Cleaning suede or nubuck shoes - what I've learnt

Etnies Ronin skate shoes (angle profile)
How a boxfresh Ronin should look...

In autumn and winter, it gets wet outside! Suede and nubuck HATES water, mud, snow and rock salt to boot (natch).

So, protect your shoes BEFORE you destroy them! Get some suede or nubuck protector spray, I mention some later in the article, and give your shoes a good treating before you step out.

I always spray treat my shoes straight from the box, and they're all still great. £5 and 15 minutes' work makes a long-lasting difference.


Back in 2010, I ventured out in some brand new trainers (a pair of Etnies Ronin skate shoes, which are black and white suede/synthetic material mixture with a white trim round the sole). Unsurprisingly, it rained the next Saturday evening, and when I came back my shoes were DESTROYED.

Unfortunately, mine weren't quite caked, but were fairly smattered in nasty looking mud. But what to do? Well, after some careful research (and even more careful testing), here's some tips for cleaning these kinds of skate shoes.

Shoes like the Ronins aren't all suede - they have what Etnies describe as an "action leather upper" combined with synthetic, woven sections (for example, the material around the E motif on the side of the shoe is a different fabric). However, in my case, the whole lot was just smothered with nasty, gunky mud.

So, what to do? First things first... read more after the jump.

Useful timesavers when using XP on a Boot Camped Mac

I'm using a MacBook Pro at work with Windows XP via Boot Camp - however, I was hampered by the lack of some key keys (pardon the pun) - no delete key! How do I Ctrl-Alt-Del? Argh! After some careful searching, I came across a great page listing most, if not all, of the various shortcut key combos you might need when using Windows on a Mac... Kudos to EveryMac for the list.

Also, a handful of quick tips which I found useful when I was first beginning to learn the ways of the Fruit:

  • If you want to eject your CD/DVD from your Mac's drive without booting into an OS, just press and hold the left mousekey when booting up.
  • If you want to display the boot selection screen (to choose between OSX, Windows or an external drive / Install DVD) press and hold Alt during boot until the menu's displayed.
  • If you want to change your default OS for dualbooting, use the Boot Camp Assistant applet (found in the Control Panel in Windows, and similarly in the OSX Options). In Windows, you can also quickly reboot into OSX by clicking on the Assistant system tray and choosing "reboot into Mac OS X".

Next, something I found VERY useful: you can change your keyboard layout back to the regular Windows layout!

Lots more info after the jump...

Continue reading "Useful timesavers when using XP on a Boot Camped Mac"

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