Cooler shirts from Smartweave

Last night there was torrential rain so it must be Summer. Women get to run around almost half-naked in this season; if men want to look respectable we still have suits or at least formal shirts to contend with. And we don't like the sweaty patches look. Last year I was on assignment for the New Statesman in Gibraltar, wearing my 'lightweight' pale grey suit and when I took the jacket off I looked as though I'd been in a shower.

Whether a shirt from Smartweave would have overcome that level of saturation I don't know, but I've worn the sample they sent twice on hot days and it seems pretty effective. No patches, but I was definitely perspiring like a whatsit underneath. It would have added to my confidence in any meetings I attended whilst wearing one.

Don't get me wrong; you'll still niff a bit. Some journalists in the Nationals used the shirts in the gym or on long cycle rides to test them and I wouldn't advise that - but for ordinary use, keeping yourself comfortable and dry, the shirt seemed about perfect.

There's a good selection of shirts on the site with variations in collars, fits and cuffs; illustrated is a relatively casual white jobbie with a tartan trim, I have the grey with black trim and it looks very good indeed. If you want to go formal for work shirts you can do so, without the trim and double cuffs for cufflinks are available. I did a little mystery shop and asked the difference between tailored and slim fit, not telling them I was writing about their company, and had a thorough response within an hour, which bodes well for customer service. Also the shirts are well put together; the fit is good on me and the seams appear strong.

I'm not short of shirts, if I'm honest; if I were I'd certainly be looking at spending around £75 a garment from these guys.

Best thing: Appears to work, sweat wicked away as promised, but looks and feels like an ordinary cotton shirt. Companies attempting this sort of thing before have produced odd-feeling and odd-looking garments but not this time.
Worst thing: Remembering not to use conditioner in the wash, which interrupts the drying technology. You can always wash it again, conditioner-free, and its de-sweating properties will be restored, but I'm a swine for forgetting and sticking it in with the rest of the whites.

Weight loss diary 1: Weird Fish

OK, this time last year I said I'd keep you all informed about how my (slightly enforced) weight loss programme was going. I am nothing if not a man of my word, and since I'm between three and a half and four stone down I see nothing wrong with telling absolutely everybody about it who wants to know, and several people who don't.

I'll write about the psychological effects another time (they're not universally positive, you might be surprised to hear) but for the moment let's consider practical stuff. I am pretty much surrounded by clothes that don't fit. I went to the gym (yes the gym) a few months ago wearing my gym kit and taking civvies with me; I forgot to take a belt and, you've guessed it, the chinos simply fell off.

Trying something new

So it's with some trepidation that I'm trying to work out what my waist size is these days. I was stretching into a 40in but have been trying 36 and more recently going into a 34in in certain brands. One of these is Weird Fish, which has made me aware of its Spring collection. The trousers they sent over to try are well-made, solid stitching and a great casual style; they're the sort in which you can unzip the lower leg to make shorts which don't look as though they've been converted from longer versions, and which somehow don't have a scratchy zip. Weird Fish is one of those companies that makes slightly tighter waists than some; I can do them up and they're comfortable when they're on but I may have been better off with a 36; the jeans I'd bought from another manufacturer the week before are a 34 and are very slightly loose. One day someone is going to explain to all of these manufacturers that an inch is an inch (I suspect the jeans are designed to flatter me while the Weird Fish measurement is slightly more honest). Click the image for a larger pic.

Speaking of flattering, they also sent a jumper, the indigo model you can see to the right. My wife tells me it's very flattering; it's warm enough for the Spring and it goes very nicely with the trousers. The red detailing on the collar and button area make it particularly appealing and if I say so myself the slim cut means I look better than I've done in about ten years. Perhaps oddly there's plenty of room in the XL size they sent; of course I'm used to XL being skin tight, so maybe this is what everyone else has been feeling like for a while!

These clothes aren't cheap - you'll get a penny change from £60 for the trousers and the same amount of coins from £70 for the jumper. But they're nicely made - the stitching suggests that unlike cheaper brands they won't be falling to pieces anytime soon - and the pre-fading on the jumper particularly makes it very stylish.

Their website and shops may well be hearing from me again.

A last-minute Christmas

OK, like last year I'd intended to go through December with an idea for a Christmas present each day, writing about them in a little depth. Then some stuff happened - I won't bore you with the details - and it's suddenly the 20th and I've covered very little.

