Geek News and Musings

This month we showed you the best times to buy anything, all year round, highlighted a better way to tie your shoes, discussed some problems with the Apple iPad, and a whole lot more. Here’s a quick look back.

• The Best Times to Buy Anything, All Year Round
  You’re always hearing about off-season, post-peak times to save money on purchases and food, but it always arrives too late. We’ve compiled a timeline and lots of best-time-to-buy suggestions into one post to help you plan a more frugal 2010.
• The Problem with the Apple iPad
  Yesterday, Steve Jobs worked his charm, attempting to wow the world with the Apple iPad, a new, super-slim computer he touted as the missing link between iPhones and laptops. It’s an undeniably beautiful device, but it also represents some serious problems.
• Five Best DVD-Ripping Tools
  You pay good money for your DVDs, but they’re hardly the only format you need these days. These five ripping tools ensure you can back them up, keep them on your media server, and load them on your favorite portable player.
• Ditch the Granny Knot to Tie Your Shoes More Efficiently
  The difference between shoes tied with a balanced, neat, and self-tightening knot versus those tied with an unbalanced, sloppy, and loose knot, is all in how you make your first loop.
• Pack a Gun to Protect Valuables from Airline Theft or Loss
  If you don’t like your bags being out of your sight and it makes you uncomfortable to think that airline workers are rifling through your stuff, you can take advantage of the TSA’s own security rules by-eek-packing a gun.
• How to Put Your PC to Good Use While You’re Sleeping
  The great part about your computer is that—unlike you—it doesn't require any sleep. Take advantage of your PC's insomnia by automating time- and processor-intensive tasks while you're counting sheep.
• Your Passwords Aren’t As Secure As You Think; Here’s How to Fix That
  If you allow applications to save your passwords, anyone with physical access to your PC can decode them unless you're properly encrypting them—and chances are pretty good you're not.
• Five Best Email Clients
  Email as a technology has been around for decades, and thanks to wide spread adoption and popularity, it isn’t in danger of disappearing. Check out the five most popular email clients to help you wrangle your email.
• Browser Speed Tests: Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4, Opera 10.5, and Extensions
  Firefox 3.6 is out, Chrome’s stable version got a big upgrade, and Opera 10.5 is inching toward release. It’s a great time for us to break out the timer, process manager, and code tracker for some up-to-date browser speed tests.

Nothing in today’s featured office is extraordinarily expensive or custom built, but the office looks like it was designed by a professional thanks to a unified color scheme and use of accessories.

Lifehacker reader Veronica Domeier made over her home office and since then she has been steadily tweaking the layout since. She writes:

So this year I decided I needed some inspiration in my home office. The new book shelf was a great start but nothing pops like a new coat of paint.

Last weekend we went down to HomeDepot and picked up some paint. I had already decided I wanted red before we got there. Looking through the swatches we came across one called “red, red wine” Perfect! One it was a nice shade of red, dark but not to dark and two it had the word ‘wine’ in it - I love wine. Sold!

Here are the results…I must say I’m really enjoying the new look

The images here show her office immediately after the make over and with the addition of an nice spacious external monitor.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

Amazon says that it will accept publisher Macmillan’s preferred publishing and distribution model.

We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.

The battle over pricing conceals a more intricate and important one over Amazon’s place in the book-buying ecosystem [Charles Stross].

Announcement: Macmillan E-books [Amazon]

Previously: Amazon and Macmillan go to war: readers and writers are the civilian casualties; Macmillan CEO on Amazon deletepocalypse; Scalzi and MacMillan v. Amazon

Xeni’s in LA at the Grammy Awards, armed with a tactical blogging apparatus. See the winners, losers and bad fashion in real-time starting after 4 p.m./7 p.m. More @xenijardin vs. a columnful of #grammys after the jump.

