Great service

I thought I'd mention the great service I got from SuperMediaStore. Last week I had a 4G thumb drive fail on me. I sent an email to their help address, and got an email back within 15 minutes saying I should go to the website and fill out an RMA form. I did this, and got an email within 30 minutes asking about one of my answers. I replied and got an email within 5 minutes saying "OK, here's your RMA." I sent it first class mail on Thursday, and got an email Monday afternoon saying "We got your RMA, we're processing it." This morning I had an email that said "OK, we shipped out your replacement this morning. We're sorry for the trouble caused by the failure."

I think every email was written by a person, not a robot.

Their prices are usually pretty good. I get ALL my DVD media there, and an occasional additional card reader or other small toy.

I still buy mostly from Newegg (SMS doesn't carry much), but I know for a fact that when I buy stuff that I COULD get at SMS, I'm trading service for price. Newegg is really not bad for service but they cut you off at about 30 days. If I had bought that thumb drive from there they'd have said "You bought that almost a year ago; go to the manufacturer." I would probably still be trying to get a response from the Taiwan manufacturer.

Firefox 3

I'm running Firefox 3 Beta 4 (it's in the dev tree, not really released yet - I want to play with the new Canvas extensions).

It's fast. It's faster than Opera, faster than IE, faster than Firefox 2. Rendering is way faster, Javascript is faster, everything I've tried is faster than any of the others.

Memory usage seems about the same. Just having it running sucks down about 45 megs, but I can open a dozen windows and it hardly budges. I can open a window with simple Javascript on it, and it doesn't budge. Opening GMail immediately runs it up to 69 megs; Google has a big Javascript library that loads up. I'll keep an eye on it, to see if the memory use creeps up.

Plugins aren't generally supporting it yet; none of my plugins had compatible versions (ForecastFox, TamperData, AdBlock Plus, CacheViewer, Download Statusbar, Leet Key, Web Developer.

When you shut it down, it has the "do you want to save your tabs for next time you start up?" question, like I guess Opera does.

I'd say to wait a while, they'll certainly stomp a few bugs or memory leaks out, but it looks like they've cleaned and speeded things up quite a bit, when it's released it'll be worth the upgrade (once your "required" extensions are updated).

OpenDNS

Thanks to a mention in isherempress's LJ, I went and checked out OpenDNS. Seems like a good idea, especially since Charter is doing the damnable redirect of all failed DNS queries to their own search page. I really dislike this behavior.

I put the servers in my router's static DNS entries, but just for future reference, that wasn't enough; it still put the ISP's first DNS in as the 3rd DNS server. Neither leaving it 0 nor duplicating #2 kept it from picking that up.

Finally from the DD-WRT forum came the suggestion to run this command on the router, which fixed it up:

nvram set wan_get_dns=208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220
nvram commit

I don't know if it'll survive a reboot. I blew my uptime by messing around with the cables down there, but I'll hold off the power cycle test until when I won't bother anyone.