Reports by Consumers

The Tao of Mac agrees with me. I really don't get the immediate appeal of Podcasting. Yet. It's supposed to be like Tivo for your radio--you can record radio broadcasts and then play them back at your leisure.

This got us onto a discussion about refrigerators, and the problems that men have with finding various things in them. Basically, if an item isn’t on the HIGHEST shelf, in the FRONT row, men will not see it. So, I started thinking about ways to make it easier for guys to cope with those gaint iceboxes that hide all of our sustenance.

3) The spaghetti sauce test. The package shows spaghetti leftovers in one of these bowls, but you know that spaghetti sauce will stain almost anything, including the inside of your dishwasher, a little orange. After nuking the sauce in test #2 above, I washed the bowl. As I suspected, it was stained orange. Very few disposable containers can pass this test, and this one was no exception.

While I do not share CD's I purchase with others, I am concerned that certain types of copy protection will prevent my copyng tracks from a purchased CD onto, say, an Apple iPod, as is the case with certain types of copy protection. Naturally, I would want to know about such "crippling" features in advance so that I can avoid such purchases; why buy something I cannot use?

The personal video recorder (PVR), also called digital video recorder (DVR) or digital Personal video recorder, is a consumer electronics device that records television shows to a hard disk in digital form at. First introduced by TiVo in 1999. (see Tivo /Timeshifting)

Just go check out this CNet article. I think the marriage or cars & technology is a great idea, and I’m in love with the idea of keyless entry & starting. It looks like the 2006 Beamer and the Prius are pretty amazing cars; if only I weren’t trying to sink my money into a house at the moment :)

The researchers comparison price shop and survey the magazine’s own readers as well as the readers of Consumer Reports magazine (the organizations publishing each magazine are completely independent) for their experiences and opinions about local stores and service firms.

This morning my ice>Link:iPod arrived. I’ve tried listening to the iPod in the car, using both an iTrip and a casette adaptor thing, but the reception on the iTrip keeps changing as I drive through the mountains on the way home and the casette thing is just crap. This baby plugs into the CD changer port in the back of your car radio and then into your iPod. Now I can use the controls of my radio to control the ipod and listen with awesome sound quality. If you’ve got an iPod don’t even bother buying aCD shuttle. Just get one of these. It’s cheaper than a shuttle and better.

How to build your own air-conditioner. If there were no computers, this is what Brett Peters would do instead of reconfiguring his home network all the time. But where would he post about it?

To help independent senior citizens live more worry-free lifestyles, DesignTech introduced the world’s first wearable emergency phone at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). DesignTech’s 911 Guardian Phone enables you to press a single button on the miniature wearable phone to call “911″ in an emergency situation without needing to be near a regular phone. You speak directly to the emergency operator through the phone. Since you are speaking directly to the emergency operator and not to a call center, you can directly explain your emergency and get help faster. In addition, since 911 Guardian Phone does not use a call center like other emergency pendants, 911 Guardian Phone has no service fees or usage charges.

The TiVoCommunity recently gathered in Las Vegas for a huge meetup that included previews of TiVo beta products. Someone that was there took a bunch of shots of a demo. Here's a note that someone wrote in with:

Initially I wanted to find refrigerator reviews on some of the models that I have short listed. Unfortunately, this kind of resource is rather hard to come by. It is easier to find a DVD player review than a refrigerator review. Most of the reviews are done and hosted by first world countries. I found no such resource for Malaysia. I quickly abandon this task. Maybe I did not find hard enough, then again, I didn’t want to spend too much time on this either.

The Baldwins began collecting toasters in the summer of 2002 after seeing a toaster exhibit at the Atomic Museum in Oakridge, Tenn. In almost three years, they amassed over 425 items including, waffle irons, coffee pots, frying pans, mixers, blenders, clothes irons, curling irons and hairdryers.

Cellartracker is an extensive online cellar management system, with the main differentiator between this and other products being that you share alot of information with other users of the system. So if someone else writes a tasting note on a wine that you own, you are able to see their opinion and rating on your cellar listing.

You have your iPod. You have the great outdoors, but hold on there’s no where to charge my lovely iPod so I can listen to my tunes. Solved! The Solio is a wicked Solar Powered battery pack for your iPod or iPod Mini. You can charge the Solio using the Sun or at a mains charger. This means you can head out with a spare power supply and if that runs out just leave the Solio in the sun to solar re-charge and you will be able to charge your iPod or iPod mini off it again and again.

Link: Water Heaters. The California Energy Commission has compared the energy cost for water heaters and a solar system would save up tp $565 and then we use the metrics mention earlier about savings and increase value of the property, the $565 increases the value of the property about $12,000 depending also where you live. Why do I mention solar powered water heaters in yr 2005 on a site for issues of the 23rd century? I believe that demand for 1st generation solar power products today will drive the development of next generation, and next generation...

