Tutorials at GetOffTheComputer.com

Mac Mini: First Impressions

Helix — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 03:05:29 +0000

The grand total of time I have spent in front of a Mac in my illustrious career with computers would probably total about fifteen minutes. I’ve never liked the damn things, as I am a child of the old-school PC-Mac wars of yonder. I never liked Apple’s products because I thought they were too much eye-candy and not enough horsepower (both hardware and software). Add to that the fact that I always thought Microsoft allowed you more control over your computer (like I said, old school), and I was firmly entrenched in the PC camp for years.

Nowadays, though, Microsoft’s operating systems just aren’t cutting it for me. Now, I don’t think you can actually compare Windows XP and OS X “Tiger” — I think it’s apples to oranges. Windows XP is almost five years old and was built in and for a different era of computers. On a slightly different, slightly related note, comparing Vista to Tiger will be fair game.

But let me get to the point.

When I first took this Mac Mini out of the box, I couldn’t believe the size of this thing. It’s 6.5 inches long and 6.5 inches deep. In fact, at first glance I thought this was the power supply. (Granted, the power supply is almost a third the size of the Mac Mini itself, but I’m not complaining.) Nonetheless, it certainly does look cute next to my case-is-off-expansion-cards-not-screwed-in PC. Yeah, you geeks know what I’m talking about.

So, then comes the first boot. Apple certainly holds your hand through the initial setup phase, and there weren’t any major hiccups to speak of. The worst thing about the setup would be one of my biggest complaints (if you can call it that) so far — the little things that come from transitioning from a PC-way of thinking. Take for example the “Home” key. I expect that to bring my cursor to the beginning of the line, not the beginning of a document.

I absolutely love the search feature in Tiger. It’s called “Spotlight” and I can find anything — from an individual file to an application to a system utility — in a matter of seconds. All you have to do is type in what you’re looking for (this tool is similar to the “locate” and “slocate” tools that are found on Red Hat based systems). My first search was for “terminal” because I wanted to get dirty in BASH as soon as possible. I only got “term” out before it was listing Terminal as my top hit. Try doing that on Windows Search.

But speaking of a terminal, I adore the fact that we get a BASH shell. From the thirty minutes I played around with Tiger, about ten were in BASH setting up cron jobs, ssh server, a backup script for my network, and a few other things related to housekeeping. After those ten minutes went by, I realized I was in my comfort zone in BASH so I went back out to dig around.

I was able to connect to my wireless network, my ethernet network, download Firefox, change my computer name, change my “workgroup,” share a folder, open a share, listen to my iTunes music, play with Dashboard, take a screenshot and resize, and feel my way around Tiger in the rest of that half hour. Not bad for a first-timer. (Of course, I’m not a n00b with computers.)

There were only a couple of other first impressions that really impressed me. One was the eye candy. Mac OS X v10.4 just looks good. I mean really good. It’s hard not to think of how bad the Windows XP interface looks after playing around in Tiger, but then again, apples to oranges. Vista’s Aero Glass may very well make this Mac’s interface look like crap. (Of course, for what it’s worth, I run KDE. Some of you know why I told you that, and I know you are smiling. As for the others, well, just move along.)

Another good first impression was Dashboard, a widget interface somewhat like Konfabulator. Basically, Dashboard lets you add tiny programs, called Widgets, such as a clock, a weather program, news, little games, etc. Normally, things like this just clutter up your desktop, but Apple has a smart way of doing it. When you have Dashboard open, one mouseclick anywhere on screen will get rid of it. (On a side note, one of the widgets is a dictionary. I added that widget to Dashboard, and while typing this entry, I brought it up and searched for “carburetor” very quickly. Tres cool! I double-checked my spelling in about five seconds.)

How about some first negative impressions? One I’ve already mentioned. I know it’s not Apple’s fault that keyboard shortcuts, etc., are different from Windows, but it’s irritating to me. When I hit F6 in Safari, for example, I want the address bar highlighted. I must have hit F6 a dozen times out of habit.

Another negative is with the machine’s power. It seems to run a little sluggish if I’m doing more than one thing at once. Even the initial opening of a (major) application feels like a carburetor that’s running rich. You pull the throttle and there’s just a little stutter. Of course, I did get the lowest-end version of the Mac Mini, and I’m sure the full-on systems run better. Still, if this device is designed to steal some of the market share from Microsoft, a little power boost might have been in order.

