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Buy a bunch of something like these, group bunches together specific to the process for each model you need to tear down regularly, and keep a bunch for ad hoc projects. Use a thermal labeler to make little labels for each compartment describing the contents, including the number that should be present. I use my own shorthand to fit the necessary info on each little label. Connect the compartments linearly or laterally in the order they will be used, and you can't go wrong.

... AND then other pieces sticky side down, to label the contents of the pieces sticky side up? And if your elbow gets a mind of its own...? No thanks! I'll stick with my labelled locking compartments!

That'll work! I once used them in a pinch to organize my mineral collection. Ain't nuthin' wrong with repurposing whatcha already got; I just happened to acquire something a bit more specialized.

The Apple Magsafe connector that many people here seem to be enamored with has 5 pins, and most of the complaints about fragility seem to be talking about the fragility of the power cord, not the connector itself. Besides, you don't *have* to have more than 2 pins... I don't know how negotiation works with this new standard, but for example, the power supply could supply 3V by default, then that device uses that 3V to power its negotiator and sends appropriate signals over the 2 power supply pins to request its desired voltage. After that, there doesn't need to be any more negotiation over the power pins. (though there could be further communication - the power adapter could say "Hey, my power source is a battery and it's running low, so I'd like you to drop down from 100W of power to 50W, ok?")

If all computers used the new standard, then the price of the power supply negotiation chipset would come down to be negligible, especially compared to the price of a laptop. The new standard would be used for many other things too -- like speakers, external hard drives, etc (i.e. anything that uses too much power to be powered from a USB port).

USB and Bluetooth implementations are much more involved than a simple voltage negotiation, yet you can buy a USB->Bluetooth adapter for 99 cents:

http://www.meritline.com/bluetooth-usb20-adapter---p-40150.aspx

True, my wife's Nokia 5800 will lose a marginal (1-2 bar) signal if she holds it the wrong way, but I think the issue here is the design of the iPhone 4 that makes it susceptible to very significant drops in signal, not the fact that it's subject to the laws of physics like every other phone.

Most phones have antennae that are shielded behind plastic or some other non-conductive material. You introduce signal loss by blocking the signal with your hand or body, but you don't lose a LOT of signal. The signal loss can be significant, and can easily bring you from a marginal signal to signal loss, or a good signal to a marginal one, but it generally won't bring you from a good signal down to tower loss.

The iPhone's antenna is not covered with anything. You could easily touch both antenna surfaces and make your body an extension of the antenna, thereby mucking up the signal sensitivity of the antenna. This is a much more profound loss of signal than simply blocking the antenna using your body as an inefficient shield, this is changing the antenna characteristics entirely.

Assuming the stories are true, which is a big "if", the iPhone 4 can potentially lose about 27 dbm as a worst case. For my AT&T Blackberry, that's about three bars' worth of signal if I'm down below the 5th bar. So you could go from 3 bars to no signal if you hold the phone wrong. That type of signal loss is in a completely different league than "I dropped from two bars to one bar", or "I lost a one-bar call because I held the phone wrong".

Fortunately, it can be solved by simply covering the iPhone with a very thin case that prevents skin-to-antenna contact. That would make the iPhone 4 subject to only the same common shielding issues every other phone on the planet has. Any Apple user affected by this could order an under-$4 skin from Meritline and make the problem go away. http://www.meritline.com/iphone-4-skin-case---p-46556.aspx - and I mean, c'mon, if you spent $200 to $600 on the phone to start with, what's $4 including shipping to make it work better?

Or Apple could buy these suckers in bulk for probably $1.50 each and make them available in all of their stores or ship you one for the cost of shipping (about 50 cents, probably) and make the problem go away entirely.

I'm not saying it's a FATAL flaw, in fact it seems like the antenna design is such that even with a 27dbm signal loss it's still better than all previous-generation phones. But it is a shame they put so much work into building an awesome antenna/radio system and apparently didn't let it reach its full potential by (for example) simply putting a thin layer of plastic over it.

Do you suggest to fit a component jack onto a 4"x2" phone and then match it with an RCA stereo jack?

My Touch Pro 2 supports video using a mini-usb to RCA adapter.

HDMI *would* be better though, as Digital > Analog.

Samung is wrong. The Blu-ray Disc format will be superseded completely in two years unless R&D and initial manufacturing costs are abandoned in favor of a successful format.

In other words, the price needs to come down and the number of data layers need to go up simultaneously. Right now.

This will allow BD to compete with increasingly inexpensive and very data dense hard drives as a backup medium and a data transport medium (sneakernet & via mail)

For HD movies, HD DVDs have created a standard where 1080p material fits perfectly within 30 GB. An 8 GB microSDHC is $27 today. In two years time a 32 GB card is going to be comparable in total manufacturing cost to a BD disc unless Sony's asinine licensing fees are dropped.

