Category: Products & Services (Page 21 of 24)

Mattel/Fisher Price has recalled a myriad of recently sold toys because they’ve been painted with paint containing unacceptable levels of lead (apparently there is such a thing as paint with acceptable levels of lead, imagine that!). The products – surprise, surprise – came from China. You expect to find lead in that cheap metallic jewelry sold out of machines – we’ve heard about it from quite a while – but in brand-name toys? You would imagine they would have better quality standards.
We owned some of the recalled toys, those to the left, and of course Camila had already chewed on one of them. Very, very sucky.
You can check if you have any of these products at http://service.mattel.com/us/recall/39054_IVR.asp?prod=

Mike got me a Sony reader because it was only $100. A waste of $100 if you ask me.
The screen has so little contrast that you can barely see the text, it’s not back lit, so you can’t read unless there is a lot of light around, and the font size on PDF files is so miniscule even someone with 20-20 vision could not read it. In other words, the thing is useless.
My ancient rocketbook is far superior. It has a much better and brighter screen (even if more pixelated, at least you can read what’s on the screen), and much easier to handle buttons. The Sony reader is lighter and has a longer battery life, but my main reason for getting it was to read PDF documents, which it apparently can’t do – so what’s the point?

So I’ve installed the latest Movable Type – hoping I’ll be able to change the look of my blogs, but I still have to get some plug-in to do that – and I realize that I can now get subcategories as well as categories. Great, just what I need. Only problem, I don’t know how to use it. *sigh* It seems I /am/ going to have to look at the manual 🙁 Probably a good idea anyway.

One of my favorite gadgets – indeed probably my favorite gadget, is my Rocket ebook. It’s the perfect way to read a long document (and just try to read a sentence on human rights issues, they are hundreds of pages long), to carry several documents with you, without the necessity of printing them out. I hate wasting trees.
Alas, I don’t think they make rocket books anymore. Indeed, I don’t think they make any e-book eader anymore which is a real shame. I don’t know if this is because there isn’t a market for ebooks – people just prefer paper – or because people rather use their palms. Or perhaps they were just too expensive.
But I think the problem might have been marketing. They marketed these books as products to read books, not documents. If they’d done the later, they would have been able to reach the business audience. It’s really a great way of reading a long document.
What I like about it is that it’s backlit, it charges quickly, and the battery lasts an enormous amount of time – 20 hours, I think. The font is also quite clear and easy to read. It’s a bit heavy, I prefer using it lying down or holding it on a surface, otherwise I need both hands to hold it. But all in all I love it.
I’m off to read a long document now.