All in all, my first impression was quite impressed. Apple’s little machine and new operating system get a thumbs up from me, but I don’t see it becoming my operating system of choice. I haven’t spent a great deal of time with Tiger, but I am a Linux geek, through and through. The fact that I get a BASH shell with OS X is the biggest plus in my opinion, but it’s really for computer geeks like me. Hopefully after some significant time with this machine I’ll have a lot more positives and a few more negatives to share.

As an aside, can it replace those Windows boxes? Well, yes and no. What I see so far is it boils down to this: either you get a crappy operating system with a near-limitless number third-party applications, or you get a pretty smooth operating system (so far, anyway) with limited third-party applications. I don’t really want to delve into that age-old argument tonight anyway. I’m impressed enough with Tiger to keep it on the Mac Mini a little while longer (if I didn’t like it, Linux was going on it), so I’ll revisit this topic when I’ve refined my opinion.

Copying Files Over SSH with SCP

Helix — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 19:37:39 +0000

SCP stands for “Secure Copy.” Basically, it’s used to copy files between machines securely. SCP operates over the SSH protocol; therefore, files that are copied between hosts are transferred as securely as transmissions over SSH itself. Unix-based machines running as SSH servers support scp by default. Windows can support it as well.

A lot of you may be thinking that scp doesn’t have a lot of use when there is FTP. The first problem with FTP is that it’s not secure. Of course, there is SFTP, a secure version of FTP; however, that leads me to the second problem with FTP. I just don’t find it as quick to use (or SFTP, itself, for that matter) as scp. If you are comfortable with the command line, then scp is going to be a valuable resource.

If you use “copy” or “cp” (depending on your OS) from the command line, then you will easily pick up scp. The full usage is as follows:

scp [-1246BCpqrv] [-c cipher] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file]
[-l limit] [-o ssh_option] [-P port] [-S program]
[[user@]host1:]file1 […] [[user@]host2:]file2

Here’s the broken-down (basic) version:

scp localfile user@host:directory/remotefile

scp user@host:directory/remotefile localfile

The first usage in the broken-down version copies a local file to a remote machine, and the second usage copies a remote file to the local machine. For example, if I wanted to copy “test.php” in the current directory on my local machine to the directory /www/myweb/testing on the remote web server, I would issue the following command:

scp test.php helix@getoffthecomputer.com:/www/myweb/testing

Running quickly through this command, from left-to-right: scp the file “test.php,” using the username “helix,” to “getoffthecomputer.com,” to the “www/myweb/testing” directory. Similarly, to copy “test.php” on the remote machine to /home/helix/myfiles on my machine, I would issue the following command:

scp helix@brandonjaynes.com:/www/myweb/testing/test.php /home/helix/myfiles

Whenever I’m doing some web design, I use scp to copy the local file to my web server to test. I also copy anything that I create locally that needs to go to my work through scp. The security that scp adds is just gravy. In all honesty, the best thing about scp is the ease of use. Rather than use FTP, cd to the right directory, change transfer formats, and put the file; I just copy as if I were copying to a disk on my local machine.

As an added bonus, if you add the public key of your machine to the “authorized_keys2″ file of the remote machine, you don’t even have to log in when you scp. Issue the command, and the file is transferred, just like magic! If you have any questions or comments, or if you would like some help with getting your public key on your remote machine, drop me an email by clicking on the “Email” link at the top. Have fun!

SSH For Windows Via Putty

Helix — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 05:52:37 +0000

Every once in a while, I have to work my way down to my Windows machine for various reasons. The reasons have to be very specific, because I’m going to use my Linux box if at all possible. Nonetheless, sometimes I just can’t avoid it. When these times happen, I find myself in need of SSH, but, alas, Windows has decided that us “dumb users” don’t need such a feature. Read on for a quickie review of a nice program I found to fill the gap.

SSH is a secure way for having remote access into a machine. I try to use some form of secure transmission no matter what I do. Be it ordering something online, or uploading a picture to post on my blog, I want to be sure that my password (or any other sensitive material) isn’t intercepted in transit. Seeing that most secure transmissions operate at a minimum of 128-bit, I feel confident that when I connect via SSH, I’m safe (2^128 = I need to get my TI out to know the answer).

