You can get  tailor made shirts as low as €38 (270kr) online (e.g. at tailor4less) but the question is whether they are worth it. I’ve been so lucky to have been given a coupon for a free shirt from tailor4less provided I wrote about my experience – so here it is!

Ordering and design options

Ordering was painless and it’s definitely not what you should be afraid of when ordering. It was easy to navigate the menus on the site and choose the design options I wanted. Unfortunately, the tailor4less only shows an outline of the shirts you are designing, so you can not keep up visually with the how shirt will look (which can be a problem if one chooses the more advanced design options such as contrast threads and fabrics, colored buttonholes and seams. Here sites like tailorstore and youtailor easier as they show a mockup of the shirt as you design it (works great!).

Wrt. the design options, they are not so many you can tailor to your personal preference, but the most important (cuff, collar (though not so many options as other dealers), cuff style, back style, bottom cut, the number of pockets and embroidery of initials) are there.
Tailor4less, offers a really cool design option that I have not seen offered before – contrasting thread for the buttonhole and only having contrast threading and seams cufflinks button holes – very sexy (why I did not choose it on the shirt I ordered I don’t know, but maybe I go for this one to the next shirt)! If they also had  the option so you could do it in the bottom button on the front of the shirt I’d be in heaven!

Another thing that was make it easy to get start was that you have the opportunity to make a semi-tailored shirt by indicating your body shape based on some pictures as well as age, height and weight. It will not be quite as precise as when you measure directly  as I did, but it makes it easier to get started with getting your  first shirt (and takes no time at all!). I got my wife to measure me and it went quickly and painlessly (did I mention the fit is excellent).

Something I have not tried myself of, but which sounds are exceptionally tailor4less’s customer service. In the unlikely event that you are not satisfied with the fit (note: YOU did the measurements yourself), you can can any tailor in your country to fix it and send the bill to tailor4less.com (max €35/piece though). Or you can send it back to tailor4less with a message about required changes and they will do the changes for free! Nice nice nice feature!

Delivery time is fantastic (mine came from China in around a week’s time compared the promised 2 weeks). Here tailorstore etc. could really learn something (I recall 4 or 8 weeks when ordering form them)!

Also a nice touch. The package was surrounded by a red ribbon when it arrived, giving a good first impression! It’s nice when there’s an eye for the small details, as you autoamatically think the attention to detail also relates to the shirt itself.

Shirt Quality

Unfortunately, trees grow not into the sky, and the quality is shirt fabricsc offered is not as good as I’m used to from custom shirts. Default fabrics are  single won 50ply. The comfort of two-ply yarn is higher and it’s a shame they do not offer it.

They do offer “luxury fabrics” in 80ply. Unfortunately 80ply (€12 extra) is not luxury, I think, and should be standard. Note that the rack-shirts from e.g. sumisura.com (which is the best rack-shirts are available) are two-ply cotton 120ply in Egypisk to approx. € 50) – Also, beware about what fabric you order as  if you do not look around on tailor4less so you end up with a fabric that also contains polyester (avoid polyester shirts like the plague!).

The fit of the shirt I got is very good (though it is due to tailor4less or my wife’s measurement abilities will be uncertain, but I give the points to tailor4less), but because it is only in single won 50ply I fear for the fit after being washed a few times! However, I will enjoy wearing it until it happens (if it ever happens). So far it  f****** looks good! My wife said, unsolicited,  ”you look thinner than usual” when I wore it the first time.

I’m a little sad that the monogram/initials I had sewn into the cuff is so prominent as it is. There should be an option where they match the thread with the shirt fabric so it’s more descreet.

Conclusion

All in all, this is a good alternative tailor4less.com my ongoing favorite for custom made shirts, tailorstore.dk. The shirts with tailor4less costs approx. half and fit very well, but fabrics are a little worse than other places (and worse, there are significantly fewer fabrics to choose from). Additionally, there are more design options at tailorstore or youtailor so custom fit your shirts or suits. It would be nice if tailor4less  had some better fabrics or  just more quality fabrics, but then the price would probably also hike upwards. But buying at tailor4less can easily be recommended I have to say!

Shirts from € 38 from tailor4less.com (mine cost € 50)

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Unbelievable, the devastation caused by Tornadoes in the US currently

seen at Joplin page on flickr

from Quotes « Bits Of Wisdom.

I know I haven’t updated barelyadraft for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it and have quite a bit of unfinished posts that may or may not ever make it on the site. At any rate, I grew tired of the site being extremely slow due to my hosting provider that, while being very nice, didn’t deliver a fast or reliable service to suit what I needed to feel the site performed up to snuff. So I have taken the plunge and transtioned barelyadraft and my private site (in danish), sorenostergaard.com, to the cloud – more specifically to Amazon’s AWS. Dead simple procedure to set up and the performance increase has been incredible, while at the same time saving me lots of money, despite moving from a very low cost provider – fatcow.com.

Each site now has it’s own server to run on with full control of the linux box – beautiful!

Would I go on a date with you? No!

