Bose Soundlink: ideal travel companion

Published on January 20, 2012 in hardware. 0 Comments Tags: , , .


Thanks to the nice people at Bose Belgium, I have been using the Bose Soundlink for a couple of weeks, and when I left for a trip to Buenos Aires last month, I thought: why not take it along? After all, it’s only 1.3kg and it could give me some better sound in the hotel. I did not regret it.

First of all it’s fully wireless: the Soundlink works on long-lasting batteries and gets its music over Bluetooth easily up to 10 meters away. It’s really light, so you really carry it with you without thinking too much. Any time I get back to my room, I just press the icon on the speaker and it reconnects to my iPhone. I take it to the kitchen, the terrace on the rooftop, and it just keeps playing, even when I leave the iPhone in my room.

Most importantly: the sound is impressive. Everyone who heard my Soundlink was really impressed and started asking me for technical -and financial- details. Now, at 300€, it’s not exactly cheap, but it’s worth all that.

For all the ‘gadgets’ I use, I ask myself: does it make my life more enjoyable (for a reasonable price)? For the Bose Soundlink, that’s a definite ‘Yes’.

Capdase camera bag for Canon

Published on December 4, 2011 in hardware and photography. Closed Tags: .

I just got a new bag for my ‘small’ Canon: a Capdase MKeeper 180A. My previous bag was too soft and I wanted to try something more solid. I looked through the Canon 500D bags and rather liked the rectangular MKeeper series. The 180 is just big enough for the 350/400/450/500/550 body and an extra lens. I could actually fit the camera body in with the extra battery grip, but that’s stretching the case a bit. If you take the camera without a battery pack, you can choose to store body and lens attached or separate. A really nice feature of the bag is the ‘raincoat’: in the back zipper pocket there is a rain protection cover that envelopes the whole case. Clever touch!

 

Capdase mKeeper

There is a big selection of camera bags at LoveCases for Canon and other SLR Camera Cases!

Is Backify (512GB backup for free) also for real?

Published on October 14, 2011 in advertising. 15 Comments Tags: , , , .

UPDATE 16 Nov 2011:
Message from Backify:

Dear Peter Forret,
First of all, we would like to thank you for using Backify. We hope you really liked our service and enjoyed using it. We regret to inform you that we can not provide free backup services anymore. All free Backify accounts will be closed on November 22, 2011. In order to prevent your account from deletion, please login into your account and update your Billing Details.

Message from LiveDrive:

We would also like to advise you that we have received a number of complaints about BACKIFY.COM from their customers and from industry organizations. We would like to advise you not to provide any credit card information to BACKIFY.COM. If you have provided credit card information to BACKIFY.COM then we would suggest contacting your card provider and informing them that your card may be used fraudulently. If BACKIFY.COM have charged your card for services not provided you should contact your card provider and ask them to initiate a chargeback procedure.

——————-

I just read the announcement today of a very strong data backup offer: backify.com lets you use 512GB of backup space for free. If you compare that to the competition: Dropbox and Mozy give you 2GB for free, OpenDrive, SugarSync and Box.net have a 5GB free account, although the latter has upped this to 50GB recently, when Apple also announced its 5GB free iCloud offering. Microsoft Live SkyDrive used to be the biggest free offer: 25GB (but no way to upgrade). So how can one company offer more than 20 times that space, and still not charge?

There are a couple of things that made me doubtful.

  • Too good to be true: a previously unknown company (Google will try to correct a search on their name to Backupify, because the first mentioning of the company was yesterday) comes and offers you something HUGE for FREE. Hmmm. Where’s the catch?
  • Business model doesn’t make sense: if you offer any John Doe 512 GB, you can count on a lot of data coming in. There will always be some guys that will try to use all of it. You need thousands of terabytes, and those don’t come for free. You could use Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure, but they will charge you $0.10 to $0.15 per month/GB. There is a freemium model for storage, but the sweet spot seems to be: anything above 5 – 25 GB should be paid for.
  • No believable team: maybe this company has developed a new, revolutionary technology to make storage 10 times cheaper, but then they would show off their exceptional team. There would be a CTO or Chief Scientist with 30+ experience in data storage and some exotic patents in ‘redundant sub-particle holographic storage‘ or so. Here: nothing.
  • Look and feel: their page looks like it was made with a standard template and cheap stock photography. Like they couldn’t afford a decent web agency.
  • Empty company blog: that was a big red flag: they point to an empty blogspot as their ‘company blog’. This definitely smells like a scam.

Continue reading ‘Is Backify (512GB backup for free) also for real?’

Google Docs’ infamous “Moved Temporarily” error – fixed!

Published on July 14, 2011 in Google. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .


I store quite a lot of info in Google Spreadsheets, for the obvious reasons:

  • anyone can edit from any place, even at the same time
  • the servers are more reliable than a server at the office
  • I can use the info (with CSV/Excel export) in other programs through a web link

But there is a problem popping up at random moments with that last export or ‘publish’ functionality. Sometimes when you download the published link of a CSV export (through curl), you get an error ‘Moved Temporarily - The document has moved‘ with a redirect to a www.google.com address. And if you don’t follow HTTP 302 redirects, you can’t get to the actual content. In the past I’ve always worked around it or waited until the error went away, but today I searched a bit further. So for those who have the same question: read and learn!

The redirect is actually for authentication. Although I publish without requiring signing in, so one would expect no authentication process, there actually is one. See what it does (I used wget in verbose mode to get the HTTP headers):

>>>:~$ wget -v “https://spreadsheets.google.com/(…)&output=csv”
-- https://spreadsheets.google.com/(...)&output=csv

(...)

Location: https://www.google.com/... (first redirect)

-- https://www.google.com/(...)/ServiceLogin?=...

(…)

Location: https://spreadsheets.google.com/... (second redirect)

-- https://spreadsheets.google.com/(...)&output=csv&ndplr=1

(...)

Saving to: ...

So what is the solution: just add “&ndplr=1” to your URL and you will skip the authentication redirect. I’m not sure what the NDPLR parameter name stands for, let’s just call it: “Never Do Published Link Redirection“.