Clothing for tall men

On By Paul HubbardIn recommendations1 Comment

This is a topic for a small percentage of people, but the Internet is vast so I’ll post it for others who’ll find it useful.

By way of context, I am 6’10” (208cm) and 260lb (118kg). I’m looking for daily clothes for office work mostly, and exercise gear as well with a strong focus on longevity and environmental impact. I do have a couple suits and a tuxedo but those mostly sit idle so they’ll be discussed as a side topic. Let’s go!

My go-to, trusted brands for daily wear

  • Eddie Bauer – pay attention to fit descriptions (classic versus relaxed) but many of my clothes are EB. Their modular winter coat was great for Midwestern winters.
  • Land’s End – similar notes here. For a while, they were owned by Sears and you could try stuff on, but even as web-orders they are solidly reliable.
  • LL Bean – ditto, though I think a slightly smaller selection of tall sizes.
  • String King – this is an awesome find. A lacrosse brand from Los Angeles, but they make custom t-shirts, hoodies and quarter-zips. You tell the site your measurements and they ship it to you, complete with your name on the tag. I’ve got on t-shirt from them, in the poly blend, and its holding up well and seems an excellent value, so I plan to shop here again.
  • Levi’s – the 541 athletic fit is my daily. I take each pair to a local tailor to add two more belt loops on the back, since they are made with only a single rear loop, and then I wear the hell out of them. 2% Lycra/elastane. Wrangler and Carhartt also make tall sizes and I’ve a pair of each, but save them for yardwork, mud and camp outs as I find them less comfortable than the Levi’s.
  • J. Crew – I’m only a bit of their clothing. Sometimes excellent.
  • Darn Tough – their merino-blend socks are expensive at ~20/pair but they work superbly, last a long time and are fully guaranteed for life. Despite having size 15 feet, I prefer their XL size to the fit of the XXL.
  • Ex Officio – their give and go travel brief is expensive at $26 but last. I have a couple of weeks’ worth and they’ve held out well.

New discoveries I’ve not yet purchased

  • American Tall – sizes up to 7’1”. I’ve a nephew who likes their clothing.
  • Navas Labs – recommended by family.
  • Tommy Bahama – I’m not really the Parrothead type that I associate with the brand but their tall size listing actually looks promising.
  • The Gap – I’ve few from them but they’re well regarded
  • Norrøna. Similar to Patagonia in that they don’t sell tall sizes, but my 6’2” sibling tells me that their torsos and sleeves are long enough. Premium prices and reputation. They also have a mountain bike lineup with longer torsos and sleeves.
  • A relative (6’2”) strongly recommends the European brand Devold. Their stuff is well made, proportioned for tall folks despite not being labeled as such and is durable and well made. A quick search found this importer, so I may give them a try.

Exercise clothing

  • AeroTech Designs makes mountain biking jerseys and shorts. I’ve their long-sleeve merino jersey and it’s great.
  • The tech shirts from Eddie Bauer are my go-to here. Since learning that microfibers from polyester are a significant pollutant, I’m searching for merino replacements but haven’t found one yet. Contact me if you can help!
  • Patagonia does not make tall sizes but they seem to make their cycling jerseys long in the torso since cycling requires a bent-forward position. I have two pairs of their Dirt Craft shorts and the 3/4 sleeve merino jersey, and they are worth every penny and fit pretty well.
  • Kitsbow makes high-end outdoor and cycling clothing to order, in America. It’s beautiful stuff and quite expensive. They now have a few tall items! I’ve one of their hot-weather jerseys (Superflow Cooling Tee) (took a chance on a non-tall XL size) and it’s damned good at wicking. I admire them as a company and, if you read up on them, I think you might also. They recently introduced a used-gear store called Experienced Gear.
  • Cognative MTB (great name, also US-based) now has unhemmed 39″ inseam riding pants! In green and black. Bought a pair, getting them hemmed, they look good.
  • I’ve been using Endura riding pants based on posts on the very helpful Clydesdale forum for big heavy riders. They make good stuff.

Information sources

I skim via RSS as explained here, and two sites I’ve come to trust are Dappered and Put This On. String King and Taylor Stitch, for example, were both via Dappered.

Formal wear

Back when I was doing more business travel, a friend recommended Sam’s Tailor, on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong. I’ve been there twice, and gotten a suit, two blazers, several dress shirts and some dress pants. It’s been years since I was there though. My tuxedo was a random purchase on a trip to Singapore, and the price and experience were meh so I’d recommend Sam’s there also.

Note that Sam’s does women’s clothing too – I took one of my wife’s favorite shirts along and they made a couple copies in silk for her.

I hope that this list helps someone else out. Do contact me or leave a comment, please.

DIY MagSafe stand

On By Paul HubbardIn recommendationsLeave a comment

So there are fifty to one hundred dollar stands that hold a MagSafe puck for your phone on your desk. Save your money – this is a 20 dollar stand with a MagSafe attached using two 3M Command Strips.

Less classy

I got the stand from Amazon(non referral link). Tablet Stand Adjustable, Lamicall. The strips are “Command Poster Hanging Strips Value-Pack, Small, White, 48-Pairs (17024-48ES)” which are eight dollars for 48, I used two here to hold the puck firmly. The magnets in the puck are strong, so this provides enough adhesion to keep it in place when I pull the phone away.

