Consumed Consumer . org

If you have ever participated in an auction, you may have sometimes lost what seemed like a very good deal at the very last minute. We will describe here how and why that might happen and how you could as well win an auction at the last minute.

This being Bike Week , I have decided I will shop less at Costco (where it doesn’t really work to shop by bicycle, because most merchandise won’t fit in a rucksack) and more at the neighborhood supermarkets. On a bicycle, it makes sense to look at the flyers than go to whichever store has the lowest prices – you get to pedal the most this way and shopping is cheapest!

I recently had the opportunity to benchmark two very similar Acer computers, differing mostly in the kind of Intel processor they shared. I found that only Novabench is worth using.

I recently bit the bullet and tried to set up my PAP with a VOIP service with my Cisco / Linksys PAP2T. Here's how it went.

Forced by circumstances, I found myself searching for a robotic vacuum cleaner. I look for something without frills, less than CN$300, which automatically excludes all the Roomba nonsense.

I have a laptop that allows me to swap my DVD drive (which I don't use much) for a second hard drive in RAID. I'm looking at buying a drive in the $100-200 range to complement my existing SATA drive.

For the longest time I've been renting a cable modem from my ISP for about $5-6/month. As DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems (capable of 400Mbps D/l and 108 Mbps U/l) have become widely available I've decided to upgrade my cable modem and also purchase it.

I once stayed at a hostel that had terrible Internet connectivity. This contrasted harshly with the superior customer service provided by the staff and the otherwise modern, cutting edge amenities. Let’s see how this problem could be solved.

As I was running out of space on my DNS-323, I decided to upgrade my two 1 TB drives to 2 TB. Due to insufficient research into the matter, I was surprised to read, prior to performing the upgrade, that there are significant performance issues with these drives.

March Break is fast approaching and though entertainment choices abound, it's worth having a quick glance at what's on the menu. The main course is, of course, C&C 4 as well as the oldies that Westwood Studios made available for free download.

You're traveling to a new country and either because you have a prepaid in your home country without roaming privileges, or because roaming is too expensive, you want to get a local SIM card to send and receive text messages (SMS), check your email and use Google Maps for directions. Where do you go and what do you get? In this series, we’ll have an answer (or more) for you for the countries we are travelling to most often. Today, Canada.

  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.

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 :)

With GooglePages suffering a slow and controlled death, it is high time to look at hosting alternatives. We even include a section for Blogger’s who only want to host their .js scripts.

Have you noticed your Internet connection getting sluggish even while your Speed-tests show no slowdown? Are your VoIP conversations breaking up and becoming unintelligible especially when torrent downloading? If your answer is yes, you might benefit from the following tips.

In the first part we looked at general purpose hosting . In this second part we are looking at specialized hosting , not so much as an alternative to GooglePages (as I strongly doubt that it has ever been used for video or audio), but for the sake of completion.