A nice program to give me SSH access is called Putty. It’s not flashy, but it is functional. Basically on startup, Putty gives a simple screen to add servers to connect to in future sessions, or you can just enter the IP or domain name of the server to which you want to connect. Upon connection, you are given shell access via SSH to the remote machine.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to remain as secure as possible. Coming with Putty is an SFTP capability. This stands for Secure FTP, meaning that your FTP connections are secured as well. On Linux, I’ll use SCP, but we’ll save that for another day. On Windows, I break out SFTP to transfer files between my Windows machine and my web server, for example. This was a nice addition to a program that I wasn’t expecting. I was just trying to find a nice front-end to SSH, and Putty provided SFTP as well.

All in all, you can’t expect (or for that matter, want) a program to do more than it’s supposed to do. For SSH, I just want a secure connection, and Putty does the trick. I recommend it for all Windows users who want secure transmissions to remote machines (by the way, most Linux flavors come with the ssh client). This, as a matter of fact, should be every one of you (if you even need to connect to remote machines). Remember that telnet is “clear text,” which means I can snoop your password, wreak havoc on your system, and make you wish you heeded this quickie-review.

I found Putty at www.download.com. You’ll find it there, too.

D-Link DCS-5300W Wireless Camera Quick Update

Helix — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 23:29:09 +0000

I spoke to soon. When I wrote my after-Christmas quickie review of this camera, I didn’t fully test it. Normally, since that wasn’t a full review, the product would have to really, really fail in some major way for me to actually post an update. Well, I dug a little deeper today with this camera and found out it requires Internet Explorer to work. That means it’s useless to me, as I use a good operating system with a much better browser.

I can’t in good faith recommend any product that is browser-specific. Especially one as expensive as this camera. Therefore, I have to change the GOTC rating of this camera to 3 out of 10.

After Christmas Reviews

Helix — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 00:44:18 +0000

The best thing about being a geek after Christmas, is that you get to tinker with your (and everyone else’s) toys. Hot on the heels of Syntax’s Geek Christmas List from last week, I’m going to write a few tiny reviews of the toys I got to play with (most of which aren’t mine, unfortunately). So, take this list with you to your favorite “After Christmas Sale,” and load up on the fun things that your loved ones were too inconsiderate to get you.

I’m going to get this first one out of the way: Half Life 2. If you’re still wondering whether or not to get this game, stop. Get this game. Maximum PC rated it the best game… ever! I’ve played just a few minutes of it because I’d like to wait until–it’s a long story. Even in those few minutes, though, I’m finding Maximum PC wasn’t too far off, if at all. Now, onto less obvious things.

The USB cup warmer is a little disappointing. The idea behind it is you can wrap your cup in this warmer and plug it into your computer’s USB port. It actually keeps the cup fairly warm, or rather, it keeps it from getting cold too fast. However, the cord is too short. The cord is about two feet long, which is incredibly short. It needs to be around six feet long to be useful. GOTC rating of a 5 out of 10.

The Canon i9900 printer is nothing short of amazing. It’s an eight cartridge photo printer and the results are phenomenal. I’ve printed 4″ x 6″ and 8.5″ x 11″ photos on it, and actually got my old loupe out to look for pixelation. I can’t find anything. The best part is that I have a digital camera that has PictBridge Direct Printing. That means I don’t have to download the pictures to my computer, but I can print them directly off of the camera. If you’ve ever worked with digital photos, you know it’s a hassle to go from camera to print. It’s not that way with a direct print printer. Very, very nice piece of equipment. GOTC rating of a 9 out of 10 (email me for my complaints).

Starry Night Enthusiast is a very nice program for exploring the stars. I’m an astronomy junkie, and I wanted a little program to tinker around with the night sky, but I had obviously extremely low expectations. This program does a ~~little~~ lot of everything I need it to do. It has an astronomy dictionary, a “SkyGuide” that will help you with your local night sky, updated local sky events, constellations, and tens of thousands of stars. It tracks every comet, planet, and asteroid, as well as a ton of aforementioned stars, in real time. It also tracks satellites. So, as time passes, you can watch the screen and see a tiny blip of the Hubble Space Telescope go across your screen. Sure enough, peeking outside, there it is. GOTC rating of a 10 out of 10.

