Tag Archives: Amazon

King Manes Beard Balm, 2oz.

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The King Manes Balm comes in a different package than any of the other balms in this series. They deliver their product in a black tube with gold lettering. It’s made in the United States, and not tested on animals. The product is quite sensitive to room temperatures, so in the winter it’s really quite tricky to use, but in the summer it is very easy to use. The key in the winter is to massage the container until you warm it up so it will flow properly when you squeeze.

The product itself at first was a bit of a challenge to dispense as I bought it in the wintertime. After reading a lot of reviews on Amazon, I discovered many of the oddities about this product could be seen as features or remarkable qualities. Getting the right amount is the most significant learning curve, as you don’t scrape it out of a tin with your thumbnail. Instead, I’ve started to squeeze it onto my thumbnail for measurement sakes and then work it from there. The product is not waxy, it is more of a thick gel with small gritty beads. As it turns out, the beads are actually wax spheres that come solidified in the product and melt when you warm it up in your hands. The warming part is done when you don’t feel any more grit in the product as the wax has all melted. The scent is a mild mint and is quite pleasant, very light, and after about an hour, you don’t even notice it any longer. There isn’t anything more remarkable to mention about this balm, beyond any of the others other than the little wax spheres lend a kind of “readiness” factor to when it is right to work it into one’s beard.

The plastic tube is a novel packaging approach; however, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to extract all the product by squeezing. I also am concerned that this creates more plastic waste than the aluminum tins do. I assume the tins are more recyclable than the plastic tubes. The most significant factor for King Manes is room temperature and patience. You can’t just use this on the go, you need a few minutes with it, especially in the winter when the room temperature is lower than the products melt point. While I am impressed by the quality of the product, the packaging feels more wasteful, and so I probably won’t be refilling this particular balm once it runs out.

Speed vs. Accuracy

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On Friday I ordered four new beard balms. An extra Reuzel 1.3oz tin, a Viking Revolution Citrus, a Viking Revolution Sandalwood, and a Rocky Mountain Barber Cedarwood. I tracked the shipment with Amazon, it was listed as arriving on Monday, prime promised it on Sunday, but hey! It arrived on Sunday after all.

So I opened the box, and out came the Rocky Mountain and the Viking Revolution tins like I expected, but the Reuzel was wrong. Very wrong. What I expected was a 1.3oz tin of their Beard Balm, smallish, with a pirate on the label. If you have seen it, the label is very distinctive. What I got instead was Reuzel Blue Pomade. It’s still top-notch stuff, but pomade, not balm. I have no use for pomade. The canister is factory wrapped, but Amazon doesn’t want it back. I did the return, they declined to ship it back, because it is classified as a personal use product, to just throw it away. I can’t throw a perfectly good, unopened, factory wrapped tin of anything away! Even the sticker on the back is wrong. The scan sticker says Reuzel Beard Balm 1.3oz. and if you look on the label of the actual product, you know something isn’t right, because the product clearly states 4oz tin. It’s HUGE in comparison!

So I reached out to Junior’s Barber Shop. If he has customers who might buy it, I asked him if I could just give it to him. But he’s on vacation until March 20th, so it’ll all have to wait, unless a gentle reader out there in Blog-land has a use for Reuzel Blue Pomade. If so, please let me know! I would hate to have to chuck it in the bin.

Saving your bacon with Dropbox

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Several days ago at work I had someone approach me with a terrible tale of woe. They were helping a graduate student with a technical problem and wanted some guidance from me. The graduate student had a USB memory stick that had their entire academic production stored on it and they didn’t have backups anywhere else. This student went to Wal-Mart to print out pictures that were stored on this memory stick and when they had returned to Walwood they found that the memory stick no longer worked.

Then I got involved when the staff member helping this graduate student came to me with proxied panic about the data that this graduate student had lost. I plugged the device into my iMac thinking that at least the Mac would be able to display some sort of basic block device even if the filesystem was corrupted or damaged somehow. The USB memory stick was very old and my Mac noticed the device but refused to even display the block device details – so while the controller was apparently working, the channels further along towards the flash memory chips was not working as expected. There was nothing I could do to help the graduate student or the staff member and I felt just terrible. That there are no backups just made the panic more present and awful.

What could the graduate student do to mitigate this? The answer is in the clouds. I told the staff member that it wasn’t enough to simply tell graduate students that they should get some sort of cloud infrastructure to put their information on, but that they had to be stronger about it. That they had to insist that all students get some sort of cloud infrastructure to store their data. The cloud infrastructure that I prefer hands down is Dropbox. I use Dropbox and I love it, but when I tried to extend Dropbox services for the University I ran into some legal issues which pretty much precluded me using it – but none of that would preclude graduate students from using the system.

