Product review: GROSCHE London Drop In Ultra Fine Laser Cut Stainless Steel Tea Infuser (Brew-in-cup infuser)

I am a tea drinker so I have used many different tea infusers through the years.  The stroing point of this tea infuser is the fine stainless steel mesh, it works even with small cut tea.  I also like the shape which makes it easy to clean - a large opening that I can get easily clean with a brush.



This infuser works with cups 4" wide or less.  4" is the width of the infuser's lip that rests on the rim of the cup.



If I had to find a negative, it is the fact that I can't see the tea while it is brewing so I can't tell the strength without lifting an infuser.  This is not a big deal just different from my other infusers.



This infuser is simple and practical. It makes it easy to try to try interesting teas by shopping in asian markets and speacialty tea shops.



I received this infuser for testing and review. I like it!



You can find GROSCHE London Drop infuser on Amazon by following this link





AshopZones review ★★★★★

Product review: Thinklux E26 LED Filament Bulb 7w LED Light Bulb

These bulbs are shaped just like an incandescent bulb, but they have a 7W LED filament. The rating says that it replaces a 60 watt incandescent. I did not have a 60 watt incandescent to compare it with, so I compared with 60 watt fluorescent bulb which generates a very similar amount of light to an incandescent bulb (in the past I measured the output of incandescent and fluorescent bulbs with a lux meter and the measurements were very similar). To give me an unbiased measurement of brightness I measured the light the LED buls and fluorescent bulb with a lux meter. A lux meter measures light intensity. I took both measurements at 19" and 13" using a ruler under the fixture to keep the light in exactly the same position for each test.



In the attached photo I show my desk under a fixture with each bulb side by side. The LED bulb is slightly brighter and generated slightly cooler light. The measurements below confirm the visual appearance with these numbers:



LED bulb at 13" = 1288 lux

Fluorescent bulb at 13" = 1002 lux



LED bulb at 19" = 768 lux

Fluorescent bulb at 19" = 527 lux



These LED bulb come on instantly. The length of the bulb is 4.25" and the width is 2.5". One of the photos shows the bulb on 1/2" grid mat for size reference.



What a nice bulb! It is brighter than I expected and looks just like good ol' incandescent.



This bulb is provided by Thinklux for testing and review. I hope this comparison will give you a better idea of what expect.



You can find Thinklux E26 LED Filament Bulbs on Amazon by following this link





AshopZones review ★★★★★

Product review: Farm Innovators Model CC-2 Cord Connect Water-Tight Cord Lock

I purchased this lock to protect an extension cord which I need to power my heated outdoor mat. After 100+ inches of snow last year I am hoping it will make it easier to deal with all the snow. We have not had snow yet but so far the lock is keeping the connection dry during the rain.



I got the green lock, which looked bigger than the orange one. What I did not realize is that this lock is adjustable in size I can make it bigger or smaller as needed. Nice!



You can find farm Innovators Model CC-2 Cord lokc on Amazon by following this link



AshopZones review ★★★★★

Product review: FUNOC Leather Women Wallet Purse Credit Card Clutch holder Case

I have been using this wallet for a few weeks and I love how it looks and having a large number of compartments. The wallet has 8 card holders, 3 cash slots, 2 dividers and 1 zip pocket. In addition to 8 card holders there is also a pocket which can be used to hold additional 4 credit cards, so I actually carry 12 cards.



The wallet is made out of leather and has relief embossing.  Amazon description refers to it as genuine leather in one place, and as synthetic leather in another.  If it is synthetic it is a very good imitation because I thought it was real until I noticed the word Synthetic as I was publishing my review.  I selected Black Peony color. It is black with subtle coloring, the colors are less bright than in the stock photo and I like how it looks in person even better than the stock photo.



The wallet is 7.7" long and 4.5" wide. When I stuffed it with all my cards it became 1" thick.



It closes with a gold colored heart charm. Also enclose a 7.5" leather loop. Both have a clasp so you can choose to have both or just one attached to the wallet. I removed the gold charm and attached the leather strap to the zipper.



This wallet is provided by ArcEnCiel for evaluation and review. I like it! It is a very attractive looking wallet with lots of slots.



You can find it on Amazon by following this link.







AshopZones review ★★★★★

Book review: Large Print Adult Coloring Book by B. Paulson

This coloring book contains a nice variety of designs birds, butterflies, dragonflies and flowers. The designs are pretty and done with large clear lines. There is a total of 31 different pictures and 65 pages. For each images there are three pages of text. I like the designs, but I did not like that back of the image is not a blank page but the text with an inspiration saying which are visible. If you want to transfer the design to another piece of paper with a lightbox to keep the book clean or to use designs as a templates for other crafts (stainless glass or quilting) the text makes it difficult.