I might sound harsh, and you’re probably a wonderful person (no really, you are, I have heard many people say it independently of each other, and you are often singled out by the people I meet as the dream person they aspire to become, the end-all of good, decent, people, both beautiful and wise and yet still approachable, attentive and caring…), but I think my wife (yay for marriage btw!!) would find it very weird if I did that, so that’s not gonna happen.  No! forget it, please!

Now, what could be  interesting (somewhat maybe?  but not really right? – read the rest of this post anyway, have a chuckle), however, is whether I would have gone on a date with you if you had met me before I met my wife back in the day.

To see if I would have gone on a date with you (and who would be paying), please follow the simple flow chart you can see a glimpse of above, that I found in an old email, which was sent to me by the awesome guys at okcupid.com (apparently a project done by some summer interns last year or the year before). I have written about OkCupids awesome blog before (see posts where they are mentioned here)

You can see a PDF file of the full diagram by pointing and clicking here.

Some more stuff not written by barleyadraft about OkCupid if you found it interesting

• OkCupid Apparently Thinks I Am Ugly (thefrisky.com)
• OkCupid’s Love Math Doesn’t Solve The Equation [They Blinded Us With Science] (jezebel.com)
• The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating [Dating] (gizmodo.com)

Shot this little gem of a photograph when I visited Manchester last week. This is from the airport, where a lot of people were enjoying a pastry and an pint…at 10AM in the morning..WTF?

via Mr. T Explains : Savage Chickens – Cartoons on Sticky Notes by Doug Savage.

The above was the headline of an email I got this morning and is currently my favorite email received in September. DSB public train system has for the last couple of month had TVs running in most their trains…WITH sound…. Yep, so going by train in the Copenhagen area meant that you were force-fed with news, cooking recipes and ads to pay for it all, with loud sound, with basically no way of avoiding it (unless you went into one of the quiet compartments).

Who the frek works in their marketing department? How did this pass internal approvals without someone stopping up and saying

“hey, don’t you think there will be a lot of people who will be annoyed that they can’t turn off noise and have a conversation, phone call, peace and quiet or listen to their own entertainment that we annoy?”

Apparently the executives at DSB all nodded and thought

“no, everyone travelling will want to see ads and food recipes and news – interrupted every 2-4 minutes by the speaker announcing arrival a new train station – EVERYTIME they travel and people will flock to use the trains”

*sigh*. It baffles me that this has gone through whatever internal review there is in DSB (which should probably be updated).

It is a typical however, and I often find (usually not around marketing people though) that people think a certain way of doing things is better for everyone (like having a TV running 24×7 as someone as DSB must have thought), which is a very dangerous approach as it will annoy the sh*t out of anyone who disagree.

Free advice: Step it up DSB and spend your time making the trains run without delays instead of experimenting with entertainment  - there is still room for improvement regarding “being on time”. I’ll give you a free insight to end this rant and reveal the single most desirable feature of public transport:

Getting from point A to point B, on time, with no distractions.

I recently bought myself a NAS (network attached storage) unit through an incredible offer offered to my sister from her place of work. Starting 2010, many Danes have to pay a “multimedia tax” if they are provided access by their employer to various multimedia e.g. phone, computer, internet access. Because of this, many companies are trying to make provide some cool multimedia to their employees so the employee maximizes the personal value of the multimedia tax they have to pay anyway (because a company paid phone or laptop are pretty common – at least in the type of jobs me and many of my friends hold) – it’s a very cheap way for the company to offer such fringe benefits.

Since my sister didn’t want to take advantage of the incredible offer, I wanted to! So for 113 DKK (~US$20) a month for 24 months, I got to choose a retail Windows7 Home Premium license, an Apple Airport Express (.N version), an Apple Magic Mouse and LG NAS N2B1 equipped with two 1TB drives (so 2TB of storage). Not bad ‘ey?

the LG NAS N2B1/N2R1

Actually it originally started because I wanted to buy the Xtreamer eTRAYz to complement my Xtreamer 2.5″ – my media player, which I have written extensively about before(part 1, part 2, and part 3) and to have a safe place both me and Julie could access our music, photographs and videos from independently of whether using any of the 4 four computers in our home. At the time of purchase I had access to the Xtreamer eTRAYz for just €59(+€20 shipping)(~$80+27 shipping). On top of that I would also have to invest in two 1TB drives, which would set me back another at least another €200 (~$275). And I wouldn’t get the sweep, no interest, no fees, 24 month payment period.

What works well?

FIRST of all, if you get one, be SURE to download the newest firmware (v2557 as of writing) and install that to the unit before doing any other setup, as there is a MOUNTAIN of difference in operation between the firmware the unit came with and the 2557 one, at least that was the case with mine. Just as a teaser, one of the features implmemented in the new firmware that was not present in the older one my unit came with was mounting the built-in BluRay drive using iSCSI and the ability to send external links to my friends of the files on the unit. So it was definitely worth to upgrade the firmware before getting started.

