Photo: JohnNyberg, rgbstock.com

It almost feels like a requirement for being a software engineer, a love affair with “the finest organic suspension ever devised.” (Bonus points if anyone recognizes that quote without asking Google.) Coffee, or at least good coffee, isn’t easy to come by here and necessitates me driving at least 45 minutes into the city (both ways) to fetch anything beyond Folgers, Maxwell House or Tim Horton’s. This being the internet age, I decided it was time to look into which online sellers would ship their aromatic wares to the country where the long and cold winters make coffee an establishment.

The hunt for the promise of delivered-to-the-door coffee between the Canadian coasts wasn’t an easy one. An annoying number of sellers focus on the United States while leaving Canada alone and decaffeinated. Shipping is a large cost affecting price, and so was taken into account as well. One factor that didn’t apply was taxes, since coffee is tax free in Canada, but many merchants still charged tax on shipping. Starbucks also incorrectly applies tax to all its orders, with purchasers needing to call to have the tax refunded.

I’ve sorted all the shops here by the “shipped kg.” I calculated it by buying enough coffee to get over 1 kilogram (or to activate a free shipping deal or max out a shipping tier, if applicable), then scaling the price down to what 1 kg actually cost for the shipment, letting all stores have a level playing field. The price is also based of the cheapest available coffee from each seller, unless otherwise noted. I’ve obviously not been able to try all these coffees, so for this comparison the only factors will be the price and type of product with no account given for taste (because taste is subjective anyways). Well, I guess I can say I detest Maxwell House. I must have some opinions, right?

Workin’ on the rollback

I placed Walmart (formerly called Wal-Mart, let us have a moment of silence for the hyphen) in a class of its own as the keeper of the lowest cost coffee I was able to find. For that reason Walmart is the comparison for just buying cheap can coffee online or in-store that the rest of the merchants will be compared against for sheer thrift. That said, their cheapest coffee is the dreaded Maxwell House followed closely by Folgers. Chances are if you’re looking to order coffee online you’re looking for something above and beyond the hum-drum of grocery store coffees, and about the most exquisite thing Walmart offers online (and not those expensive barely-ok-cups) is Folgers Flavours coffee.

* Some areas might get free shipping, then the online and retail prices would be the same.

Familiar faces

If you’re used to buying your caffeine buzz by the prepared cup from a local store, you might be able to buy your fix online and delivered to your door. Of course, if you’re close to one of these chains you’re going to almost always be better off just buying coffee from their retail outlets — once again the shipping can put a damper on your percolator.

Close to home, far from mind

After leaving the familiar territory of the well-known brands we enter the leagues of those who operate (still within Canada) with less renown, but who still might offer us a cup of something special. Some of these companies have their marketing hooks based firmly in their causes or in their sources. Birds and Beans, for example, supports bird-friendly causes.

Distant lands

Nearer the end of our quest we look to those lavish troves of coffee south of the border, piling up and begging to be shipped through the long and arduous journey of grimy postal worker hands to your snow-covered doorstep. Since coffee isn’t taxable in Canada, tax and duty are unlikely concerns for cross-border brew shopping, shipping is more likely to be your nemesis (nemesii?). Of all the options, Green Mountain was closest to the “at-home” mega brand in pricing and had the widest range of flavored coffees.

The caffeinated and lazy

Lastly, there are a couple of coffee subscription services in the US that will also deliver to Canada (there were more, but, they were all higher in price than even craft and I didn’t feel the need to list them). I emailed Tonx customer service to have them verify that the total cost is the same if you live in the US or Canada, and they definitely appeared to be the more well-organized of the two.

Buzzing conclusion

I’m sure there are some I missed here, and all the prices are bound to flux as time goes on (they were correct as of March 1, 2013 when this compilation was begun). If you have a different roaster you use or want to share a cool deal, post it in the comments below as well as any reviews of the places I’ve listed. The only coffee I’ve ordered online and tried personally was the Starbucks Kenya blend (which was awesome). Remember to research any merchant before you buy from them online!

Alienware desktop model from February, 2013.

It’s been my experience over the years of building computers that in many cases you can build better or cheaper computers from scratch than you would be able to get pre-assembled from major manufactures. For me, there was also great value in getting to have the experience of assembling a PC yourself and having a sense of the “I built that” pride. Despite holding this belief I never set out to actually prove it, until now.

On the right you’ll see the Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop with the default settings as it retails in Canada for $1,499 for the low-end model all the way to $2,999 for the ALX high-end model (see the end for a detailed comparison of all specs). The goal will be to use NCIX to build a machine with the same specs (or as close as is possible) and compare the custom build based on price.

