Garrett M. Vonk

The most terrible thing about ESPN’s already-mediocre web site is the auto-loading, auto-play video on their homepage. You’re just sneaking a peek at the scores with your morning coffee when–boom goes the dynamite–a loud video clip starts playing immediately, alerting everyone around you to the buzzer beater some basketball player shot last night.

Here’s the simple two step process to make sure you never again disturb everyone around you. This assumes you’re running Firefox.

1. Install Adblock Plus.
2. Add a filter for this url string:
   http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/mpf/players/*

Until ESPN changes the code on their site, this will block that video from ever loading. Coffee break saved.

I just found this spam comment in my moderation queue… Definitely more positive and uplifting than most.

Spam Comment left today

Wait, does that say “have gun”? Never mind.

Our plane for Dublin leaves later today, so I’m super busy and don’t have much to talk about this morning. If you need something to read, maybe check out the “games and tech” blog Scott and I started recently, Nermit.

It’s just an outlet for random topics that he and I feel like writing about, including:

• My recent adventures with Comcast and CableCards
• The death of HD-DVD and whether or not it is prudent to wait for new technology to mature
• Apple strong-arms Think Secret into closing to avoid having to reveal their sources.
• Scott buys a PS3. NOOOOOO!!!!!!!1

Microsoft made a big splash with their Surface platform today. This is pretty slick.

I’ll take two of every display shown in the video, please.

• Halo 3 - I’m in the multiplayer beta. It’s loads of fun. The mercilessly short beta period means that I’ll probably be online most nights between now and June 10th.
• I’m reading Radical Evolution, which I saw on Cool Tools and recommended to my dad. The book is chock full of exciting tidbits about the frenetic pace of technological progression, and it makes me wish my trip on MARTA were a little longer every morning. Garreau excels at framing concepts in an almost breathless, excitable voice that marvels at many of the important changes we’ll see in the next century and beyond.
  

  We live in remarkable times. Who could have imagined at the end of the 20th century that a human augmentation substance that does what Viagra does would sponsor the NBC Nightly News?

• I had barely closed the book this morning when I read about a related development, the release of the first consumer hard drive with a capacity of one terabyte. For $399, you can (probably) store in a single 3.5 inch device more data than all the computers in the world could hold on the day I was born. I remember going with my dad to pick up an 800MB hard drive for the same price in the late 90s, and I’m pretty sure that’s about what we paid for a 30MB drive back in 1989, though the latter was 5.25″ in size.

That you are throwing a baby shower for someone on another team is NOT grounds for sending an urgent email to everyone in the office.

I’m trying to get work done here, people.

Bill O’Reilly is awesome. Yes, the story is from earlier last year, but I still really enjoy reading his crazy rant against video games and iPods.

The have-nots are growing. Why are they growing? Because the skill set that is necessary to earn a decent living is being deemphasized in a fantasy world of football games and shooting zombies and all that…. Now you have the “knows” and the “know-nots”, because if you spend all your youth being prisoners of machines….. you’re not going to know anything…. You’re gonna fail.

It helps if you imagine an old man shaking his cane while you read his words. I hesitate to respond to his points at length as I have a gut feeling that he’s just trolling.

I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America…

All this ranting about “the machines” and complaining that the youth are “prisoners” isn’t just paranoid rambling. It’s not that he’s a luddite; Bill O’Reilly can and will sensationalize anything. Still, with rants like this, he’s never going to attract any of the coveted stoned slacker demo. I just hope I can escape the machines in time to make a living for myself.

To paraphrase what I said last week, sending an email every night to remind me that my mailbox is over the limit is tantamount to rear-ending people to inform them they’re not wearing seatbelts.

After 4 months at my job, I’ve reached the 120MB limit of the Exchange mailboxes here at work. I’ve commiserated over this before, but at this job, they send you an email every day to remind you that your mailbox is full. I guess nothing says “mailbox space is precious; you’ve run out” like clogging my inbox with apoplectic nastygrams.

Yes, I know that my linkdumps don’t actually count as posts, and I’ve been pretty blog-negligent lately. (Blegligent? Blogligent? Nlogligent?) Here’s a weekend recap:

• Friday: Heather flew back in from Orlando. Her plane took off early and landed early. Does that ever happen?
• Saturday: I went up to Jasper to help my Dad paint the mountain house. Moderate bonding and extremely dirty clothes ensued. For probably only the second time, I missed my SUV terribly as I gingerly wedged my paint-covered self into the driver’s seat, trying very hard–and failing–to keep my seats clean.
  Also, we saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. It was cool, though I’m definitely still over disgusted at paying $9.25 for a movie ticket.
• Sunday (yesterday): We walked over to the AVP Beach Volleyball tournament at Atlantic Station. It was enjoyable, though hot, and despite my inital suspicions, it had nothing to do with Alien Versus Predator. For some reason, the women’s tournament is more popular than the men’s. I wonder why that is…

In the same vein as my post about haggling your way to a good cell phone deal, I want to make sure everyone within the sound of my voice knows that there’s a better way to buy cables than at your local Big Box electronics retailer.

