In this Market, Rent - Don't Buy

At the moment I'm looking at a shelving unit in my office. This unit is designed to hold DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs... It currently holds 180 DVD movies, 80 TV season box sets, and a small set of VHS tapes. In the past year I have taken an item off that shelving unit exactly ZERO times.

My first DVD was purchased in 1999, and my last was probably in 2011. I've come to realize that the "cost per view" of each of my DVDs far exceeds the cost of renting each of those viewings.

These days, I don't rent any movies from a video store (I'm not sure where I'd find one anymore). I don't even use those Redbox kiosks at the grocery stores. I prefer to stream video rentals directly to my home theater because of the convenience. I use a service called vudu (yes, all lowercase), but there's Amazon, iTunes, and other places to rent streaming movies. I also use Netflix to stream whatever content they have for $8/month.

It's not really news that digital distribution is becoming more popular. The fall of Blockbuster is indicative of that. But I'd like to take a moment to urge my readers to rent their digital media instead of buying it. There are several reasons I recommend renting streaming movies instead of buying them:

• You don't really own them. If the studio ever decides to rescind the rights to a movie (there's been some close calls recently).
• If the service you bought from shuts down, you don't have your movies anymore.
• Lock-in: if you buy a movie on iTunes, you'll never be able to play it on an Android device or a home theater device that isn't the Apple TV ( meaning you can't use 3TG's favorite media streamer, the Roku 3). The same would go for any movies you purchased on the Google Play store.
• You might not watch it enough. As discussed earlier, it's good to think about whether the movie you're buying will be watched enough to make it worth the purchase.

If you have to buy a digital copy of a movie (kids do watch movies an endless number of times), then try to find something that will give you access to your content in the most places. The movie studios are desperately trying to fight piracy and also give users a convenient way to play back the movies they've bought. The service they've come up with is called Ultraviolet, which is a service that keeps track of the films to which you've purchased the digital streaming rights. These movies can be viewed through a few different services, most notably vudu. You can even take your old DVDs to Walmart and buy the ultraviolet for $2-5. I still don't trust Ultraviolet to be around forever, but at least in the meantime you can watch the content on multiple devices.

Bunnies Can Slow Your PC

Is your computer running slowly? The culprit could be dust.

The vast majority of computers are cooled by air, and most of the time this is done with fans moving room temperature air past the much hotter internals of a computer. Metal heatsinks sit on the hottest parts and draw the heat away from them. The air being moved by the fans cools off these heatsinks and carries the heat out of the computer's case.

If dust collects inside a computer, it can clog up fans, heatsinks, and other parts. This reduces the airflow and thus the effectiveness of the air cooling system. Your computer has temperature sensors in key places to sense when parts are getting too hot. In order to keep these parts from burning out, your computer will automatically decrease performance so they're generating less heat to begin with. In extreme cases, the computer will even shut off to save its self. In the photo here you can see two heatsinks caked in dust. Air is unable to get inbetween the fins of the heatsink, so the center of them remain hot. It's even possible for dust to encase a fan so much that it stops spinning.

Everyone has dust in their computers, even those with the cleanest homes. These airflow cooling systems do one thing all day: pull air through the computer's case. It's inevitable that dust is going to collect in the system.

I recommend that every so often - once a year is probably enough - you take your computer outside and use a can of compressed air to blow the dust out of the system. You may need two cans, since they can lose effectiveness the more you use it (and they get really cold). Laptops are just as susceptible to this problem, so make sure you clean those out too.

This is a project you can do yourself, but you might be wary of the delicate components inside a typical computer. If so, give us a call and we'll give that computer a thorough dusting!

Fun fact: in the beginning of this post I mentioned that the "vast majority" of computers are cooled by air. Another cooling method (generally only used by hardcore PC builders) might surprise you: water! Water cooling can eliminate the fans in a case entirely. Water is pumped through tubes the pass over blocks placed on the important heat-generating components, and is then usually brought out of the computer where it's fed through a pump that cools the water down before it's fed back into the computer. It's a very effective cooling method, but it's pretty expensive and clearly the effects are pretty bad if there's a leak anywhere in the system.

Tip: this post was just as much about air cooling as it was about dust. Air cooling uses ambient air to cool down a computer, but that air needs to be relatively cool (room temperature) to do its job. You can have a squeaky clean computer but if it's being cooled with warm/hot air, you'll see the same problems I described above. For this reason, I urge my clients to make sure there's a decent amount of room around their computers so the air has somewhere to go. One of the worst offenders of overheating are the "computer desks" (like the one pictured here) which include a compartment where you can put your computer and close a door in front of it. This creates a compartment of hot air that doesn't recycle. Keep your computer out for the best performance and the longest life.

