These are simply the best USB SDHC card readers at any price because it’s the fastest reader I’ve measured, and DealExtreme sells it for $2.99 (free but slow ~3 week shipping from China). I was able to measure read speeds of 22 MB/sec and write speeds of 11 MB/sec using a cheap 16 GB class 6 SDHC card from A-Data. At these prices, I ordered a several extra just to hand them out as cheap but really cool gifts.
Image credit: DealExtreme.com I hope they don’t complain about the image usage since they’re getting free advertising here.
I also got one of these all-in-one 3.5″ media readers for $5.32 and they were terrible. Not only was it incredibly slow (we’re talking 4 MB/sec read speeds), but the drivers aren’t stable and it “disappears” from Windows Vista.
I just received this UltraFire WF-502D flashlight from DealExtreme (SKU 04314) in the mail. This flashlight battery compartment is simply too short. When you put two batteries in it, you can’t even screw the back lid on. Furthermore, the on/off switch was broken but that was the least of its problems even if the on/off switch worked.
This flashlight was $20, but it is extremely powerful. The two high capacity 3.7 volt Lithium Ion rechargeable batteries (SKU 20392) that I bought have 8.88 watt-hours of energy each. Two of these batteries almost have the same energy storage capacity of the Apple iPad which is pretty amazing.
Now it’s quite possible that these extremely high capacity batteries happen to be on the large-side because they barely fit in the charger, and the flash light might have erred on the small side. Combine these two facts and we have a situation where the flashlight can’t accommodate these batteries.
I just issued a defective item claim at Deal Extreme and I hope they send me a good one. I’ll update this post when this issue is hopefully resolved.
Updated 9PM – DealExtreme support has responded and said I can mail the item back to a US based address in Florida. They’ll cover shipping if it’s less than 30% of the defective item (which in this case it is). They’ll ship a new unit when they get old one back.
Fry’s (San Francisco Bay Area stores only) has a great deal on an Intel i3 540 CPU and Gigabyte H55m-S2H motherboard for just the cost of the CPU. That basically saves the cost of a $90 motherboard (price at Newegg) and the cost of shipping if you live near a Fry’s. Here’s a positive review of the Gigabyte H55m-S2H motherboard in case you’re wondering if the motherboard is worthwhile.
This is a low-power Intel “Clarkdale” system with a 32nm dual-core Westmere-class CPU and a 45nm Intel G55-class graphics processor built into the CPU package. Power consumption is very low for idle and peak and Clarkdales are known for extreme overclocking potential. The motherboard has DVI and HDMI so it is a great HTPC candidate.
The Clarkdale graphics is has full dual-stream 1080P offload and probably more than double the 3D performance of the older G45 based graphics from Intel. That’s still not good graphics performance by any stretch of the imagination, but decent for an integrated part for casual gaming like World of Warcraft type games but not too good 3D shooters.
MSI PineTrail-based Atom N450 Netbook for $260! Comes with 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, and 802.11n.
Intel dual-core Core2 processor (Celeron E3200) with G31-based motherboard (with graphics) for $40 (and additional $10 rebate). This packaged deal is $10 cheaper than just the processor which sells for $50 by itself at Newegg.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! This post is going to change as things get updated.
Samsung CLP-315 color laser printer @ Fry’s – $70
I got this printer last year for $100, and I haven’t run out of toner yet. Just getting the new toner from this is worth it. It has no native networking capability, but you can just hook it up to a network print server appliance.
Samsung CLX-3175FN Color Laser All-in-one appliance @ Fry’s – $150
I’m assuming the “fn” means it has a fax and network interface.
Gateway 10.1″ Netbook @ Fry’s – $178 (Note that this item probably requires showing up the night before and waiting all night.)
32″ Westinghouse 1366×768 HDTV @ Target – $246
This is probably $100 cheaper than any 32″ HDTV (8-bit IPS panel) I’ve seen. Anything smaller than this and it’s only a 6-bit TN type display.
Anyone who has ever tried to get wireless BlueTooth A2DP working in the last three versions of Windows will come to the following conclusion. Getting A2DP stereo BlueTooth needs to be WAY easier in Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. Getting basic BlueTooth connectivity working for wireless mice or keyboards is fairly painless and easy because everything just works out of the box after you plug in a BlueTooth adapter into your computer, and you’re tricked into believing that everything is already working and installed. Trying to get low quality monophonic headset audio working is hard enough and trying to get A2DP high quality stereo working is a royal pain. This is something that’s amazingly simple on any modern cellular phone but it almost seems like rocket science in Windows.
The first thing you’ll notice in any recent version of Windows when attempting to connect a BlueTooth headset is that it will ask you for a bunch of drivers. Scanning the Internet or local hard drive won’t yield any results, and you’re left scratching your head wondering what happened and why the headset doesn’t come with any drivers. But as it turns out, you need additional drivers for your BlueTooth adapter to make any of this stuff work.
On my Lenovo X200, I downloaded the latest BlueTooth drivers compatible with Vista or Windows 7 here only to find out that only low quality 8-bit monophonic audio is supported. I had to search the Internet to figure out that I needed the WIDCOMM BlueTooth drivers from Broadcom, and Broadcom BlueTooth chipsets are very common though there are others on the market and you’ll need to get drivers from the chipset manufacturer. The driver install was fairly automated, but it took a LONG time to install and it required a reboot. I also had to connect and disconnect the A2DP headset and reconnect to get it working, but it worked beautifully when it did and sound quality was amazing.