I also got to play with the D-Link DCS-5300W wireless camera. It operates over 802.11b wireless networking and can be accessed from a web browser anywhere in the world. This is a snazzy device, albeit too expensive. At 30 frames per second, it’s not choppy at all, and the quality is certainly quite nice since it’s powered by CCD’s. You can record video with MPEG-4 compression, and all if it can operate over 256-bit encryption. To top it off, it does have pan and tilt functions that can be controlled by the web browser. GOTC rating of a 8 out of 10, mostly because of the price.

Syntax has a review:

The Canon A85 is a 4.1 mega pixel camera with practically identical specs to it’s more expensive older brother, the S410. I’ve probably taken over 500 pictures since Santa dropped this under my tree a little early, and practically every one of them are gorgeous. Outdoor pictures are nothing short of amazing and indoor shots are excellent as well. I have only printed 4″x6″ and 5″x7″ prints so far, but they look superior to pictures taken with my standard issue 35mm film based camera. I haven’t gotten in to the manual settings deep enough yet, because the “auto” mode is excellent at guessing in every situation, but there are eight or nine manual setting modes as well as a movie mode that lets you capture movie clips (with audio) for up to three minutes. Canon has long been respected for the digital cameras, and the A85 is no exception to this standard. If you don’t mind the slightly larger footprint, this camera is a steal for around $75 cheaper than the S410. GOTC Rating 9 out of 10.

Actually, Syntax has two reviews:

Seems every hardcore geek these days dreams of owning the Logitech MX1000 Laser Mouse. The packaging claims “Optical is obsolete” and let me be the first to tell you – it is. Since the mouse actually uses a laser instead of the standard camera plus LED found in optical mice, gone forever is the red glow that we’ve become accustomed to. I don’t have any technical way of validating the “20x the tracking power” as claimed on the box but in my informal use and testing, I’d say that’s a pretty fair assessment of it’s capabilities. When I first plugged in the mouse, I could not keep up with the cursor on the screen because the laser tracks so fast. After adjusting to the speed, I’m happy to report that my frag levels are up in UT2k4 and my accuracy to cap the Combine in Half-Life 2 has improved as well. The only drawback (as is typical with Logitech mice) is the software. To gain any use of all the extra buttons (seems like there are about 100 of them) you’ll have to install Logitech’s SetPoint software. It is far improved from the last time I used their MouseWare utility, but I still hate having to install it. The default settings of the forward/back buttons didn’t work in Firefox for me, but a quick Google search pointed me towards the proper settings. Overall, I’d give the MX1000 a GOTC rating of 9 out of 10.

That’s it folks! I hope that your Christmas was as good as ours here at GOTC. We all look forward to continuing our tutorials and reviews in the new year. Have a happy one!

Second Annual Geek Christmas List

Syntax — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 21:27:26 +0000

Continuing our Christmas tradition around here, I’m now ready to present you with the Second Annual GetOffTheComputer.com Christmas Shopping List for Geeks. While these suggestions may be coming a little later in the season this year, have no fear, because we still have lots of great suggestions. There are several hot items to be had to geeks everywhere if cash is no option. And even if you don’t have a wad of cash to blow on your favorite geek, read on for the Second Annual GetOffTheComputer.com Top Ten Tech Toys for less than $50, or in geek terms, GOTCTTTT< =$50.

This part of the list might look a bit similar to last year. Storage devices are still high atop my list this Christmas as hard drive and flash memory device prices are still dropping. Last year I recommended an 80 gig Western Digital drive, but this year there’s no excuse for buying anything smaller than a 120 GB disk. If your geek’s computer supports them, go with Serial-ATA (aka SATA) drives of which a 120 gig model should be somewhere in the neighborhood of $90.

Several hot new rodents have surfaced in the past few weeks. Logitech’s new MX1000 is a true laser mouse and offers the finest tracking capabilities that we’ve seen so far in optical mice. This has been quite a hit among gamers so far and for around $75 street price, it’s a small price to pay to keep the geek on your list happy.

A new video card is sure to make any avid gamer ecstatic. If the “1337″ on your list don’t have a DirectX 9 compatible video card, they need one! If you’re on a budget, last year’s video card of choice, the ATI Radeon 9800 is currently available for roughly $150. If money is no object and you enjoy seeing grown men pee their pants, wrap up a nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra, but good luck finding one for less than $500. Hey, can you really put a price on seeing someone wet themselves?