I’m using NCIX because of their liberal price-matching policy and because they offer a PC assembly option that will let you choose the components you want and have them build it, adding a 1 year warranty to the final machine in the process. This will let us compare the result directly with Dell/Alienware for the fully built machine.

Heart of the Beast: Intel Core i7

Our low-end Alienware machine boasts an Intel® Core™ i7-3820 processor (Quad Core, 10MB Cache, Overclocked up to 4.1GHz), while the high-end ALX starts with a Intel® Core™ i7-3930K processor (Six Core, 12MB Cache,Overclocked up to 3.9Ghz). Neither lists what’s being used for a heatsink (more than likely because it’s something custom to Dell), so I’ll be using my best judgement on a nice heatsink to allow overclocking to that degree.

The Right Head Space: Motherboard

The motherboard is another part that Dell remains largely “mum” about. All we can know from the Dell specs is that it is LGA2011 and supports SATA3, DDR3 and has built-in 7.1 surround sound. For a mix of overclocking control and features I selected the ASUS P9X79 ATX motherboard for the low-end build and the Deluxe version of the same board (which has some more ports and features) for the high-end build. Both boards easily match what we could deduce from Dell’s and come with built-in overclocking tools.

I’ll also match the Dell provided DDR3 memory with RAM manufactured from G.SKILL of the same speed and capacity. I’d recommend totally maxing out the amount of RAM if you were getting one of these machines, but, for our comparison needs I’ll just match what Dell is doing for now.

To See You With: GFX Card

We do get to know what GFX chipsets Dell used for these two Alienware builds: 1.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660 for the low-end and 2GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 680 for the high-end. Despite my searching I was unable to find a decent 1.5GB GTX 660 for the low-end build, so I opted to go with a better ASUS 2GB GTX 660 (NVIDIA authorized). For the high-end I went with a EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Superclocked 2GB card. If that doesn’t scream “power”, nothing does.

There was a $20 rebate on the ASUS card, but my totals will use the full retail price.

Fond Memories: Storage & Operating System

Dell installs Windows 7 Home Premium (64bit, of course) on both builds. The low-end has a 1TB HDD and the high-end a 256GB SATA3 SSD. I’m pretty disappointed in Dell’s defaults here all around. I’ll match the for the comparison, but, you should be putting an SSD and a HDD in the build along with Windows 8 (same price as 7) if you’re making these builds for yourself. Also, remember that Windows 7 only supports at most 16GB of RAM.

Also included is a LG 24x DVD writer for the low-end and a Blu-Ray writer for the high (Dell only provided a reader). Once again, a possible $10 rebate for the SSD and $20 rebate for Blu-ray writer were not included.

Skin Deep: Case

Alienware has a trademark case design, which means finding something equally obnoxious (er, I mean… artistic, yea!) case is difficult. If we wanted to go with something more unassuming you’d do well to select the Antec GX 700 which I’m rather fond of. Although I find the Alienware design and lighting atrocious I was able to find a case in a similar vein: the Thermaltake Chaser MK-1 which also includes three color modes for the lights (Red, Green, Blue).

We’re also going to need something to give juice to the case, for the low-end that juice is provided by a 700W Thermaltake PSU, and for the higher-end I went to a Corsair Professional 1050W PSU. Now is also the time to add comparable keyboards and mice to each build as well.

Once again, rebates of $20 on the Thermaltake Chaser MK-1, $10 on the Thermaltake PSU and $15 on the Corsair PSU were not included.

How You Play the Game: Results

After applying the $50 assembly fee to each of our builds, both come in under the retail price of the Alienware alternatives. One could also argue that both are also easier to change before ordering and upgrade after receipt, since there are no proprietary components to deal with. Since you’re building yourself you get to choose which components you want, and the result will be even more uniquely your own.

All four builds are listed below, hopefully they’ll be an aid for you next time you or a friend need to choose between a brand-name computer and a custom build. Remember, these prices are correct as of when this post was written, and none of them include taxes or shipping (NCIX and Dell often have free shipping offers if you keep an eye out).

Trademarks are held by their respective owners, prices are provided for informational purposes only. Talk to your doctor before starting any new exercise regimen. Contents may be hot.

Back in the churning and brainstorming days of Mozilla (back when one person’s voice in the project was able to make a profound impact) I was a teen looking for something to do with my seemly endless supply of free time and determination. I hung around in the developer IRC channels (Rheeet!), made small talk with those who nurtured the Mozilla Suite (now known as Seamonkey) and tried my best to pick up C/C++ by example. I was already knowledgeable with Perl and proficient at PHP, but I had in my mind to learn a real language and figured volunteering my time with Mozilla was the best thing I could do to get the experience I wanted.

