Me, yesterday:
Amazon not shipping things to Australia is the bane of my existence. Or cool stuff not being available in Australia, one of the two.
Every time I get a link to yet another cool thing from Amazon they won’t ship to Australia, I put it in a special collection of bookmarks and forget about it for a little while. And every now and again (i.e. a few times a year), I pick and choose a few things that I actually want and do a shipment via OPAS, my package forwarder of choice. Sign up using my referral link, and you’ll get free registration (usually $25) and I’ll get a credit every time you ship something with them.
Shameless self-promotion aside, this last shipment of stuff from Amazon was pretty impressive.
In no particular order:
-
Cyalume 10″ SnapLights in green and white — apparently these are the best chemical lights money can buy. I just had to have some. (I have a bit of an obsession with glow sticks. Weird, I know.)
-
Fenix PD35 — pretty decent torch for the money. Takes either two CR123A batteries or one 18650 battery. Seriously bright, too, and the strobe is impressive, to say the least.
-
Gerber E.A.B. Pocket Knife (and the Lite version) — I saw these on Uncrate a little while ago and thought they’d be cool. I had intended to use them as an every day carry kind of thing, but decided that was just asking for trouble. They’re really nice, though. After purchasing I wasn’t sure if they would make it through customs, but here they are.
-
Lenox Gold titanium-edged utility blades — two packs of five. Titanium edged razor blades! Crazy. To go with the pocket knives.
-
iTP EOS A3 flashlight — 96 lumen output from one AAA battery, in a minimal design not much longer than a standard house key. It replaced the ageing Star Wars lightsaber laser that previously adorned my keyring. Waterproof, too.
-
ThruNight Ti2 flashlight — pretty much the same thing as the iTP EOS A3, except with a slightly newer version of the CREE LED inside (CREE XP-G2 versus XP-G). Also waterproof, etc.
Not pictured:
-
Nitecore IntelliCharger i4 — charges pretty much anything, including Li-ion, Ni-MH, and the Earth-destroying Ni-Cd.
-
And last but not least, two rechargeable Panasonic 18650 batteries. 3.7V, 3400mAh.
And finally, the pièce de résistance:
- One Acer C720 Chromebook (specs via Anandtech). Ever since this was announced earlier in October I’ve wanted one. Didn’t really want to wait for it to become available locally (who knows how long that will take), so I imported one from Amazon. It’s honestly pretty great for a $250 laptop — I’ll have a full review up in the next month or so.
All in all, all of the above was around $160 to ship to my door — expensive, yes, but it arrived in around 6 business days. The bad news is, I’m already planning my next Amazon shipment (something I should have bought along with the C720 but failed to think about ahead of time). One item might not be so bad, shipping wise.