LCD monitors are also gaining popularity. Pixel response times have improved dramatically over the past year and finally make flat-panel displays suitable replacements to even the hardcore geeks who have always been CRT fans. The Samsung SyncMaster 172x series of monitors is available in several colors and has received better than favorable reviews from many notable sources. The SyncMaster 172 is available from a retailer near you for the low price of around $500.

Those items way out of your price range? Then I bet a list of ten fantastic items that are under $50 is music to your ears. With no further adieu and in reverse chronological order, I present to you the Second Annual GOTCTTTT< =$50.

10. USB Christmas Tree ($10)
9. Tux Crossing Poster - for all your friends still using Wind0ze ($10)
8. Books on hardware, coding, computer history ($15-$30)
7. Logitech MX700 ($45)
6. USB Flash Drives ($25-$50)
5. Binary LED Clock ($25)
4. Their very own blog - they’re all the rage this year ($50/year)
3. iTunes gift certificate ($0.99/song)
2. DVD Burner ($45)
1. Half-Life 2 ($45)

So there you have it. This year’s Christmas shopping guide for your favorite computer guru. Since I am a little behind this year, you may just want to select “expedited shipping” on all those online orders. It may cost a little more, but believe me, but you won’t have to wait in those crazy lines and fight all the other morons and your sanity is definitely worth it.

Script To Watch A Group Of Computers

Helix — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 19:17:42 +0000

Continuing my sporadic posting on scripting, I thought I’d put up a script that I use for keeping an eye on a group of servers. Read on to see the script, and afterwards, I’ll explain what it’s doing and why I did it that way line-by-line.

This script polls a group of servers by pinging them once every five seconds. When one of the servers go down, the script sends a text message to an email address (usually my phone) and exits with error code “1.”

#!/bin/bash

# Variables go up here
TECHIE=”"
IPLIST=”192.168.0.100
192.168.0.101

192.168.0.102″

# Main loop
while true
do
for IP in $IPLIST
do
ping -c 1 “$IP”
if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
echo “$IP has gone down” | mail $TECHIE
exit 1
fi
continue
done
sleep 5
done

As you can see from the first line, I chose to write this as a BASH script for Linux. I actually have another cron job checking if it is running. If the script isn’t running, the servers are pinged to see if they are up. If the servers ARE up, then the script starts. If they are not up, it is assumed that I haven’t fixed the problem to begin with. There is no need for this script to continually page me that a server is down; therefore, it stays shut down.

There are two variables, “TECHIE” and “IPLIST.” The “TECHIE” variable is the email address (I use the email address of my phone). The “IPLIST” variable is a list of IP addresses, separated by newlines, that I want to keep an eye on. In this example, I’m using three IP addresses, 192.168.0.100, 192.168.0.101, and 192.168.0.102.

The main loop is a while loop that is an infinite loop. In other words, this script runs indefinitely until manually terminated or the exit condition existing further down exists.

The bulk of the script is in the for loop. In the first line of the for loop, I’m assigning the first IP of the “IPLIST.” Subsequent iterations through the for loop will assign the next IP in the list and so on.

Each iteration through the for loop goes through these steps:

Ping the IP once

Test the exit status of the ping command; if it’s not equal to “0,” then it failed, so

Mail the email address in the variable “TECHIE”

Exit

Notice that if the ping was successful, the if statement fails. In such a case, the next IP is taken from the IPLIST variable and the process repeats. When all IP’s have been tested, the for loop finishes. In such a case, the script sleeps for five seconds then starts over again.

That’s it. It’s a tasty little script that gets the job done. The best way to start this script is as follows:

pingtest > /dev/null &

I hope you can use this and that it made sense. If you have any questions or comments, reach me at the “Email” link above. Happy coding!

