Written and curated by Cole Conrad
Are you a fan of technology?
Do you like art?
Would you like to find others with similar interests?
Using the latest technology and today’s most important minds, Sandwich Video in partnership with The McGarblin Group and Ludlow Ventures bring you these answers and more on Computer Show. Be sure to stay tuned for more episodes soon[0].
[0] - As long as the investment in Intellivision pays off.
08/02/2015 Update: Re-framed this post to reflect monthly items without a one off purchase and provide more context as to the potential Jet has to add savings based on how much you buy at once. Thanks to Reddit user pasttense for the feedback that lead to this re-framing.
Last weekend I discovered a new service for shopping online called Jet through this conversation on Twitter. I was intrigued to see if this new service could compete with Amazon on pricing, specifically for Subscribe & Save items. We’ve used Amazon Subscribe & Save for about two years now to have our staple household items delivered to us on a schedule and (primarily) to save between 5% and 20% off of those items in doing so. The biggest downside for us with Amazon Subscribe & Save as of late is that a lot of the offerings that qualify for the program are bulk size quantities and we’ve moved into an apartment that’s a third the size of our previous home[1]. We just don’t have room for all items to come in bulk orders like we used to and I’m sure we’re not alone in that. After perusing Jet’s site I decided to build our monthly cart and see what our cost differences would be. I’m going to share those differences below in the simplest form, by count.
| Items | Amazon | Jet |
| Pampers Size 5 Diapers | $0.29/diaper | $0.23/diaper |
| Pampers Sensitive Wipes | $0.02/wipe | $0.02/wipe |
| Charmin Basic Toilet Paper | $0.56/roll | $0.29/roll |
| Puffins cereal | $3.95/box | $2.51/box |
| Peter Rabbit Organics Pumpkin, Carrot And Apple Packets | $1.75/packet | $0.73/packet |
| Barbara's Morning Oat Crunch Cereal | $4.30/box | $3.91/box |
| Tide HE Original Scent, 100-Ounce Bottle | $11.05/bottle | $8.69/bottle |
| Peter Rabbit Organics Sweet Potato, Corn & Apple Packets | $1.92/packet | $1.33/packet |
| Seventh Generation Natural Fabric Softener | $4.98/bottle | $4.44/bottle |
| CoffeeSock Chemex Filter | $6.16/filter | $5.35/filter |
| Opti-Free Puremoist Multi-Purpose Disinfecting Solution | $8.02/bottle | $6.67/bottle |
| Total (when buying one of each item) | $42.99 | $34.18 |
| Total savings on monthly items alone | $8.82 | 20.5% |
While everything above provides a fair representation of a regular month’s order, there is one last item that I ordered which shows where the real power of Jet kicks in. With Jet, the more you buy the more you (can) save. In this case I ordered a hand mixer as I’ve been making chocolate chip cookies more frequently and our literal hand mixer recently broke which has left me using wooden spoons like an animal. With all of the above items in my cart I received a substantial discount on the hand mixer as you can see below. Adding this to the total calculations adds another 12% to the savings Jet may provide compared to Amazon when purchasing items together.
| Hamilton Beach SoftScrape 6-Speed Hand Mixer | $38.49 | $20.72 |
| Total savings on monthly items with the hand mixer | $26.59 | 32.63% |
You can find the calculations behind everything above here. I highly recommend you check it out as there are links to each product along with the breakdown. It was compiled in Soulver.
I wish that the amount of time I spent compiling the breakdown in cost above was able to stand as a solid argument as to which service was cheaper but the truth is that we live in the age of dynamic pricing . The main difference between buying these products from Amazon or Jet is the algorithm used to give me these prices at the time I went to purchase them. Amazon has long been the master of dynamic pricing with the largest product base at their disposal to continue honing the ability to supply us with giant boxes of Nerds at cut throat prices. Jet admits that dyanamic pricing is their competitive advantage while (wisely) bludgeoning the explanation of their algorithm with Kumail Nanjiani as the jester in their video explaining how the service works.
Overall my experience with Jet has at least gotten me interested enough to continue using it during my free 6 month trial[2] to replace my monthly subscribe and save purchases if it comes out ahead in cost. It’s going to take a lot to untangle my Amazon usage but competition is always a good thing.
1.0 Innovations newest creation is a bigger version of their SETA stand which I reviewed last year and still use daily. As has been the case with every product they've released thus far, the SETA Tablet Stand is currently being funded for production on Kickstarter.
While there may be customer demand for this product I'm not currently looking for a stand of this sort for my iPad. My personal preference is 1.0 Innovation's first product, the XFLEX Stand which I've still yet to buy for myself but I have friends who have and love it. If you're looking for a simple stand to house your iPad on I can assume this will do you well.
