Skip to content

Product Reviews

Reiss Personal tailoring fitting was an absolute shambles!

  • by

Jesse gave me a call last week to tell me that my suit was arriving this week so I booked in to see him for an alterations fitting. Walking in early to the Reiss store in New Change shopping mall, I found Jesse ready to greet me with my suit. The first thing I noticed in the changing rooms was that the block machine stitching was really good. There was a little fraying in the lining and there were some loose ends but around all of the wool the seams looked neat or were completely hidden.

Reiss Personal tailoring suit with my chosen red lining
Reiss Personal tailoring suit with my chosen red lining

Around the back of the jacket there was a little bagginessRead More »Reiss Personal tailoring fitting was an absolute shambles!

Mark Marengo cock up

  • by

Following on from my review of my Mark Marengo suit, I thought I’d share with you my wonderful revisit to Savile Row to fix my crotch rip.

Mark Marengo trousers ripped at the crotch
Mark Marengo trousers ripped at the crotch

I thought that I would premiere my wonderful new Mark Marengo number for an EMEA marketing event hosted by Excelsior recruitment the other week. Everything was good, Read More »Mark Marengo cock up

Mark Marengo Review plus Cad & the Dandy Basted fitting

  • by

A couple of days ago I went back to Cad & the Dandy for my basted fitting session. I turned up about 10 minutes for my appointment which was made over the phone with Ian, the guy in my previous Made to measure suit post. There was another guy around who hung around. I wasn’t sure whether he worked there or if he was another customer. Ian welcomed me with a handshake and noted that he had read my blog post. He put away the name dropping on this visit which was a plus for me. He asked me how business was and who I was working with. I moved on quickly to get started with this section of my suit fitting.

My jacket at basted fitting stage shows the hand stitched full canvass from Cad & the Dandy
My jacket at basted fitting stage shows the hand stitched full canvass from Cad & the Dandy

I tried on my basted suit for size, the band at the top of the trousers were a little snugRead More »Mark Marengo Review plus Cad & the Dandy Basted fitting

Made to measure suits (also known as personal tailoring)

As I look back at my YouTube videos from 2006 I have noticed one major difference… I used to be a lot thinner. Oddly as I have gotten older and fatter, people still ask whether I am a recent graduate. I even got asked for ID when buying a £10 meal deal from M&S recently. I’m pretty sure that I don’t look 18 anymore let alone younger but it appears that many do! I figure that some of this is down to my ultra laid back casual look.
In an attempt to turn forward the age clock or perhaps the respectability factor, I am going to turn back to the tried and trusted male staple of the suit to bring me back some professional pride. When I started out working in investment banking over a decade ago, I used to wear a suit every day. Back then there was little choice in what to splash the cash on when it came to suit buying. Basically, you went with a nasty cheap suit from a store that fit really badly or you went bespoke from a tailor down Savile Row. There was the ready to wear option but the suits were really naff.Read More »Made to measure suits (also known as personal tailoring)

Jeep Wrangler review

  • by


I have driven a lot of different cars over my driving years so far. This is mainly due to work and also use of rental cars instead of owning outright until recently. I had never driven a jeep before though as they are not a very popular car in the UK. In Hawaii though they are the rental car of choice. The Jeep Wrangler is a compact four-wheel drive sport utility vehicle vehicle produced by American automaker Chrysler, under its Jeep marque. A defining feature of all Wranglers is that they continue to use live axles both front and rear like their original Willys civilian Jeep form the 1950s.
When I first got a first look at the Jeep at Alamo in Hawaii I was stunned to see such an abused car being rented out again. The soft cover was not on properly, there were scratches all over the place and they had warning stickers on everything inside the car. Things did not get any better when I turned on the engine either. The ride height was really high yet it was still difficult to judge the width of the car. The handling was non existent and driving around in windy conditions was even worse with the wheel being turned every millisecond to compensate. The noise was intense too with the soft cover being blown to bits as the car was swaying side to side. I’m not a great fan of automatic transmission but being the USA I didn’t have any choice in that sense. Read More »Jeep Wrangler review

Toto Washlet Review

  • by


Toto is the largest producer of toilets in the world. I’ve never even heard of them in the UK but in their native Japan, Toto have over 70% of their flagship washlet toilets in installed in Japanese households. My stay in a Mauna Kea hotel room was the first time I had encountered one of these in person and I was impressed form the start. For those who have never seen one before, these toilets are deodorising, seat warming, bum washing, massaging and drying, self flushing and soft closing.
The model that I tried wasn’t even their most premium model. They have one that raises the toilet seat as you get near it and closes itself! In countries like Thailand I’ve had to use a water hand washer to clean my bum after a poo as is the standard for a lot of Asian countries but this washlet bidet thing does it all for you. Read More »Toto Washlet Review

