Reports by Consumers

The next generation of consoles is forgoing a level of universality as many of the new systems will come in several different bundles of varying capability and cost. Handhelds such as the PSP are acting like laptops. The video game industry is now the largest entertainment industry ever, and one of the major components of the entire tech sector.

The Law of Supply and Demand simply states that when Supply is higher than Demand that prices fall. When Demand is higher than Supply, the price increases. Gas prices are a perfect example of this. There is far more demand currently for gas than the supposed supply, therefore prices go up. If millions of folks began driving cars that ran on an alternative source of energy and the demand for gasoline dropped, the price would fall as well.

Informational parenthetical: quite simply put, refrigerators work by extracting heat from the air inside them and putting it outside. That’s why the back of your fridge is hot. Until now, that heat’s been wasted. Well, with the Hot Fridge, a creation of Hae-jin Kim, you could conceivably give your fridge dual use and keep things hot, as well as cold. It would do this by placing the “back of the fridge”, on top, where a special hot food storage compartment would be placed.

Things in our kitchen seem to be breaking down and my son has definite ideas on how to go about fixing them. The dishwasher needs to be re-anchored and he says we need to get loooooong screws and drill biiiiger holes. My reply: let daddy take care of it. This morning the sink started acting up again. I told T, “The sink is clogged up again.” His reply: plunger it, Mommy.

Indeed, bad products will be developed and customers will be hurt but by having a robust product recall strategy, a company will do just fine. But by fighting a war with people who used to be one-time customers of Merck, the company is merely setting itself up for eventual destruction.

Before embarking on this review, I need to lay out the facts. Every screen protector that was tested was used by me for a week long period. When applying each screen protector, I thoroughly cleaned the PSP surface to remove dust. I applied each screen protector with whatever tools that were given to me with the product only. I did not purchase any of the screen protectors, every one was kindly given to me for the purposes of this review.

There’s my dilemma. It may seem silly to some of you, but if you have a PVR/DVR of some sort, you know that you just can’t go back to watching TV without one. While I don’t know exactly how I should feel about it, Kelli and I do watch a lot of TV, so this is important to us. I need to find the best combination of stability/functionality/quality. And no, I will not just buy/rent a dedicated DVR. I do not like being restricted by such devices. I much prefer being able to move shows over to my laptop to watch later, or being able to burn them on DVD for friends, etc. Anyone see something obvious among my options that I may have missed? Any opinions on what I should or shouldn’t do?

If you use Blogger, you may have noticed they've just launched a survey asking about Blogger users and, more importantly to me, what you want from Blogger.

An outspoken anti-pornography advocate has been hired by the Federal Communications Commission to advise the agency on consumer issues involving the cable and broadcast industry, which has been under scrutiny for airing racy material.

For most computer users, the effect would likely be an inconvenience at worst: Their computers will be updated with new software by then, or configured toconnect to network time servers that will know the correct time. But because not everyone's computer is networked or updated, some glitches could occur--especially in consumer electronics devices that aren't designed to be reprogrammed.

A related issue, the Highway Bill is going to add much needed transportation capacity to our freeways. Leave us not forget, cars idling on inadequate freeways produce 7 times the pollution of cars running at 55mph.

I recently bought a handheld pc from Dell, while researching prices I came across something quite interesting, it seems that Dell hates Canadians.

After spending a few hours tweaking and tuning things, I finally had the system ready to go. So I ripped out all the electronic components from my entertainment center and dropped in the media PC. I hooked up my WinTV USB2 external TV tuner with DVR support (integrates seamlessly with Media Center Edition). I added the RF receiver for the SnapStream FireFly remote I purchased (Amazon...overnight). This is a sweet piece of hardware. Not only does it control all the MCE features without line of sight (thanks to RF), but it also has a cool mouse emulation mode. Not something I'll use all the time, but nice for the occasional mouse click. What I really like about it is that all the button macros are configurable by editing an XML file. Very well-engineered hardware, intuitive software and extremely usable.

I spent a few vacation days and the weekend getting our new dishwasher hooked up. This is a big win for us–not so much because of the automatic dishwasher itself, but because it doubles the amount of counter space we have available in the kitchen. (Not having to wash dishes by hand is nice, too. But the counter space was critical!)

What was Comcast thinking? Any ReplayTV and Tivo owner (and Comcast DVR “renter”) is not going to be too excited about recording Six Feet Under and watching it later after reading these spoilers. They should have had an article on the upcoming episode with a warning about spoilers in the article and just a link from the front page (like CNN did with their Six Feet Under article) but that would make too much sense.