In general, their prices are great. You need to keep in mind that you’re getting (essentially) grey market goods without the manufacturer’s warranty. If the term “grey market” scares you, you should be aware that you’ve probably already got grey market goods in your house but do not realize it. Sam’s Club, Costco, Amazon all sell grey market items. I would also point out that if you’re going to buy speakers from them, a warranty is pretty damned worthless anyhow as speakers are just a large electromagnet and have no moving parts. Just inspect the items when you get them to make sure there isn’t any shipping damage.

So in the way of a review:

• Great prices
• Shipping prices are absurd – $80 for UPS ground for two small pairs of speakers. A similar item on Amazon cost $35 for UPS ground shipping. They’re clearly underpricing their advertised price and inflating shipping charges which is dishonest.
• Website shopping interface sucks. Placed an order 2 days ago, still haven’t received a confirmation of the order.
• Prior orders with them, however, have gone smoothly. I ordered some Sonance 622′s for my living room and they arrived well packed and in great condition and they sound super.

Overall OK, but watch out for the shipping charges. Might make sense to look around because the total price might make things less expensive elsewhere – for instance the pair of Sonance 623′s I ordered cost just as much as a pair of Definitive Technology in-ceiling speakers from onecall.com or another reputable online dealer.

You can’t (really) virtualize OSX under Linux, sadly, as this would give an elegant solution if you’re trying to run a Linux server.

Some suggested alternatives are easily found by googling, but most fall short. A commonly recommended one is KnowledgeTree as they have a FOSS version. Unfortunately, it’s not what you think and the install is cumbersome. I’d recommend you try out the online demo before getting into installing it yourself – you can sign up via their website.

So I am still looking. What I’d like is the following workflow type thingee:

• Docs scanned to network share in PDF
• Periodically OCR’d
• Manually sorted, if need be
• Available on a local network in a searchable, retrievable form

One potential option is Zotero, but it doesn’t do any kind of previewing and it doesn’t search contents of OCR’d PDFs. For organizing scientific articles it’s the SHIZ though. I regularly use it for that purpose. If you keep your collections sync’d across the webs with dropbox, it can be really cool.

Referencer is pretty cool in that it offers a preview of PDFs, but it wants to make everything a scientific journal article.

Nautilus – the file manager – can do PDF thumbnails which is handy. There’s also a nice search feature in there. I’ve tried using gscan2pdf, but the OCR is laughable and it doesn’t create proper searchable PDFs. Did I try tesseract in addition to GOCR? Yes – tesseract is only marginally better.

There’s just not a good Linux solution I’m afraid, though just using Nautilus may be your best bet.

Dear [commanderflatus],

Mr. [flatulence],
I have a question for you relating to your recent sale of a Fugitsu
s510m scanner. I bid on it for almost 24 hours as did at least
one other person in increments of $5. For the last hour or so of
the auction, I was the high bidder at $281. I had entered a max
bid of $300. In the last 5 seconds of the auction, someone bid
$305 and won. I find it exceedingly curious that, even though
eBay's countdown clock showed no other bidding going on,
suddenly in the last seconds someone knew enough to bid not
just one $5 increment above the last bid (mine) but $5 over my
unposted maximum. I am not questioning anyone's ability to bid
at the last second as this person did. What I am wondering about
is how that auction winner knew to bid exactly $5 over my
unposted maximum. Are you aware of any way a person could
hack the site to find out what maximum bids are? Thanks much.
I remain,
a Disappointed tyro-Pat

- tyro_pat

I’m only talking about clinical articles with real impact on practice. I’m not covering some new inducible transmembrane gene linked to sonic hedgehog here.

I think Hepatology is easy – and it’s a tie – but I would give it to:

This is too easy…

man-whore

polydipsia.com and their parent company, polydipsia productions ltd are announcing today that they have officially dropped Tiger Woods as an endorser.

1. Societal norms change over time, this is an important lesson for children to learn (in addition to adults apparently)
2. Cartoons are not reality
3. See Bugs Bunny, Coyote, Muppets, etc.
4. If you rely on (or allow) cartoon to formulate your children’s world view you deserve a swift kick in the ass
5. Finally, I’m glad that we have this whole healthcare thing so well figured out that this is the most important thing for us to worry about.

I fully realize that the Christmas issue is usually BMJ’s light issue and perhaps that’s the only reason that they published this politically correct garbage, but come on.