Now my problem is that I need to find functional A2DP drivers for these super mini USB 2.0 BlueTooth dongles I got from DealExtreme.com for $2.36. Bluesoleil for Windows version 6 worked fine with this cheap adapter, but Bluesoleil costs $30! There’s just no way I’m paying $30 for a set of drivers to run a $2 dongle. You’re much better with a jWIN JB-TH101 which comes with A2DP drivers and it’s smaller. It’s only $10 if you can pick it up at a Fry’s store and avoid shipping charges. Getting it online might double the price due to shipping. I have a nice little IOGear GBU421 which comes with drivers but I used the Broadcom WIDCOMM drivers but it might cost you $20 with shipping.
And here’s a parting tip. I bought this amazing BlueTooth to 3.5 mm stereo jack adapter (includes a microphone as well) for $13. The cheap plastic earphones are lousy but you don’t have to use them and it’s worth it even without any earphones. More importantly, having the ability to connect your own high quality earphones is even more important.
I just got a few of these universal battery chargers for $2.01 including shipping (no taxes) that draw power from a USB connector. So far, it looks great and I can charge most of my lithium ion batteries. My new Canon 500D Rebel T1i has a battery with some vertical narrow strips and that unfortunately won’t work with this charger without some very creative pin bending on the charger which I can’t recommend.
While this isn’t something you would want to use as a routing way to charge your battery, having this little device in your bag on the road is a life saver when you forget one of your normal chargers. Of course if you forget your laptop charger or 110-220 volt AC to USB adapter, you’re out of luck.
Deal Extreme also has another charger that’s $2.60 which is rated pretty well and they offer $0.01 shipping all over the world. I pay them via PayPal and it’s all very convenient. My experience is that it takes anywhere from 2 to 5 weeks to get a product in the mail box in a plain brown envelop. But for the price and virtually free shipping, it’s worth the wait. They’ve got lots of other useful things most of which are very good deals. Some of the more expensive items don’t seem like good deals to me so make sure you do some price research before you buy.
I’ve been railing against the monster cable rip-off for some time and I was surprised by a real-life encounter today. I was shopping today in an electronics store and I saw a woman paying for two $130 HDMI monster cables next to me. I won’t mention the store name because all electronics stores do this and try to get their customers to buy the most expensive cable possible despite the fact that there isn’t a shred of difference. I looked at the cables and then looked at her and her only remark to me was “expensive cables”. I said yes, they’re real expensive and you’re wasting your money since there isn’t a shred of difference. She then explained that the salesman told her to get these and I told her a quick search on the Internet and she’d find something like these $9 cables which are actually 2 foot longer than the ones she was getting for $130.
There will always be someone somewhere who will try to claim that some engineer told them that there was a difference between monster HDMI cables and regular HDMI cables. The problem is that this is only partially true and the part that’s true is totally irrelevant to the picture and sound in your HDTV and speaker system. The more expensive cabling might measure within a tighter tolerance but it’s irrelevant in the digital world because the signal is rounded off. So when a digital stream of data comes in and the measured is well within the threshold for rounding off to the correct value of 0 or 1, getting a an even more precise signal is irrelevant. Furthermore, even if there is an error in the data transmission, there are error correction capabilities in the HDMI standard that can fix some small errors.
So while one might claim some theoretical benefit for using monster cables on analog audio and video signals – and I doubt the average person can see or hear the difference – there isn’t even a theoretical benefit to using monster cables for HDMI. Retailers know that consumers are willing to spend a lot more money on anything if they perceive a benefit and monster cables are simply a monster rip-off.
UPDATE 12/30/2008 – One thing I didn’t mention is that on a purly technical level, all data transmission mediums have some level of error. For short-haul pins that transport billions of bits per second of data from your computer’s memory banks to the central processor, we’re talking about maybe one incorrect bit every few years. For consumer applications, that’s not a big deal if the computer has a glitch once every blue moon. For mission critical servers where there is zero tolerance for errors, more expensive memory with error correction is used.
Applying this concept to HDMI cables, the cheaper HDMI cables will have higher error rates than the more expensive HDMI cables. But the rate of error is extremely tiny to begin with and the HDMI protocol has error correction. It’s conceivable that every once in a blue moon that some of those errors are non-recoverable and there are no opportunities to retransmit with HDMI due to the lack of buffering which would have introduced additional latency. That means it is theoretically possible that you’ll see a few more screwed up pixels over the lifetime of your device using the cheaper cables than the more expensive cabling. Since there are 2 million pixels per frame and 60 frames every second, the error would only be noticeable if you analyzed the data stream with a computer over the lifetime of the product. If that’s worth paying an extra $120 for each HDMI cable you buy (remember you need many of these cables) and you’ve got the money to burn, then be my guest but you’ve been warned.
Ten years ago, I bought an HP LaserJet 2100 black and white laser printer for over $800. I haven’t changed the toner yet because I don’t print that often but I have a feeling that the time to buy new toner is drawing near. Unfortunately, the cost of the toner is $224 for the real thing $104 on HP’s website and even imitation cartridges are around $40.
I’ve seen actual laser printers sell for less than that and it makes me wonder if I should just replace the printer with a new one although the HP 2100 is a well built high output quality printer. Remanufactured cartridges are around $16 and that might be the best way to go without resorting to any do-it-yourself refills.
On Black Friday, I bought a brand new Samsung CLP-315 at Fry’s Electronics for $99. A quick search on the web revealed that new toner for all four colors will cost about $300 list price and $92 remanufactured. Again, it makes me wonder if I should just buy the next color laser printer I spot for $100 and sell the old printer on eBay or Amazon for $100 when I get low. Hopefully, the color laser printers won’t employ the inkjet tactic of shipping new printers with mostly empty ink cartridges.