Sony Bravia KDL32EX403 Review

  • by


So I have been using the same old-style television for what seems like 10 years; Oh! It has been 10 years! Now 10 years ago there were no LCD panels, there were only CRT style massive televisions and I had one of those massive televisions until it started displaying some very weird stuff on screen. I then asked myself the same question every curious guy asks when he wants to buy a new TV – “Which is the best TV on the market?” Luckily for me it was March time which is when the new models tend to start coming out. Having looked at the 2009/2010 range of Panasonic and Sony televisions I was excited and looking forward to what the 2010/2011 models would bring.I then looked up the new range of Sony Bravia specifications on the Sony website and I just had to try one of these new babies out! There are 4 new ranges for 2010 to 2011 – the essential range, the cinematic range, the signature range and lastly the top-of-the-line range which is the network range. As of the end of March 2010 with the run-up to the World Cup Sony released to the public the 32 inch essential range television. Although it is supposed to be the most basic range, it is anything but! This television comes with YouTube out of the box, DLNA, LAN connection, full PC and freeview HD!Read More »Sony Bravia KDL32EX403 Review

How to select a TV stand

  • by


Back in the 80s, when I was growing up, people had small television sets that sat on top of some wooden furniture that already existed in the house. As I got older, television stands began coming as a package with televisions themselves as the televisions grew in size. The television stands that came free as a package, usually came in the same colour as the television itself and it was usually made with cheap materials like MDF and were made big enough only to accomodate 2 VCR sized pieces of equipment. Luckily for us time moves on, and these days we have very nice looking stands that we can put our prized televisions on. You can still buy television stands that are made of wood and look like furniture but most consumer television stands are now made out of a mixture of plastic, metal and glass with glass being the main material.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the dimensions of the television stands are usually hard to find and instead they give a recommended maximum size of television that can be put upon the stand instead. A good example would be a stand that is meant to be used for the televisions up to the size of 42 inches, being absolutely suitable for a television that is 55 inches in size, as well as a television of 22 inches in size. The key thing to look out for is how much space you actually have for your stand, how much of equipment you have which you would like to put away on the stand, and also the weight of your television.Read More »How to select a TV stand

Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking Review

  • by

Last week I reviewed Microsoft’s free speech recognition software which was poor. Will the most famous paid for speech recognition software fare any better?

In the above video you can see the below transcript as I dictated it. View the above video in full 1080p for the best view.
Maximise the do like the wire recognise words, but as a maximise to service maximise that pair to make default a lot bigger. Speaking reader to easier. Now I’ve set this to be the most accurate Earth face. It doesn’t like it when I say,Read More »Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking Review

Microsoft Vista Speech Recognition Review

Many people own a copy of Windows Vista or Windows 7, but many people don’t know that it comes with a hands free dictate from speech to text software built in. To activate it just go to your control panel and then go through the options under the Speech Recognition button. After about an hour of setting up the software going through the tutorials and then training the software I was eager to see what this free piece of software could deliver. I told the software to ‘Start listening’ and then I ordered it to ‘Open wordpad’ and then I started dictating. Below is the result I got:
I am trying to get used to the Microsoft dictation software that comes free with windows vista. Even though I have taken the training on three separate occasions, I am having difficulty with dictating this document. I had to continuously correct myself on a continual basis because the dictation software keeps getting me muddled up. I think the main problem is that when we dictate our documents we speak very differently to how we would speak normally. We are supposed to speak in a newscaster fashion and this may not come naturally to most people even a trained presenter like myself. I have found many instances where I’ve had to correct words of context in a sentence such as the word to and two. I started this document at 11.10 AM and it is now 11.30 AM and I am finding that I’m getting used to this newscaster fashion of speaking although it is not as fluent as a program you have to pay for such as Dragon naturallyspeaking. I do like the fact that you don’t have to pay for the program if you already have windows vista although I’m starting to feel like you get what you pay for. It is now 11.35 AM to give you an idea of my progress. I have found it increasingly annoying that the computer will go and select something that I have already dictated as it gets confused with my commands with my dictation. I have to admit that the program is learning quite quickly the things that I’m saying at a relatively quick pace. Since taking the tutorial and three advanced voice recognition stages, I have launched wordpad and started typing this article without once lifting my finger to move the mouse or keyboard. There aren’t too many words in this article so far yet it is already 11.45 AM and I certainly don’t have 99.97% accuracy rate, for the amount of words that have been written I would say it’s closer to a 30 per cent accuracy rate but it is definitely going up. Read More »Microsoft Vista Speech Recognition Review

The best Cornish Pasty in the world

  • by

Cornish Pasties can only be made in Cornwall and Philp’s bakery with branches throughout Cornwall claim to have world famous pasties. As well as their own self confessed boast – we’ve had recommendations from multiple locals to confirm the same thing – that the pasties from Philp’s bakery are the best in the world!Read More »The best Cornish Pasty in the world