the two poles most fishing gear gets sold at, well above the cheap rod we all had as boys down at the creek and well below the rig a tournament guy hauls to the ramp. Ugly Stik sent me one of their 50th Anniversary combos, and I am impressed by how much quality they packed into fifty dollars.
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- Written by: James Hills
The reMarkable Paper Pure is a 10.3-inch black-and-white E Ink tablet with one job: replace the notepad you carry into meetings and the journal you keep for yourself. It starts at $399, it will not check your email, and it will not run apps. I have owned dozens of tablets over the years, and this is the first one whose pen does not feel like a pointing device.
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- Written by: James Hills
A ten-piece Yesker garden tool set runs about $30, and it is the first thing I would tell any guy setting up his first vegetable garden to buy. Not because it is the last set of tools he will ever own, but because you cannot know which tool matters to you until you have spent a season using all of them. Here is what each of the ten pieces does, when you reach for it, and how to work out what to add once you know.
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- Written by: James Hills
A backyard either turns into the place your buddies text about on a Friday afternoon, or it turns into an expensive patch of grass you look at through the kitchen window. The difference usually has nothing to do with what it cost. Living in Michigan, I've been paying attention to what guys are putting in their yards - shade, fire, light, somewhere to set a beer down - and the same short list of decisions separates the two.
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- Written by: James Hills
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