We received this Blu-ray player along with a few Blu-Ray DVDs for an anniversary present. The BDP-S301 is the same as the BDP-S300 except it is only sold at wholesale outlets like Costco and Sam’s Club. The S301 also includes an HDMI cable.

The Pros: The image looks great. Hands down it is a clean, crisp image, and with the latest firmware updates (click here) supports most audio configurations.

The Cons: This thing is the slowest media player I have ever laid my hands on.

The instructions warn that the initial setup could take 90 seconds to start and after that, start up would be quicker. I suppose they didn’t lie - start up on an everyday basis takes around 40 seconds or more! After that, you can finally eject the tray to insert your movie, or make your way to the menu.

Forty seconds, when you have an impatient toddler wanting to watch Finding Nemo for the 50th time, is similar to taking a short detour through Dante’s 3rd circle of hell.

In addition to that, woe to the consumer who might get a relatively new, $30 Blu-ray movie to play in it. We put in Dan In Real Life (Ok movie, but slow paced) - it proceeds to play the previews, fine. Then it seemingly locks up for a few minutes on a screen with a progress bar that says “loading”. We power down, start the process again. Briefly before the “loading” screen pops up again, it mentions that on older players it could take several minutes to load the menu. Seriously, 3 to 4 minutes later, the menu loads up.

Again, we received 10,000BC (don’t waste your time) in the mail from Blockbuster. Started to play it and we wanted to stop and start it over. I pressed the stop button, and I guess I overloaded the system as it was totally frozen. I had to press the power button for 10 seconds and start the whole process over.

Are you kidding me? This is the worst consumer experience I’ve had in a long time. Maybe I am just an impatient American, but spending 5 minutes waiting for a movie to load up, after having spent that much money on top of the line technology, is a disgrace. Sony should be ashamed that they let this product go to market.

What is it doing during this loading time? Is the Java OS loading all of its unnecessary libraries? Who allowed this to pass by QA?

So my recommendation to anyone looking to buy one of these systems is keep looking! There are more and more choices out there. The PS3 is only $50-$100 more and it loads movies much faster and has many more advanced media features (like streaming audio and video right to the PS3 from other media servers), not to mention all the games you can play on it.

Sony used to be top notch in my opinion when it came to hardware of any kind. However after this incident, I will really have to think twice before getting another Sony product!

The AskApache blog has a great comprehensive guide to .htaccess. A must read for anyone who does a lot of work with Apache.

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/apache-htaccess.html

Updated on 8/26/2008 with corrected information!

Window’s simple shutdown command works well, but has some major drawbacks. The major one is that it will only schedule a reboot up to 10 minutes into the future (600 seconds). Linux’s shutdown command makes this easy, just issue the command ’shutdown -r +60′ for example to reboot an hour in the future.

No such luck in Windows, you need to download a separate program to do this. It is a sysinternals program, you might remember sysinternals from such utilies like FileMon and ProcessMonitor.

The program we use for this is called PsTools and more specifically the file psshutdown.exe.

[Download PsTools here]

Place psshutdown.exe into a directory for future use, for this example we will use c:\tools\.

Easiest Method:

Type the following command into the command prompt:
c:\tools\psshutdown.exe -r -f -c -t 02:00 /accepteula

PSshutdown will respond with:

PsShutdown v2.52 - Shutdown, logoff and power manage local and remote systems
Copyright (C) 1999-2006 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Local system is scheduled to reboot in 15:08:00.

If all goes will, Windows will reboot at 2:00am, or your specified time. This command will start a system service with the psstools scheduling program, PSSDNSVC.EXE.

Alternate Method:

Then open a command prompt and type the following command:

at 2:00am c:\tools\psshutdown.exe -r -f -c -t 10 /accepteula

This will result in:

Added a new job with ID = 1

You can verify this task has been added by looking at the Scheduled Tasks - the job name will be At1 if you haven’t scheduled any other tasks via the command line.

For some reason, Firefox started to display a blinking cursor, like web pages I have been viewing were editable. Thinking that some errant plugin was causing this behavior, I manically disabled a few I had recently installed. However that didn’t fix the problem.

Good ole Google to the rescue.

Firefox has a ‘feature’ that lets you select text with more visual feedback. I guess the little one must have been hitting keys and turned this on.

Turning it off is easy! Press F7 to turn off caret browsing.

Alternatively, type “about:config” in the URL area, then filter for “caret“. Change accessibility.browsewithcaret to “false”.

I have a new post up on Makeuseof, regarding Firefox Addons for Privacy and Security. Maybe you won’t use all of them but even installing some of them (NoScript in particular) can really lower your chances of getting hit with a javascript exploit.