Review: Drop Stop Car Wedge

Drop Stop Car Wedge is a simple product that does one thing very well. It blocks the gap between your car seat and the center console, so that you can't drop stuff down into that hard to reach spot. 

I have been using one, and It works great. I do notice that I can feel the right side of my seat is button cushion is a little bit firmer due to compression, but it doesn't bother me.

The wedge is a tube made of black neoprene, with a pass-through for the seatbelt latch.  It is stuffed with filler.  To install it, you slip it over your seatbelt latch and then stuff it down, working it forward and back smooth it out. 

At $20/pair plus shipping, it isn't cheap, but isn't outrageously expensive either.  It should outlast your vehicle.

Pros:

• Simple, effective
• Unobtrusive
• Seems durable

Cons:

• Unknown country of origin (not on packaging)
• $20+shipping is a little steep for what is basically a stuffed fabric tube
• Limited distribution (Can't buy it on Amazon, etc.)
• Adds firmness to right seat cushion side

*Note: DropStop did not provide any payment for this review, other than sending me a test unit.

My Sad HP Tale

I decided to replace my stuttering old Dell Optiplex desktop (Core 2 circa 2008) with a new desktop.  I saw a very good deal on Woot!--an HP Pavilion with a quad core AMD CPU and 1TB HDD for all of $300.  It was, of course, refurbished.

That was a mistake.

The HP came loaded down with crapware (trials, useless media players, etc.).  The Pavilion case was made of very thin metal, and thing made a lof of an and drive noise compared to my old machine.  But the worse part was that it came broken.  Despite having 4 RAM slots, the motherboard would not boot if I put more than 2 sticks of memory in it.  HP agreed this was an issue, but informed me my machine was out of warranty.  After several long phone calls with customer service (in India) I finally got them to extend my warranty to the proper 90 days, and accept the machine for repair.

It came back with a new motherboard, and would accept more memory.  But this one would run for a seemingly random amount of time, and then freeze solid. It wouldn't even write the errors into the Windows system log, so I had no way of knowing what was wrong.

The machine went back to Woot for a refund, and I bought a factory refurbished Dell Optiplex 780, with Intel Core 2 Quad CPU.  

The Dell Optiplex came with no crapware, other than a a free trial for a virus scanner, which was easily removed.  The machine is quiet, and fast, and with a free web coupon, it was cheap too.  And, unlike the HP, the Dell came with a 3 year warranty, and an actual restore DVD.

Viper's iPhone Remote Start System

Viper (maker of car alarms and remote starters) sent me a PR kit for a new system which will allow you to remote start your car with your Apple iphone.



It looks neat, because you can start your car even if it isn't within direct line-of-sight; the system communicates between the iphone and the car over the cellular network.

However, there are a couple of things I wonder about. First, the cost: after the first year, it costs $30/year for service. Is that worth it? Not to me, when I can have a service-fee free line-of-sight remote starter.

Secondly, I wonder about the safety implications of being able to remote start your car without being near it. All remote starters have a cut-off timer which kills the engine if you don't come and open the car within a certain amount of time, typically about 10 minutes. But without being able to see your car, you have no idea if there is some unsafe situation where you wouldn't want to be starting a car.

The Galileoscope

A team of astronomers went to work to come up with a low cost telescope kit, that kids could put together to learn about how telescopes work, and then use to observe the night sky. The result is the very cool looking Galileoscope, which costs only $15 individually, and reportedly has pretty good optics. For example, they used lens designs which reduce chromatic aberration, something that Galileo did not have in his day.

There is a short video about it here:


Here is another