Reviews of Two Unrelated Products

I got a $25 Amazon gift card the other day and used it to pick up a couple items I’ve been meaning to get for a while now. Here’s a review of them.

Photon Freedom Micro Light — $10

I already carry a 2xAA LED MagLite in my bag, and I have an app on my iPhone to use the flash as a makeshift flashlight in a pinch, but I wanted something more useful. There are a lot of keychain lights available, but this seems to be the one that everyone who actually needs one gravitates to.

The Photon Freedom is a button-cell keychain light. It packs in an absurd number of modes. Squeezing it for a moment will turn it on or off in normal mode, but squeezing it longer will do any of the following:

• Brightness adjustable mode
• Beacon mode with three flash speeds
• SOS mode (flash SOS in Morse code repeatedly)
• Manual Morse mode (light flashes in time with your squeezing)

The lamp is amazingly bright (brighter than my non-LED MagLite when we walked the dog last night), and it packs all of this in a tiny plastic shell that weighs, as far as I can tell, literally nothing. It adds no weight to my keychain that I can discern. A bit of bulk, but nothing noticeable against the Leatherman Squirt multitool that sits next to it.

This was a great buy and I expect to use it all the time. It will be so much easier than digging out my phone and finding that one app.

Zippo Pipe Lighter — $15

My other purchase was a second Zippo lighter, this one with the pipe lighter insert. The normal Zippo insert doesn’t work well for pipes since you need a sideways flame to draw down into the chamber to the tobacco. This alternate insert works great, though. It has a large circular cut out in the wind guard around the wick, allowing it to be used sideways.

I like the case, too. Having the pipe emblem on it will make it easy to pick out the right lighter when I’m in a rush for a relaxing smoke…