I ended up working with awesome people like Bart Decrem (who unwittingly offered a 14-year-old Canadian a job in Silicon Valley) and Asa Dotzler, where I ended up settling down in a role working on QA for Mozilla’s browser products (I was scarily good at spotting duplicate error reports, if I must say so myself). I was there to watch the first steps of Phoenix and it’s identity crisis as it then became Firebird and finally Firefox. Perhaps most importantly to my future, I was there when Spread Firefox was created and I became one of the first members of the community that spread Firefox to the four corners of the globe.

There I learned about CivicSpace and got a job through Chris Messina (who’s now a big social rock-star and remains an awesome dude). I’ve been an open web advocate and Drupal Engineer ever since. Amazingly, I’ve loved almost every day of my work for the last (nearly) eight years. So, thanks Firefox, thanks Mozilla, and thanks especially to those like Bart, Asa and Chris who believed in a teenager with a passion for open source and gave him the push he needed for it to become his career. Cheers, guys!

A while back I wrote a quick guide for getting Drush up and running on a shared Dreamhost account and it was great to see lots of folks taking advantage of the power of Drush on a more commodity (read: cheap) host. But what if you’re running on a slightly more expensive and more featured host like MediaTemple’s grid offering? Well; you can run Drush there too, and I’ll show you how.

First off, we’re going the more manual route this time since I’ve had more success with it on MT. So head on over to the Drupal.org Drush project page and copy the latest tar.gz version of Drush to your clipboard. Then, log into your MT (gs) instance (or just run the command `cd` if you already have an SSH session open to your (gs) already) and create a directory called bin in your home directory and enter it:

mkdir ~/bin
cd ~/bin/

Next, download and extract the tarball of Drush you copied earlier:

wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-All-versions-5.x-dev.tar.gz
tar xvpfz drush-*.tar.gz

Now, make a new folder in your home directory called .drush and enter it:

mkdir ~/.drush
cd ~/.drush/

Because of the more tightened security on the default CLI version of PHP MediaTemple provides we’re going to need to override some configuration values to suit us. In the ~/.drush/ directory make a file named drush.ini and place in it the following values (I prefer to use nano drush.ini for this):

memory_limit = 128M
error_reporting = E_ALL | E_NOTICE | E_STRICT
display_errors = stderr
safe_mode =
open_basedir =
disable_functions =
disable_classes =


Lastly, we need to add Drush into our path and reload the BASH configuration:

echo "export PATH=\"~/bin/drush\:$PATH\"" >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

That’s it! You now have a fully working Drush on MediaTemple; get out there and `drush up`. Go on, I know you want to

tl;dr: Install the latest 5.x-dev Drush on your (gs) by running this long command, or replace the highlighted tar.gz with the version you want:
mkdir ~/bin;cd ~/bin/;wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-All-versions-5.x-dev.tar.gz;tar xvpfz drush-*.tar.gz;mkdir ~/.drush;cd ~/.drush/;echo -e "memory_limit = 128M\nerror_reporting = E_ALL | E_NOTICE | E_STRICT\ndisplay_errors = stderr\nsafe_mode =\nopen_basedir =\ndisable_functions =\ndisable_classes =" >> drush.ini;echo "export PATH=\"~/bin/drush\:$PATH"" >> ~/.bash_profile;source ~/.bash_profile

Updated 2/14/2013: Dreamhost made some config changes that required a different PATH variable for this method to work. The instructions above have been updated to reflect this. Editing drush.ini is now suggested to be done with nano, since some folks were having issues with the quad-chevron approach.

One of the easiest and most convenient ways to get your hands on Drupal is on a shared hosting environment. It’s pretty much where everyone is going to start from unless you happen to have a giant long-term budget for your own hardware.

You have a number of options when it comes to hosting and at one time or another I’ve tried a lot of them. Three companies that have managed to keep me the happiest though are A Small Orange (use coupon 15-off to get 15% off; no affiliate), DreamHost (no affiliate) and MediaTemple. I’ve found DreamHost in particular to be pretty impressive when it comes to hosting a lot of one-off sites on my very inexpensive shared plan. I even use it when rapid prototyping for clients.

The best part though is that with DreamHost I can use SSH and Drush the way I normally would like to on a dedicated or virtual server. Set up is a bit more complex than normal, but, once it’s set up for your user it’s smooth sailing.

Before you can do any of this, you will need to make sure you enable SSH for the user you assigned to the  domain you want to use Drush with. You can find these options under the Manage Users section of the DreamHost panel. From there open up your favorite SSH client and log into your site (PuTTY works well on Windows, you can just run ssh from the command line on Mac or Linux).

Since you’re in a locked-down shared hosting environment, you obviously can’t make system-wide changes. The easiest way to install Drush is though Pear. Pear, by default, wants to make system-wide changes. Since we can’t do that in a shared environment, our first order of business will be to set up a new instance of pear just for our user.