Which is a shame because I've been sent a few good items to look at. The Colgate ProClinical A1500 toothbrush would make a good stocking filler for the hygiene conscious; it adjusts its pressure and speed according to where it thinks it is in the mouth. There's a display and a 30-second pacer that tells you when you've done enough on one area.

I liked the idea a lot and since I'd recently replaced my own toothbrush I passed this to my daughter to see what she thought. She found the display a little disconcerting - difficult to read while the brush is actually in your mouth, which is when the display will count - but in spite of her protestations, she's got cleaner teeth than she had before.

Clutter
For me this has been a year of getting more and more clutter around the place and given that I write a lot about technology this means a lot of wires. This is why I thought BlueLounge's CableBin so useful; it's basically a large bin with a gap down the side so you can put an extension cable in, and then have all of your other cables simply coming out of the bin.

It really tidies the place up and for all I know makes it safer, too.

Another gadget on sale this week is at Aldi - the 7in DVD player for £39.99. I can confirm it works, the packaging is nice and stable and it plays many formats on DVD or CDs.

However...

I'd have reservations about how many kids (I'm assuming a younger market) will want it. It's an exaggeration to say we're all on downloads now, but many people are and they won't want this player. If they do, they may want a larger screen. It's only ten years or so since this sort of technology was a big wow and if you're certain your recipient wants to watch a DVD whilst travelling (and hasn't got a plain laptop) then go for it; my instinct is that these things have had their day.

Fitness

If this year has been about anything for me then it's been about getting fitter. This is where my favourite gadget of the moment, the MisFit Shine, comes into its own. It's an activity tracker worn like a wristwatch; you sync it with an app on your phone and it tells you what you've been doing.

It can take a little getting used to. You can read the time from it but it has a system of lights which take some deciphering. You can tell it when you're performing a particular activity - swimming was mine - by tapping on it three times, but I didn't tap correctly apparently so after a one-kilometre swim it thought I'd been fairly inactive.

Persevere, though, as it's a lovely little gadget that tells you how much of your daily target you've achieved and how many calories you've burned. Don't do what I did, though, and keep it on whilst getting the Christmas tree out of the loft. The wristband can catch on things, then you get downstairs and find you haven;t got the thing on your wrist any more, and the lighting in the loft rather suggests you won't be able to find it again even if you try.

But a lovely gadget and my favourite of the season - all too briefly, I'm afraid.

Christmas presents 1: Scent to you

Now this is a good idea. The new Vivabox, available in exotic venues like Boots, is simple but genius. Costing £37.99, it consists simply of seven small samples of eau de toilette - you can buy one set for men and one for women - and a voucher for a full bottle of whichever you like, from The Perfume Shop. It's as simple as that.

The even better news is that the scents aren't rubbish. My wife wasn't drastically struck on the selection for women but she's a fussy whatsit who's fond of her Jo Malone - you know, the seventy-quid-a-bottle factory (it's rather good but then it pretty much ought to be). She had a selection from Lacoste, Boss, Ghost, Paco Rabanne and more, and no these aren't their second-tier offerings, these are the top sellers.

I was rather happier with my box. Boss Orange Man is something I rather like although my wife doesn't  so that's remained unopened, like the Hugo Man; I'm wearing the Carolina Herrera 212 Men at the moment and it's a little sweet for me (to me it smells feminine; I don't get this 'this one's for men, this one's for women' ethos so many perfume makers think ought to be a hard and fast rule, either you like it or you don't, and if I wanted to smell flowery one day that's down to me).

I suspect I'm going to opt for the bottle of Eau D'Issey but I could also have chosen Paco Rabanne Black XS, Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male or James Bond 007. Actually I don't dislike the James Bond, but you'd feel such a pillock buying something with a name like that - and isn't it ironic that it should come out in the Daniel Craig era; if ever there were a 007 who wouldn't give a stuff how he smelled, he's the one.

Good and bad

It's not a faultless scheme. I can't exchange my voucher online, presumably because it's a come-on to get me into the shop in the first place. That's a valid promotional idea but a Christmas present that's a promotion may not appeal to everyone. Also, I can't go into the shop and use it as a contribution towards a more expensive scent. I'm starting to run short of my beloved Armani Code, but the voucher is strictly for exchange for one of the scents included in the promotion.

On the other hand I don't have to use the voucher until the middle of 2015 so nobody's hurrying me. The samples contain enough for a day or three's splash each, so I can get used to how each of them smells rather than have a quick sniff and buy on the spot.

