Hamilton Beach BrewStation? POS Coffee Maker!

On my recent trip to K-Mart (yeah, they’re still in business…) I decided that I needed to pick up a coffee maker. A bit of back story, just moved into my own place with no more roommates so I’m lacking a lot of basic neccesities which in this case, a coffee maker. Anyways, just being myself living at the house, I decide to pick up a coffee maker of the single big ass cup variety.

Browsing the coffee maker aisle I discover this gem, the Hamilton Beach BrewStation. This lovely little coffee maker had the attractive price of only $29.99! On the box, it shows someone filling up a single travel mug full of coffee. “Awesome” I thought to myself, “it comes with a travel mug!”. So I pick up the box just to make sure and read all the details. I figured if the coffee mug wasn’t included, it’d say so. It didn’t give any details of what’s included so I giddily threw it under my right arm and made my way to the register.

Once I exited the store, I decided that I will confirm that it does come with a coffee mug and ripped open the box when I arrived in my car. Of course, it did not. Oh well, not a big deal, I’ll pick one up at the grocery store which I did later that night.

I get home, plug it in, throw everything together and make my first pot of coffee. Success! It works! Awesome. I drink my coffee, piss away some time on the internet, and before bed I program it to make me some more coffee in the morning.

Next morning, I awaken to the wonderful smell of coffe! Awesome… or so I thought. When I shove my happy new little travel mug under the BrewStation, nothing comes out. Not even a drip… odd. I open it up and what do I find? DRY COFFEE GROUNDS. This can’t be right… Double check and it has water.

Can it be? Is my new coffee maker broken already? Screw it, I’ll goto work and dick with it when I get home. Later that night when I arrive home, I confirm my suspicions. It’s already broken! What the fuck, how is this possible? It’s a coffee maker, it does one thing. Make coffee! How does such a simple piece of machinery break so soon?

I read over the manual 30 times and everything I’m doing to make my delcious cup of non-exisitant coffee is correct except one part. IT DOESN’T FUCKING WORK!

BrewStation? More like POOSTATION. >:( I thought this could be love. But you deceived me you evil little coffee maker. Of course, I already threw away the receipt. Fail.

New iPod shuffle. No buttons on the device.

Apple just released the new iPod shuffle in the 4gb form. It comes in at around $80 and is ridiculously small. We’re talking the size of a small persons finger small. The battery life is good but it’s not as good as the previous gen as it only gets 10 hours of continuous use versus the last gens 12 hours.

There are 2 color options to choose from, black and silver. It has Text2Speech to name Arist and Track titles.

They’ve also added another new feature…

Seriously, none! Do you use your mind to control it? Do you yell at it until the track changes? No! Instead, Apple moved the buttons to a little pod on the wire of the earbuds. Now if you’re like me, the first thing you do when you get a new iPod is chunk the earbuds in the garbage. With the controls moved to the earbuds, you have no choice but to use them

Apple stated that they will release an accessory to allow the use of third party headphones. Apple forcing you to buy accessories to use their products?! Big surprise there!

What happens if you lose your Apple shuffle earbuds and you have a spare pair of headphones but no little Apple thirdy party adapter thing? You’re screwed.

The Shuffle is still large enough to squeeze in some buttons. Sure, they may be super tiny but they are buttons. Oh well, at least it’s not a Zune.

Check out the Apple demonstration video of how the new Shuffle works. The girl showing it off is really cute, much better than the stoner chick from years ago doing the Mac switch ad’s

Comcast can eat my ass

So I’ve had Comcast for a few years. As much as I dislike Comcast as a company, they surprisingly offer some pretty quick internet connections. I can bitch all day about Comcast but sadly one of the things I can’t complain about is the speed.

With that out of the way, let me give a bit of back story before I start my bitching. I’ve pretty much always had Comcast. All the way back in the day to when they were MediaONE when I was still living at home all the way up until now. There was a brief 6 months lapse when I first moved out and into an apartment with roommates where I had Bellsouth but that quickly changed. The reason I switched to Bellsouth? Comcast couldn’t have anyone out for at least 2 weeks to install cable at the apartment.

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Running Windows 7 on a MacBook

So Ars Technica wrote an article about how to run Windows 7 on the new MacBook. Absolutely amazing! It’s the exact same process as running any other Windows operating system! I mean, wow, absolutely ground breaking material here.

Okay, maybe this article is amazing to someone but I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta on my first gen MacBook since the day the beta came out. Maybe I should have wrote an article like this.

“Pop in the Windows 7 cd, open Boot Camp assistant, reboot, install Windows, boot Windows, pop in Leopard CD, install drivers, call it a night”

Alright, I admit, I’m being a bit of an asshole here. They do go into detail about getting the proper nVidia drivers installed on the new MacBook.

Check out the article here. Don’t expect to run the 64bit version though. Even these new fangled MacBooks can’t do that. Not that Apple hardware is to blame, Bootcamp doesn’t have the supported drivers. Oh well.

Also it looks like my experience running Windows 7 on an old First Gen MacBook has been much smoother than their experience with a shiny new Unibody MacBook.