I was cleaning my backup hard drives today and started to find old projects from college and high school. Amongst the heap I found a file titled "version 1.0". Inside was a website directory so I went ahead and opened index.html. I was instantly transported back to 2005.
Side note: I've put all the sites up on a server so the links on the photo of each site is live. V1's source code is especially interesting to look at seeing as to what it was spit out of...
It all started with my first personal website... And it was built with iWeb.
iWeb was a WYSIWYG website creation tool that was introduced in iLife '06 and lived a long and healthy life until Apple killed it alongside the MobileMe transition to iCloud in 2012. It generated downright awful code in the background but allowed the user to drag and drop elements in a fashion similar to Pages or Numbers. This was at a time where Dreamweaver was the tool of choice that I was being taught how to build HTML with in college. Dreamweaver was still more work (and often awkwardly freaked out when attempting drag and drop interactivity with what you were building). So in stepped iWeb and what I can't believe I'm actually going to share publicly. Again.
It was aptly titled What's Crackalatin?
It physically ails me to look at this site today. While it encapsulates me from age 17 to 18 and that brings back some fond memories; the design is like having hot knives pierce my eyeballs. The content isn't any better. I used to treat my blog as a diary that I left open on the internet. Such a bleeding heart of teenage emotion here. You can also check out the mohawk I used to rock that nearly cost me the ability to graduate high school. I'll leave it to you to find that easter egg.
By the time I put V2 together I had about a year of college under my belt. I started college with a focus on networking and communications but quickly found myself confused and bored learning about IP addressing and the binary calculations involved in the process. I wanted color and animations and code! I needed something that would engage me in a way that made college enjoyable so I switched majors to Multimedia Design and Development in between semester one and semseter two. I was learning Flash, HTML 4, CSS and graphic design. It was awesome. I knew that my current site was garbage and I could now build something from scratch by writing my own code. Thus, version two of What's Crackalatin? was born.
The design is comprised of multiple images acting as links and arranged in a table. There's even a banner for the long defunct Bear and Yeti Designs that my pal Dave Shepherd and I ran for about 2 years while in college. While I have backups of the blogs throughout time, I don't have backups of the WordPress databases so sadly my old blogs that ran on Wordpress are going to stay buried (for the time being). The design on this site is simplistic and painfully scattered. I used to think that every graphic deserved to have it's own font (which is a terrible decision). My portfolio from that time is also linked here and is a kick back to when I was involved with projects such as this awful, awful website that still stands as an example of archaic and terrible design. Every single site I built back then is dead and gone. Huge loss...
Version 2 of my personal site may have lasted the longest of all designs thus far. For roughly four years version 2 represented my personal braaaannnd online. That's just sad. To call what follows here version 3 is really a cop out. It's an image I created with a link to my about.me page. This was the only thing that resided at dabigc.com for nearly a year. Such procrastination.
I decided in 2010 to dump the inscrutable What's Crackalatin? slogo (yes, I just said slogo) and just use the "pseudonym" of my most common username online. My new site would live at dabigc.com and would eventually be way better than that junk I'd previously made. I thought that the whole idea of using a pseudonym was slick and that it would get people to search for me by using my psedonym instead of my name. Why? Why would any sane person want to break away from their own name? Because of Cole "The Polar Bear" Konrad. That's why. Searching for Cole Conrad on Google has consistently provided results of this guy and asked if you want to see results for Cole Conrad, like so. I live in the Polar Bear's shadow and used to think that I could circumvent this by using dabigc as my individualization. So many bad decisions. I decided to put up a placeholder site with a tongue-in-cheek nod to the whole thought process above.
When I finally got around to putting version 4 together I was really looking to create what I wanted my about.me page to look like (and they still look about the same as of this writing).
I used a CSS box with rounded corners and the opacity turned down to stuff a blurb about me into. Outside of that I used some social media buttons to link outward to services I used and a jQuery backstretch javascript to ensure that the left aligned background image of me in all my alternative (read: hipster) glory would resize to the window. I felt much better about what I'd built here as my whole intention at this point was to control what people would find if they looked for me online. It was simple and to the point, much like an about.me page and that's all I wanted.
I decided I wanted to start focusing on writing online and having that be the first thing that came up when I started to get the itch to change the website up again. So I began working on version 5 which is what you see currently when navigating to dabigc.com.
It had been two years that my site had sat silent, looking like an about.me page and I wanted to force myself to start writing more and have that be the focus of what you first saw when to went looking for me online. I thought about building my own theme for Wordpress and the mere idea overwhelmed me. So I took the easy (and much traveled) way out. I visited what I believe to be one of the better Wordpress theme sites out there, WooThemes, to find something that I liked. I landed on Hustle and then created what's currently the logo for the site. The logo has all five letters of dabigc in it with a focus on the "c" since I'm the "c" behind the site. It really has no other aim than to reinforce the site's name but it doesn't make me nauseous like a lot of my older design work. I finalized the site while I was on this trip. I did it all from my iPad mini on the bus ride back from Passion 2013. I still remember Josh Maze asking me what I was doing as it wasn't easy to manipulate the Wordpress backend and an FTP client on a 7.9" touch display.