Flash media is going to overrun BD discs, if video-on-demand over the internet has not already, in two years.

Family Video had it as their deal of the day for $3.95 a couple months back. HotMovieSale offers it for 25 cents, but you have to cancel a "savings club" membership they enroll you in (NOT WORTH IT). Not sure what the demand is on this movie, but it is no doubt a classic.

A 4 GB SDHC card is $10.

An 8 GB micro SDHC card is $27.

By the time Blu-ray Disc player prices come down to a reasonable level, I think flash media sales of movies, etc. are going to squash them.

Imagine sending a re-usable micro SDHC card to the local movie joint for a rental to be imprinted.

The other area where movie sales are heating up is on-demand over the internet. You don't even have to go to the mailbox.

Family Video had it as their deal of the day for $3.95 a couple months back. HotMovieSale offers it for 25 cents, but you have to cancel a "savings club" membership they enroll you in (NOT WORTH IT). Not sure what the demand is on this movie, but it is no doubt a classic.

A 4 GB SDHC card is $10.

An 8 GB micro SDHC card is $27.

By the time Blu-ray Disc player prices come down to a reasonable level, I think flash media sales of movies, etc. are going to squash them.

Imagine sending a re-usable micro SDHC card to the local movie joint for a rental to be imprinted.

The other area where movie sales are heating up is on-demand over the internet. You don't even have to go to the mailbox.

Can these use the SDHC cards? You can get a 16gb SDHC card for ~$80 here:

http://www.meritline.com/a-data-16gb-turbo-sdhc-flash-card.html

They're a little over $1 each here, though I wouldn't necessarily trust critical backups to this brand. Good ones are half again as much. Far less, per GB, than these HD discs at the moment. They area about 3x the cost of the single layer media, or (roughly) a 50-60% premium for the denser storage.

It easily and compactly holds over 500 disks and is no bigger than a brief case (a little taller). The key feature is that the sleeves are in no way attached. They hang like a file cabinet, allowing for extremely simple alphabetization and additions. When the lid is closed, they are not able to slip off the rails. They also have smaller and bigger versions.

http://www.meritline.com/neracoclcddv.html these are perfect, as a test I chucked one of these with a cd in it against a brick wall from 6 feet at full force...the case it self was scratched, but not broken, and the cd was fine. worked for me but I wouldn't suggest it on a regular basis as ymmv.

You can get a 4GB USB thumb drive for $100 (or get four 512MB and one 2GB bundled together for $108). The current crop of MicroDrives (CompactFlash-compatible miniature hard drives) of similar capacity runs even less.

If a normal consumer can buy these things on the retail market today, Apple really needs to get its act together and start increasing capacity on its lower end or it is going to lose that market to these cheap drives and the simple add-ons that allow playback of music.

So, assuming they're willing to give me CDs or digital downloads for less than the price of a blank CD-R, plus the electricity required to run a computer for 10 minutes, we'll be all set.

Unfortunately, I think that might cut into their profits a little, since CD-Rs are hovering around about $0.13 USD when purchased in bulk (assuming you don't get them free with a rebate). I'm not going to do the math for the electricity for you.

Yeah, for some reason I think their definition of "reasonably priced" isn't the same as ours.

Actually, Mini DVD's are CD-sized media that are formatted to hold video. It wouldn't be appropriate for a handheld device. You're probably thinking about cDVD's, sometimes called 3-inch DVD's. They hold somewhat less than a UMD (1.4GB vs. 1.8GB) but might have been considered, if piracy weren't an issue.

I guess it depends on who you ask, but yes, I was thinking of the 3" verion that holds 1.4GB.

1.4GB would have been fine as far as size is concerned, but, then again, SD cards would have been fine as far as flash memory is concerned. Sony like to go it's own way with this stuff. And just many large Memory Sticks and pre-recorded videos would have been sold if everyone could have inexpensively burned their on-the-go music and video's to inexpensive 3" DVDs?

Piracy was probably an issue, but a small one. Making money reselling 512MB Memory Sticks and HellBoy were probably more important. After all, wouldn't you still have piracy on an MS?

Slot loaders: you're probably right. I'd like to add though that the potential to get gunk in your drive is also pretty high when a full third of the back of your device pops open to insert a UMD.

TW

You mean these and these?

Hmm this sounds like a fun game. I'd like to see USB memory built into ... A lunch box? :-)

That's actually cheaper than I can find it in the U.S. for (and that price includes 25% tax??).

Meritline.com, which traditionally sells media quite cheap, has a 1GB MMC-RS for $95 USD. A regular MMC costs $58 for the same capacity. CompactFlash is about the same -- however CF has the additional advantage of going all the way up to about 8GB also.

