Note: These are items I’ve bought for myself and would recommend to anyone else looking for something similar. I don’t make any money from any of these links (unfortunately), so please to look around for better deals. I’m also sure the prices I’ve indicated will change over time, so they will most likely be wrong the day after publication.

EDIT: I have added a link to get 10% off the XShear store, which gives me some money. Feel free to not use it if you don’t want to.

General

• XShear trauma shears - XShear, £35 10% off XShear products - These are much better than the disposable trauma shears you always get thrown at you. On top of that, you can actually clean these. I have also not yet found a use for pretty much any tool included on the raptors, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t go for XShears.

• XShear holster - XShear Gen2 Tactical Holster, £40 10% off XShear products - The main issue I had with my XShear compared to raptors is the bulkiness and ease of use (or lack thereof) of the Gen1 tactical holster. This Gen2 holster is much much nicer, even though it’s not cheap. I’ve configured mine to be horizontal, along the back of my belt. It’s far less bulky, and I’ve not had any problems with retention.

• Lanyard for shears - Kevlar Lanyard at PatrolStore, £26 - I use these with my XShear, attaching it with a karabiner.

• Stethoscope - Littman Classic III at MediSave, £75 - More than good enough, but not silly. Make sure to get it engraved, and unless you always use it in the same place, get your phone number on it instead of your full name - it’ll find its way back to you far easier.

• Steth case - Classicpod Micro Stethoscope Case at Amazon, £13 - Small stethoscope case to protect it without the bulk of some other cases.

Nursing

• Clipglow Light - Amazon, £16 - A night shift essential for me personally, and a lot of people have asked me about it. Waterproof (so you can clean it well), magnetic clip, not too bright, lasts long on one charge and casts the light quite wide.

• Reference cards - Yard Card, varies - They have many different ones, but I love these for quick reference. I keep the reference ranges and GCS/SBAR ones on my lanyard behind my ID card.

Prehospital

• Sunglasses - Pit Viper Flip-Offs, £82 - I wear prescription glasses, I can’t see anything without. These are very nice, if slightly ridiculous, sunglasses that I can flip up when I go inside (and still see with the prescription insert), without having to carry two pairs on me.

• Prescription insert - Pit Viper Rx Inserts at SVED Optical, varies - So you can see, if you can’t see without.

• Belt - 5.11 TDU Belt at TacTree, £20 - A cheaper, strong belt. Easy adjustment.

• Belt (the gucci option) - UKOM Narcissus Cobra Buckle Combat Belt at Contact Left, £70 - A much more expensive belt, but I prefer it slightly. Very strong buckle that is easy to use. It feels a lot more robust than the 5.11 belt, but it takes longer to adjust and is far more expensive.

• Boots - Haix Airpower XR1, £240 - Definitely not the cheapest boots and just under 1kg each, but these are the most comfortable safety boots I’ve ever used. The zipper is very nice and makes them fit snugly, while still allowing you to take them off and put them back on in seconds. Long, hot days on your feet are always annoying, and the zipper lets me take my boots off whenever whenever I have a minute to take a break.

• Hero Clip - Amazon, £15 for Mini - A karabiner with a hook. Very useful to carry with you as a karabiner, and I’ve seen people use it to hang a bag of fluids on a door, lamp, cupboard, etc. I have a mini and a medium, and the medium definitely feels a bit big. If you just want one size, go for the mini.

• Mesh organiser pouches - Set & Done on Amazon, £13 for 6 - I use these to organise all my various bits and pieces of gear in my backpack. It’s much more convenients to move around various pieces of kit around my bags and taking only what I actually need. I’m not 100% happy about the quality, but they’re all still doing well, and the size is perfect for me.

• Waterproof trousers - Amazon, £25 - A bit of a strange one, but these have been a lifesaver for me on more than one occasion. Decent, plain black trousers that will make torrential rain slightly less horrible.

Paperwork and Notes

• A6 Clipboard - Amazon, £6 for 2 - A bit small for actual use and not super rigid, but if you need to carry it around in a pocket, this is a nice size.

• A5 Clipboard - Amazon, £3 - Bigger than the A6 one, so more useable for writing on. It also has a flap with a small pouch, which I use for a small collection of relevant documents, maps, etc.

• A6 Wallet - Amazon, £20 - A small wallet for notes and aide memoirs. Always useful to have quick reference on you.

• Reference cards - Yard Card, varies - Same as above, still very useful.

