voluntaryXchange

One Way a Tween Celebrates the Season

The vXboy blurted out last night: “I’m going to make a Lego Christmas tree for my Death Star”.

Some day we’ll be able to bottle those moments …

Technorati Tags: lego,christmas,death,star

While I’m On the Subject of Cameras … Have You Seen Lytro?

Lytro was in the news last week … it’s available for Christmas (for $399). It’s a camera that you only point and shoot, and you focus afterwards with software.

It’s a bit hard to explain, and I didn’t think it worth posting until I went to this Lytro demo site.

There’s a bunch of photos, I liked the one I set it to start on the best. Click the button on the lower right of the photo, then click on the spider. Cool orb web, eh? Now click on the pink flower above and left of center. Where’d the web go?

What a cool thing for Christmas morning when everyone is opening gifts at the same time?

Technorati Tags: lytro,camera,focus,after

A Problem with LED Holiday Lights: Easier Vandalism

They are much easier for vandals to remove than other lights.

MJ bought many strands of LED lights this year to retire some of our incandescent lights: she likes the new lights, and doesn’t like me fixing the old ones. Fair enough.

Last night she noticed that a bunch of them were out.

Today I went to fix them, and found that someone had taken a single bulb out of 10 different strands, from one bush, close to the sidewalk – turning them off.

I suppose this could have happened with the older bulbs … but they were tough enough to get out that they didn’t require a little tab to hold them in place.

Technorati Tags: led,holiday,light,pitfall,vandal

WTF?

Why the hell did “bespoke” become the marketing word of 2010?

Kindle DX Economics for a Student

UPDATE: POLITICAL CALCULATIONS HAS POSTED A MUCH MORE USER-FRIENDLY CALCULATOR BASED ON MY SPREADSHEET.

The new textbook size Kindle is out (officially it is Kindle DX).

The price is $489 – almost 25% higher than I predicted yesterday.

About 6 months back I did a net present value analysis of a Kindle purchase here at voluntaryXchange.

I’ve redone that analysis (and you can download the spreadsheet and play with the assumptions if you like).

There are a lot of variables in play here – a primary one being that we don’t know how much Amazon is going to be able to knock off the list price of textbooks. One of the articles I linked to yesterday suggested that Amazon would be able to easily knock off 1/3 of the price, but my simulations suggest that this won’t be enough.

The reason is that this interacts with the students willingness to resell their textbooks. Since students aren’t going to be able to resell their Kindle texts, the important comparison is the net retail price a student pays for a hardcover (after reselling), versus the list price of the text for the Kindle. One thing is clear: the Kindle books will have to be under that net price.

The thing is – a student controls that net price. Some resell everything and their net price is probably half of the list. If you keep your books, the net price is then the retail price of your text.

But … if you’re going to keep your books, a new element enters the picture – you have to keep your Kindle too.

The cool thing for this analysis is that those factors balance out.

So, say you’re a text-keeper. If you buy 4 conventional books a semester at $100, and Amazon prices the Kindle equivalents at around $50, a Kindle DX becomes a good buy if you use it for only a single academic year – even if you keep it and never use it again!

Alternatively, suppose you buy your $100 books, but you resell them for $50. Amazon will have to beat that net price of $50. But … because you’re text-reseller, you’ll probably have no compunction about reselling your Kindle DX too. The result is about the same: a Kindle DX is a good purchase if you’ll use it for two semesters even if Amazon prices their books just below the net price you’d pay for conventional texts.

The spreadsheet includes all the other details that financial professionals like to see: opportunity costs, discounting, salvage and so on.

But … the bottom line holds. There are two types of students – those that keep their books and will keep a Kindle too, and those that resell books and will resell a Kindle too. For either one, the purchase is close to a no-brainer if Amazon can knock off half the price of a conventional textbook.