What is it about the cloud that drives me to it so strongly? It takes away a huge issue in one firm slash. The question of backing up your data. Using the cloud effectively abstracts away storage from the user, takes it elsewhere to be handled by people who spend their entire time only considering the proper storage and backup of data. Dropbox relies on Amazon S3 for primary storage and it’s Amazon that does the backups and the media shifting and everything that if you were to read an older “protect yourself” blog post would encourage you to do yourself. Instead of relying on you to do all the heavy lifting, which lets face it, we all want the benefits of that protection but sometimes getting to that point can be daunting, having it abstracted away makes a lot of sense. If there is a problem with Amazon S3, then the Internet has a bigger problem and if that’s the case, I would argue that Earth has a problem and that singular condition trumps the conditions of your backups because there are other more important things to consider. Now, please note that I am not directly advocating loading your data into Dropbox and then ignoring secondary backup completely, but for the majority of people out there, I do believe that Dropbox and Amazon S3 is enough to ensure your data security and persistence enough to stop here. Nothing stops anyone from duplicating their Dropbox contents on another storage medium but only those who are really invested in technology really need to move beyond what Dropbox provides.

I think every student should get a Dropbox account. The basic one is free and you can store up to 2GB and Dropbox has several ways you can win more space, such as referrals and such. For the panicked graduate student there is little that can be done beyond perhaps using a data recovery service such as the one I had previous experience with, Secure Data Recovery but the price tag on recovery with them is very expensive. You only use their services because you have to, and it’s a blessing that they are there, for when shit hits the fan.

I also think as a sidelight to this, that people invest in a diversified storage layout, especially when using public systems like those at Wal-Mart. Flash drives are very cheap now and it’s easier to kill a cheap throwaway “sacrificial lamb” than it is to watch your entire life disappear in a puff of logic from an overused terminal and it’s possibly damaged or shorted-out USB port. It is also my strong professional recommendation that people put lifespans on the devices they depend on. USB Hard Drives should be replaced after five years, no matter how long they have been running or not. USB sticks should be replaced every six months. Flash technology is not bulletproof, these devices degrade over time and it’s best to be safe and not sorry and if it costs a little extra or seems wasteful, then my argument is, so be it. Better to waste money on devices you don’t need then have to spend a thousand times more to recover data from a device that you errantly depended upon for far too long.

If I were in the academic sector at my University I would take this threat very seriously and as a value-added service to the student population I would find some way to set up a “University Cloud” storage system, and open-source variant that provides the same functions that Dropbox provides, alas, I am on the wrong side of the aisle on this, so all I can do is load my good ideas into my professional trebuchet and lob it over the walls of the ivory tower. Maybe someone will read this and it’ll spark something. Just some cursory searching on the network has led me to some possibilities:

Thanks to Quora for this list

Above and beyond everything else, when your life is becoming more and more digitally based it becomes a new vital thing to protect yourself from loss. The maxim “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is more relevant and important than you may have originally considered. Don’t end up being pushed up against a wall, protect yourself, backup your digital life!

Barnes & Noble's Nook HD+ Is Clever

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Barnes & Noble just sent an email out announcing their two new tablets: The Nook HD and Nook HD+.

Previously to this release I was discussing with my partner, who works for Barnes & Noble ways that B&N could compete with Amazon and Apple in the tablet space. There was a concern that B&N had lost traction and that the company was going to spiral out of control and crash, eventually. These tablets have just eliminated a good portion of that worry.

For full disclosure, I came across a rather pleasant and unexpected windfall in regards to money and I’ve been kvetching about the poor performance of my 1st edition iPad and in a way, Apple has sent a clear message that they regard the device as dead because they are no longer writing software updates for it. I went ahead and purchased an iPad 3 and I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot.

This news from B&N is very interesting to me as this new device has several key areas that put up more bang-for-less-money. The first surprise is the processing speed of the Nook HD+ in comparison with the iPad 3. 1.5GHz dual-core versus 1GHz dual-core. Ever since 2003 when the world pretty much stopped worrying and loved the bomb that is processor speed ratings this distinction isn’t as compelling as it appears on paper. The two units have different core technologies, the iPad has an A5X processor and the Nook HD+ has an OMAP 4470 processor. We have seen from manufacturers like HTC and Samsung that even when you pour huge muscular processors into devices to compete, that if the experience of the user isn’t done correctly then all the computing horsepower in the world means very little. It’s not about the muscles, it’s about the refinement of the motor cortex. It isn’t how strong you are, it’s your dexterity – at least in the phone and tablet space. I do hand it to B&N when it comes to pumping numbers and keeping costs suppressed – that’s a win in their column.