Lighting

• Headlamp - Nitecore NU25, £41 - My choice of headlamp. Lightweight, good range of power levels, rechargeable battery, angles well (so I can wear it around my neck and still have it facing forwards).

• Flashlight - Olight Warrior Mini 2, £90 - A solid little flashlight I keep on my belt or vest. Advertised 220m of throw, and I’ve definitely used it to illuminate things beyond 100m a few times. Can be bright enough to search decent distances in a dark park, or dim enough to read in the dark.

Radio Comms

• Universal earpiece - Earpiece Online, £25+ - I’ve only been able to find these on this website. If you’re like me and you regularly work with multiple different radio systems, you want a decent earpiece for each of those, and this makes it so you can switch out the connector for your earpiece. Every time I come across a connector I don’t have, I take a picture of it and buy it here - I’m up to seven different ones now. The earpiece itself (acoustic tube) is decent enough and definitely far better than the speakers that clip onto your ears that are simultaneously too loud and too quiet. There’s a few better solutions for earpieces, but none of them work with multiple types of radios, and it’s this convenience which really sells me on this system.

Note: this is not an exhaustive list, and it will be updated as I find more TLDs that act in this way.

I admit I haven’t read through all of the RFCs for the WHOIS system (yet) and I’m not familiar with all the ins and outs of what ICANN expects from registries, so my use of ‘correct’ in the title is just based on my experience with the most common TLDs so far and the original goal for the WHOIS system. If I have missed something, or used wrong terminology somewhere, be sure to let me know in the comments!

For those unfamiliar with how WHOIS works for domain names, WHOIS servers respond to lookups with information about the owner and maintainer of the domain name. The normal response to a lookup might look like this:

$ whois google.com
% IANA WHOIS server
% for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
% This query returned 1 object

refer:        whois.verisign-grs.com

domain:       COM

organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address:      12061 Bluemont Way
address:      Reston Virginia 20190
address:      United States

contact:      administrative
name:         Registry Customer Service
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address:      12061 Bluemont Way
address:      Reston Virginia 20190
address:      United States
phone:        +1 703 925-6999
fax-no:       +1 703 948 3978
e-mail:       info@verisign-grs.com

contact:      technical
name:         Registry Customer Service
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address:      12061 Bluemont Way
address:      Reston Virginia 20190
address:      United States
phone:        +1 703 925-6999
fax-no:       +1 703 948 3978
e-mail:       info@verisign-grs.com

nserver:      A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.5.6.30 2001:503:a83e:0:0:0:2:30
nserver:      B.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.33.14.30 2001:503:231d:0:0:0:2:30
nserver:      C.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.26.92.30 2001:503:83eb:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      D.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.31.80.30 2001:500:856e:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      E.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.12.94.30 2001:502:1ca1:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      F.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.35.51.30 2001:503:d414:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      G.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.42.93.30 2001:503:eea3:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      H.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.54.112.30 2001:502:8cc:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      I.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.43.172.30 2001:503:39c1:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      J.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.48.79.30 2001:502:7094:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      K.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.52.178.30 2001:503:d2d:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      L.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.41.162.30 2001:500:d937:0:0:0:0:30
nserver:      M.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.55.83.30 2001:501:b1f9:0:0:0:0:30
ds-rdata:     30909 8 2 E2D3C916F6DEEAC73294E8268FB5885044A833FC5459588F4A9184CFC41A5766

whois:        whois.verisign-grs.com

status:       ACTIVE
remarks:      Registration information: http://www.verisigninc.com

created:      1985-01-01
changed:      2017-10-05
source:       IANA

   Domain Name: GOOGLE.COM
   Registry Domain ID: 2138514_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
   Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.markmonitor.com
   Registrar URL: http://www.markmonitor.com
   Updated Date: 2019-09-09T15:39:04Z
   Creation Date: 1997-09-15T04:00:00Z
   Registry Expiry Date: 2028-09-14T04:00:00Z
   Registrar: MarkMonitor Inc.
   Registrar IANA ID: 292
   Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abusecomplaints@markmonitor.com
   Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.2083895740
   Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
   Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
   Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
   Domain Status: serverDeleteProhibited https://icann.org/epp#serverDeleteProhibited
   Domain Status: serverTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#serverTransferProhibited
   Domain Status: serverUpdateProhibited https://icann.org/epp#serverUpdateProhibited
   Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
   Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
   Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
   Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
   DNSSEC: unsigned
   URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/
>>> Last update of whois database: 2020-05-14T17:31:44Z <<<

As you can see, this includes all the information relevant to the domain.

