Let's start with a simple filter: I want Prime Eligible, sold by Amazon.com, $15 or less, 4+* rated earphones:

Easy, is it? Well, not for Amazon:

Look, I know the economy is bad and the US Dollar sucks, but if we just look at the numbers, then 22.50 is bigger than 15, is it?

Oh, wait, actually it is listed as less than $15 because one of your third party sellers of Amazon's Marketplace has it:

Amazon, why do you have a filter for "Seller: Amazon.com" only to ignore it then? But let's look at the $13.69 offer:

Wow, so you got some shitty seller with 50% positive ratings that charges $15 for shipping a product that weighs a mere ounces from Texas to California and you think that this offer is so good it should be in my search results for "Prime Eligible" (=NO shipping Costs) and "Seller: Amazon.com" (=NO third party vendors)?

Inflating shipping costs to undercut the competition on the product price while still making a decent profit is the oldest trick in the book, even eBay reacted to it and is now sorting their auctions by "Price + Shipping Cost", and yet your crappy search isn't smart enough to do that?

If you need an Engineer to fix your shitty search in his spare time, drop me an email and I'm sure we can arrange a little side-contract for less than a $100k. And don't tell me that's not worth it, after all you're the company that came up with the "Milliseconds equals money" equation - and if each millisecond is costing you a truckload of money, how much money is your shitty broken search costing you?

This happens when you drag a folder into another folder, which already contains a folder with that name.

If you are a Windows user, you know what happens next: The folder contents will be merged, which is usually what you expect.

What happens when you click "Replace" here? Well, Apple is at least honest, because it will do exactly what it says: It Replaces the folder. Your old folder is gone.

The braindead thing? The old folder doesn't go into the Trash Can. If you delete a file in either Windows or Mac OS X, it goes into the trash can, so you can restore it. If you Replace a folder in Mac OS X Finder, the old folder is permanently gone.

With all due respect for the fine work the software engineers did in the past decade and a half: Whoever is responsible for thins function needs to be punched in the face, preferably once for every single folder that users - who are expecting a OS that values user friendliness to perform better - permanently lost.

What's even worse: There isn't even an option to merge. Really guys? "The world's most advanced desktop operating system" does not even have a function to merge two folders through its primary file management tool?

(PS: For a similarly dangerous function, try moving a folder over the network and briefly interrupt the connection. Chances are good that the folder gets deleted from the source since it was moved, but doesn't fully arrive at the destination because the connection got interrupted. Yes, the worlds most popular desktop UNIX fails miserably at basic network functionality.)

Update: Turns out that OS X Lion finally learned to merge, but only when copying stuff. If you are moving folders within the same Volume, move is the default. Holding down the option key allows you to merge:

This is arguably a lot better than any previous OS X Version. Still, it's way inferior to Windows 95 which happily merges on move (saves me the cleanup afterwards) and can also merge a subfolder with it's parent folder, something else OS X can't do:

This isn't needed that often, but useful when extracting a zip file yields a folder/folder/files structure.

Today, Amazon announced three new Kindles, including an Android Tablet, the Kindle Fire.

Let me first say something about another new Kindle, the Kindle Touch: I don’t like it. At all. It seems like the worst of all worlds. It has a multi-touch screen, but no apps or anything, it’s the standard Kindle OS. On the other hand, it does not seem to have physical back/forward buttons. These are a killer feature for me on the eInk because I like to hold the Kindle, rest my thumb on/near the Next Button and just press it. That works so well on the Kindle 2 and 3 and I don’t see the point for not having it. The only real point I see is that selecting a bunch of text is easier (maybe for snippets?), but I think I’d rather go with the Keyboard Kindle 3. Both are equally priced anyway, at $189 for the 3G and $139 for the WiFi Model. I think this is like the iPod Nano: A gimmick

The other new Model is the low-end Kindle priced at $109, a full $30 less than the previous entry-level WiFi Kindle. I think it’s a fantastic product: It’s small and lightweight. It does not have a keyboard, but I don’t take notes anyway on my Kindle, it’s purely a reader that requires three buttons: Select book, Next Page, Prev Page. I think this one will be a massive success, if you can live without 3G.

