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.

Works like a charm.

AppCleaner.

In a press release, Aaron Patzer, Founder and CEO of Mint.com said “we look forward to Intuit’s multinational reputation of screwing stuff up. They bring to the table dynamic opportunities to involve more stakeholders in the wanking up of our products and/or services”.

Super! Read all about it here. Also, for giggles (and to understand what a bunch of wanks work at Intuit) read here.

Seriously, Intuit needs to focus on their core business. The flaming pile of stink that is Quicken for Mac needs to be fixed. I switched to iBank because I gave up on their worthless crap.

So I tried some of the other OSX personal finance software which is available. Rather than blow smoke up anyone’s ass with flowery language, I decided to test the software with a one-shot out of the box compatibility test. Face it: online banking is why most of us use this software, and downloading transactions is critical.

Here’s what I did: each software got tested with three online bank accounts: USAA credit card, Regions checking account, and American Express credit card. All three work perfectly out of the box in Quicken Windows.

Here are the results:

• LiquidLedger – Nice UI, worked for AmEx, not the other two. FAIL
• iBank – Prettier UI, worked for AmEx, not the other two. FAIL FAIL
• Moneydance – Ugly UI, worked for AmEx (sorta), not the other two. FAILFAILFAIL
• Gnucash – not gonna go there. Reviews primarily negative
• ????????mint.com – shows promise, perhaps. At least all my accounts work

In the end, they all suck. Perhaps Intuit will do something good for Mac users. As it stands, Quicken Mac has poor support for investment accounts, no invoicing, and poor compatibility with its Windows cousin. Almost doesn’t make sense to switch or port your data.

I thought this was a great idea:
Micro Fueler Is First Ethanol Kit for Brewing Backyard Biofuels on the Cheap – Popular Mechanics

But consider the economics: the machine costs $10k alone. From the article, 10 gallons of sugar makes one gallon of ethanol. From my homebrewing experience, 10 gallons of sugar equals (roughly) 30-40 pounds of sugar. Sugar in bulk costs about $25/50 lbs. So that makes (approximately) $15-$20 per gallon not counting the ten large you put out for the machine.

I’ll pass, thanks.

Full URL is: http://www.polydipsia.com/calculators/ref_calc.html.

See also: http://www.slobrewer.com/mobile/

I’m out of control. See also: http://www.polydipsia.com/calculators.