• The magnetic strip on my student ID card is weak. It still works in doors, but more often than not fails to swipe in the meal plan registers. Is there a way to make the magnet stronger?
• Anyone have any recommendations for a good/durable/economical ice cream maker?
• Is there a way to block images in Google Reader feeds?
• Any suggestions on getting a suction cup to regain its suction?
• Does anyone know how I can mount only a single folder from an external drive to a folder on my Windows/NTFS partition?
• How do I burn an .img file on Mac?

I sat down with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week to talk about his business.

Brightcove isn’t the sexiest startup out there. They’re a video platform – giving websites the tools they need to host and stream video, for a fee ranging from $100/month to “six figures per year” for the largest customers. For the most part users never see the Brightcove brand. And Allaire is just fine with that. He just wants happy customers.

The company launched in 2005, has raised just over $90 million in venture capital, and is approaching profitability, he says. Allaire says he wants to build a public company, and is happy being based in Boston.

Brightcove competes with newer upstarts like Ooyala, although Allaire says Brightcove remains the strongest company in its space. Another competitor, Maven Networks, was acquired by Yahoo in 2008 for around $160 million. The product was unceremoniously shut down by Yahoo a year later. Allaire says they picked up most of Maven’s customers.

You can see the full interview above. And don’t miss the outtake at the end of the video where Allaire gives some free tech support to a customer. Time Inc. reporter Barbara Kiviat was having some issues uploading a video.

A new development in the Amazon vs. Macmillan fiasco. Amazon just posted an announcement indicating that will be “capitulating” to Macmillan by selling the publishers’ books for their desired prices.

Macmillan is trying to price their e-books at $15, while Amazon prices e-books at $9.99. Macmillan’s CEO John Sargent said that unless Amazon sets the price of new e-books to $15, the publisher will not distribute new books to Amazon when they are released. On Friday, Amazon basically banned titles, both paper and digital, published by Macmillan by refusing to directly sell them. And Macmillan took out an ad in the Publishers Marketplace magazine protesting the tactics being used by Amazon regarding pricing.

Amazon is now giving into Macmillan’s demands because of the publisher’s monopoly over its titles. In a passive aggressive manner, Amazon says that readers will decide whether its reasonable to pay $14.99 for e-books. And that other publishers will compete by offering their books and lower prices.

Here is Amazon’s announcement:

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

Follow-up on an earlier post. Phil Agre has been found and is safe according to the LAPD. The facebook group Fans & Friends of Phil Agre is not as sure about the “safe” designation and is continuing to investigate.

John Gruber (and Rob Scoble) explain why the iPad’s lack of Flash is a bigger problem for Adobe than it is for Apple. Just one example: some of the sites featured in the already-infamous ‘blue legos’ image already had Flash-free editions.

Orli Yakuel noticed that Google has quietly added a new icon in the ‘Compose Mail’ window of its free webmail service Gmail, enabling users to run search queries from within the interface and insert results and URLs straight into drafted e-mails or open chat conversations.

This is an expansion of a Google Labs feature, simply dubbed ‘Google Search’, that was introduced back in April 2009 as an optional setting in Gmail.

The first iteration of the labs feature added a ‘Web Search’ box next to the main column (left side on the screenshot) that provides much of the same functionality, only you needed to remember to go to the side column to run a search. Now, enabling the feature also adds an icon to the top toolbar in the ‘Compose Mail’ window, where you can also customize colors and fonts for your message, add links and emoticons and more.

It’s unclear when the icon was added, but we can’t retrieve any mention about this on the Gmail blog and today marks the first time we’ve seen it.

The icon opens up a search box at the bottom of your screen and lets you run a search like you would using the regular Google search interface. A small arrow opens up a limited menu where you can paste results, paste URL and send by e-mail (which is kind of redundant in this case, since you’re already in a new e-mail). If you have a chat conversation open in Gmail, you’ll also get an extra option to send search results to your contact.

Obviously, this isn’t a ground-breaking feature, but if you’re a Gmail user you might want to (re-)enable the Labs feature in Settings. Guaranteed to save you quite some time.

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