The existing Kindle Keyboard and Kindle DX are just like they were before: The DX is still overpriced after the last Kindle 3 price cut ages ago, but great if your eyes aren’t that good anymore. The Kindle Keyboard is still a solid device to take notes or make annotations.

Now, the big new announcement is the Kindle Fire, a $200 Android Tablet featuring a Dual Core CPU, multi-touch 7” screen, full color display. It’s essentially a BlackBerry Playbook which doesn’t mean a bad thing – the hardware on that was solid, only the OS sucked. But really, the hardware is for us geeks, the end user is more interested in what this device offers, and this can be summarized with “Books, Netflix, Angry Birds, a Web Browser”.

As I said before, I love my iPad. I use it in the morning to browse the web or when lying on the couch to draw some stuff. However, the iPad is big and heavy, so I don’t usually carry it with me. The Kindle Fire addresses both problems: It’s smaller (7” vs. 10”) and lighter (413 vs. 680 grams).

Amazon is quick to say it’s not an iPad Killer, and they might be right. It’s far more likely that it will kill everything else, because why buy a $400+ Android Tablet that’s not as good as the iPad anyway? The $200 price tag is a killer for pretty much every other 7” Android Tablet, and possibly for a lot of 10” ones as well. I don’t think it will affect the iPad too much, because it not only has a strong established customer base, but also stand out features like 3G, more capacity and a 10” display.

I think it’s a safe bet to assume the price is heavily subsidized – $200 simply sounds to good to be true. Part of the money comes from Kindle books – no 30% commission fee to Apple like they would have on the iPad (if they wouldn’t have created Cloud Reader), and Amazon was once a book seller anyway. Another source of potential income is more interesting: Their Silk Web Browser.

The description reads interesting: Instead of making a ton of HTTP Requests (for JS, CSS, Images), your request will be handled through Amazon (acting as a proxy server), and they send one big chunk of data. Also, they can improve the reading experience by parsing the page and adding page indexes. It’s a bit like Opera Mini on steroids.

Now, this is a great thing to have on a 3G connection. However, the Fire does not have 3G (not surprising, I doubt carriers would be willing to make that commitment at that price). It has WiFi. So why do that? Just to add Page Indexes? This could be done on the device itself, it has a Dual Core Processor after all.

It doesn’t take much imagination and only a little bit of Paranoia to realize what this Feature does: By proxying all traffic through Amazon, they can analyze it and use it for advertising purposes. Essentially what Google is doing with GMail and AdWords.

I could whine about possible privacy concerns, but I think it’s an acceptable tradeoff if you are aware of it. You get a really nice, dirt cheap tablet and in exchange let Amazon monitor your Internet traffic. For people with Google and Facebook accounts, it’s not much difference anyway. I just hope that the amount of compatibility problems will be small, but since it’s an Android Tablet I am 100% sure you can just download a Firefox build for it at some point.

As usual, the Kindles come in a price reduced versions with Advertising on the Screensaver. That makes the new entry level Kindle a $79 device, which is a killer price for it. In fact, I ordered that just today with overnight shipping because it seems like a decent travel device, lighter and smaller than my Kindle 2 at the expense of 3G. I also preordered the Kindle Fire Tablet – if it turns out to be a dud, it’s still a dirt cheap, $200 Linux Computer with multi-touch screen, for which someone will make alternative distributions.

But really, I think we’re going to see a massive price war and the death of a lot of “Me Too” $400+ Android Tablets. And it fires the rumors of Amazon buying Netflix. And it should scare the hell out of Google. In any case, good times lay ahead.

I’ve been backing a Kickstarter project promising a unique stylus for the iPad: The Adonit Jot. Since I wanted to brush up my camera skills anyway, I decided to make a small video review.

Doing this I realized that a) iMovie is a really basic program (might look into iMovie Pro aka. FCP X) and b) I need to work on my accent.

