AmazonUK Super Saver

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AmazonUK, quite a while ago, instituted the Super Saver delivery option on certain of their products.What this entailed for customers in South Africa, and a few other Commonwealth countries, is free delivery on orders over GBP25.

I would have liked to have taken advantage of this previously but for some reason the deal doesn’t applyto any video games. I did recently have the opportunity to try it out when I placed an order for a book and a Blu-Ray disc.

The main advantage with ordering from AmazonUK is the usually lower prices on products, and also the some times earlier availability of certain products. The book I ordered was on special at half the cost of what I could obtain it locally, and the Blu-Ray at the time wasn’t in stock with local suppliers.

To keep their costs down, AmazonUK make use of standard Royal Mail postage service. One major drawback with this is the lack of tracking system for your parcel. When I placed my order they said it would take 8 working days to arrive here, which placed in SA on the 22nd of December.

Being near Christmas I didn’t really expect it to arrive that early, and previous packages I’ve sourced elsewhere have spent extended times in customs before arriving.

On the 30th I finally received notice that the package had arrived at the post office. Going to pick it up I was greeted with a small invoice from SARS. The customs duties I was charged weren’t exorbitant, but definitely off set the expected savings from the overseas order.

I was charged roughly 16% tax on both items, plus a ZAR15 admin fee. In the end I payed about R320 for products I would have paid R470 for had I bought it through local suppliers. Although it meant it took about two and a half weeks to arrive here, whereas I could have expected the same package within a week had I purchased it locally.

So as long as you have the time it definitely seems worth the while. You do place a slight bit of trust in the SA Post Office, but although the degree of service I’ve had from them over the past few years has been extremely varied, I don’t recall them ever having lost one of my packages.

Reading through the Super Saver details however, it states that it is only available until 15 January 2012. From what I understand they are in the habit of extending these dates, as it has been available for more than a year. There exact words are: “At the end of this period, we reserve the right to further extend, amend or withdraw this offer”

NOTE: Since this post it appears that Amazon chose not to extend the period. No news on how permanent this is.

Wi-fi Hotspot with Samsung Galaxy Ace

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My dad recently got an upgrade on his cellphone contract and opted for the Samsung Galaxy Ace. It’s on the lower end of Samsung’s Galaxy range, but running Android and with a very nice touch screen is fully packed with useful features. One thing which has become fairly standard on new smart phones is the ability to share its 3G/HSDPA data connection with nearby devices.

thegadgetsblog.com

I hadn’t thought much about it until my dad asked me if he was still going to be able to tether the phone to his laptop to connect while on holiday. A Google search didn’t return much help, but I dug through his menu and found it fairly easily. To share the phone’s data connection do the following.

  • From the home screen go to menu then settings
  • Open wireless and networks
  • open tethering and portable hotspot
  • select the mobile ap to activate the hotspot

by default it sets up an unsecured AP, with the high costs of data here it’s best to activate security, this can be done from the current menu by further going to

  • configure mobile ap

here you can set the ssid, security and password for the AP.

Fairly straightforward and works nicely.

Dead Feed

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After reloading my website, I failed to re-enable WP’s permalinks, opting instead for the default \?=<article number> links that it gives. Benefit of this being that they tend to be far shorter than the permalinks I used previously.

This had two unforeseen problems. Firstly, all the the links to my articles, on my own site and others, would no longer work. This I noticed immediately, and had corrected some of the more recent articles of mine.

feednotifier.com

Secondly, and I only found this out now, is it appeared to have destroyed my RSS/Atom feeds. For some reason this is affected by permalinks. In any case, I’ve switched permalinks back on, and now I’m going back through my articles and updating them again.

For those interested, you can get more info on WP’s Feeds here.

Analogue vs Digital

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I have always been in favour of digital over analogue. It’s quicker, easier to read, more accurate, and although I currently wear an analogue watch, I still maintain a digital watch is better. This being said, the more things become digital around us, the more I see value in certain systems remaining analogue.

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From my experiences, analogue has a very set place. It’s great for comparisons. My first example is in reference to a speedometer. When driving, the times I’m concerned with my speed, I’m not so much concerned with what speed I’m traveling, but more that I am within the speed limit.

Whether I’m going 115 or 117 is of little significance to me, and it is far easier to see that the needle is below 120, than it is to process 115 and realise, yes, it’s less than 120. I say “far easier”, not that much processing is required either way, but that one can just look at the speedometer and know what you want, without having to read, or focus much. I’ve driven a car with a digital speed read out several times, and often found myself driving faster than intended, and generally not being sure as to what speed I was travelling.

I’ve heard the same argument for watches, that when you check the time, you generally want to know where you are relative to a certain time, ie. how much time you have left before you have to be somewhere. I find that in general I’ve wasted more time staring at my watch in a sleepy haze trying to figure out what the time is than I have calculating how much time I have left on a digital clock. As I said earlier, I wear an analogue watch, but this is mainly due to the way it looks and the way it’s made. It’s a good solid stainless steel watch, which I do everything with. My watch wearing started when I was 6 with a digital watch whose body and strap my father had to repair countless times. That being said, all my current watch does is tell the time, and the date. And even that is wrong once every two months. Digital watches offer so much more when it comes to functionality with dates, stop watches and alarms.

At the beginning of the year I worked at ESCape Gauges in Cape Town. They manufacture high-precision measurement components and sell various measurement devices, verniers, micrometers etc. And again both analogue and digital devices have their place.

Much of the work done is go/no-go gauges. A form of analogue measurement, where an object must fit in section, but not another. It doesn’t matter how far it is in or out, as long as it fits, it’s correct. Analogue dial gauges are also used, with the gauge section having red and green areas coloured in. As long as the needle is in the green area, the component is acceptable, it doesn’t matter what the value is.

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On the other side, certain companies want to record the size of every component, so they can view the data in comparison to the performance of specific processes or the component itself. Here digital gauges are used which output data to be stored on computers. This information is easily obtainable, and allows for greater control. A red and green light are used in conjunction with this type of system to return whether the component is within constraints.

Although not what I was thinking of when I started this post, when it comes to digital media, I am far in favour of it over analogue. The ease with which it can be handled, and, in my opinion, the quality is far superior to that experienced with analogue media.

Digital media has definitely taken over analogue, but it will be interesting to see in the future if analogue displays start to fall away completely, or whether they’ll still hang around.