The second surprise, and I’ve been half expecting someone to notice this glaring deficit in tablet OS design comes down to what I believe to be Barnes & Noble’s knife-held-confidently-behind-its-back killer feature. Barnes & Noble is going to bring profile control to the tablet space. This casts a huge pall over both Amazon and Apple devices and redefines a tablet to be a multiuser device. It is exceptionally clever for Barnes & Noble to do this because it draws a clear bead of connection from everyone’s computer experience (where you have an account and profile) off to your device. When it comes to Apple, they rejected this model and regard a device to be a one-person-only deal, which has been a weakness in the iOS OS design. Apple may be too far along to make such a fundamental change to iOS so we may see the creation of a new track of tablet technology. Is a tablet multiuser or single-user? By being multi-user, and if B&N does it elegantly, it can cast B&N in a family friendly light, more than an Amazon or Apple product because one relatively inexpensive device can serve an entire family. Instead of the onerous cost of a Kindle or iPad for each person, because each device is single-user, one Nook HD+ can be used by different members of a family without having to worry about security, privacy, preference or profile leakages between people. It’s a failure of the Apple iOS OS and here is why: When I come across another persons iOS device, I am utterly lost – I don’t know their preferences, their security settings, where they have placed icons, and I find myself having to relegate to the search screen to even find where they put the ubiquitous “Settings” icon. If B&N does profiles elegantly, this will be a non-issue. Rendered moot because each person has their own settings that they are used to, making the confusion evaporate.

I think that B&N will pursue a marketing strategy that elevates the personal touch and the family friendliness of their Nook HD and Nook HD+ devices. That will be key, with profiles, the ability to use LendMe to share books, and their admittedly well-done “Parent recording storybooks for their children” technology they will position themselves to be “The Booksellers who care about you and your family” and they will occupy a third niche in this space. The first niche is the deep-discount one, that’s occupied by Amazon. The second niche is the elegance-at-all-costs one, which is occupied by Apple – and then last but certainly not least, the third niche which is the Friends-Family-Kids one, which is going to be Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

This niche may be the best hope for Barnes & Noble to retain their 21st century relevance.  They should maintain their “Brick and Mortar” presence and cater their stores to being a place where you feel welcome, with friendly staff and a coffeehouse/library atmosphere. The elevator sales-pitch is that B&N is more personable and immediate than Amazon could ever hope of being – you don’t know Jack at Amazon, but you know Jack at B&N. B&N’s approach to kids and family with their very deep roots set throughout America means they have already beat Apple to the market in terms of the personal touch. Yes, Apple has the Genius Bar and yes they are friendly geeks, but you don’t go to a Genius Bar to find out about Apps and Woodworking! You can only do that at a Barnes & Noble!

The real competition isn’t between B&N and Apple anyhow, since Apple touches B&N only in this one market-space. The real competition here is between Amazon and B&N. It’ll be an interesting evolution to say the least – which do people prefer more? The cold, impersonal, sterile deep-discount algorithms of Amazon or the instant-gratification, warm, personal, and direct approach of Barnes & Noble Booksellers? It may simply come down to how people refer to these two competitors. You USE Amazon and you VISIT Barnes & Noble Booksellers. That right there is something that Jeff Bezos can never buy himself into, but B&N already exists to cater to. Which do you value, the impersonal or the personal?

Barnes & Noble Booksellers may have just secured their direct relevancy in the market for the next decade with these two new devices. The proof is in the pudding of course, these devices, once in the stores, will be the final arbiter on the survivability of B&N in the tablet market space.

 

Nook vs. Kindle vs. iPad

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I’ve been watching a lot of the press surrounding the brewing three-party war between Apple, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, and Amazon over the tablet space for the past few months. I was one of the first people to be in line two Aprils ago when the first generation iPad was released by Apple. I bought it without hesitation, knowing that it was exactly what I had wanted and dreamed of all this time – a much larger version of my beloved iPod Touch. As I’ve had some opportunity to use different devices I’ve discovered that at least for me, each device that I own serves a particular purpose. Here’s a handy list of the device and what I use it for:

  • 24” iMac – General computing, work and writing.
  • 13” MacBook Laptop – General computing, work and writing.
  • First-Generation iPad – Convenience browsing, game playing, reading comic books, cookbooks
  • iPhone 4 carried by Verizon – Telephone and 3G data access with the HotSpot feature. I use it for mobile data access, taking pictures, scanning prices and comparing retailers and writing down notes and ideas for my writing. Sometimes inspiration strikes when you least expect it. Also enables me to play Foursquare, as well as many other location-aware games and activities that my family has come to enjoy.
  • iPod Nano 6th Generation – Contains my entire music library and is the device I use when I want to play music. Also has a very useful pedometer that I use to track my steps and calories burned while I work.
  • Nook SImple Touch – Contains a giant book library and is the device I use when I want to read.