To give away the conclusion: I really like it. Wish it had a pen clip though.

You can find their website at http://adonit.net/

I used to love Dropbox. I own multiple machines and dual boot them, so a convenient way to share files was a big win, and Dropbox delivered on it. They have a seamless Windows and Mac OS X client.

Recently, they had a few security issues – that sucks, but it seems to have been a genuine mistake rather than gross incompetence (like storing cleartext passwords like other did), so I gave them another chance.

But then they crossed the line that no company may ever cross: Taking ownership of your data. TwitPic tried to do that. Adobe tried to do that. And now Dropbox does as well, by adding this to their terms of use:

By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service.

In all three cases, the TOU have been revised, or “clarified” as the vendors put it. But even though I do know about Hanlon's razor, I’m unwilling to believe that it’s always just a mistake or unclear language, but rather an attempt of free services that are in financial struggle because no one buys their premium services and they simply have to make money.

As I’m a free user, I contribute to these struggles because I cost them money without bringing any in, so I’ve just decided to do Dropbox a favor by logging in and clicking the “Delete my account” link at the bottom of the account settings.

As a User, always remember that in the moment you give your data to any website – be it a hosted blog, a social network, a sharing site, “the cloud” – you have lost a great deal of control over it and have to be vigilant about TOU changes and companies taking advantage of your data for monetary or other reasons.

Choose wisely, and remember that there is always an alternative company that didn’t try to pull a trick like that (yet).

This does the trick for me:

find . -iname "*.txt" | xargs -I {} basename {} | uniq -d -i

So what this does:

1. Call find to find all files that match *.txt (case insensitive) in the current folder and all subfolders
2. Call basename to turn /path/to/file.txt into file.txt. We have to use xargs since basename does not seem to be able to read from stdin
3. Call uniq to check the list for duplicates. -d means that we only show duplicates (default is to show unique values) and -i performs a case insensitive comparison

Sidenote: As much as I love working with Windows, it just does not stand a chance against a long chain of simple, small, well-defined UNIX tools that are piped together. As much as PowerShell is a step in the right direction, it's not the same because the philosophy of having tons of very limited and specialized tools doesn't seem to exist in the Windows universe - most command line tools do too much. Also, UNIX has a 30 year head start against PowerShell.

Now, the camera is nice, but has one major drawback: A non-standard USB Port which requires the special Panasonic USB Cable - this sucks. Also, I got a 16 GB SDHC Card but my existing USB SD Card Reader is an old one that does not support SDHC. Also, removing the card from the camera for syncing every time isn't that great either as the camera does a complete reboot every time I open the battery cover to remove the card.

Scott Hanselman had a posting about his digital camera history and mentioned a special SD Card with Wi-Fi connectivity, made by Eye-Fi. Looking at their website, they have four different cards, but only one that supports RAW. I bought the Pro X2 on Amazon for about $99.

The card comes with a USB SDHC Card Reader, and the card conveniently contains the installation software for Windows and Mac OS X. You need to configure it on a Mac/PC first so that it connects to your Wi-Fi. Registration requires internet access, as you need to create an account with Eye-Fi and register your card with it - I'm not too impressed with that, as I think it's unnecessary. I understand that certain premium features like automatic Geotagging should be restricted to an account, but I feel that the card should 'just work' without any account. I just hope Eye-Fi never goes out of business.

This account allows for some nice features though, if you choose to do so: You can automatically upload pictures to your account, even through hotspots. So if you are on the road and the card connects to a hotspot, it can automatically upload your pictures to Eye-Fi and you can then download it to your PC when you are at home again. Also, it can automatically upload photos to popular photo sharing sites like Picara, Flickr or Facebook.

On my Mac I use Picasa as my photo application, because iPhoto does not support the RAW format of my camera (neither does Preview). One of the nice things is that Eye-Fi Center allows me to configure separate directories for JPG and RAW photos (my Camera is set to save pictures as both RAW and JPEG), so I can put RAW into my Picasa watch folder. Unfortunately, automatic Geotagging does not work for RAW files, only for JPG so I might need to write a script that copies that info from the JPG to the RAW at some point.