Now we come to the reason why I’m writing this - some TLDs do not respond in this way. Sometimes this is because a typical response like above contains personal information, and this conflicts with GDPR or privacy in general. One of the TLDs that acts this way is .tt, the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Trinidad and Tobago. If we do another WHOIS lookup for possibly the most well-known .tt domain, ma.tt, we see the following:

$ whois ma.tt
% IANA WHOIS server
% for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
% This query returned 1 object

domain:       TT

organisation: University of the West Indies
organisation: Faculty of Engineering
address:      St. Augustine
address:      Trinidad And Tobago

contact:      administrative
name:         Dr. Patrick Hosein
organisation: TTNIC
address:      84 Abercromby St.
address:      Port of Spain
address:      Trinidad And Tobago
phone:        +1 868 483 4454
e-mail:       admin@nic.tt

contact:      technical
name:         Dr. Patrick Hosein
organisation: TTNIC
address:      84 Abercromby St.
address:      Port of Spain
address:      Trinidad And Tobago
phone:        +1868 483 4454
e-mail:       tech@nic.tt

nserver:      A.LACTLD.ORG 200.0.68.10 2801:14:a000:0:0:0:0:10
nserver:      NS3.NIC.MX 200.33.111.1
nserver:      PCH.NIC.TT 2001:500:14:6063:ad:0:0:1 204.61.216.63
nserver:      RIPE.NIC.TT 193.0.9.50 2001:67c:e0:0:0:0:0:50
ds-rdata:     2539 8 2 b06dfa79674df3ea8190e7616164414b01e9199b7c94ec1540378a395daa401f

status:       ACTIVE
remarks:      Registration information: http://www.nic.tt

created:      1991-09-03
changed:      2020-01-14
source:       IANA

As you can see, the WHOIS lookup only returns the information for the .tt domain.

Does this mean we can’t find any information about these domains? No, if we go to the NIC’s website, we can perform a lookup on the following web page: https://www.nic.tt/cgi-bin/search.pl. Unforturnately, this information is not available via the normal WHOIS system (TCP/43).

List of TLDs and where to find WHOIS information

• .be - dnsbelgium.be (online search form and WHOIS service, does not return any registrant information).
• .tt - nic.tt (online search form only, returns registrant name but redacts contact information).
• .to - tonic.to (online search form and WHOIS service, does not return any registrant information).

My first blog

I started my first blog six - I think - years ago. I used Wordpress, which I’d installed on my server. All in all, it wasn’t too bad, and I actually wrote a couple of posts. Keeping up with all the admin just took too much time, with Wordpress and so many plugins having patches for vulnerabilities released what seems like every week. On top of that, Wordpress was just slow in my experience. Even with multiple plugins and hacks to speed it up as much as possible, I never quite got the performance I wanted.

I later migrated away from that hosting provider, keeping a copy of my database, in case I’d ever want to migrate the blog to a new server, but with the amount of people visiting my blog and the effort required to keep the Wordpress blog up, I never felt like it was worth it.

Spooky

Later, I don’t remember how much later, but it’s also a couple of years ago by now, I decided to have another try at writing some articles about my projects, and various other things. After searching for a good CMS, I eventually settled on Ghost, hosted on my DigitalOcean droplet.

Ghost immediately seemed like a much nicer option. I was able to write my posts using Markdown in a distraction free editor. There were also a lot of good-looking minimalist themes, which also appealed to me.

I don’t fully remember why I stopped using Ghost, but it was probably a mix between configuration issues I was having, and simply not having enough time or interesting subjects to write anything interesting.

Third time’s a charm

Now, here’s attempt number three! I have been collecting things to write about for the past few months and I’ve been planning on setting up a better website for myself.

Now is finally the time.

This time round I’m using Hugo, hosted on Netlify. I’ve been using Hugo for some small side projects for a while now, and I love how well it works with Netlify. I can write posts from any of my devices (and inside Visual Studio code while I’m working on other things), and simply commit the changes to the git repo. It’s fast, and it’s secure, because the website does not have a backend that needs authentication.

When I push my changes, Netlify automatically builds the website and sets it live immediately as a fast, static site. Not having to manage the web server myself, a fast CDN and free SSL by LetsEncrypt makes that this blog is much easier to manage than most of my other websites. Oh, and this is all just on the free tier of Netlify 😍

Will I find the time to write more posts than the previous times, or will this be the only post on this blog? Check back soon to find out!