The kicker for me is that if they had used a regular MMC slot, they would have given consumers the choice of either format, since you can put an RS-MMC into a MMC slot with an adaptor. By choosing the smaller format when there really wasn't any reason to, they've locked people in to the smaller and more expensive version forever.

I can understand wanting to go with the small one on a cellphone, but not on something that's as big as this tablet is.

When are they going to make a cool cassette decks for the PC?

I won't evaluate its "coolness" but here goes: The Meritline DIGI DECK http://www.meritline.com/meritline-digi-deck-conve rt-tapes-mp3-copy-digital-music-cassette.html

Hmmm... That's all nice except for the fact the last 100 CD-R spindle I bought was $23.95 CDN, not $36.92 or $59.99. I just checked, and it looks like it has gone up a bit, but not that much:

Ridata CD-R Media 100 Disc $26.95 CDN

So, how much are Ridatas in the US?
Same thing: $19.99US = $24.38

I doubt you could pay for the shipping with that small of a difference.

http://www.meritline.com/ultra-slim-external-enclo sure-accessories.html

Why bother with trying to keep stuff secretly installed on the system hard disk drives? You should use an external USB 2.5" hard drive enclosure case with a good laptop drive. For around $80, you get 60 Gigabytes of portable storage you can take anywhere and plug into any Linux or Windows computer with a spare USB port.

You can find good deals on DVD media. http://www.meritline.com/ has some spindles of 4x DVD-R 4.7gig for as low as $0.23US a disk with free ground shipping. They should be paying me for this...

only $372 for a 30 pack of dvd-r dual layer disks. http://www.meritline.com/dl-dvd-r-dual-double-laye r-verbatim.html what a bargain.

Others who need pocket tools on their job may prefer a swiss army drive.

SuperMediaStore and Meritline represent pretty much the cheapest places to safely buy large quantites of high-quality media (read: Ridata, et cetera).

So, if you've got something important to burn, and it's 8.5G in size, it better be $20 important, you'd better not accidentally make a coster, and don't forget to pay your VAT if you're in one of those countries.

Also, the dual-layered NEC2510A runs about $79 (or cheaper!) at NewEgg.

I made my own template for oodraw for Meritline Matte CD/DVD Labels. They work.

Sigh. I guess I'm going to have to sit down and make my own templates for these as well. Does glabels support vertical retangular stickers as well as round CD stickers on the same sheet?

Here are some CDRs larger than 700MB.

That site only carries 99min and lower CDRs, but I'm pretty sure there are retailers selling gigabyte CDs that are especially tailored for overburning.

These at meritline look good. For those too lazy to type and search, here's a direct link to their mini CD-RW's.

I've ordered 50 and 100 packs of Samsung Beall DVD-R from MeritLine like 3 times now. Plus my Pioneer 106 (-R +R -RW +RW) drive was like $120 there. Good prices, and reliable ordering every time so far. I have no connections with them except I order from them.

Now that I check my bookmarks, it ends up that this is what I was thinking, and it's not AM at all.

This ISA card is the only AM radio device I could find. Since I have only a single ISA slot (and itw as trouble to find an AthlonXP mobo with one), and it's already taken, it wasn't an option. It is cheap as hell, though!

--falz

What about the 8cm CDRs that can fit in your wallet?

You can get DVD-Rs in the same size now. They're not cheap (CD-Rs in the same size have always been more expensive too), but they hold the same amount as two 120-mm CD-Rs in the same physical space as one 80-mm CD-R.

don't know how if these would work, but it's easy enough to find mini DVD-R disks for sale.

meritline will sell you DVD-R media in a 500-disk spool for 74 cents per disk. You can get lower quantities of name-brand disks for around a dollar per disk. Now, if there were something like a 6x burner so a disk could be cranked out in less than 45 minutes or so...

The double-sided DVD-R media is coming down too. You can get the 9.4GB double-sided media for around $3-$4. That's pretty cool.

BTW, you're paying too much for CD-R. ;)

And with DVD-R media at about 3,- EUR and DVD-RW at 6,- it also becomes a feasible alternative to CD-R/RW.

NOTE: I do not work for Meritline, but I have ordered DVD-R/RW media from them several times in the past and have always received prompt shipment of working media, generic brand or otherwise.

$14-$15 for a blank DVD?
Where are you buying them from?
Even Apple sells them for $5 a disk, and Meritline sells cheap bulk packs of DVD-R disks for less than $1 a disk.

$14-$15 for a blank DVD?
Where are you buying them from?
Even Apple sells them for $5 a disk, and Meritline sells cheap bulk packs of DVD-R disks for less than $1 a disk.

I just ordered one so I'll soon find out if it lives up to it's claims.

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