Erin Billy

Problem: A lot of my CDs are scratched and therefore skip when I try to play them.

Solution: Buy a machine to remove those CD scratches. I bought a Disc-Go-Pod PLUS for about $500.

My review:

First impressions

• Wow, this is small! It’s bigger than a roll of toilet paper, but smaller than a bowling ball.
• And what, no anodized aluminum casing? No brushed steel anywhere? What’s all this gray plastic?
• Hmmm… This is just a motor in a plastic case. The motor spins the CD against some pads. $500 for that??

So I take it out of the box. The instructions seems pretty short, and I see that I have everything I need to get started–the liquid polishes and a few other things. I follow the instructions carefully, and put in a scratched CD. Sure enough, after one cycle, I’ve got a mirror-shiny disc.

Following the instructions, I spray it with the finishing spray, and hand wipe it clean with the soft white cloth that the machine ships with. I take it over to my computer to test it with Exact Audio Copy (the standard freeware software to test the readability of the data on audio CDs) to check it, and sure enough, the CD has no errors.

So I run a few more CDs through it, and I receive mostly the same results, with a couple of exceptions, which I’ll talk about in a bit.

Problems

The first pair of pads stopped working for some reason, perhaps because they got gummed up with ink or other material from the CD I put in upside down! What do I mean by saying the pads didn’t work? Well, they were effectively too ’sticky’; i.e., they were holding onto the CDs with too much force, which kept the CD from spinning at the high RPM necessary for a good clean. I took them out and cleaned them with warm water and a toothbrush, the cleaning method I saw mentioned in the manual, but they still didn’t work. Fortunately the Disc-Go-Pod comes with a spare set of pads, and these worked fine. On Monday I’m going to contact the company to ask for advice. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve never heard of lala.com, here’s the quick run-down: a bunch of really smart people, with lots of seed money, have set up a system whereby you can trade CDs with other people for a dollar or so. It’s basically an intermediary for CD trading.

To simplify further, to trade CDs that you have, here’s what you do:

• You have an original CD that you are willing to part with.
• You list it on their system. This is pretty easy to do, and their search function employs the latest trendy AJAX technology, so various search results appear as you type.
• If another lala member wants your CD, you get a message tellling you that somebody wants your CD.

Read the rest of this entry »

I dabbled in photography in college and even took a few classes as electives. I enjoyed them, but my teacher (Dr. Mary Hammond) was very old-school, and never let us use any of the various technologies available to us. She said all you needed was a Pentax K1000, a good lens, and lots of film (she liked Ilford for black and white). We were required to take a semester of manual pinhole photography before we could even pick up an SLR. As I’m sure all of you are aware, a manual pinhole camera requires the use of a very slow film because the shutter is very slow or at the very least, imprecise (since a human hand has to open and close the shutter). We had to shoot all of our pictures using paper negatives (which are grainy compared to film), but that’s what Dr. Hammond wanted. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been using vBulletin and Invision Power Board on different sites for several years now. I know that many people will want to know only my final decision, and to cut to the chase, I will say now that I much prefer vBulletin. But please keep in mind that what works for me may not work for you. As they say on forums sometimes, YMMV (your mileage may vary, which means that it might be different for you).

For those of you who want to know why, please read on.

I will try to describe my thoughts as i felt them (i.e., as I installed the two software packages on my sites and learned how to use them):

What I liked about vBulletin: Read the rest of this entry »

Situation: I’m typing in an input field and want to enter a special character, for example to type in “café”. I hit Alt + 130 to enter the “é” character.

For some reason, the “é” character shows up in the Firefox Google search box, not in the text box, then the page directs to a new page.

Data isn’t always saved (I guess that depends on the application.).

Response from Google: Known bug.

Well, last year some of us Google customers/publishers received the radio that would change colors while you played it. But this year, it’s the geek traveler’s toolkit. I like this year’s gift more, as I’ll be more likely to use it througout the year.

I received some good goodies from Google, including: a 128 MB flashdrive, which is much less than the one I currently use, but certainly welcome; a wireless mini-mouse with NiMH rechargeable batteries included; a USB hub with a four-to-one whatever-you-call-it (yeah, I’m not the biggest geek on the planet); a cool earphone that looks to be made to use for Google Talk (one ear piece, a microphone with a disconnector, and two jacks), and a few other cool things, all contained in a leatherette case.

Here’s the best picture I have so far:

Other forum posts that I’ve read have said that some people have not received a wireless mouse (but have received a wired mouse instead), nor the headset.

Bottom line: Touchless car wash scratches a car again.

For those of you unfamiliar with these places here in San Francisco–the idea is that you can get your car hand-washed in about ten minutes for $20 or so. Many people don’t use the mechanical car washes because they’ve been led to believe that the brushes on these machines will scratch the paint or will eventually wear down some of the coatings on various trim parts. The problem, of course, is that the human element of the hand-wash businesses comes into play, and at least some of the dozen or so hands that will touch your car do so perfunctorily. So Twilight Zone admonitions be damned, the machines here seem to have the upper hand–they do not succumb to indolence or apathy, as the towel-wielders at Touchless Car Wash seem to.

A scratch on a car is not as simple or small as it might seem. Read the rest of this entry »