While version 5 of my site definitely looks the best thus far, the site's naming had long been an awful choice and was honestly only slightly less embarassing than telling people my website resided at whatscrackalatin.com. So I started thinking about writing something that was more focused on what I was immersed in at the time; technology's role in education. Thus version 6 of my site came to be and Course Code was born.
I started going through different names on Hover as it would be pointless to re-brand to a difficult domain name since that was my primary reason for re-branding in the first place. I was blown away when I found coursecode.net was available. It seemed like a mistake that somebody hadn't already grabbed the name but there it was. I jumped all over it. Once I had the domain name I sat on it for a few weeks as I waffled on what the site should look like and if I would stick with Wordpress as the backend for the site. I decided to give Squarespace a try to avoid getting my hands dirty as I knew that I'd get distracted messing around with code if I didn't. My aim was to write. That's it. I wasn't going to screw with the look of the site and end up miles away from my original intent. So I started with the Amelie theme and adjusted it to my liking. I also slapped together what may be the laziest approach to a "logo" that you can create. I made a QR code that pointed to coursecode.net and slapped it above the name in the sidebar. To be fair, I rushed to put the final touches on Course Code a few nights before recording an episode of Out of School with Bradley Chambers. Casper Focus had just been announced and I wanted to write about it before the upcoming recording so I slapped things together in a rush to make that happen. I started to write fairly often and then the inevitable happened. The writing well dried up and I was back to a post here and there. This lead to version 7.
I took the feedback of a few friends and my own self-awareness of how bad the QR Code looked and decided to make Course Code look more like what I wanted it to. Simple, focused on the content and easily readable. I'd had Gabe Weatherhead's post on MacDrifter about his redesign for speed and legibility in my head for months before I touched Course Code's design again and it heavily influenced the approach I've taken with the current look of the site. I'm using pretty large text (20px) and bold Sans-Serif fonts that are easily readable and put the words and images front and center. No sidebars, simple navigation and plenty of posts before you have to click through to the next page of content. Gone is the QR Code (hallelujah!). Instead, the header let's you know that you're reading Course Code and nothing more. I'm content with the look of the site as it stands. We'll see how long that lasts.
Even if it's horrifying when looking back at where my taste and direction were scattered at certain points along the way, the progression I've had since first becoming interested in web design back in high school has been really satisfying. There are fond memories tied to every revision of the site and what prompted me to invest the time I have into the part of my online presence I own. I'm lucky to have found the backups I did but there were pieces that were missing. Luckily I was able to piece them together using archive.org's Way Back Machine. It made me realize the value of what they're doing and how important it is to have an archive of the history of the internet as it ages. When I listened to episode 98 of CMD+Space a few months back I heard Andy Baio talking about the importance of the archive.org's work but I didn't really comprehend it. I'd be truly saddened if I had no way to pull up the work I've put online in the past and share it with my son one day. As the internet continues to become a bigger part of how people represent themselves it will hold more of who they are and eventually who they were. The work that the archive.org team is doing is complicated and has to adapt to the new technologies that are yet to come in order to preserve the full spectrum of what we create online. For those reasons I recommend getting involved or donating to archive.org to help keep the Way Back Machine alive and advancing alongside the market.
I can't believe I've been online with my own space for nearly a decade now. I can't imagine where things will go from here. All I can hope for is that my taste will continue to evolve and that I'll continue to contribute in my own small ways.
Update: In the hours I've been using my Mac since I implemented this fix my machine has been running so much better. The Instant-On plug-in must be so deeply integrated with core pieces of OS X that it makes a dramatic difference in the way the system runs if the plug-in isn't yet supported.
If you're running the developer preview of OS X Yosemite and
The Instant On plug-in is most likely the culprit of your audio issues. I know this was the issue for me.
To fix the issue you'll need to remove the plug-in located at
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/
Your audio should start working immediately after trashing the file.
The possibility of solar roadways seems awesome after watching this video. The idea of roadways providing fiber connectivity and bringing fiber optic speeds anywhere roads run makes me giddy with joy (maybe too much). The ideas presented seem like solar roadways are a no brainer. With the exceptions of cyberterrorism to change the LEDs on the road (Die Hard: With A Vengeance anyone?) and cost, I don't see anything but possibilities here. Unfortunately there is likely to be staunch opposition by those who stand to lose a lot of money in the existing roadway construction industry. Personally, I'd love to see this technology become mainstream.