Consumed Consumer . org

The prevailing view has been for a while that taking your daily dose of multivitamins can't hurt and will certainly benefit you. Yet every now and then research comes out stating that most vitamin supplements are not being absorbed by the body. One such last study claims that vitamin supplements may in fact have an adverse effect.

  The Beijing Olympics are in the center of the world's attention, exemplifying what the Chinese leadership has deemed the "peaceful rise". We take a quick look at smaller consumerist happenings in and from China.

Toronto was recently shaken by a the rapturous news of a Kirkland Signature recall. For countless consumers, the KS brand had come to symbolize high quality and most of the time low prices.

As most consumers can no longer ignore economic news, we are taking a long, hard and detailed look at the data spewed by the financial press.

Google has just announced more improvements to their free translation services. To celebrate, we are releasing the best way to introduce Google Automated Translation to your website, using a self-updating drop-down list with a few featured languages.

Some call it a big iPhone that doesn't make phonecalls, while others point out that it may not be a hot sell for women, for intimate hygiene reasons. The very last video in the playlist below explains this best.

Just as reports of the rate of birth defects continuing to increase in China were published, we learn that UK researchers have determined that levels of lead exposure previously determined to be safe are in fact unsafe. Furthermore, most electronic waste dismantled in China is recycled back into consumer products (and sometimes, unwittingly, in food) and sold back to the industrialized world.  

I just got an email from an acquaintance working for Amnesty.ca .

Speedtest - how fast are you? : I clocked 2 short of 60 WPM, which is not bad on a laptop keyboard :)

After our salute dedicated to Microsoft Windows 7 milestone, it is only natural to repeat our welcome to Windows 8 RTM and answer the burning question “where can I get the ISO?” .

In what is becoming a regular occurrence, I attended yesterday evening a meeting of the Art Experience Group (AEG). We ate, drank, watched a movie, and plotted to take over the world. The spiritual one, that is :)

Googling Google posts about a hidden Gmail operator that lets you restrict your messages to a certain language. It is hidden for a good reason - the automatic detection is not perfect, so not all messages are labeled correctly.

There was a time when having a “media center” involved building an HTPC, which was a difficult project to undertake, wrought with frustrations and hardware/software incompatibilities. OTA HDTV came along and many felt left behind just when they had gotten things working. Some experimented with Popcorn while others played with NZBs/NNTP/Usenet downloads. After all these years, one media interface has emerged dominant: XBMC / Boxi / Kodi.

A few years after the first major meltdown of this millennium, the pieces of the puzzle are starting to coalesce into a better understanding of what happened. For better (a select few) or for worse (most of everybody else), Goldman Sachs played a central role in the collapse.

I recently got another used laptop off eBay. It came without an OS so I was going to install Linux, but seeing that Windows 10 has just become available for download, I decided to give it a try and install Linux alongside, in dual boot. First, let us look at downloading the ISO, comparing the 3 possibilities: NetSession, Direct and BitTorrent. This article represents my pre-install research – the install experience and tips coming up soon.

Let's start by wishing you a prosperous, joyous and all-around successful happy new year ! We wish we could join other sites in presenting you with an insightful retrospective; alas, we cannot - we only started a couple of months ago, and we have yet to finalize the "look and feel" of our website.