taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Build a Web Page Monitor with Google Docs : incredible. the GDocs spreadsheet supports getting a remote URL, extraction using XPath, and RSS output, making it a pretty credible scraping platform
  (tags: google-docs google xpath rss feeds scraping)

• PayPal phishes their own customers : ‘Your monthly account statement is available anytime; just log in to your account at https://SECURE.UNINITIALIZED.REAL.ERROR.COM/au/HISTORY.’ doh
  (tags: paypal phish phoul funny errors anti-spam via:risks)

• laptopsdirect.ie crappy reviews : wow. I dodged a bullet when I bought my work Thinkpad T61p last year; since then they’ve accumulated a truly atrocious customer service reputation. avoid
  (tags: laptopsdirect.ie laptops shopping ireland boards.ie reviews customer-service cluetrain)

Tags: anti-spam, boards.ie, cluetrain, customer-service, errors, feeds, funny, google, google-docs, ireland, laptops, laptopsdirect.ie, paypal, phish, phoul, reviews, rss, scraping, shopping, via:risks, xpath

• prescription swim googles : for $28. woo
  (tags: glassyeyes glasses prescription goggles swimming beach want)

• Design By Humans : great tees on this US site
  (tags: shirts tee-shirts apparel shopping want t-shirts)

Tags: apparel, beach, glasses, glassyeyes, goggles, prescription, shirts, shopping, swimming, t-shirts, tee-shirts, want

• 30% Of Internet Users Admit To Buying From Spam : ugh. we need a reminder of the Boulder Pledge. Mind you, Marshal have put out what appear to be inaccurate figures in the past regarding the Rustock botnet, so apply a pinch of salt
  (tags: marshal spam boulder-pledge commerce shopping statistics via:techdirt)

• more details on EC2 Elastic Block Store : achieves 70MB/s on an m1.small instance; ‘performance exceeds what we’ve seen for filesystems striped across the four local drives of x-large instances’. pretty good for a network filesystem, although not great compared to fast local SATA disks. also: snapshots are incremental and perform nicely compared to local S3 copy-and-upload
  (tags: ebs amazon performance benchmarks s3 ec2 disks snapshotting filesystems)

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) : ‘Prior to Amazon EBS, block storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can chose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances.’ — can even snapshot to S3
  (tags: amazon ebs ec2 aws s3 cloud-computing hosting)

Tags: amazon, aws, benchmarks, boulder-pledge, cloud-computing, commerce, disks, ebs, ec2, filesystems, hosting, marshal, performance, s3, shopping, snapshotting, spam, statistics, via:techdirt

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about good shopping experiences I’ve had. Here’s a couple:

SoleTrader.co.uk: I’m a terrible shopper. I hate shops, I always wind up having to visit them at their busiest times on the weekend, and the last time I tried to go shopping for a new pair of shoes, I got caught in torrential rain, fell over and broke my thumb instead. seriously. So feck that.

Instead, I resolved to buy them online, and that I did — from SoleTrader. They had a great range of trainers, I found what I was after, the price was grand, and delivery on time. Shoes are always the same size — their sizes are standardised, after all — so naturally they fit fine. All in all, it worked out great.

Be Organic: these guys operate in North Dublin, delivering bags of organic fruit and vegetables to your door, weekly. We get the Essential Fruit Bag and the Mini Box, with a bi-weekly bag of spuds on top, for EUR 32 per week. The quality of the food is absolutely fantastic, there’s never any spoilage or wilting, and it’s always fresh and delicious. Compared to supermarket fare, it’s leagues ahead. They’ve also been grand and flexible when we need to tweak the order slightly — for example we have a veto on celery, and that’s not an issue at all. The only problem would be that they’ve recently increased their prices… but unfortunately that seems to be a general problem in Ireland these days!

Tags: dublin, food, good, organic, plugs, shopping

A good deal came up on a mailing list I’m on: SAMSUNG 245BW Black High Glossy 24″ 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor for $459.99, or $409.99 after rebate, via Newegg.

A follow-up from a German poster: he’d just picked up a Dell 2407WFP-HC ‘for the low, low price of 659 EUR’.

We marvelled at the price difference — then I looked up Dell.ie forcomparison. I thought 659 EUR was bad, but Dell.ie is asking for 1,117.74 Euros inc VAT for the same product — insane!!

What possible excuse could there be for that? EUR 458.74 worth of shipping maybe? Do they encase it in platinum? That’s nearly three times the price of the Newegg monitor.

Update: Duh. I’m an idiot. That’s a 2707WFP, not a 2407WFP; it’s 3″ bigger and quite a bit fancier. It appears Dell.ie is no longer selling the 2407WFP.

Tags: dell, dell.ie, ireland, markup, newegg, prices, ripoff, shopping, wtf

Apparently EMI are now offering their DRM-free MP3s via 7digital, so I thought I’ve give the newly-revamped 7digital site a go. Results were a little mixed, unfortunately.

