Amazon Price Comparisons on the iPhone

As some of you may have noticed, Amazon prices fluctuate constantly. It is in your best financial interest to known when the price is as low as possible, and to choose that time to make purchases. Enter the website camelcamelcamel. They index the prices on Amazon.com, so that you can instantly bring up history of pricing for that product. If you create an account, you can add watches on items, so that you will be notified when the price drops below a specified threshold. This is great for those purchases which you don't have to have now, but that you would like to make someday.

The chart below is for a pressure cooker that I was looking at a while ago:

As you can see, July 9th would have been a very bad day to purchase this product...costing $18.98 more than the day before or after. Incidentally, the price was a whopping $119.99 when I created the watch, but I could see from the chart that was the highest price ever. Without a tool like camelcamelcamel, you would probably never know.

To help make using camelcamelcamel easier, Josh Lewis posted a bookmarklet on his blog. This bookmarklet allows you to click the bookmark from any product page, and you will be immediately taken to the corresponding price chart at camelcamelcamel.

Unfortunately, the bookmarklet did not work on my iPhone...

It turns out that Amazon formats their page differently for use on the iPhone--and probably other smart phones as well. The bookmarklet was looking for information that just isn't there on the web pages sent to phones.

So...I modified it to work with either version of the Amazon webpage. If you want to try this, just bookmark the link below. Don't just click the link, because it won't work. On most browsers the easiest way to add it is to just drag the link to your bookmark list. The easiest way to add it on an iPhone is to add it from your computer in whichever browser you use to sync bookmarks to your iPhone, then perform a sync. Now, visit an Amazon product page, choose that bookmark, and you should see the price history graph appear.

View Amazon Price History
(Fixed for mobile devices, original credit to Josh Lewis)

As a note, camelcamelcamel is supported by affiliate revenue they receive when you click through their site to get to Amazon. So, if you like their service, use their links to get to Amazon, and you will help them stay around.

Bright Lake (Old Settler's Park) Fishing

Friday night on the way home I decided to stop at Old Settler's Park across the street from my neighborhood and try fishing in Bright Lake, which is really just a small pond. I had a container of very dead worms that had been sitting in my car all day. The sunfish just couldn't get enough of them! I have never actually seen a fish caught in that lake, but I probably caught at least 20 of them, including this bass that latched onto about a half inch piece of a worm.

I really had intended to release them all, but then I killed a sunfish that swallowed a hook, so I decided to start keeping some of the larger ones--unfortunately it didn't occur to me to take a good picture with the heads still on.

In additional to the fish, I managed to catch about an 8" turtle that liked worms too! Luckily it was just caught in the lip, so I was able to release it with a quick flick of my pliers. I also had a snake trying to eat fish off my stringer!

Fishing at lake Pflugerville

Well I finally decided to take up some Texas fishing. Lake Plugerville is about 10 miles from home. It is a small reservoir that was created a few years ago, but people catch some decent fish out of it.

The first picture is a largemouth bass I caught on my second cast Tuesday night. The others is from Friday morning when Steven and I went fishing before work. We caught at least a dozen small sunfish and minnows. This was one of my smallest, so it made a funny picture. I actually managed to catch a blacktail shiner about the size of my pinky, but it bounced away while I was snapping a photo. I actually didn't think anything that small would be possible to catch with a hook.

Kitchen cabinet pullouts...phase 2!

Well, last time I showed some pictures of the new cabinet pullout I made and installed in my kitchen. Well today, I built another and installed it in the same cabinet to make my first double decker pullout! We don't have it fully loaded yet, but we should be able to fit loads more stuff in that cabinet than we did before, and no more crawling inside to dig around for what we are looking for.

As you can see in the picture both are full extension drawers, which is great. In the picture they look short, but the cabinet is actually just wide--the drawers are a full 23 inches deep.

Even though I have now made several boxes with my dovetail jig, I still hit some snags this time. First I accidentally cut the wrong corners together, forcing me to recut the front of the drawer. After building the whole box, I realized I had cut the front and back half an inch too wide, so I had to cut an and off of each and run them through the jig again. Oh well, I guess this is why the jig says that with practice you will rarely make mistakes. I guess there just is no perfect with this thing!

3 years later...another cabinet drawer!

So those of you who have found it in your souls to travel to Texas to visit know that we have a couple pull-out drawers in our kitchen cabinets. The first one we installed was purchased from our cabinet manufacturer. I was disappointed with the 3/4 extension slides and otherwise junky quality of this product and decided to build my own. The second drawer in this picture is the drawer I build in December 2006, which utilizes the full depth of the cabinet and has full extension slides.

