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The title of this post was originally going to be “Delicious: A Review from a Late Adopter.” But that was four months ago and only a few days after I started using social bookmarking site Delicious. At the time, I found it useful even if lacking in a few areas.
While Walt Mossberg is getting buzz for calling Firefox 3 the “best browser for web — for now,” I thought I’d point out my first time paying for something to do with a browser. I purchased the Dictionary Tooltip extension for Firefox 2 for $3.99. And while I’m anxious to give Firefox 3 a try, I’m waiting for the big kick off later this month.
My last two laptops have both been Dell. I had always loved the fact that I could customize my laptop fairly specifically at the same time as getting a great price. At the time, other companies generally could only offer one of those options: a prepackaged bundle with a good price or customization with a premium.
Mozy, the online backup solution I use and have mentioned a couple times, is responding to HP’s Upline debacle in an interesting way. First, some background information:
Two weeks ago, HP released HP Upline, a service similar to Mozy that provides unlimited storage for $59/year. HP also released free accounts of the service, limited to 1GB and one year (Mozy does free too, but their version is 2GBs and has no expiration date). About a week and a half later, the Upline service went down for several days.
Slingvine is a free application that allows you to send files over the Internet. For me, it felt like a replacement to email attachments. Here’s how it works:
You download and install the client on your computer. Then you right click on any file or folder in Windows and click on “Sling Selected Items.” This uploads your files or folders to a temporary webpage (url) that you then give out to whoever you want to receive your files.
Phone support: it’s all around us. Even with the Internet being last decade’s next big thing, somehow we’re still on the phone when we need help. And how is it? Has there been innovation? Improvement? Hardly.
In my experience, not much has changed with phone support in terms of today versus, say, ten years ago. And I’d say that, on average, I’m on the phone for support almost weekly (at least multiple times a month). Other options are available, of course, like email or chat.
Backing up your computer is something you don’t want to think about; you wish it would just happen. With that perspective, I thought I’d bring up the online backup service offered by Mozy. I use it for both my laptop and desktop and now think of backups only when I desperately need to restore something (which can happen more often than you think).
Mozy has a free version, which allows you to backup two gigabytes of data. It requires no credit card and is quick and easy to install. And it’s no different than the version you pay for in terms of features and options. The only difference is that if you do pay $5 per month, your backup has no size limit (if you are interested in the Mozy Unlimited version, when signing up, use promo code TECHCONSUMER to get 10% off an annual subscription or TECHCONSUMER2 to get 10% off a biannual subscription).
Back in November, I asked for help in deciding between HD DVD and Blu-ray. I ended up choosing HD DVD via an amazing Amazon deal: HD DVD player and 10 HD DVDs for $174. (That deal is now over, but now there’s an even better deal: HD DVD player and 7 movies for only $132.)
But it wasn’t just the price being nearly half of any Blu-ray equivalent (check out Amazon’s Blu-ray page, where every player is well above $300 with not nearly as many included movies), it was other little things. For instance, HD DVD is region free. This means that any movies bought in Europe or the U.S. can work on any player bought anywhere as well. The same isn’t true for Blu-ray.