I found a couple of tracks I wanted which were available as MP3 format, clicked the “purchase” button beside them, and they were added to the “basket” on the right-hand side. Pretty typical stuff, if you’ve used EMusic or iTunes. Then I created an account, chose to pay using Paypal, paid a couple of quid and all was well!

The good stuff:

• the website works great in Firefox on Linux, and was nice and speedy.

• the range of music seems pretty good; most of the catalogue is WMA-only unfortunately, but most of the new releases now seem to be coming out with MP3 as an option.

• it’s very easy to pay by credit card or with Paypal.

There were a couple of glitches, however.

First, it allowed me to buy a file, then not give it to me. My first tester track was the Soulwax remix of ‘Standing in the Way of Control’ by Gossip. I happily added it to my basket, checked out, and paid — then when I got to my ‘Your downloads’ page, I was presented with this:

Gossip - Standing In The Way Of Control (Soulwax Nite Version) / 6:54 / Released 24.06.2007

No download links etc… hmm. A quick check of today’s date reveals that the 24th is a week from now — the track hasn’t been released yet! It seems this isn’t yet “available as a digital release” for some reason, despite the fact that as far as I can tell it’s been out for ages on CD. The only way to spot this in advance of purchase is to look at the “Digital release date” on the album info page and compare with today’s date; there’s no other notification that you’ll be buying a prerelease, and will have to wait to get your digital mitts on what you buy. Grrrr.

OK, next one; my other tester track was the title track from the new White Stripes, Icky Thump. At least this one was available. Now, supposedly we’re getting 320kbps MP3s, right? Not so, it seems — this one was 192kbps, a fact that’s only revealed once you’ve already paid for the tracks. Double grrr…

(it turns out, by the way, that only the “EMI content” is delivered in 320kbps format. I guess the other MP3 labels are sticking with 192kbps.)

So, two for two, both of the test downloads turned out to be wonky in one way or another. A bit disappointing. I hope they’ll improve though — there seems to be a new willingness to offer a decent MP3 music-download service there… and this is still more convenient for me than having to boot up a Windows virtual machine to use the iTunes Music Store.

They could really do with signposting exactly what you’re getting more clearly, though; in particular, being able to search by available format and bitrate would really help.

Tags: 7digital, ireland, music, reviews, shopping, uk

Hey lazyweb, hear my plea! What are my options for buying consumer electronics online, now that I’m back in Ireland?

I like online shopping. I dislike Argos, and I really hate Dixons, Currys and all the rest of the consumer-electronics high-street operations. Get me on the net and out of the nasty little shops and I’m happy. ;)

All in all, I’m a bit of an Amazon fan. However, now that I’m back in Ireland, I’ve been brought back to earth with a bang on that count; the prices are OK for items at both Amazon.com and .co.uk — but shipping is turning out to be a total disaster.

Basically, I’ve put in two orders, paid through the nose for basic shipping, and neither has turned up. For example — I ordered this phone a week and a half ago, on the 9th March, ponying up UKP 27 for the item — and a painful UKP 7 for shipping by International Mail.

Delivery estimate on ordering was for between 5 and 7 days — 14th to the 16th March. That was long enough — but it still hasn’t turned up, and Amazon.co.uk is still claiming that that is the current estimate, despite the 16th of March being 4 days ago ;)

On top of that, it appears they don’t offer any way to track the packages using that shipping method, so who knows what’s happening with the damn thing right now.

If I compare that with an order I made at Amazon.com last November, in which I nabbed a handy FM transmitter for my iPod — in that case, I got it shipped by plain old US Postal Service for $4.51, which was handily discounted as Super Saver Shipping. That — as with pretty much all my Amazon.com orders — arrived in 3-4 days, and for a hell of a lot cheaper too. If I’d had to pay for shipping (which I didn’t anyway), $4.51 vs UKP 7 works out as a third of the price, no less.

I’m guessing this is mainly down to Amazon.co.uk being shoddy in terms of how it deals with shipping to Ireland, and there are probably sites that use better-quality shipping partners.

Surely there must be better deals with vendors in Ireland, or even elsewhere in the Eurozone? Anyone know? Please drop us a line in the comments!

Update: the items arrived — 14 days after ordering. This is a moot point now, though, since Amazon.co.uk are no longer selling ‘PC & Video Games, Toys & Games, Gift items, Electronics & Photo and Home & Garden items’ to Ireland; I guess it was easier to give up on the Irish market for now. Very disappointing — but I’m waiting to see what happens next.

Tags: amazon, e-commerce, ireland, retail, shipping, shopping

Irish: Sarah Carey’s back – good to see it. Delivering a prime piece of moral outrage regarding malls (or ’shopping centres’ as they’re quaintly called on the eastern shores), and their intolerance of political speech.

Tags: delivering, intolerance, irish, outrage, piece, shopping, speech