Three companies that can make your life a little better

As a happy liberal, I believe we should let the free market do what it does well (consumer stuff) and let government do what it does well (serious stuff). While the financial scandal on Wall Street, along with the housing bubble show the free market at it's lowest point there are some encouraging things about the free market as well. In the happy holiday spirit I would like to present some of these.

newegg, yep the online retailer. newegg is my favorite online retailer, I have used them since graduate school (and that was a long time ago). They have a fine BBB rating, but for me I respect them because

• The price is always reasonable. Sometimes they are not the lowest, although they often are. But unlike Amazon they are NEVER the highest. Sure Amazon has everything, but some times at twice to four time the price you would pay elsewhere.



• The shipping is crazy good, especially if you are on the East Coast (Midwest will be a little slower). For example I ordered a replacement fan for my computer on 12/17 and it came 12/18. As other people have commented (on the newegg site) the shipment sometimes arrives before the tracking confirmation.



• They are fair. One thing that had kept me from blogging about newegg is that I am a very careful shopper. Until this year I had not needed to return anything. While it is impressive to provide excellent sales service, excellent return service is even more impressive.



• They have a nice service where you can have them notify you if the price drops or shipping is free.



• They quite often have a product in each class with free shipping (cables seem to be an exception). For instance the $7.50 120mm case fan had free shipping!

So despite what a few people have said newegg is an excellent online retailer. In this day and age where there are scams and other problems it is important to have a company you trust. Plus, if you want to know if you are getting a good price compare it to the newegg price.

Speaking of good return and customer service, the pinnacle of this has to be Proporta. I had a crystal case I bought from them. It is available from several merchants, even US ones. However, Proporta had very few complaints and cheaper shipping (despite being in the UK). It protected my Palm well, but eventually broke. Despite the fact it broke from a fall they offered to replace it. Further, since it was discontinued they let me upgrade to a more expensive case. Now that is good old fashion customer service, those from Chicago may remember the retailer Marshall Fields as having similarly excellent service. Add to this Proporta seems to always produce good stuff, and they don't (like most US firms) charge an arm and leg for accessories. For example take the Ted Baker Six pack (which I deeply regret not getting) http://www.proporta.com/F02/PPF02P05.php?t_id=4126&t_mode=des. Compared to what Radio Shack (http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2767656) sells it is a little more expensive. However, the Proporta version has a 3400mah battery compared to 2100mah (in the same package size). The Proporta is beautiful, the Radio shack not so much. Finally, and what I love most about outside the US companies they charge ~$2 for the device heads. For the Radio Shack/ Lenmar you pay ~$6 per head (if you can find them, I can't any more). Also, despite the apparent similarity they don't have interchangeable heads.

Finally, we come to Limoliner (http://www.limoliner.com/). Unlike the rolly polly Fung Wah Bus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fung_Wah_Bus_Transportation_Inc.) Limoliner competes in price with Amtrak (not the Acela http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/am2Route/Vertical_Route_Page&c=am2Route&cid=1080772074490&ssid=134). However, Limoliner offers faster service (usually), much better food (which is included), and slow but usable Internet. Now sure if we subsidized trains better Amtrak could blow them away. But we don't and a bus still beats driving a single car for the environment. So for filling a niche in a good way we have to give props to the Limoliner.

Buying a portable shop vac

I have had a big Craftsman shop vac for some time. I bought it when it was on sale for ~$60. It's been great so far, bailed us (literally) out a couple of time from some minor floods. Also, the blower is pretty good for moving leaves around a small yard. However, it is chore to haul around our rather small house. Also, without a garage it is not ideal for car cleanup. So I began a search for a small vacuum that would be easy to port around. There are three contenders for me: Craftsman, Home Depot, and Lowes. My ideal vacuum would have standard hoses, a blower port, and have an available HEPA filter. However, as we can see in the table I could not find that feature set. For me the Craftsman makes the most sense, on sale for $50 it has interchangable hoses with my big shop vac. Since the big vac can be a blower I can use that with the small hoses to blow out our radiators (no I don't have a compressor and I wouldn't see myself hauling one upstairs anyway).