The other great feature is Endless Memory. Basically if the card is filled to a certain percentage, it will automatically delete older photos, but only ones that were transferred to the PC before.

Overall, the card works just as I expect it to be: magically. The little Eye-Fi Helper app that runs in the background of my Mac automatically picks up pictures if the card is in my network, puts the JPG in one and the RAW files in another folder where Picasa picks it up. No more proprietary cable or removing the card all the time, it just works.

The only downside I can see is that 8 GB isn't exactly a lot nowadays, but I can use my old 16 GB card as an emergency spare in situations where space really becomes a problem.

So this time, I wanted three monitors. As I wanted to avoid two graphics cards (always gets crowded inside the PC, also as my graphics card needs to be good enough for high-end-gaming I didn't want to run 2 different cards, but also not buy 2 $400+ cards...), I ended up buying a ATI Radeon 5870 which has 2 DVI, 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort connector and can drive 3 screens at a time. Well, in theory. I'm going to make another posting, but basically one of the three monitors has to be DisplayPort, 2x DVI and 1xHDMI will not work, and neither will the cheap Adapters - I'm currently waiting for my $100 DP->DVI Adapter to be delivered as I already have 3 Monitors.

But anyway, the problem with 3 big monitors is that they take up an insane amount of space on the desk. I bought a big desk, but still it's too much. I remembered a posting from Jeff Atwood about monitor arms and thought I'd give them a try. I bought an Ergotron LX Dual Side-by-Side Arm (45-218-194) which holds two monitors, as long as they are max. 20 lbs/9.1 kg each (basically everything up to and including 24" - if you weigh, remember to remove the foot before). The two monitors I've connected currently are Acer B233HUbmidhz - 23", 16:9, 2048x1152.

The Ergotron arms are solid metal and certainly make a very sturdy impression. The users manual on the other side is IKEA-quality, that is barely understandable pictures instead of good explanations. Definitely take some time when you install them, it took me a bit more than an hour. The nice thing about the Ergotron arms is that you can either drill through your table or mount it using a clamp - no drilling! But make sure you have some space under your desk - I thought I had enough, but I underestimated the size of the clamp...

Luckily it still fit well enough to hold the screens, phew! It takes a little time adjusting them properly, because of the two parts of the arm (one can be removed) - prepare to move the clamp. As said, take your time. Oh, and another hint: There are two plastic caps that you put on the holder after installation to make it look nice. These caps are hard to remove, so installing them should be the very last thing you do, after mounting the monitors and adjusting them completely. Also, another important hint: You can (and need) adjust the strength of the spring that holds the monitor. Do not wonder if you just mounted your monitor and it's weight drags the arm down - do not write an angry review on Amazon that makes you look bad, but look at the (as said, horrible) manual again (Step 7a) and tighten the screw. Last hint: Make sure your cables are long enough.

I'm definitely happy with it, removing the feet of the monitors makes the desk much more tidy in my opinion. For my third Monitor, I'm looking at the normal LX Arm.

During the 1980s, he put up advertisements in newspapers, posing as 15 year old Tanja Nolte-Berndel and asking to "share" software, only to sue responders for breach of copyright laws. In later years, he was active in some controversial lawsuits regarding brand copyrights for brands like "Explorer" (suing Microsoft and some newspapers for using the brand, even though to this day it's not entirely clear if the claim was ever valid, the German patent office even deleted the entry for Explorer). Recently, he was found guilty of Fraud and sentenced to 14 months jail, which were supposed to start this month.

Needless to say, he was not a very popular figure, and that is as nice as I can say it.

But still, he made a name for himself and to this day, "Tanja" and "Gravenreuth" remain an insider under C-64 (and other 80's computer) users. It is part of computer history in Germany now, so when I heard the news, my first thought was "Whoa". It's weird seeing something or someone who just seemed to be always there go away. Maybe it's just a sign that I'm getting old (even though I'm only 26), maybe it's just a sign that the 1980s and my childhood are really over.