The paper take pastel pencils very well. Wet markers do bleed through a bit to other side of the page. The designs are well suited to coloring - they do not have a lot of shading of their own (if there is a lot shading it makes difficult to color). None of the design are too small to introduce coloring.



I like the templates for the bookmarks with designs at the end of the book. The page on the the bookmarks also had writing. So if someone wanted to cut the bookmarks out they would have a pretty design on one side and cut up text on the other side.



Overall, beautiful designs. The change I would make it leave the back of each design blank and have less text overall.



I was provided a copy of this coloring book for evaluation and review.



You can find it on Amazon by following this link.









AshopZones review ★★★★☆

Product review: ADATA USA SP550 480GB 2.5" Sata_6_0_gb III Solid State Drive 480.0

I own a couple of SSD drives and always run the same tests on each new ssd so I can compare their performance. The ADATA has an excellent READ speed performance and fairly good WRITE speed performance. There are more expensive SSDs available that have write speeds that are about 15% faster than this one, however in real world use such small differences in write speeds have no impact on system performance.



I tested the ADATA SP550 SSD on an Intel iCore 7 Haswell system running Fedora 23 with 32G of memory. The Adata SP550 SSD has read speeds that are limited only by the SATA 3 interface (excellent results). It has good but not industry leading write speeds. The manufacturer specifies read speeds of 530 Mbytes/second and write speeds of 480 MBytes/second which I confirmed using two bench marking tools, Gnome Disks and Sys_basher.



I took three sets of measurements with Gnome Disks, a set with a 1 MByte sample size, a set with a 10 MByte sample size and a set with a 100 MByte sample size.



Average Read

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 Mbyte sample:______407.5 MBytes/second

10 MByte sample:_____525.5 MBytes/second

100 MByte sample:____534.5 MBytes/second



Average Write

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 Mbyte sample:______230.2 MBytes/second

10 MByte sample:_____359.4 MBytes/second

100 MByte sample:____433.5 MBytes/second



Average Access (latency)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 MByte sample:______0.13ms

10 MByte sample:_____0.13ms

100 MByte sample:____0.15ms



Another interesting measurement is to measure transfer rates for different file sizes. At small file sizes (less than 256K) the overhead of the operating system has a large impact, as file sizes grow larger the SSD approaches it's maximum transfer rates. Because of the limitations of the SATA 3 bus no SSD has faster read transfers than the ADATA SSD.



' Read performance

Size__________Transfer Rate

KWords___________MBytes/Sec

4__________________21.56

16_________________64.00

64_________________143.09

256________________344.93

1024_______________465.83

4096_______________512.31

16384______________530.49

65536______________545.45



' Write performance

Size__________Transfer Rate

KWords___________MBytes/Sec

4__________________2.42

16_________________10.13

64_________________40.18

256________________100.44

1024_______________191.49

4096_______________254.52

16384______________409.05

65536______________443.47



I am using this SSD drive for SSD caching using DM-CACHE which is part of Linux logical volume manager. This is a perfect use for SSD because the write do not go to SSD when the files are created, they only go to SSD after a read occurs, which means it is used only for files that I am actually using to make access to them faster. I am seeing a noticable speed up in i/o operations



Overall, this is an excellent SSD drive and my tests confirm the benchmarks provided by manufacturer.



" on Amazon via this link



AshopZones review ★★★★★

Product review: AFAITH Portable Folding Ultra Aluminum Tripod

I do quite a bit of table top photography and through the years used a large number of small tripods. This tripod has all the features I value:

(1) Sturdy - AFAITH is the sturdiest small tripod I have. Everything tightens nicely, the feet are rubberized. I am using it with 17.1 oz camera. It can support a load up to 6.6 pounds.



(2) Quick plate - FAITH has a nice metal quickplate, because it is metal it will not get distorted if I over-tighten it. A few of my small tripods did not held up for a long time due to quickplate issues when they were made out of plastic.



(3) Quick release legs - AFAITH tripod increases the length of the legs by loosening one knob at the bottom of the leg. They also have a quick release at the top, which allows me to change the angle of the legs. So though this is not a classic quick release lock, this is better than having to extend each joint one at a time. Sometimes I have to fiddle a little with the AFAITH leg knobs to get them to catch but not bad.



(4) Flexible ball head, ability to take pictures at different heights and angles - AFAITH has three knob ball head with a built-in level. It works well. I can extend the tripod to 18". Minimum height is 7" without removing the central column, and 5" with the central column removed. My favorite feature is that I can really tilt it down and take pictures from above.



(5) Light weight - 1.66 pounds.



I received this tripod from AFAITH with a request for an honest review be it good or bad. I have been using it every day for the last two weeks - I like it!



You can find it on Amazon by following this link.





AshopZones review ★★★★★