I built this drawer out of pre-finished baltic birch drawer sides I ordered from either Rockler or Woodcraft. Building this drawer involved some improvising and messy router work, since I didn't have a table saw to do the joints I wanted to do. You can see in this picture my makeshift joint, along with my makeshift extenders for the drawer's face frame bracket to allow it to clear the door hinge.

After making the first drawer, I ordered materials to outfit my whole kitchen with pull-out cabinet drawers. I also ordered a dovetail jig to improve upon the makeshift joints I used. Finally, after all the supplies sat in my garage for three years, I finally made another drawer. This time I didn't use face frame brackets, and just installed filler wood in my cabinets so that I could screw the drawer slides to the side.

In addition, I spent the time to learn to use my dovetail jig! It took a couple hours to figure out how to use it and get everything adjusted properly, but now using this drawer stock I can create half-blind dovetail joints for a drawer in about 5 minutes! For a small box I made the joints were tight enough that I didn't even need glue, but for this larger drawer (about 19 x 22 inches) I used a few dabs of wood glue in the joints.

So, I am pretty happy with the new drawer. As you can see it is a bit crowded, so I intend to add another drawer above this one to hold small pans, lids, etc... Let's just hope it doesn't take me another three years to get to that one!

For all you non-truck owners

Ok, so I know that almost everyone that reads this has a truck, but I don't. This can make things a bit hard when I need to do something like haul around bags of manure or pick up lots of free mulch from the city brush recycling center.

Well I just thought I'd tell you about a nifty item I found, probably in the back of Family Handyman magazine or something. It is called the InteraTARP, and it basically a tarp made into a big box shape to fit the interior of a SUV or van. With it I was able to cleanly haul about a yard of free mulch this morning, with very little effort and virtually no mess.

I'm sure you could do the same thing with a regular tarp, but it is handy to have one that is already shaped like the vehicle. I especially like the flap on the back that keeps the back of the van clean. I also found today that to unload I could just set the wheelbarrow next to the back of the van, place the flap in the wheelbarrow, then use my rake to pull a whole load of mulch into the wheelbarrow.

So, if you don't have a truck, and want to haul messy things, take a look!

Customer Service: HP vs Costco

I had a problem with my HP printer the other day. This was a new OfficeJet that we bought in February, because we wanted a wireless printer. Our previous HP had worked fine for years, so I didn't feel bad about buying another HP.

Boy did that change last week. About a week after replacing the print cartridge for the first time, it started complaining that an incompatible ink cartridge was installed. After running out of ideas from their website, I called HP technical support, who rather quickly decided to send me a new printer. This seemed crazy to me...how did they know it was the printer and not the cartridge? Oh well, I figured they knew what they were doing.

They didn't. After receiving the printer, I was required to install my old ink cartridge, after which the new printer gave me the same incompatible cartridge error. I called HP, thinking they would quickly send me out a new ink cartridge, and we would be done with it.

Once again, they didn't. They wanted me go through all the same troubleshooting steps I did the first time. When I refused on the basis that I had already done it all, they said they could do nothing to help me. I have to admit that I became the stereotypical furious consumer at that point. Through the course of the call I was put on hold for long periods of time, was told that I could not speak to a supervisor or manager, and was refused when I requested any way to identify the person I was speaking to (all he would tell me that his name was Richard). Finally while being put on hold, I went ahead and did the troubleshooting again just to get this call over with. After I told this to "Richard," I was placed on hold and he never came back...

Wow.

After this I was so mad I packed everything up and hauled it back to Costco--four months after my purchase. I no longer had the original packaging, just a ziploc bag with all the manuals and cables. After spending at least two hours on the phone with HP, Costco took about two minutes to refund all of my money for my printer and the open pack of ink I had purchased. This gave me almost the exact amount of money that I needed in order to buy a new Canon Pixma printer (from Costco, of course).

After comparing the HP OfficeJet J4680 I returned to the Canon Pixma MX860, there is no comparison between the two. Everything about the Canon build quality and feature set is superior to the HP. I don't feel like going into the details, but compared to the Canon, the HP just seems like something the HP "engineers" churned out as fast as possible without regard to quality.

Two things I learned from this:

1. Just because a company's products were once good, doesn't mean they will stay that way.

2. Costco's return policy rocks. After this experience I want to make all my major purchases Costco, even if it is a bit more expensive (which it usually is not).