Some of the features I really like are are (in no particular order):

RAID setup:The RAID setup can be setup a number of ways, and luckily exactly the way I like it. I have split the NAS into two partitions using RAID1+JBOD. The 2TB have be split into a ~300GB partition mirrored RAID1 partition for sensitive data such as photographs and our music collection that we would be VERY sorry to lose, and a 1.4TB JBOD parition for videos. Now my unit came with two 1TB drives installed, but you could easily put in two 2TB drives if you need more space

Torrent client: The torrent client has a very pleasent webinterface that looks eerily similar to the webinterface of uTorrent and works quite well. It supports uPNP to open ports, so speed is pretty good. The benefit for me is that I can have the LG NAS running all night without having to have any PCs turned on, saving on electricity (as the in-use electricity consumption is ~42watts, and with standby @ ~12watts. Adding torrents is as easy as feeding the torrent URL to the clinet through and “add torrent” button in the interface and the LG NAS will download the torrent file and start the torrent download. Pretty sweet (some readers might remember me bashing the MVix Ultio implementation of the torrent feature to be EXTREMELY poor and bascially unusable due to the fac that you had to download the .torrent file to a PC and then upload it yourself to the MVix Ultio. Also on the Ultio you couldn’t set the port the torrent cliens use and there was no mention on whether it supported uPNP). I’ve installed an extension in my Chrome web browser called Remote Transmission so all .torrent files I click while browsing are automatically sent to the LG NAS for download.

DDNS service: The DDNS service works as advertised. After setup on the unit, it will allow you to access the webinterface (and thereby all the files as well) on the unit, as well as adding torrent URLs easily on the go. It might not be the hottest feature to promote, but it’s one of the features I am fond of, and because it is built-in into the unit itself, it ensures it’s always updated correctly even if your IP is changed while you are not at home.

iTunes server: Sure, the iTunes server implementation does not allow for playlists, but it’s a minor thing. It autoscapes the iTunes folder where all the music is located every five minutes and adds any new files. I should mention that it is a little annoying that all music have to be in the speific iTunes folder for it to be scaped by the iTunes server, so I actually have my music both on the RAID1 partition and have it mirrored in the iTunes folder on the JBOD partition (luckily the mirroring of folders is something that can be setup to happen automatically on the LG NAS).

DLNA: DLNA support was the original big-ticket feature I wanted, so that all videos I have will play on the Xtreamer with ease, and it works as advertised. I shold recommend to anyone contemmplating setup this up to invest in a .N wireless router, as the files can take some time to start if you are ona a .G wireless network (hooray for the Airport Express I mentioned in the beginning of this post).

What should be updated/What am I missing

If you go to any of the NAS pages (e.g. here), they will tell you that the LG NAS (both the N2B1 and N4B1 versions) does not perform well speedwise compared to comparative units from QNAP or Synology, but from my perspective, as I will be accessing the unit wirelessly, that shouldn’t be an issue. In a wired setup built for performance it might matter, but I am currently able to stream movies, music and watch photographs. But something to keep in mind if you are contemplating buying such a unit.

Apart from that, there are a couple of things I would briefly mention (and hope people from LG, working on updating the LG NAS, read) the following:

• I haven’t gotten webDAV to work at all. Whenever I try to mount it in Windows, it does not allow me to authenticate. I have a sneaking suspecision it has something to do with my skills more than the unit, as I am able to mount webDAV in Firefox and Chrome. Would be a killer feature to have if I ever got it to work. (update – fixed – don’t know what happened, but it works now)
• While the torrent client works great, all the torrent sites seems to be moving towards MAGNET links and using DHT to get files instead of .torrent files download, which the LG NAS does not support. Support for this is important for me. (*sigh*, the unit still uses v1.92 even though v2.x of Transmission is out)
• FTP does not seem to accept connections from outside the network. Again this has probably more to do with my skills, as I am able to get a connection to the FTP, but the FTP always sends out the internal IP, and no matter if I use passive/active connections from the ftp client, it doesn’t solve the issue (if you know how to solve it, let me know) (update – fixed in the latest firmware v2557)
• As I mentioned , the iTunes Server only adds songs located in the /service/itunes partition located on the JBOD partition, so I have to have them in two places
• I wish I would be able to to sync folders/drives on the LG NAS to e.g. external FTP servers or webdav folder. Mirroring folders is also implemented on the LG NAS, so it would be nice if this feature was expanded to include external folders/ftps/webdavs.
• It would also be nice if the LG NAS supported downloading newsgroup files (using NZB files for example), in the same web interface as the torrent client. I doubt this will be implemented though, as the LG NAS is not thought to be an enthusiast type device, and I don’t know anyone non-enthusiats/nerds using newsgroup servers and NZBs..heck I don’t know any non-nerds who even know what NZBs are. Competing units from QNAP and Synology does this.

That’s it. All in all I love my LG NAS. I have a few gripes, but technology is never made by people who think exactly as I do (Apple comes though), so I can accept less than perfection, and the LG NAS is a bargin @ less than €200/$280 over two years with no interest or fees.