While I can't say that I'm crying, I'm also not cheering. I can't say much good about him, except that he was part of the culture I grew up in and as such made an impact, and so there is a certain emptiness now. That and suicide is always a horrible way to make things end.

Goodbye, 1980's.

A few weeks back I ranted about TV manufacturers unable to properly list their Inputs/Outputs in the specs and how I have to read the user manual to find out if I really am able to use it. Weirdly, some companies are unable to provide a shot from the back and a user manual.

My current reason to rant is the Acer B233HU monitor. I bought it more or less blindly because it has a resolution of 2048x1152 and because it has an HDMI input that supports that resolution (my graphics card can drive 3 monitors, but only has 2 DVI Ports, so I needed a HDMI or Display Port Monitor). Now I'm realizing how much space my monitors take up on my desk, so I remembered Jeff Atwood posting about Monitor Arms some time ago.

Now, to buy a Monitor Arm, I need to know the proper measurements for VESA Mounts. There is 75x75mm, 100x100mm and some other sizes. For my Philips 240BW that's no problem: Go to Philips website, look at specs, see that it's 100x100mm. But my Acer Monitor? No information. I can guess or measure myself that it's also 100x100mm (it is), but really, that belongs in the specs or the manual!

I think it's astounding that they list stuff like what the pins of the DVI Port do (As it's important for me to know that Pin 24 is DDC TMDS Clock-) but not what measurements their VESA Mount it.

Seriously, why is it so hard for companies to determine which specs are important and list them? Yes, I know that I belong to the minority of people who look at the specs and buy stuff that fits a need rather than just buying stuff because of bling-bling and advertising, but do you really need to constantly remind me of that fact? Can't you just - at least sometimes - pretend that us engineers are still valued customers?

While checking what took so much space, I found quite a few things, but one caught my attention, the Hibernate file:

I have 8 Gigabytes of RAM in my machine, so I have to live with a large Page File (no, I'm not disabling it. If even Mark Russinovich advises against disabling it, that counts more), but I certainly do not need the Hibernate file as this is a Desktop PC that's either running or off.

Weirdly, I couldn't find any option in Windows 7 to do so.Not sure if it's me or if there really is none, but it can easily be done on the command line. Run an elevated command prompt (cmd.exe, Run As Administrator) and type in

powercfg /hibernate off

The Hiberfil.sys should now be gone and the disk space should be free again.

Fast forward to the present day. VMs are a staple in the toolset of every developer now. Need to test your app on Windows XP, Vista and 7? Need to test deployment on both Server 2003 and 2008? Need a legacy Internet Explorer 6 machine? Or want to give Linux a spin? Great, just create a VM. Virtualization products are available for free now, thanks to Microsoft giving away VirtualPC and VMWare giving away their VMWare Server.

Now, VirtualPC is rather useless sadly, as it can not run 64-Bit Guests. Yup, surprised me as well. On the other hand, VMWare Server isn't really well suited for Desktops - it goes "too deep" into the system and it's whole interface is more aimed at remote usage (you can't select an .iso file on your hard drive unless you previously added it to a list of known locations...). There was a different free VMWare product though, VMWare Player.

The first versions could only run, but not create Virtual machines. They were great to run Live Systems/Appliances, for example Mono. Needless to say, soon sites like EasyVMX emerged to allow creating new Virtual Machines, so that Player was a full VM solution. So yesterday I installed the newest VMWare Player 3, already prepared to head to EasyVMX to create my VM. But then I was pleasantly surprised - Player now creates VMs!

And VMWare really went all out here. At least for Windows, they automatically detect your Operating System and offer Easy Install:

Easy Install means that it will do an unattended installation - you only have to enter your Product Key and maybe a password, then you can lean back and wait until it presents you with the Login Screen of a fresh Windows installation.

This, my dear friends, is awesome! I don't have much use for the advanced features of VMWare Workstation, so Player is my solution of choice - and Player 3 is a significant update!