Simple, cheap, and the 3M strips remove cleanly for when things change. I can now just drop my phone here as I work and it’s visible and topped off. The AirPods also work well.

iPad coding

On By Paul HubbardIn programmingLeave a comment

It’s Saturday, and I wanted to do a bit of Python coding. Specifically, I want to use

  • my iPad Pro with keyboard
  • my home Raspberry Pi 4 server
  • a full IDE with Python support

I’ve been 96% happy using my iPad as laptop replacement (note the arbitrary precision! So science-y!) and this is a continuation of that effort. Based on a six colors post, I’ve used the REST endpoint from my power monitor to build an iOS widget using Scriptable:

Today I want to extend that with timestamps. To do so, I need to edit Python (Flask and SQLite) that’s running on my Raspberry Pi.

There are a few ways to code on an iPad, and I’ve bought a few. In this case, I need remote development, where the code is remote and the iPad is a terminal.

Commence the searching! This post was a good start, and I dimly recalled that VS Code had a remote capability, which eventually led me to this post. He links to the code-server project, which in theory can run on my RPi. It looks great:

https://github.com/coder/code-server

Well, that doesn’t work. NPM issues. More searching led me to the single-issue raspi-vscode project.

Nope, that fails too:

I found the log file and it appears that there’s no cloud-agent binary for the arm7l on the Raspberry Pi:

This leads to the saddest and loneliest page on the Internet:

Zero results. Gotta leave it there for now, but maybe someone else can move this forward. It’s worth noting that the code-server project now has a new open source project called ‘coder’ but it doesn’t have arm binaries either.

Worth a read: 99 problems

On By Paul HubbardIn essays, Law, Law enforcement, PoliticsLeave a comment

Ever wondered about your rights? Can, for example, you say no when the police ask to search your car?

Caleb Mason is here to help. (PDF)

This is a line-by-line analysis of the second verse of 99 Problems by Jay-Z, from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor. It’s intended as a resource for law students and teachers, and for anyone who’s interested in what pop culture gets right about criminal justice, and what it gets wrong.

http://pdf.textfiles.com/academics/lj56-2_mason_article.pdf

The song is often known for it’s crude language. I had avoided it, but according to Jay-Z and this article, it’s a reference to a K-9 search dog, not a woman or women. Also, you can’t refuse to exit the car, a locked trunk doesn’t require a warrant, and my home state is 2-party-recording consent.

Well worth a read. I’m no lawyer, but this was entertaining and informative.

Was the past better or worse than the present? – Lawyers, Guns & Money

On By Paul HubbardIn Politics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The reactionary world view is based fundamentally on the idea that the past was much better than the present, because people were happier. And why were they happier? Because they knew their place in an unquestioned and unquestionable social hierarchy that gave their lives meaning and structure, and that specific kind of happiness is much more valuable than the shallower kind of happiness provided by general anesthesia and plentiful food and central air conditioning and the Internet and what have you.

That’s what every reactionary believes in his bones. That’s what fuels contemporary American fascism and contemporary American evangelical Christianity and right wing Catholicism (but I repeat myself).
— Read on www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/06/was-the-past-better-or-worse-than-the-present

Seven Head-Scratching Features from WWDC 2022 – TidBITS

On By Paul HubbardIn Computer science, RandomLeave a comment

Customize Spatial Audio with TrueDepth Camera

This announcement came and went fairly quickly, but it had us scratching our heads immediately. The idea, it seems, is that spatial audio sounds more realistic if it can take into account aspects of the physicality of the listener that affect their perception of space. Apparently, this is a thing—called Head-Related Transfer Functions—and by capturing data using the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera, Apple could personalize the otherwise average HRTF that combines data from thousands of people.
— Read on tidbits.com/2022/06/13/seven-head-scratching-features-from-wwdc-2022/

I worked with HRTFs in grad school, trying to implement the filters in the wavelet domain (More here) so this is interesting to me. Looks like we’ll be able to use some combination of camera + lidar to capture the pinnae and derive personal HRTFs from that.

I cannot wait. Guess I’ll need to explore the spatial music and maybe movies now.

Safari on iOS 15 – ‘Hide IP address’ breaks a lot of sites

On By Paul HubbardIn RandomLeave a comment

Since I got this iPad Pro (M1, 10”) a year or so ago, it’s been my primary machine for almost everything. SSH, Remote Desktop, video of course, even video editing and uploads with the GoPro and Quik. It’s a fast, silent, long-battery machine and I love it. Paired with the trackpad/keyboard, I don’t miss my MBP13.

Except. Some websites, typically e-commerce ones, never load. You’ll see a spinner in the upper right corner, next to the cell/Wi-Fi icons, and it never loads. Today I found the fix!!

The problem is the iOS 15 privacy feature ‘Hide IP address’. Disabling it fixes every site I’ve had fail on me. Before finding this fix, I had cleared cookies, erased history, disabled extensions, bypassed the Pi-hole and sometimes used Firefox. Note that Firefox doesn’t have this problem, but I prefer Safari just a bit on iOS.

Go to Settings / Safari and scroll down.

Click on ‘Hide IP address’:

Disable it, go back to Safari and you’ll find that the mystery spinner is banished. Bizarre.

Maybe this’ll be fixed in iOS 16… due to be announced in a couple of days, but I found this so frustrating that I should share the fix.