NVidia's MicroConsole Brings Your PC Games to TV CES 2015

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Nvidia's Forge TV brings one of the best tricks from last year's NVidia Shield series to your TV at a more affordable price - streaming and control of your game from your desktop PC / MAC to your living room.  But unlike the Shield which requires a GT6xx series graphics card on your PC/Mac, this one will support AMD as well.

(Of course it does the other usual Android gaming stuff as well.)

It'll run you $149.99 with the controller as pictured above, and comes out next quarter.

Hyperjuice 2 External Battery Pack for your Mac

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I got the newest HyperJuice external battery pack in the other day to add to my road-warrior kit.  I've hacked up a MacBook Pro power adapter for use, and so far so good - more details to be provided in My MacLife section next week.

This portable power pack is powerful enough to charge a MacBook, and two tablets (iPads, etc) at the same time.

Other hyperjuice products coming soon as well - let me know if you want to see any other product lines from HyperJuice reviewed.

Review of course forthcoming, so check back soon for my initial impressions.

Amazon Refund To Closed Account?

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This all started back around Christmas 2011.  I bought a camera on Amazon.com, and then ended up returning it because it didn't suit my needs.  The problem was that I had closed my account on Wells Fargo shortly after buying it, and the original Amazon.com policy is to refund back only to the original card.

So fast forward to 2012 February, the refund gets processed.  Of course, I ask Amazon to please just give me store credit instead of trying to process the refund.  Unfortunately it was a no go, and they told me to please contact my bank or to expect a check refund from the bank.  Well I can tell you after several months, none of that happened.

I finally just went to Wells Fargo yesterday and asked someone to look all this up for me.  It turns out they wipe their records clean after X number of months so they have absolutely nothing on the computer system for me.  The rep also said there would be no way a refund / credit would have been processed after the account was closed.  I didn't want to call him a liar but Wells Fargo had been a pretty shady bank to me over the years.

So I went back online and contacted Amazon.com for some assistance - via email.  Their response was the same, so naturally I filled out the feedback form and let them know what I thought about their policy.  They asked me to give them a chance to correct it and offered to have them call me immediately to resolve.

25 minutes on the phone, and its finally resolved.  Most of it was just waiting for their team to figure out a way to process the refund to me - store credit isn't possible, but a work-around was.  Basically they would refund an amount from a previous order to my account.

All-in-all, Amazon did not lose me as a customer.  Amazon and Costco rank right up there for me in customer service and it's still my favorite place to shop.

The State of Portable Navigation for Cars - 2012 April

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I will be adding annotations (which are only viewable directly on youtube), so you may want to view on youtube from a computer to get the most information out of this.

My current top choice(s) would be the google maps on Android (free) or TomTom for iPhone / iPad with subscriptions paid for traffic.

If I had to go for a standalone GPS device for driving, it'd be:

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CES 2012 Coverage - Day 1

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I watched (no, listened mostly) to the Qualcomm keynote in the morning.  Is it me, or does it seem like the video was not very well presented.  Maybe it was the speaker, or the content?  I just didn't feel the enthusiasm (even at 8:30 AM).  Well, even the Jabbawockeez performance wasn't all that great... (yes there are quite a few celebs here).

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CES 2012 Coverage - Day 0

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Press line up for the Nokia Press Conference @ CES 2012

CES officially starts tomorrow January 10th, 2012.  Day 0 is typically for the press conferences and early appointments with vendors and exhibitor final day setup.

This is the first time I've arrived this early for CES.  There was no traffic on the freeway, no wait at the buffets, and generally no crazy traffic jams.  That was nice for a change.

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Staying Cool on a Budget with a Great Air Cooler

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Air coolers work.  Unfortunately most air coolers you can find locally don't work all that well - I know I've tried several.  There is exactly one company that I've come across that knows their swamp coolers (evaporative coolers), and that's Convair.

Yes, they aren't cheap - often times the models exceed the typical cost of a typical window box air conditioner but there are a lot of advantages.

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When is unlimited, not unlimited? Turns out almost everywhere.

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Unlimited

adjective 

1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined
2. boundless; infinite; vast
3. without any qualification, or exception 

Home unlimited internet access is limited.  Try uploading at maximum speeds for a while and you will find your access severely throttled.  I should know because I knew for a fact that Comcast did that, as I'm sure Time Warner did for a while.  What they do now is slow the internet down so its near unbearable for anything else after a while.

Cell phone data plans aren't unlimited, even if they were advertised as so.  Well at least now the carriers have done away with unlimited data plans and are starting to charge more reasonable fees for tiered plans.

And really with the comparatively slow speeds of our "high speed" internet access we can't compare with many other countries in speed or affordability so reach a relatively low cap every month in how many movies we can stream or pictures we can upload.

Ooma calling isn't unlimited.  At first the limit was 3,000 minutes per month, but has recently went up to 5,000 minutes per month.  In case you're wondering that comes out to about 2 weeks of straight talking.

My latest pickle has to do with my Pro Phanfare account with unlimited storage.  Turns out I've hit the limit not once, but twice so far this year.  The first time it was because I hit a 50 GB upload limit back in May while I was in Asia.  I'm sure that I wasn't the typical customer who only takes snapshots on vacation with their pocket cams (but hey, most of my shots in Asia this year was with my pocket camera).

At that time they told me they had just raised the limit to 100 GB upload which I just hit yesterday while uploading pictures from this past week's touristy romp around So. Cal with friends.

I fit the profile of 1% of their customers I'm told, and my current storage costs them about $600 per year not including any bandwidth usage since they use Amazon's S3 storage service.  Click here to see their rates.

My advice.  Read the fine print - there's always fine print.  They re-define what unlimited is, and typically state that no matter what, they can change what 'unlimited' means at any time without notice.

I'm a pretty BIG fan of Costco

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Here's yet another story and an example why someone else is now a very big fan of Costco.  In a nutshell, this guy saves a huge bundle on a demo camera already, checks out and realizes that he paid about $120 less than he was told it would cost.  He tries to give money back, but Costco refuses.  Now they have a customer for life.

Click here for the story on consumerist.