Feature	Craftsman	Home Depot	Lowes
Power	5	5	5.5
Capacity	4	4	5
Hose Size	2.5"	1 7/8"	1.5"
Blower	No	Yes	Yes
Price	49.99/69.99	59.00	69.99
HEPA available	Yes	?	No*
URL	URL	URL	URL

Palm T|X Flash Memory Speed

I use Mapopolis (no longer available for sale) and was wondering if a high speed flash card would help. When I had my previous E2 it had a memory limit of 1GB, but with the T|X I can now use 2GB. This card was on sale for $14 at Staples, so I figured it was worth a try. There are lots of posts about card speed, measured with various utilities (but the numbers appear unreliable). I am a big fan of benchmarks that represent real world situations. Copying from my PC to this card (with my USB2 reader is faster than my old 1GB card). Even more important a nvbackup of my Palm was cut from 14 minutes to 4. So clearly the Palm T|X can benefit from at least this level of speed. Kind, of wish I had gotten the even faster card to benchmark :) Mapopolis seems more responsive, but it is a lot harder to benchmark. I've got all the US maps, and all the applications I use commonly on the card as well as an nvbackup image. This way if I have to do a factory reset all I need to do is reinstall from the card.

Fun with the new T|X

Recently my son stepped on my Palm E2. He is only about five so the blame is mostly mine. Fortunately, it was not all bad. Ever since I bought the E2 for ~ 190 a couple of years ago I had wished I had something with a little more capabilites. Since the E2 met its demise with a broken screen the next order of business was a hard case from Proporta to protect the new device. I considered the aluminum cases, but they seemed somewhat less useful and awkward. I settled on a clear case which has been stepped on and is still ok. I like Proporta because they seem to charge very fair prices for products and shipping (despite being across the pond) the lifetime guarantee is nice as well.

Compared to the Palm E2 the extra processing power in the TX is really nice when running Mapopolis (too bad Mapopolis is no more and nobody else is making new GPS programs for the Palm). Fortunately, I live in the North East and there is not a lot of new construction so I don't need any updates yet. Strangely, Mapopolis only runs well (voice command work, does not crash) when run from a SD card.

The next step was to try and get the Palm TX to dial my brand new W385. The steps that worked for me are:

Easy Part

1. Update the phone link application (I don't think this is necessary)
2. Establish a bluetooth connection between the phone and TX

Hard Part (I found these on a couple of boards)

1. Go to Prefs->Connection- select my phone connection and Edit-
2. change the "Model:" to "Standard GSM" from the drop-down list-
3. click on "Details..." button that appears-
4. replace the Init String with "+MODE=2" (do not include the quotes)- click OK- click OK- click Done (sorry I have no idea why or how this works, any comments welcome)
5. pull the battery
6. reboot the palm
7. use the dialer and presto!
8. NOTE steps 6 and 7 ARE required and are often left out.

Now my Palm dials my phone.

Internet Security 2008 (A necessary file could not be loaded (1002,1) after installing a Norton 2008 program) (download symfix)

Since this is a fix/workaround I will cut right to the chase. I had the following symptoms:

• I have multiple accounts on my computer (mine, wife, kids)
• I installed NIS from my account and it worked fine
• NIS did not work in the other accounts (Virus protection was off)
• I recieved "A necessary file could not be loaded (1002,1) after installing a Norton 2008 program" when running in the other accounts
• I am running XP, but I suspect the same problem would happen in 2K and Vista (since it si a directory rights issue).
• Norton's automatic help unhelpfully suggested either
• Download symfix (did not help)
• Unintalling and reinstall (which did work for my wife's account but it was too time consuming)
  

My problem was an Norton Internet Security 2008 feature to "protect the files from hackers", it also seems to "protect" them from multiple accounts. You can find this feature under Norton Internet Security Tab, Internet Security Options, How to protect your product from hackers. If you turn this off you should be able to use NIS on all your accounts (it worked for me). This is a lot nicer than uninstalling and reinstalling NIS in each account.

If you want to root cause this yourself use windows explorer from one of the accounts NIS is not working in. See if you can see the C:\Program Files\Norton Internet Security directory. If Norton is installed somewhere else you can look at the properties on the menu item or shortcut to find out where. In any case if you can't see this directory from the account you want to run NIS in the solution above should help.

I suspect I may be able to give all my users read access to the directory and then turn the feature back on, more on that later.

As a conclusion I really like NIS 2008. The performance seems fine, and I like the new interface. It does not seem to have integrated with my SystemWorks, but that is ok. I think 2007 did. This plus SystemWorks and I have my computer nicely cleaned up and ready for the new year.