I have to be very clear here, I am an Apple fanboy. If Apple makes it, I’ll use it. Over the years all the Apple devices have worked exceptionally well and over time they have gotten better. I still love using my iPad and my iPhone. There are four devices that I simply cannot go without whenever I travel, my iPad, my iPhone, my iPod, and my Nook. The iMac is a work-only machine and I leave it at work all the time. My MacBook I use from time to time, but I actually prefer to work on my iPad to my MacBook unless I’m writing something very long. The iPod Nano fits in my pocket so easily, or clips to my shirt so well that carrying it everywhere I go is a non-issue. My phone keeps me in touch, mostly over SMS and iMessage, and secondarily by the voice service itself. The majority of this post isn’t about these other items that I find indispensable, but rather about the tablets.

I can speak for the iPad and the Nook Simple Touch. I was absolutely sold over the iPad, especially when it comes to reading comic books. As for reading “regular” books, the glossy display and backlit nature of the iPad does start to wear down the eyes plus the native book app in the iPad, which is iBooks, doesn’t support the font I like the most, which is Helvetica Neue. I was a little dubious about the Nook Simple Touch at first, but the device won me over with it’s eInk display and it’s expandability via a microSD card port on the upper right corner of the device. The Nook Simple Touch has a lot of really compelling features going for it which made it’s purchase a sure thing. Here’s a list of what I like about my Nook Simple Touch:

  • Size – It’s perfectly sized. It feels a lot like a paperback book, this size really is a sweet-spot for me because this device can fit in my front and rear pants pockets when I want to carry it without having it in my hands and it can be easily stowed anyplace a book can go.
  • Weight – It’s surprisingly lightweight. Even with the microSD card, which only adds maybe a gram or two to it’s total weight, the whole package is very light.
  • Textured and Contoured Back – The rear of the Nook Simple Touch is contoured to fit my hands and rubberized so that I can keep a nice grip on it without having to strain.
  • Interface – Ever since the 1.1.0 Nook Firmware upgrade the device has been surprisingly quick on display updates and the touch sensitivity has also been tuned and I notice it. You can either use the side navigation buttons or a tap or swipe on the display to advance pages. It has a built in dictionary and wifi, with some social features but so far I haven’t explored those enough to report on them.
  • Compatibility – The Nook Simple Touch (as well as the iPad) both can open and display ePub format books. There is a special place in my heart for the ePub format. it’s open, it’s well understood, and there are tools like Calibre which I can use to convert PDF or DOC or MOBI format (actually there are a huge number of formats that Calibre understands) and convert them all to ePub. I bought a 4GB microSD card and was able to store thousands of free eBooks on my Nook without even a second glance. I know the books will work, I know they are configurable, it’s perfect for me.

So now I’m witnessing this war brewing between Apple, B&N and Amazon. I’ve never really used a Kindle, but I assume it’s most like the Nook devices. The latest device to be released, and is shipping now is the Amazon Fire. I’ve heard a lot of people going on about how the Fire may be Amazon’s answer to Barnes & Nobles Nook Tablet and may compete with the iPad. Out of curiosity I went to Amazon’s site where they describe the new Kindle Fire and as I was reading along several alarm bells went off in my head all at the same time. Here’s a list of issues I have with the Kindle Fire, even before laying my hands on it:

  • Eight hours of battery life – Even my iPad can beat this rating. I will hand it to the Kindle Fire that they were able to squeeze such a battery lifetime out of a device that was smaller than the iPad, but when you are watching video I will bet real money that end users never see these eight hours of battery life, let alone their hedged-bet of seven and a half for video playback.
  • Incompatible with ePub format! – This one took my breath away! Any device should at least be compatible with the ePub format, but Amazon has elected to support their own format called AZW instead. There are other formats supported, but ePub is not on that list and my library is configured to support ePub and I prefer it that way.
  • Prime Membership – If you want the most bang for your Kindle Fire buck, you’ll have to spring for an $80 a year Prime Membership. This could be useful if you do a lot of Amazon.com purchases but I don’t. It’s a little creepy that Amazon sells you a device and then charges you over and over again to use it fully. Feels more like a cash-grab and/or a gyp to me.