The BIG IF for now is what textbooks Amazon is going to be able to make available. My guess is that they are going to start with the standard general education classes. These are probably filled with resellers that might put downward pressure on the list price of a new Kindle DX. The alternative is graduate students – particularly Ph.D. students. These are the book keepers, and their books are often high price and low margin in traditional formats. Publishers like Wiley may leap at the chance to get out of the paper text market.

Technorati Tags: kindle,dx,economics,textbook,resale

Stuffed (Microbe) Animals

GIANTmicrobes are always on the gift list at our house; these are plush "stuffed animals" of germs, pests, virii, and even human cells. Check these out:

They've got about 50 of these now, so remember, nothing says I love you like a gift of a flea, krill, or even malaria.

How To Tell You're a Westerner

In the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy ... you might be a westerner if your neighbors give you a gun for Christmas.

We got our first Christmas gun this year ... more of a peashooter actually, but it's the spirit that counts.

Cute Confirmation from Brookstone

I ordered something from Brookstone as a gift, and I got a confirmation e-mail with this header:

If this is a shared email account--and you havenot recently placed an order with Brookstone--please do not read further. It would be a shame to spoil a surprise!

Very thoughtful.

Stocking Stuffer for the Gadget Freaks Out There

Holiday lights are annoying.

One of the most bothersome things is having to throw out a whole strand of mini-lights because a third of them (all in a row) have gone out (see below).

There's a tool that can fix this; it's called Lightkeeper Pro, it looks like a gun, and you can buy it by clicking the link.

Plug the lights in, pull the trigger, and on go your lights. It is an unbelievably empowering rush to get out of nonsense like this, but there it is.

Here's how it works.

Believe it or not, the holiday light hegemony is not out to get you.

They actually have figured out that it was really annoying (in the good old days) to have to go through a strand bulb by bulb to find the dead one. If holiday lights were as simple as the bulbs around your house, the whole strand would go out when a single filament broke. But holiday lights are more sophisticated than that.

Those little tiny bulbs contain not only filament but a shunt as well. The filament is low resistance and puts out the light. The shunt has higher resistance. The power goes in and through the filament, to avoid the shunt. Except, occasionally filaments break, in which case the power will go through the shunt.

If the shunt doesn't break, the single bulb goes out, but all the others stay on. But, if the bulb goes out, and the shunt fails, then the whole line fails. This is a big pain, since you can no longer tell which bulb is the problem. The circular file beckons.

This is where Lightkeeper Pro comes in. Shunts fail because there is a tiny little gap in them. I'm guessing that somewhere inside Lightkeeper Pro is a big capacitor, powered by its  3 watch batteries. What you do is unplug any bulb in the dead strand, plug the empty socket into the Lightkeeper Pro, and pull the trigger a few times. It sends little jolts of DC power from the batteries that fuse that shunt back together. Power flows and the lights come on. You don't even have to unplug the strand in most cases.

I kid you not. You have a tree full of lights, a small section goes out, and your significant other starts committing to replacing all the Christmas knick-knacks your budget can afford, plus some that it can't. And you walk in with your Christmas light gun, shoot the lights, and leave a hero.

FWIW: I wouldn't have posted about this at all except that I brought up this gadget at lunch, and everyone was fascinated. I fixed a broken strand outside that evening, and accidentally left it in my coat pocket, so the next day I showed it to one and all, and they were like kids in a candy factory.

N.B. Holiday lights go out in sections (usually thirds) so that your whole light display doesn't fail when one strand has a problem. It's a good thing. What's going on is that, while there is a problem in the dark area, power is still going through to light the other areas, and more importantly, is also being delivered through to the plug on the end and the next strand of lights.

Currency Trivia

Here are two bits of information about paper currency and paper "currency":

• Who prints more curreny: Hasbro or the U.S. Government? The former prints about 40 billion "dollars" of Monopoly money per year, while the latter prints about $70 billion. From the print version of our alternative paper, The Cedar City Review.
• But not for long; Marginal Revolution reports that Hasbro is replacing paper money in Monopoly with debit cards.