NewEgg Egg Saver Shipping SUCKS!!!

So I have ordered several parts from newegg over the past 4 years and I have only had a couple problems.

1) Ordered computer parts with my parents credit card (graduation gift) and shipped to my house. This caused several problems and took me 3 days to resolve by getting my address as a shipping address and then threatening to cancel the order because they wanted to start a problem because of a phone number.

2) Egg Saver Shipping (3-7 business days).... OH MY GOD WHAT A LOW CLASS SHIPPING METHOD THIS IS. Yeah I know I could have paid $10 for UPS 3 day shipping but I figured it doesn't have to go far my stuff usually ships out of the NJ warehouse. So it was picked up on 9/11 in the evening and made it to IL 2 days later (note this is going to southern MI). Ok I can buy that its cheapo shipping. So on 9/15 it finally makes it to MI but changes carriers (USPS). Well it sits in Allen Park for 7 DAYS! and leaves Detroit on the 8th day. Ok so how did it get from Allen Park to Detroit? Who knows because USPS has the worst tracking system ever.

So after waiting two weeks from shipping date I emailed newegg customer support and they surprisingly said the shipment must have gotten lost in transit and that they would either refund me my money or send me out a new product. So trying to give the postal system the benefit of the doubt I decided to wait to respond for another day to see if it arrived that night or the next (friday). But still no RAM.

But oh wait... after I ask for a replacement (good thing on a weekend) the package finally shows up almost 2.5 weeks after shipment. The package was a little bit abused but at least RAM from Kingston is packaged very well. The best part about the package was the "Time Sensitive Material" text on the USPS sticker. I guess "time sensitive" is a relative term and USPS figures eh... anytime in the next month would be great.

Mac OSX Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse Bug

So I have had a iMac for a week now and have come across a bug that was happening at random (actually it wasn't). So when I put my computer to screen saver mode (it just powers down the screen after a bit) I would turn the mouse off (keyboard i just let go to sleep). So a few hours later I would come back turn the mouse on and try to login. Well sometimes the mouse would work and other times just the keyboard would work. I was about to take the keyboard to the apple store and demand my $30 back and the regular keyboard. Fortunately I ended up finding a repeatable pattern to cause one input to not respond and a repeatable solution.

My Setup:
1) Silver 20" iMac Core2 Duo 2.66Ghz
2) Apple slim silver bluetooth keyboard
3) Logitech Bluetooth notebook travel mouse

Problem:
1) iMac is in sleepish mode
2) both keyboard and mac off
3) wake up computer using mouse first then try to use keyboard
Doing this will cause the mouse to not respond yet the keyboard will

Solution:
1) Wake up computer fully with keyboard
2) Turn the mouse on and wait for it to respond
Both of these should take less than 5 seconds each to happen (usually faster).

If you find yourself in a situation where one input is not responding (even if the computer says its connected to it) simply turn off both inputs and turn the keyboard on first make sure the computer is responding to it (Command + Tab is a great test) then turn the mouse on.

Pronouncable Password Generator

I have to periodically make passwords for others that I want to be secure but memorable so I found this CLI app called GPW. So I have created a Mac App to interface with it and to hopefully in the future provide more options for possible passwords configurations.

Download the GPW app

Speed Switcher

A couple of years ago we needed to test different connection speeds at work. So I created a simple Mac app that uses firewall rules to limit the speed allowed on ports 80 & 443.


Download the Speed Switcher app

Mac OSX + VMware Fusion 2 + TeamFortress 2 = Sweet!

So I just purchased a Core2 Duo 20" iMac with the 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro video card and I am very impressed with the speed of the game. Now don't get me wrong it wasn't the best but I am still tweaking some setting to get it to become smoother.

I setup VMware so that I dedicated 1GB RAM to the VM and set it to use 1 Core. Next time I am going to try setting it to 2 cores and see if I get a speed increase. The other thing is my 4GB Ram kit hasn't showed up so hopefully I will get that and dedicate 2GB to the VM.