Month: January 2009

Don’t Leave Your Draft Designs Laying Around Web

I am a big fan of encrypting my laptop’s hard drive, and typically use PGP Whole Disk Encryption product for that purpose. So yesterday I installed the 30-day trial, encrypted the drive, and ran it through its paces. As usual, WDE impresses me for its speed and unobtrusiveness.

But paying for  it — that’s a whole other ball of wax. So I open up PGP, go to the “Buy a License” setting, and end up at their online store. Put in my credit card and other details and hit submit.

Uh oh — server error message. But there’s a helpful mailto link that suggests I send a notice to the web master to resolve the problem. So I click on the link, draft a quick “I’m just trying to register PGP WDE” and hit send.

And, of course, it bounces back. The interesting thing, though, is the e-mail address is clearly a dummy filler address that the web designer put in with the intent of adding a real address later . . . in fact the designer helpfully named the placeholder e-mail address:

[email protected]

Except, of course, it looks like no one ever bothered to go in and change [email protected]

Sigh. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Why Is Blu-ray Writable Still So Expensive?

I really like to back up data to optical media, and as the volume of data I back up continues to increase, I would love to back up to 25gb Blu-ray discs rather than 4.2gb DVD discs. But Blu-ray media is still far more expensive than DVD media and the obvious question is “why?”

The Blu-ray Dimensions blog offers an answer which is basically — relax, DVD writable media was even more expensive at a similar point in its history.

The technology uses a different type of laser (that’s how optical discs are read). With all that it does not compare to when a DVD recorder drive was $13,000.  Yes those days (years) really did exist.  This is not where we break out into a story about walking to school in bare feet in the snow but it really is a matter of perspective.  Recordable Blu-ray is not as inexpensive as recordable DVD because DVD is a mature market.  Demand has leveled off  and despite the crazy forecasts from some manufacturing sectors, the same ones who dump product on the market because they are always wrong, prices have drifted down.

One problem with this analysis, however, is that Blu-ray does not seem to be approaching anywhere near the adoption cycle that DVD experienced. Sales of Blu-ray software and hardware have significantly trailed sales of DVD movies at similar points in the respective technologies’ histories. According to Wikipedia,

According to Adams Media Research, high-definition software sales were slower in the first two years than DVD software sales. 16.3 million DVD software units were sold in the first two years (1997-1998) compared to 8.3 million high-definition software units (2006-2007). One reason given for this difference was the smaller marketplace (26.5 million HDTVs in 2007 compared to 100 million SDTVs in 1998).

That slow adoption could make it much tougher for Blu-ray writable media prices to come down to DVD levels on a per-gigabyte basis.

Fireshot FTW

I’ve had the Fireshot screenshot extension installed in Firefox for a long time now, but I mostly used it just to take the occasional shot of some web page or another in my browser and never really investigated its feature set. Holy cow.

Like a lot of screenshot utilities these days, Fireshot will take a screenshot of a webpage, including the portions not visible on the screen. Nothing real special there.

What kicks it up a notch is that Fireshot can take a full screen shot of every open tab! Hell yeah. Yes, I have a series of 27 or so pages I want to take a screen shot of every day. So, open a new Firefox browser, open all those pages, bookmark them as a group, then its just a matter of opening that bookmark and telling Fireshot to please take screenshots of all of them. Gone in 60 seconds.

Why No RSS Feeds for Amazon Wish Lists?

Maybe I’m just out here on the cutting edge and no one else in the universe would find this useful, but I’m always amazed that Amazon doesn’t have RSS/Atom feeds for wishlists. I could subscribe to all of my relatives/friends wish lists in Google Reader and give Amazon yet another opportunity to suck up my hard earned cash.

But, alas, no. I gave up on Amazon Wish Lists awhile ago and was using TheThingsIWant.Com which pretty much sucked except that it had RSS feeds. But now it appears to be down for the count (offline the past few days).

Companies seem to omit services like this because the knock is that the average user has no idea what RSS is, much less why they’d want to use it. Which is true enough, I guess, but there are plenty of Amazon-related sites geared to non-technical users that at the moment are forced to scrap wish list information from Amazon. Why hamper the development of such services by not offering native RSS/Atom feeds?