Archive for October, 2007
October 30, 2007 at 6:09 am
· Filed under General ·Tagged gadgets, money, oil, plastic, the circle of life
If you’ve been paying attention to the news at all, you’ve probably heard about how expensive the cost of a barrel of oil has gotten–topping $94 as I type this. Another thing you may have learned about on the news (though it is less likely) is that the US dollar is at it’s weakest in a very, very long time. In fact, a quick check of the exchange rates (again, as I type this) at XE.com shows that the USD is still trailing the Canadian dollar by about five cents. Not a lot, but we’re still weaker than the Canadian dollar!
So, what does this mean for gadgets? It could mean nothing, but then again, gadgets do contain a lot of plastic, which is a petroleum product and gadgets do cost money to buy. What this may mean eventually for us is more expensive gadgets. In fact, it’s a little surprising that we haven’t seen at least small price jumps in the years since oil began it’s astronomical rise and the dollar’s long fall. However, there are certain physical laws when it comes to money and they can’t be ignored forever.
Here’s how price jumps will work when they come (and they will):
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October 30, 2007 at 5:42 am
· Filed under General ·Tagged electronics, gadgets, police auctions
While it is kinda creepy, a great way, in theory, to get great deals on gadgets is by seeking out police auctions. Don’t worry–these aren’t hard to find since they are available online. The most popular one, at least according to Google, is PropertyRoom.com (clever!) which also goes by the domain StealItBack.com (even more clever!). It has a good variety of items, too–not just gadgets. Just now, I noticed a great selection of older iPods–several 4g models, a few 1g Shuffles, some Nanos and a Mini or two. There are even a couple 30GB video iPods in their original packaging, both going for under $200 a piece.
Other items available include Karaoke machines, headphones, wireless cameras, PDAs, DVD players, and more. All of the items I saw were under $200.
So, where do all of these electronics come from? Well, this is the kinda creepy part. Read the rest of this entry »
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October 30, 2007 at 4:39 am
· Filed under General ·Tagged , hackers, malware, Russia, spyware
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October 30, 2007 at 3:48 am
· Filed under General ·Tagged big business, consumer satisfaction, customer service
Staring at a faulty, broken or dead gadget in your home? Was that gadget found by you in that state upon opening its packaging for the first time? Sure, it happens to all of us gadget-hounds, but what can you do? A few years ago it took me six months to convince Apple to replace an iBook that had died on me three times. Finally, I got a refund (and then a PowerBook) but the steps were meandering and, at the time, impossible to predict.
Well, have no fear–Cory Doctorow, over at BoingBoing.Net points readers to a huge post at Consumerist.com all about how you, the consumer, can fight back when anything you’ve bought is less than what you’ve expected. The Consumerist post is vast and informative. There are lots of tips here–some are obvious (I remember doing a few of them on instinct during my iBook Adventure™) and some are not (the one that teaches you “How To Get Your Problem Solved By Posting It To A Company’s Stock Forums” looks particularly intriguing).
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October 30, 2007 at 3:05 am
· Filed under Static, TV tech, TV-on-the-go ·Tagged Hulu, NBC, TV, Universal
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October 30, 2007 at 1:44 am
· Filed under Portable Computers, Portables ·Tagged Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, XO Laptop
Originally called “the $100 laptop,” the XO is a computer built by the OLPC non-profit started by MIT-guy Nicholas Negroponte with the intent to provide One Laptop Per Child across the entire planet. Lofty goal? Sure. Impossible? Definitely. Still worth trying? What do you think? The problem is–well, what is always the problem when someone tries to do something good without any apparent ulterior motive? People hate you for it. In this case, everyone is going nuts about how the $100 laptop has “just” had its price hiked to $200.
Just yesterday, Jim Finkle wrote an article for Reuters pointing out, quite cynically how “A computer developed for the world’s poor children, dubbed “the $100 laptop,” has reached a milestone: It is now selling for $200.“
The catch is that the XO had it’s price hiked a couple of weeks ago and despite that has already been put in front of handfuls of poor kids in poor countries, runs on a tiny amount of power, is environmentally friendly, has a huge battery life, can do all the basic stuff you expect from computers and has inspired copycats like the eeePC from Asus. So why the hate?
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October 29, 2007 at 5:38 am
· Filed under Desktop Computers, Portable Computers, Static ·Tagged Apple, Java, Leopard, Mac, OSX
Reinforcing the classic pessimistic argument against upgrading, “if it isn’t broken don’t fix it,” early adopters of Apple’s OSX “Leopard” are discovering that the operating system won’t run Java. Java, in case you weren’t aware, is a kind of programming language. The reason people like it so much is because it is cross-platform. That is, it’s supposed to be cross-platform.
Now, it turns out that a lot of people actually use Java on Macs. I, myself, use it to manage music on a Sony thumb drive Walkman I picked up on sale. However, programmers who work in Java are now thoroughly screwed until Apple can put out a fix and since Apple isn’t used to putting out fixes as often as good old Microsoft is, who knows when a patch will become available?
As a RegDeveloper.co.uk article points out, “Apple marketing monkeys, trying to woo developers to OS X, like to refer to the OS as “the only major consumer operating system that comes complete with a fully configured and ready-to-use Java runtime and development environment.”“
Whoopsie!
Kind of tough when one of the very things you put in bold face on the brochure you end up being unable to deliver.
[RegDeveloper.co.uk]
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October 29, 2007 at 4:42 am
· Filed under Audio-on-the-go, Mobiles & PDAs, Portables, Video-on-the-go ·Tagged Apple, iPhone, iPhone Nano, rumors
Yes, that is the rumor–there will be an iPhone eXtreme in January of 2008. HOWEVER, this is ANYthing but confirmed. I simply stumbled across a guy who name drops like mad in his Twitter posts and in one of said posts, he drops:
PLEASE KEEP IN MIND that this rumor goes almost COMPLETELY unsourced beyond this one dude on Twitter. The thing is, something like an iPhone eXtreme and NOT something like an iPhone Nano, makes sense.
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October 29, 2007 at 4:19 am
· Filed under Audio, Static ·Tagged analog, records, sound quality, vinyl
Not to get too personal or anything, but I remember thinking that my very first mp3 player, my Diamond Rio, represented the future of audio technology. My belief was that while the tech in the Rio wasn’t not the end-all and be-all, mp3 audio technology would improve and become fairly close to perfect. Less than ten years later, we all listen to lossless digital audio, right? Well, Eliot Van Buskirk, over at Wired.com, says that digital audio will never and can never sound as good as old fashioned analog.
The deuce, you say, Eliot!
The point of his piece on Wired, which posted just hours ago, is that vinyl is slowly hammering the nails into the coffin of the compact disc. One of the reasons he says is the very thing we were told CDs were good for: sound quality. Eliot says:
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Older Posts »
Wow, repeat that headline to someone from the 19th century and they’d call an exorcist. What it means, in words Stephen Colbert would find offensive, is that unbridled capitalism is allowing more Windows PCs to get hacked thanks to a for-hire network of little hacking robot programs or “bots.”
So, the Internetz are all abuzz today about NBC/Universal’s new Hulu video site going beta yesterday. Most people lucky (or connected) enough to get invites are saying it’s not nearly as bad as they’d expect a service from a major media corporation to be. Some are actually saying 
