Tag Archives: dynomighty

A fine, perfectly OK, not-too-shabby, backpack

img_3352There are two pieces of fashion I truly care about. OK, maybe three. Jackets, backpacks, and wallets, in that order. Jackets are, well, they’re jackets, along with all the versatility and variety that comes with the garment. Jackets are capable, casual, and my only regret is that moving to Brisbane has meant to less jacket-wearing than cooler climates. But it’s fine, I just need different jackets — see what I mean?

On the other hand, wallets are a little more personal. Because you keep all of your personal stuff in your wallet, your personality is kind of reflected in your wallet. It kind of has to, when it carries around your ID, your credit cards, and whatever else you deem necessary to have with you day-to-day. Does your wallet reflect your minimal lifestyle, or have you packed in every bit of loose change and every scrap of a receipt that you’ve ever been given, until one day it just explodes all over the place and forces you to clean it up? Like I said, wallets are personal, as evidenced by our discussion on the topic on AppleTalk.

And because guys can’t go around carrying handbags due to certain social stigmas, but occasionally also require something to hold all the extras they need for their day, backpacks are the only suitable solution. Backpacks are there for guys that need to haul around their laptop to and from work. They’re there for the guys that need to carry a change of clothes, or want to bring a few odds and ends about with them without resorting to the fashion faux pas of cargo shorts. In short, backpacks are the guy’s handbag.

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New Wallet!

I’ve been looking for a local distributor for Dynomighty Design wallets for a while now, and I’m glad to report I’ve finally found one.

Roughly four years ago, a couple of friends and discovered ThinkGeek. We were probably a little late on that particular bandwagon, but that’s okay. At the time getting items shipped from the US seemed like a particularly daunting task, so we decided to go in on a group buy – one of us would place the order and get the items shipped to that person’s house, and then the rest of us would pay that person back in cash. It kinda made sense as we’d save on shipping.

That very first order was pretty epic, to say the least; I’m not 100% on what I picked that first time around, but the total order amount came to over $400 AUD for the four of us. One of my items that very first order was a Dynomighty Design Dot Matrix wallet, as it greatly appealed to my inner-geek at the time. It was cool as was pretty much indestructible, and it had the number pi printed out in the ultra-cool dot matrix style.

It’s been a good four years. Many people have commented on how slim it is, even loaded up with receipts and cash/cards, and it’s pretty unique, too.

It was about time for a replacement though, and for a while I wasn’t even sure if I could get them in Australia without paying the exorbitant shipping rates from the Dynomighty website, or without going via ThinkGeek again. Looking into the matter a little more revealed that there were Australian distributors, but they charged quite a lot for the actual wallet, plus I then had to pay shipping.

To be honest I had completely forgotten about the issue until about two weeks ago, when one of the people I follow on Twitter tweeted about a cool little store in Elizabeth street, a cool little store called Syzygy. I went to Syzygy, and to my delight, their window display had a Dynomighty wallet on display! Well, that settled it – I just had to have one. Sadly they weren’t open that day, but I vowed to return.

And return I did. I was back the very next day before Uni, and picked up the wallet with the NYC subway map. It’s like having a wallet without actually having a wallet. It’s (somewhat) unique. It’s only a single-fold, but that’s okay, I’ll get used to it.

I like it – I’m still tossing up whether I should give that extra bit of personalisation with an Apple sticker (as seen below), as doing so would mean that some of the map is covered up. We’ll see.

7 Links I Know You’ll Enjoy

Continuing with the theme somewhat, here are 7 links I know you’ll enjoy. I’ve put them here for your satisfaction, but really, they’re just here so I can get them out of my webbrowser and make room for more news that I missed out on. I’m under 2000 RSS items (I started at 4000), so progress is being made! Enjoy.

So, in the list we have:

  • Dynomighty Mighty Wallets
    These things rock. I already own a tri-fold dot-matrix wallet which gets questioned frequently in public, and to stand out more, I’m going to get some more. They make great gifts, but really – if the Australian dollar wasn’t so sucky at the moment, I’d buy them in  a heartbeat. They’ll have to wait, however.
  • Glow Grafitti
    I’m no grafitti artist, but glow in the dark spray paint? That’s like any childhood dream! I found this on the internet – thanks Boing Boing Gadgets – a while ago, lost the link, but then found it again, so here it is for posterity. There’s probably nothing cooler than glow in the dark grafitti. Again – a little exxy at $59 a can, and when you convert that into Aussie dollars, well, it hurts.
  • Uma Doodlebook Frame
    A tradition photo frame (read: non-digital) with a twist – you can create your own borders simply by drawing them. It’s got 80 pages, so you can create up to 80 custom borders for any of your pictures. Again, how cool is that? I rekon I’ll just stick one photo in it, and then use it as a scratchpad for notes and stuff.
  • iTunes Music Store – the web version
    Yeah – again, props to df.net for this one – this one’s cool. It’s essentially a webbrowser-based version of the iTunes store. It’s a pretty good rendition of the actual store, but you need to open itunes to buy stuff from it anyway, so yeah. Handy if you don’t have iTunes on your current computer, or need to browse something quickly at the library or whatever.
  • Windows Shutdown Crapfest
    I had no idea Windows developement was this convoluted. It’s actually amazing that they manage to ship products at all, considering that they’re “the left hand cannot see what the right hand is doing” approach with regards to all their code. No wonder Vista was so bad – here’s to Windows 7, the start (hopefully) of a new era in Microsoft computing.

Update – here’s your seventh link, folks.

  • Palm, Google, and Apple

    Unlike Siegler, I think the large number of recent Apple employees now working at Palm on the Pre suggests that the relationship between the two companies is cold — ice cold. What I heard last month at Macworld Expo is that Palm has a standing offer for engineers at Apple to jump ship, with a starting salary of 1.5 times their current Apple salary.

When you’re done perusing the links – give us your comments below, yeah?