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Jenn-Air added glitz to fridges. Now the Maytag division's Attrezzi line adds pizzazz to stand mixers, blenders, and toasters. Touted as a "modern renaissance," the line of coordinating appliances features etched glass, antique copper and oiled bronze finishes, and plenty of graceful curves. The toaster even browns bagels in a choice of seven shades. Mixing bowls and blender pitchers, both in 10 colors, are designed for double duty, going from kitchen counter to dining table. When done, removable cords let them sit statuesquely. And these babies...

Good grief! First Paul Thurrott gets Tiger early, now he’s been early and accurate on the question of Apple switching to Intel processors. I had thought that it might be some product - eg an iPod or similar bit of consumer electronics - rather than the computers themselves. Still mulling this one. Too little information right now. The key one, I think, is: how are you going to get the laptops to run (a) cool enough (b) long enough?

The new analysis directly contradicts earlier studies about the effectiveness of airbags, which have been required for drivers and front-seat passengers in all cars since the 1998 model year in the United States.

Apple has used IBM’s PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin a phased transition to Intel’s chips, sources familiar with the situation said. Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.

It's being reported on Slashdot that a class action suit against Palm is being settled. The class action suit was brought against Palm because of bad backup capacitors. Owners of "dead" Palm m100, m105, or m125s can file a claim, send it in, and they should receive a replacement. There's no word what the replacement will be, but anything is better than a dead PDA.

What’s a PVR? It’s a Personal Video Recorder. I’ll be presenting more information on them in a few weeks, but in the meantime, here are some links to peruse at your leisure:

These days, it seems like everyone has a cell phone. It’s no wonder that promoters have begun to pitch shields as protection against the radiation the phones emit. But the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s consumer protection agency, says current claims for the shields are "all talk."

Finally, it would be good to explore distributed power generation. We used to have solar panels on my Dad's house in the 1980s. They never generated enough to repay the cost, and I cannot think how much landfill space they will generate when they are removed (that house won't last forever). But there are good cases for using solar and wind energy as supplemental systems, along with on-demand water heaters and other technologies like heat recapture. With all of that said, the market will take care of this as energy prices over time rise to be...

It can be used to magnify images - stills or moving - from small screens, such as PDAs, giving you a large virtual screen in front of your eyes (the company claims 50" in its literature). It can connect to a portable TV tuner, a portable media player and so on and also be used to play games. Leadtek says it means you won't need to 'carry around a heavy video monitor'.

CNN Money reports buyers of early generation iPods may receive $50 in store credit or cash compensation as part of a proposed class action settlement against Apple Computer, according to one of the law firms representing plaintiffs in the case.

So much for that wonderful DirecTV HD service Mike had. Yesterday we returned the HD DVR with Tivo after only having it for two days. There were two main reasons. The first was that we found out DirecTV will soon be stopping their support of Tivo. Yeah, you will still be able to use Tivo, but DirecTV won't be offering upgrades to their DVR boxes. This means Mike had a Tivo that wouldn't get the promised wireless networking upgrades or anything like that now that DirecTV is launching their own DVR service. The big strike though was the announcement...

VOOM customers, despairing over the loss of their HD service, which goes dark at the end of this month, have been thrown a lifeline by DIRECTV. DIRECTV is offering a $200 mail-in rebate on its HD equipment exclusively to VOOM customers who will be without service when the company ceases operation on April 30, 2005.

There is so much health and nutritional information available that it is simply overwhelming. Significant amounts of it are contradictory and subject to change with the next released study. Pretty much everything in our pantries or refrigerators will supposedly kill us. This can lead to a lot of guilt, especially if you are a Christian and have people lecturing you about your body being a temple.

I personally think that the product packaging on this Cutter product should be recalled (or the the product packaging should be modified with softer and/or non-pointed teeth). That said, sentence number seven on the back label of the Cutter product does say, "Do Not push finger through lid opening".

When do (generally) sensible people become stupid? When do products need to be modified for safety reasons? Would your answer change if it were a child's finger that got stuck in the story I recounted?

A heated discussion amongst the audience and the panelists arose surrounding the replacement for parabens in personal products. If you are not familiar with parabens, they are a synthetic chemical that cosmetic and food companies use to preserve the shelf life of their products. Recently parabens have been linked to breast cancer. New studies are demonstrating that whole parabens can be found intact in breast tissue and are an endocrine disruptor, which is a scary thought. Synthetic chemicals such as parabens like fat and collect in fatty tissue,...