I don’t really believe the Kindle Fire will pose much of a risk to the iPad and iPad 2 class devices. I haven’t gotten a chance to hold either of the more relevant competitors devices in my hands to give it a right and thorough review. Based on just the description from the manufacturers alone, and even considering the Nook Tablet costs $50 more than the Amazon offering I can say just from the start that the B&N device is the one to get. Better battery life, better storage, better hardware, ePub format, that’s the one that I would get if I didn’t already have an iPad.

Keep your eyes peeled on this blog. I doubt I’ll ever get my hands on a Kindle Fire, but I’m pretty sure I’ll eventually be able to review the Nook Tablet.

My Clever Laundrette

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This weeks theme is “Clean or Die” and as a wonderful spot of serendipity I ran over this blog post by a fellow I’ve been following for quite some time. I went to my local Meijers market and while there to stock up on some needful food items I thought I would walk down to the laundry aisle and see if Meijers carried any of the items listed in the post. The items specifically are:

  • Borax (sodium tetraborate)
  • Washing Soda (sodium carbonate)
  • Ivory Soap

As it turns out, I only have a very faint and foggy understanding of what Borax is and not a single clue as to what Washing Soda might be, at least I know what Ivory Soap is, oddly enough, that was the most common and most annoying item to buy. The Borax and the Washing Soda were the first big surprises, they were nestled up against each other at the end of the laundry aisle, far away from the big expensive detergents, hanging out in the “laundry additives ghetto”. At the other end of the ghetto were the bar soaps. Meijers doesn’t sell Ivory in single or even double-packs, instead, you have to buy a 10-pack. The price, $4, of course is insanely cheap, but the fact that I couldn’t acquire just a few bars at once irked me. My snark would have been fully realized if Meijers had put all three next to each other, but alas, that was not to be.

I had the earlier referenced blog page printed out and after I had whipped together dinner I got out some non-food-use implements and started to assemble the recipe for the laundry soap. With three ingredients, it was embarrassingly easy to assemble. Pour this, pour that, but when it came to the Ivory soap, I was blown away. The instructions say to microwave the ivory soap in a container. Huh? You don’t cook soap! Well, yes, that’s actually the entire point! I got a plastic tub, put the Ivory in it, and closed the door and turned on my Microwave. At first I was full-o-doubt, but then the damn thing started to foam and extrude big white fluffy cloud-shapes out of the side. I realized that I needed at least 2 minutes, not 90 seconds, but that may be due to a difference in microwave wattage. Once I was done decimating the Ivory soap, I grabbed the giant puffy white mass and knocked it down and then mixed everything together with my handy-dandy potato masher. I suppose I could have used my KitchenAid Mixer, but on something this exploratory, I didn’t want to make a mess of my entire kitchen.

The end product is quite plain. It’s a white powder with very teeny puffy bits interspersed throughout. It has a very feeble scent of Ivory soap and it made me sneeze a few times. Once I was done and ready to process a extra-large load of laundry I went downstairs with my powder in hand and utterly geeked at the novelty of it all. As I stood stooping over my plain-jane Whirlpool washing machine (not HE, of course) it struck me. I have no idea what an appropriate load measurement might be for this powder. The blog post goes on about two tablespoons of powder in an HE machine, which does me no good with my old-skool standard washing machine. I thought about the powder, what each one does and pulled a 1/4 cup per XL load out of thin air. I started my machine, waited for a inch-deep puddle in the bottom of the basin to collect and tossed in my powder. Once it was in, I added the clothes.

When the cycle was done I pulled out a shirt and gave it a sniff. Absolutely nothing. No fragrance, no scent at all. It was honestly clean, nothing left behind. I sampled other items and they all were the same way, no scent at all. Everything being equal, I still have a 64-load jug of Tide Liquid Detergent to use up but this powder is really quite good.

How about the economics? By my calculations, buying everything either in a market or off of Amazon (I used Amazon because they display prices) the per-ounce price of this laundry cleanser is 43 cents. I guess a quarter cup per XL load, so that’s two ounces so my per-load cost is 87 cents! If I had a HE machine, it’d be half that price!

So if this home-crafted laundry detergent costs 87 cents for a XL load, leaves no perfumes behind, cleans soiled clothing adequately and is non-toxic to the environment how can you go wrong?