I’m talking about all kinds of cables: From USB to Cat5, from RCA to DVI to HDMI to VGA, there’s really no reason you should pay what the big retail stores want for these cables.

Example A: HDMI Cables

HDMI is all the rage. You can connect your high-definition components to your HDTV with a small, single cable, covering video and audio, rather than the 3-5 bulky cables previously used for the same process. It’s a miracle! Except that when the man in a polo shirt who just sold you a TV, in his most helpful voice, intones “And you’ll need an HDMI cable to connect that to your components”, he’s not actually trying to help you. He’s trying to send you home with, at a bare minimum, a $64 length of rubber-coated wires. Which somehow seems reasonable to people who don’t know you can get that cable for $6 on the web.

Example B: USB Cables

The (admittedly apocryphal) word on USB cables is that Best Buy et al have a tendency to mark down their printers to near-cost, and just lean heavily on their salespeople to make sure everyone walks out with a $30 USB cable to push the margins back up. The “standard” USB cable Best Buy sells will set you back $28.99.
Granted, part of that ridiculous amount gets you hilariously witty Geek Squad marketing banalities like “Agent 642 does not personally recommend using this cable as a fish stringer.” Ha ha ha!

While you’re laughing your way to the big yellow and blue cash register, you’re supposed to forget that you can get a cable that is equal in length and function for seventy-two cents if you know where to look. I’ve used similar dirt-cheap cables (hint: they come bundled with a lot of USB devices), and I’ve never had a problem with one.

Example C: Ethernet Cables

I’m of the school of thought that ethernet cables are easy enough to make yourself that you should never even have to resort to buying them “prefab”. However, I realize that operating an archaic BDSM-esque crimper is outside the scope of many people’s Sunday afternoon hobby proficiency. Still, that’s no reason to pay $20 for a pathetic, 6ft length of ethernet cable. If you don’t have the skills to DIY, there’s still a veritable rainbow of cables in all sizes, starting at $1.70 for a 7ft cable that will be just as good as any $20 Geek Squad Cable.

Sources

It would be painfully negligent if I were to publish such a diatribe on what I would label as a paradigmatic pricing scheme, only to pepper my examples with evidentiary links that all point to the same site. That would prove nothing, except that one retailer happens to have great prices on cables. But there are tons of them out there.

A quick Google Search for “cheap cables” brings back plenty of results, but here are some I rely on (or have heard good things from trusted sources):

• MonoPrice
• Cable Wholesale - I got some really long VGA cables from these guys at an amazing price.
• Computer Geeks - They sell a kit for $28 that you could use to make fifteen 20-foot cables, at only a little more than Best Buy wants for one six-foot cable.
• Deep Surplus - Haven’t ordered from here, but the prices look very good. I’ve read good things about them.
• A tangentially related post from Make Magazine

But Don’t Take My Word For It

Whether you hook up your TV via digital connections, analog connections, or both, you are unlikely to detect any difference in picture quality between a cable with a moderate price and a luxury brand. The only difference you’re likely to notice is how the cable looks behind your TV.
-PCWorld.com: The Cable Game

There are some great insights, not just in the body of this blog post, but in the comments:

Not only isn’t there $143.62 worth of quality difference, there isn’t $.01 worth of quality difference.
-mattyice11 on Gizmodo: HDMI Cable: Price Gouging?

And if you’ve made it all the way down here and you still care, even just a little bit, about the quality and price of the cables you buy, check out this grandaddy of expensive cable debunkers, Roger Russell. This has long been my favorite exposé on “audiophile” cables:

So what do our fifty hours of testing, scoring and listening to speaker cables amount to? Only that 16-gauge lamp cord and Monster cable are indistinguishable from each other with music and seem to be superior to the 24 gauge wire commonly sold or given away as ’speaker cable.’
-Speaker Wire: A History

So there ya have it… Lamp cable sold at 30 cents a foot outperforms so-called “Speaker Cable”, and is indistinguishable from the cable sold for hundreds, even thousands of dollars.