YHIHF: Do Internet Shopping Companies Ship by Access?

It’s been a few months now that I noticed something odd going on. Whenever I buy something on certain online shopping sites, nothing happens for a while. Then, when I log on to check what’s happening with my order, mysteriously it ships on the same day.

It all started with this deal site. I ordered a refurbished computer, and while the site stated they were shipping within two days, after four I had no email confirmation, no tracking number, nothing. When I went to the site, it said it was undergoing construction, and that sent me into Scam Prevention Mode. I sent them an email demanding an update and alerted my credit card company.

Comparing eBook Readers

The local Best Buy has a display with different eBook readers, so I got a chance to hold them all in hand and compare them. Nice way to entice customers, by the way!

Price wars are all the rage right now. The new Nook reader came out, and the price dropped to $149 (no 3G). Amazon followed suit and dropped the price of the Kindle to $189 (with 3G, compared with $199 for the nook 3G). Sony interestingly still sells ebook readers, and those were on display, too.

MeeGo to Become Default OS for Nokia Smartphones?

To my complete surprise, I found an article on Slashdot this morning, in which Reuters was quoted as saying that Nokia is going to ditch Symbian on the N series of phones. Instead of the trusted in-house OS, Nokia is moving their flagship product to MeeGo.

For those of you who don’t know, MeeGo is the merger or Nokia’s very on Maemo project and Intel’s Moblin. All three projects have the same aim: to provide a full Linux distribution for mobile devices. Nokia’s main aim is the smartphone market, while Intel started out thinking about MIDs and netbooks.

Kindle and Calibre

I’ve been using Calibre on and off to get content to my Kindle, and I have to admit the software is gaining a lot in functionality as it matures. The version label (currently 0.6.42) doesn’t do functionality, stability, and ease of use justice at all, and I highly recommend it to anyone with a Kindle, regardless of use.

What do I do with it? I mainly add all those files I couldn’t otherwise read on Kindle. Calibre allows me to easily do the following:

Quick Greasemonkey Script for Kelley Blue Book

One of the most frustrating user interfaces on the planet is that of Kelley Blue Book. It just seems to be designed around the idea of making you click as many times as possible to get to the information you need, instead of around the notion of quick access. Is that because KBB wants to maximize ad impressions?

Well, it really doesn’t matter. There is only a certain amount of clicks I will endure until I start typing URLs manually into a browser, and KBB got me there. In frustration.

Compact Flash - Long Obsolete?

A few years back, I thought I’d revive my days of taking pictures and bought myself a digital SLR. Back then, they were not all the rage, mostly because they were so incredibly expensive and the pictures they shot were not much better than the point-and-shooters’. Seriously, if it hadn’t been that I was already used to SLRs and that I knew how powerful the lenses are, I would have done without.

My Ideal Phone

I am OK with my N900, but not really happy. The software is still buggy, the thing is too heavy, and the slider keyboard is useless. I do like certain things about it, tough, and that got me thinking: what would a perfect phone look like?

Form Factor

I find that the bigger the screen, the more I like a phone. Actually, it’s mostly the resolution that I like – I couldn’t live with the crappy resolution of the 3G iPhone, and the resolution of current Android devices (and of the N900) is OK. Even better, though, would be a phone with a screen that folds in the middle. A little like the current crop of eReaders, only that those tend to have two different screens (one eInk, the other LCD-type). You either flip the phone open (screens protected inside) or the screens are on the outside (one turned off until you flip the phone flat). That way you get twice the screen real estate at half the carrying size. Gotta love that!

MMS on Nokia N900/T-Mobile

OK, this is the latest on N900 and T-Mobile MMS. It works, but you have to figure out a few things. To save you the time and aggravation, here is my recipe:

1. Download and install (via Application Manager) fMMS.
2. In fMMS, go to Settings -> Internet Connection Settings
3. Get the current settings from this page (they worked for me)
4. You are ready to go

The settings (in the format used by fMMS), in case you can’t reach the page or whatever, are summarized below:

Mashups, Lady GaGa, and the Rebirth of Pop

A slightly unusual post today. I’ll talk for a change about music, even if with a firm rooting in technology.

As someone who lived through the 80s, I can say that whatever you may think of politics, economics, fashion, or architecture, you’ll have to admit that music in that decade was exciting. Sure, the 60s had the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, etc. – but the 80s had by far the best pop music. In addition, they started an explosion of musical movements and genres (rap, punk, hip hop, etc.) that came to fruition (and popularity) a lot later.

Roku Player

I was getting more and more frustrated with my Netflix account. The company was going more and more in the direction of online streaming, but you had to use Internet Explorer to watch online movies and shows.

I knew for a long time that Netflix was going to push online streaming. After all, the whole business model with the mailing of DVDs had to be hugely expensive and incredibly inefficient: you’d spend a vast portion of your revenue on simply postage, no matter what wonderful deal they had with the USPS.