Well done, VMWare! I wonder if Microsoft will ever catch up? XP Mode in Windows 7 is kinda nice, but I'd rather setup an XP VM in Player than installing a 32-Bit-only Virtual PC.

Luckily, there is a way to remove that function - thanks to Peter Çoopèr for pointing that out! In your Dashboard, go to Appearance => Editor and edit your functions.php to include these two lines before the closing ?>:

remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize');

Voilá, quotes are quotes again! This works with newer WordPress versions, I'm using it at 2.9.1 at the time of writing.

I'm starting to get fed up with this. Storing Passwords in Clear Text is an absolute no-no policy, with no excuse whatsoever. If this policy were a car, it would be an Edsel. If this policy were a computer game, it would be Big Rigs or Rapelay. If this policy were a crime, it would be bioterrorism. It's not some "small oversight" or a "configuration mistake". It's a sign of complete and utter incompetence to run a web site. In my opinion, someone who stores passwords in clear text should be prohibited from using the Internet.

As said, this happens to reputable companies as well, so it's not a small issue that eventually may go away. Therefore, I would love to see the privacy laws of most country changed to force websites to disclose how they store their passwords. We do already have privacy laws in the EU and US that force companies to disclose how they use any information collected. Can't we expand it to force companies to disclose how they store this information as well?

It's bad enough that Third-Party Websites ask for your data, but sadly again this is done by reputable websites. Okay, it can be questioned how reputable a website like LinkedIn is if they ask you for your E-Mail account, but the reality is that a) it happens and b) millions and millions of users use it. I don't think we can get that genie back in the bottle, and I don't think we'll get comprehensive coverage of technologies like OAuth to prevent abuse like that.

In an ideal world, I could go to a website, check its privacy policy and see something like

All passwords are salted and hashed with SHA-512. Passwords are not persisted in clear text.

I would even go so far to ask for clear-text storage declared illegal and punished as a federal offense, unless a) it's required for implementation and b) that implementation is clearly stated.

All Facebook Passwords are persisted in clear text, as we couldn't figure out how to use the Facebook API and instead rely on HTML scraping.

I know that such a disclosure means nothing to the average John Doe, but it allows tech-savvy people to avoid such incompetent companies and whistleblowers to warn other people about these scams.

Remember: Reputation means nothing when it comes to data storage. Companies and Governments lose your private data every day and while you can't really avoid it without missing out on a large part of what makes the Web so great, you should still think twice before giving any website the login details of any other website.

Really, why is that? I was looking at a TV, and I want to know if I can connect my equipment and I needed one with RCA Audio Outputs to go into my stereo amplifier. I'm not a big fan of digging through walls of text (often incomplete) describing the in- and outputs, often using different terminology. I want two things. First, I want this:

This is a picture of the connectors on the Sharp LC-52LE700UN, the TV I have on my wish-list now. From this picture, I can see it has everything I want. So the second thing I want is a link to the PDF of the User Manual so that I can double check that there are no caveats.

There are dozens of companies trying to sell their stuff. Amazon listed over 100 TVs when I searched for my criteria. How am I supposed to find the one which has what I need? By looking at the connectors! By simply looking at this, I can already remove many candidates from the list. For the remaining ones, I can then read the User's Manual to see which suits me best.

Yes, I realize that style is a big sales factor, and I'm not saying that pictures from the front/sides are unimportant. But on the other hand: As a geek, I get more excited when I see a battery of connections. Seriously, leave that shiny black high-gloss coating to the ladies and instead show me RCA sockets!

The same goes for audio equipment, and here even more as some amplifiers have shared inputs or a separate phono input. I was looking for a cheap Stereo Amplifier as I still had speakers but no Amp, and I ended up with the Sony STR-DH100 primarily because of the clear back shot and available user manual, and only then I started reading the reviews.

Remember companies: There are dozens, sometimes hundreds of products available in a category, and as a customer I want to be able to remove all but 5 or 6 of them ASAP, so that I can take a real in-depth look at those remaining. So do me a favor and show me your backs.

Love, Michael.