Above all, if you or your partner have ever had a scent given to you that you don't like, you'll be appallingly aware of how awkward that can be - you think you should wear it when the giver comes to visit, you don't want to be rude...this selection idea is more personal than a bland gift voucher but it also gives the recipient a decent breadth of choice.

I'd get one for someone if I were you - then maybe next year they'll increase the range.

Taking the tablets (and phones)

Apple has been making new toys as you've probably read. Of course I've been looking at them and some are very shiny indeed.

First the one I don't 'get'; the iPhone 5c. Slightly cheaper than most of the others on offer but not sufficiently to make it a cheap option, this comes with up to 32 gigs of memory and has a better camera and faster processor than its predecessors. It's a nice phone and if you want a marginally lower-spec phone then OK - but releasing it at the same time as the 5s? Really? I suppose something's going to compete with it and Apple might as well aim for the number two slot as well. I did wonder whether the youth market would go for the colours; my 13-year-old's view was 'it's a bit yellow, isn't it?'

iPhone 5s

The 5s is a prince among phones. It has fingerprint recognition and it's no use mugging me and gruesomely cutting my finger off so you can use it - it detects that it's an actual finger with a pulse that's touching it. This seriously excellent function is hidden in the start button so there's nothing obtrusive in the design, which basically echoes the iPhone 5. It's a faster phone than we're used to in terms of apps and it has a number of new whizzy features; if you leave your phone switched on in a locker in a basement (it can happen) then normally it will continue to waste battery trying to find a signal. The 5s won't - it realises it's not moving and switches the aerials off.

Best of all is the camera. You get decent pictures from your mobile, which has never gone without saying. Here are some fireworks from mine - remember this is just a phone camera with the flash turned off in poor light - someone who knew what they were doing with a camera could take some seriously good pics (this'll probably look OK on the page, click it for a larger image and see how out of focus it actually is - my fault, not the camera's). I certainly don't have any reason to carry a 'snaps' camera around with me any more...oh, you'd got to that stage some time ago? OK.

Look also at Apple's third video down on this page, which about two minutes in demonstrates the slow-mo video camera. I've had hours of fun making the dog wet and filming her shaking using this - just nothing worth sharing yet because I don't know what I'm doing with the lighting. Here's the Apple link: http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/

As you can gather, if you're thinking of upgrading or generously buying someone hundreds' worth of phone for Christmas, I'd go for the 5s.

iPads

I haven't seen the new iPad Mini yet but the iPad Air is much lighter than its predecessors. It has the same processor as the new phones so is faster to react than the older versions and a lenticular display like the last one; the result is a very easy full-sized tablet which is fine for high-definition movies, whether you're filming them or just watching. The speakers always impress me; you get a reasonable amount of bass for something so thin.

I find my own previous-generation iPad Mini more practical because you can carry it around in a smaller case; on the other hand I've stopped using it for typing in spite of buying a keyboard case because the keyboard is physically too small to be comfortable, and I find the larger screen better when I'm travelling as I like to carry movies with me for the plane and long hotel evenings whilst on business.

Accessories

As always there are accessories available, including the usual gamut of cases and chargers. My favourite is the Griffin PowerDock 5. Looks like a toast rack (except the dividers are plastic) and it supports up to five devices. The blurb says it's designed for Apple gadhets, which I imagine is a bit of marketing - it has USB ports, you plug your own adapter in so it'll work with anything. I've recently bought a Google Nexus 7 for testing Android apps and it's charging perfectly happily as I type.

(Incidentally I don't write as much about Android because I use mostly Apple, but for a good all-round tablet with a smaller form I've been very impressed with the Nexus 7 so far - it even managed to transfer a YouTube film to my TV yesterday without my having to set up a manual connection. I suspect it was talking to the Virgin Media box, but I didn't have to fiddle with passwords or anything like that as it was already on the same WiFi network. Didn't work for stored video, unfortunately, so Apple kit plus Apple TV is still ahead on points if not price).

Photographers should also look at the Olloclip, a deceptively simple add-on for the iPhone's camera. You just clip it on and focus a bit and you suddenly find your camera on your phone has gone wide-angle or panoramic, there's a lense for each. Make sure you buy the right one for your phone; grown-up photographers will want to know that it takes fish-eye, wide angle, macro 10x and macro 15x. None of that means very much to me; I do know that I've started to take pictures that look as though they come from a much better camera...unfortunately with the same incompetent operating it as before.

That's handy (or other glove-related puns)

OK, I'll ask - what did someone just do to the summer? I'd have sworn there was this Autumn thing before winter kicked in but the state of these blocks of ice - or 'feet' as we call them in the trade - on the end of my legs tells me otherwise.