Win2PDF

Syntax — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 13:27:31 +0000

Several months back, we realized that we go through WAY too much paper here in the GetOffTheComputer.com office complex. Being the high-tech geeks that we are, we set out on a mission to move our office into the 21st century and eliminate as much paper as possible. How’d we do it you ask? I’ll spare you the boring technical details and give you a much easier solution, Win2PDF. Win2PDF is a shareware program that installs a faux printer driver on your Windows computer, allowing you to print to an Adobe Acrobat PDF file instead of paper. This may seem like a foreign idea or even somewhat silly, but there are huge advantages. This obviously won’t work if you need to turn in a term paper to your 95-year old German professor or if you’re printing out directions to your hotel in Vegas for your next family vacation, but if you’re printing a ton of pages each day for archival purposes, STOP! There is no loss in quality of the documents when you print to PDF and the cost is actually amazingly less than it’s paper counterpart. Once you have the file in PDF form, you can print only selected pages if you need them. A common occurence here is needing to print a document that spans 200 pages so that we can pick out any of the pages that have the phrase “u R 1337″ or “w3 0wnz u!” on them. Open up the PDF, search for these pages, and print only the ones you need.

Win2PDF is only one of many utilities out there that do the same thing. Win2PDF is shareware so we strongly encourage you to purchase and register a full version so you can stay legal.

The example…
Let’s use a 117 page report that I needed last week. The average ream containing 500 pages of your typical, boring, 20lb office paper costs around $2.50. That breaks down to $0.005 (half of a penny) per sheet meaning that for 117 pages it would’ve costed around 59 cents for the paper alone. Add in the cost of ink (black HP inkjet cartridge) and you’re looking at nearly $2.70 that I just spit out of the printer. That may not seem like a lot, but that’s only one report. Now the digital side for all you still reading. Printed to PDF, this file weighs in at a whopping 138KB. let’s assume we’re gonna buy a dedicated drive to store our new PDF files on and spend $82 for a 120GB Western Digital. That amounts to $0.000683/MB of storage or in an even smaller increment, $0.000000683/KB, meaning that to store our measley little 138KB file it costs $0.0000943. Now, you decide what’s best for you.

PHP: The Mail() Function

Helix — Sun, 14 Nov 2004 00:35:53 +0000

I recently finished a little PHP program to process online forms for my work. I couldn’t find anything on the net generic enough to do everything I needed it to do. Basically, this program parses the PDF and emails the recipient with the information, among a few other things. For the purpose of this tutorial, that’s all that needs to be said, anyway. Today I’m going to give you a little write-up on the mail function in PHP.

This is one of those catch-all functions that I use and abuse even on my own system. I have a little script using the mail function to text my cell phone, my wife’s cell phone, and email my main email account every time I get a voice mail message. It’s a necessary function and one you can do a lot with.

Let’s take a look at the syntax per the PHP site.

bool mail ( string to, string subject, string message [, string additional_headers [, string additional_parameters]])

Reading left-to-right, only the first three are absolutely necessary. First, notice that the function returns a bool argument (true or false) depending on if the function succeeds or not. Then, the first three arguments are as follows: recipient, subject, and message. That’s pretty self-explanatory, but just to make sure, here’s an example (don’t forget your PHP tags).

mail (”notarealemailaddress@atleastihope.com”, “testing”, “Hey, just a test”);

This will mail “notarealemailaddress@atleastihope.com” an email with subect “testing” and body that reads “Hey, just a test” (no quotes).

Here’s another example:

mail (”example@example.com”, “testing”, $body,
“From: me@myemailaddress.com\r\n” .
“Reply-To: me@myemailaddress.com\r\n” .
“X-Mailer: PHP/” . phpversion());

This mails “example@example.com” with the same subject and message that is contained in the variable “$body.” What follows in the fourth argument are the additional mail headers. I’ve set the “From,” “Reply-To,” and “X-Mailer” mail headers. The periods are concatenations, of course, and each argument has “\r\n” for both carriage return and newline, which is necessary.

That’s about it. For more info, see the mail function over at www.php.net. Thanks for reading and happy coding!

War: Blockbuster vs. Netflix

Syntax — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 23:01:15 +0000

Online rental of DVD’s is not a new concept by any means. What is new in recent months is that another provider has surfaced. Several months back, the chain rental store Blockbuster entered this market to compete with the existing companies offering this service such as Netflix and Wal-Mart. All of these companies offer practically an identical service on paper, but how it’s handled in reality is quite different. The company sends your movies in an envelope that doubles as the return envelope with the postage prepaid. All you have to do is open the package, watch the movie, seal the package back up, and put it in your mailbox.

