Archive for November, 2007

Futurama fans rejoice — a new full length movie, Bender’s Big Score, is now available on DVD. It’s a hilarious movie, pulling in many of the quirky characters featured in the original series. The only people who might not enjoy it is the FOX executives who cancelled the series — they get pretty severe treatment in the opening of the movie.

If that awesome Black Friday PC you bought is loaded with useless trial-ware and crap-ware, you can simplify the much-needed cleanup process with the free PC Decrapifier program. Manually uninstalling everything isn’t that hard, but this is certainly easier.

The upcoming Windows XP SP3 provides a 10% speed boost over SP2, according to early benchmarks. This news makes a downgrade to Windows Vista even less attractive.

How much does “phone home” DRM suck? A lot. Major League Baseball seems to be backing down, and letting their DRM victims re-download purchased content. Even so, any DRM that requires contact with a remote server to “allow” playback of legally purchased content is just awful. Please don’t pay for this garbage.

I bought a refurbished Sandisk Sansa e250 mp3 player from Buy.com for a very good price — just $39. When the package arrived, it contained a software CD, the player, and a set of headphones. The 3 items were loose in the shipping box — there was no product packaging at all, aside from some bubble wrap. No USB cable was included. The cable is needed for charging and for loading music, and is listed in the item description on the web site. I sent a service request to Buy.com asking for the cable. I was told to contact the manufacturer or request an RMA to return the item — [...]

The Amazon Kindle ebook reader is now available. The device is $399, which is $200 – $300 too much to ever be a huge success. A lot of the high cost likely went into the built-in and free wireless connectivity to the bookstore (via EVDO — the same technology some cell phones use). While that’s obviously a cool feature (really cool!), I think it should be optional. Many of us would be happy to buy our books via wi-fi or even through a computer sync — especially if it means saving $100 or more. Most books are $9.99, which is pretty reasonable for hardbacks, but crazy [...]

Marvel Comics is taking their book business online, posting select comic books on their web site. The comics are only viewable in a web browser, and most will be behind a $5 per month subscription wall. For a limited time, 250 back issues will be available for free. The service provides users with access to classics like the first issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, The X-Men, Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four and others, along with newer likes like New Avengers and Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men. Marvel counts 2,500 comic books at launch, and plans to add at least 20 additional titles weekly. Each [...]

The PDA is an inevitable casualty of convergence: In the third quarter, IDC says that 728,000 PDA shipments were made globally. To put this in perspective, consider that Apple sold one million iPhones in only half a quarter, and RIM saw sales of more than three million BlackBerrys for the quarter ended September 1. I still see the value of a dedicated PDA, but I’m in a growing minority.

Happy Diwali to all. Today is the festival of lights known as Diwali. The cultural importance of this holiday in India and among Hindus worldwide is similar to the western importance of Christmas. I’m down with any holiday that involves fireworks, sweets and gifts. Follow the link for a kid’s perspective on Diwali.

Buy.com has the Asus Eee for $399.99 with free shipping, with an in-stock status of “Usually Ships in 1 to 2 business days.” If you use Google Checkout for the first time, you get an extra $10 off. Personally, I’d like to see the promised $299 version come to market.

My 13 year old son is asking for a Sony PSP Slim and Lite for Christmas. For just $169, it not only plays games but looks like it would make an awesome hi-res portable video player. In fact, he’s leaning towards the $199 PSP Daxter Entertainment Pack, which includes a Daxter game, a Family Guy UMD video disk, and a 1gb MemoryStick. There’s also a cool Star Wars edition of the PSP, complete with a Darth Vader image on the back of the console.

$300 laptop coming from Everex.

Today begins National Novel Writing Month — write a 50,000 word novel in one month. I participated in 2001 — it was a lot of fun.