Online Shopping: 3TG Style

Shopping online is easier than ever. Here, I'm going to talk about a few of my favorite ways to shop online for savings, convenience, the ability to find the right items. Just in time for the holidays, here are some of the tips and sites 3TG recommends:

Amazon

It's not much of a revelation that Amazon.com is a popular online shopping destination (at the moment it's the largest online retailer). But I have to mention it because it's the place where I purchase almost everything, from gadgets to cat litter (making sure to use CamelCamelCamel.com, discussed in this previous entry). I shop at Amazon because the prices are usually better, I'm able to find almost everything I'm looking for, and because Amazon Prime is such a compelling attractor.

Amazon Prime

With Amazon Prime, you're given the option to ship all eligible items in two days for free, or one day for $4 (most of the items on Amazon are eligible). Prime costs $79/year, so it might not be for you if you don't shop at Amazon very often. However, that subscription also gets you access to everything the Amazon Prime Instant Video library. This is a subset of their streaming video offerings and includes movies like Skyfall and The Exorcist, and TV like Downton Abbey and The Good Wife, all of which you can watch as often as you like. To be honest, Netflix has a better selection (especially their original shows), but Prime builds their service into their shipping benefits.

Woot!

There are few shopping experiences online that are as fun as Woot.com. Woot began with a simple premise: sell a single discount product for 24 hours until they run out, and spruce the sale up with a humorous description. The site has expanded far beyond that into various categories, but they still follow this general format and you can still find great bargains. Most of the products on Woot's site are clearance items or refurbished, but that means they have some deals. I've purchased a factory-refurbished Dyson vacuum there for at least $100 less than new, and it works like new.

My advice is to sign up for Woot's daily email digest, which shows you the items and prices on all their sites. If you missed out on those Best Buy black Friday deals for an inexpensive TV, you'll regularly find really good prices on TVs at Woot and the digest will let you know when one comes up.

Other tips

• Amazon has a really nice wishlist feature. There, you can create wishlists for yourself, and even better you can create lists for each of your loved ones. I find this extremely convenient because when a gift idea strikes I can add it to these gift idea lists, so when birthdays and holidays roll around I have a recorded idea of what to get.
• Sometimes the item you want to buy can only be found at an odd online store where you'll never shop again. Maybe you don't entirely trust the site but you really want to buy that item. Well if you use GMail, here's a neat trick to keep your spam down: simply give them your usual email address (bob@gmail.com) and add a '+' sign and something to distinguish it (like bob+nospam@gmail.com). This way, if you ever start seeing unwanted emails going to that address, you can filter them out. This way you get almost infinite email addresses. (this tip only works with GMail).
• Never buy an HDMI cable for that new home theater device at places like Best Buy (you'll get ripped off). Purchase it online or when you have 3TG come out to install that new device!
• Looking for a gift idea? Check out the 3TG product pages, which includes a fun gift idea section.
• Finally, check back with this blog and follow 3TG on Twitter and Facebook for future online shopping tips. You'll often see posts about particularly good deals on electronics.

Tech Tip: Prowling the Amazon

Amazon.com is one of the best places to shop online (or anywhere). The selection is incredible, the user reviews are a huge help in deciding which products to buy, and Amazon Prime is addictive in its ability to get you almost anything in two days.

Perhaps you have your eye on a product, but feel it's still a little too expensive. Maybe you'd like to know if it was ever sold for less than the current price. Check out this website:

www.camelcamelcamel.com

Camelcamelcamel (I'll call it "CCC") does two main things. First, it shows you a price history for products, so you can see if the price has ever been lower than it is right now. Notice that in the chart below, you can see that 3TG's favorite desktop mouse, the Logitech Performance MX, which is going for $45 as of this post, was listed for $85 about 15 days ago. If you had purchased the mouse at one of these peak times (or even the average price of around $75), you would have missed one of the several times it hit $50:

Seeing price histories is fine, but how do you know when to buy? Where CCC shines is its price alerts. First, you sign up for a free account with CCC. Then, search for the product you're interested in. Next, enter the price you're hoping the product comes down to. This can either be based on an actual previous amount, or if you're very patient, you can enter a hypothetical sale price (maybe that mouse will go for $20 for a day). That's it! Now, every time the price drops below the price you've set, you'll receive a notification.

Sometimes it's hard to resist pulling the trigger on an online purchase. But if you take a moment to check the prices on products you purchase at Amazon, you just might save a lot of money this holiday season.