I’ve been a long time, off-and-on customer of Netflix but when Blockbuster announced their offering, I jumped at the chance to give it a try. Competition is one of my favorite aspects of free enterprise and the timing for Blockbuster entering the online scene couldn’t have been any better. It was around this same time that Netflix announced price increases to all of their existing customers on the 3-out plan. For the past four years that I had been with Netflix, I had been paying $19.95USD per month to have out three DVD’s at a time, with unlimited rentals each month. Within days of being notified that my charges were increasing to $21.99 to allow them to “improve the rental experience” I found out about Blockbuster’s new online rental service.

Blockbuster’s offering was different though. Not only could I have three movies at a time, but they were also issuing two coupons every month good for one free movie or game rental inside a brick-and-mortar Blockbuster store for $17.99 per month. So, for $5.00 cheaper each month and with two “bonus” in-store rentals for when I get a strong urge to run and rent Lady and the Tramp again, I signed up for their free two-week trial to give it a shot and things went extremely well. Blockbuster had a few key advantages over Netflix, mainly in the shipping department. Netflix’s nearest shipping center to me was in Greensboro, a two-day trip by U.S. Mail when shipping DVD’s back and forth. I quickly discovered when my first discs arrived from Blockbuster that they were shipping movies from Charlotte, a whole day closer as far as the mail is concerned. This cut two days of turnaround time off the round trip of a disc, meaning in theory that I could watch more movies during the course of a month. After two weeks of nice, quick shipping and things going well I decided to continue my Blockbuster membership and cancel Netflix.

Jump ahead one month and there had been a few problems with Blockbuster. With Netflix, if I ever had two discs that I wanted to send back at the same time, I simply stuck them both in the same prepaid mailer and dropped it in any mailbox. The first time I did this with Blockbuster, they received both movies without a hitch. The next time, the only logged back in one of the movies and not the second one. I thought maybe it was a one-time glitch, but since then I’ve tried it a few other times and Blockbuster has repeatedly “lost” the second disc. Even stranger is the fact that I can send away two movies in separate envelopes on Monday, Blockbuster receives one of them on Tuesday afternoon, but by Friday, they still haven’t received the second one. I’d almost jump at the chance to blame the U.S. Postal service if I hadn’t seen this happen with Blockbuster before. Each time this has happened, I’ve clicked the “Report a problem” link and let them know that I have sent the disc back five days ago and they still had yet to process it. Within 24 hours they usually send out the next disc, but I’ve lost about three days while waiting to see if they were going to get the second disc. But enough about this, you get the idea.

Problem number two is movie availability. It seems that no matter what I want to watch, I have to wait for it. From just released movies to Casino from 1995, they were all unavailable. At one time I had 23 movies in queue and only SIX were available, those six being CSI: Season Three. Apparently the Blockbuster algorithm for shipping is flawed as well. If the top movie on your list is on a waiting list, you wait for it. Common sense says go down the queue and ship the first movie that is available, but apparently Blockbuster online says no to that philosophy.

Finally, customer service is a hot issue with me, no matter what the service, product, or circumstance. If you don’t believe me, you can ask my wife or anyone who goes out in public with me. Once the incident with movies not being received happened twice, I contacted Blockbuster’s customer service department using the insanely too long form on their web site to let them know I was displeased. For fun, I threw in a one-liner about how in four years of using Netflix, they’d only lost one movie and that the speed, accuracy, and availability of their movies was worth $10 more per month than Blockbuster. My message pretty much demanded a personal response to a few questions and comments, but you and I both know what I got: the form message stating that if I experienced problems with movies to use the “Report a problem link” from my queue. So, what’s a man to do?

Fast forward >> >> Three months later, today actually, I canceled my Blockbuster account and reinstated my Netflix service. Upon logging into my Netflix queue, I found that they had saved my queue from when I canceled several months back. I thought that was pretty kind of them. In addition to my queue, they also saved the hundreds of movies that I’ve rated on their site in order that they can make recommendations to me on what I should watch next. About a month ago, Netflix announced that they were slashing prices on their services. My target plan of three-out was only going to be $17.99. To compete, Blockbuster drops their rate to $17.49 per month. Worth it ya think? Yeah, I think not. It’s good to be back “home” with Netflix.