So I've been looking at gloves. And I have a new favourite pair - from MacWet.

These are technically sports gloves, and I have been using them in the gym. You need to measure your hands across the knuckle - this is because they are 'proper' fitted gloves, suitable for people doing work with their hands rather than just commuting or something. The grip is stronger than you find on most other gloves.

I can vouch for their efficacy when you're pushing weights up and down, certainly. Not that I'm massively active; people who follow this site will be aware I've been trying to lose weight, though, and part of that has involved reintroduction of exercise into my life. They work.

Mostly, though, I use them when I'm out generally. A snugger fit than most, you can use them when you're operating a phone (mostly) or whatever else you need to do; they're comfortable because of the case you'll take in measuring your hand, and they look rather stylish in my view.

£27.99-£29.99 a pair depending on the length of the cuff. Not the cheapest gloves but for the right context among the most practical.

Trumper's shaving triumphs

OK, I've been shaving again and I've been testing a number of creams and colognes from Geo. F. Trumper. They're not the cheapest but the company produces some of the most pleasant shaving preparations I've used - more on those in a minute.

The wet shave
I used to get quite frustrated by the sheer amount of men's publications advising us on how to shave. We know, I'd say, we mastered that when we were 13. But then I look around and notice how many blokes still have some sort of shaving rash. And it's not necessary. Here are a few guidelines...

• Blade: The blade with which you shave must, repeat must, be clean. This is very difficult once you've used a modern 'cartridge' head with about 53 razors and a bit of rubber to lubricate it more than once, which is why I switched to a double-edged safety razor a couple of years ago. If you do the same, change the blade every five shaves or so. My Dad used to tell me that a new razor will always cut you; it won't, the old off-sharp ones are the ones that will catch on the skin.
• Heat: Water should be hot and if you can (a flannel will do it) the face should be warmed before shaving, to soften the hair.
• Shaving cream: Your preference rules, but remember soapy stuff will dry up on the skin and may well lead the razor to catch a bit. If you use a cheap preparation, don't lather the whole face at once as it'll dry up.
• Shaving: Shave in the direction the hair is growing to avoid razor burn. If you have time, shave twice gently, each time to reduce the hair growth rather than machete the lot at once.
• Rinse: Get all of the soap or cream off - you don't want to be stuck with a spot-making residue.
• Cologne: On the upper chest or back of the neck by all means - but not straight onto the face after shaving, you've just been dragging a naked razor across it so it'll go red.

That should get you over a number of difficulties.

Preparations and products
My favourite barber The Valet has one fault and that is that they don't stock Trumper's, fast becoming my favourite shave company (with a respectful nod to the Bluebeards and looking forward to the Valet's own range which it will be releasing sometime next year).

Shaving cream is important. It has to feel pleasant, stay moist and not dry up and smell OK. I've been using the Trumper's almond cream (pictured) a lot recently and it fulfils all the criteria; the chances are that when I've finished my current pot I'll replace it with the coconut version I was using before as the almond smell is a bit sweet for me (NB: this is because it smells of almonds, and to be fair there's a clue in the name). The Eucris version is also nice to use with a refreshing sniff of eucalyptus in the morning, and the extract of limes is also a good wake-up concoction; both smell quite distinctive, though, and may clash with your choice of cologne.

There's no obligation to stick with the same company's scents of course. Trumper's goes for the traditional and classic rather than the modern scent and some I find too dated or overpowering; the violet cologne seemed very feminine to me, reminded me of a music teacher from primary school - I have no idea whether she shaved with Trumper's stuff or not, but she was about 100 and smelled terribly of violets. Another scent, Curzon, I found to be different in smell but similarly oversweet and elderly.

Spanish Leather, on the other hand, has become a firm favourite. It doesn't smell as manufactured and artificial as so many  of the major perfume houses' modern offerings (you know how you can get something that smells not so much of a single scent but 'smells of Armani' or 'smells of Hugo Boss'? You don't get that with Trumper). Masculine, classic, a bit refined and different from most of what you find on the High Street. Extract of Limes I liked very much as well, particularly  when used with the matching shave cream - lime and a bit of spice in there, and it lasted most of the day.

These are quite strong and should be used sparingly - a few drops will do you. And they do last - unlike some colognes  I could mention, you'd better decide you like the smell of this stuff because if you put it on at 7am you'll still know it's there at 6.