My baby brother has now got permission from the government to own and control a deadly weapon.

(No, that isn't him.)

Fear.

Grragh! Uninstalling the Filterset.G updater for Firefox — in the official way, through the extension manager, mind you — causes the browser to stop working, as in "not start up at all". I could be using those 350-odd Kb for something useful, curse you, like not receiving a slew of "disk space quota alert, blah blah" emails every morning. *shakes fist*

Last night some dudes on the bus wanted to know what my powerball was, so I ended up giving a quick demonstration. Yes, I am playing with my wrist exercise toy with its slightly suggestive hand motions on the back seat of the bus. Now all I need to complete the look is a dirty brown overcoat instead of the black-and-flame-red leather duster. *looks shifty* But really; it's an hourish-long journey and the only time in the day when I haven't got more exciting things to do, so it seems like a waste not to do something more productive than read the newspaper (or indeed listen to it).

Here's my review of the powerball, aka wristball, after a few days' use, in case you're thinking of buying one.

Took me a while to get the hang of it. The first important point is that as much as possible of the motion must be in your wrist (I grab hold of the elbow with the opposite hand or rest it against something when it's misbehaving). The second is that you need to get the ball spinning fast enough to start off (takes me a few goes just to yank the string hard enough, though considering my circumstances YMWV). It's obvious once it's working, because it will start humming with vibration and pushing back against your arm.

I'm slightly diffident about this model only in that it makes more noise than I'd expected. The brand-name ones are described as pretty quiet, but this is a cheaper version I got through eBay because I didn't want to shell out if it didn't turn out to be any use, so tough luck, I suppose.

Still, it is demonstrably doing something; at least, it makes my muscles burn embarrassingly quickly (this dies away very quickly as I keep going, though), and once my grip (hopefully) improves I should be able to keep it going for more than ten or twelve minutes. My hands are vibrating as violently as the bus engine when I stop the ball, which again is probably particular to my case and, I hope, will also improve soon...

One end of the string that starts it up is already ruined, and you don't get a spare, so before I break the other end I hope I'll have got the hang of starting the ball spinning without. Dude on YouTube says this is possible, but perhaps I lack the strength of thumb to spin it fast enough.