Once logged in, and in your user’s home folder, run:
pear config-create ${HOME} ${HOME}/.pearrc
pear install -o PEAR

Now you have your own instance of pear, but you still can’t use it yet. To fix this, we will edit our .bash_profile and add in the path to the most recent PHP version DreamHost provides, as well as adding in our pear directory early on in this user’s PATH.

Open ~/.bash_profile in your favorite editor:
nano ~/.bash_profile

And add these lines at the bottom of the file:
export PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN=/usr/local/php53/bin/php
export PATH=${HOME}/pear:/usr/local/php53/bin:${PATH}

Finally, re-load the file so the changes will take effect immediately:
. ~/.bash_profile

Now we have the newest version of PHP and our custom version of pear available to us, to check this out, you can run these commands:
which php
which pear

Pretty cool, eh? Lastly, just run the usual install command for drush to install it:
pear channel-discover pear.drush.org
pear install drush/drush

Now you can use drush from any site under this user as you would anywhere else (try running `drush help` for some cool examples). You can repeat this process for any other SSH users on your account. A one line tl;dr version of this process is included below for your automated and repetitive pleasure. Enjoy!

tl;dr: Get drush running on DreamHost by running this line in SSH:
pear config-create ${HOME} ${HOME}/.pearrc;pear install -o PEAR;echo "export PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN=/usr/local/php53/bin/php" >> ~/.bash_profile;echo 'export PATH=${HOME}/pear:/usr/local/php53/bin:${PATH}' >> ~/.bash_profile;. ~/.bash_profile;pear channel-discover pear.drush.org;pear install drush/drush

Windows has a few really cool tricks for managing applications that get almost no attention, but once you discover them can dramatically improve your workflow. You can drag the title bar of any resizable application window to the left or right side of your screen to have it resize to exactly fill that half of your display. It’s excellent for file management, writing documents, or keeping multiple applications in the same viewing area in general.

Sadly, if you happen to also use Mac OSX, you are going to be met with some frustration if you try to do this same trick. Thankfully, your Mac can be taught those tricks thanks to a small and cheap (sadly not free, but hey, this is Mac we are talking about) application called Cinch

Once Cinch is installed dragging application to the left or right edges of your screen will cause your apps to resize just like on Windows. Dragging an application to the top of the screen will maximize it just like Windows, too. Just one more thing to make living with a Mac easier.

This is a classic example of how startups and growing businesses shouldn’t treat their existing customer base, especially for subscriber services. Companies like Netflix have taught us this lesson well. And, the dynamics of a community tell us that if you’re selling a subscription service with fixed goods, subscribers tend to use less of your service’s offerings over time (meaning, you make more of a profit from them over time).  These are all lessons WooThemes ignored, tore up, and pretended didn’t exist when they announced back in September they were raising their prices 33%.  WooThemes adds 2 themes per month, and, feels because of this the library has grown more and the higher monthly price tag makes sense.

While I’m sure this makes sense from a business standpoint (and, by business, I mean someone with a business major and no reality in sight), it doesn’t from a product or community standpoint. People paid WooThemes monthly expecting to get 2 new themes per month, and a one time setup fee for the rest. So, you pay $7.25 each month for a theme if you use it or not, and $100-200 to get started.

Increasing the monthly fee just means now you’re paying $10 a month for a theme, you’re not “gaining” anything.  If they wanted to sell that story, they should have raised their setup fee to account for all the available themes in their library for new users. Instead of just admitting they were raising prices in general, they did a corporate swan song on the size of their library and support options.  In the end, I wrote this comment on their original blog post:

I’m still irked that folks like me who have been club subscribers for a long time and /haven’t/ used your support (and, really only used a couple themes in the wild) are having our rates increased. We’re not “gaining” anything by it whatsoever. Increasing it for new members who are getting more up front makes sense, but, we’ve been “financing” and believing in you for a long time and we’re the ones being shafted. I still only pay $15/yr for Grooveshark, because I was an early subscriber. I pay less than half the monthly fee for Blinksale because I was “grandfathered” into their new plans. I pay $15 less per year for Skype’s calling plans because I got them when they first came out.

Other companies /respect/ the customers they were built on enough to let the older users who believed, held down the fort, and built their community to let them keep the subscriptions they always had. Heck, even most of the jerks at mobile phone carriers do. We’re the /vetrans/ of your community, and, if you aren’t able to respect us, we’re going to loose respect for you.

That is all,
/Robin

I’m still hopeful WooThemes will have a change of heart and make a more sensible change to their plans — all in all they are a pretty great service. But, if you need to raise prices to cover bad business decisions, say so. Don’t lie to your customers.

There are two ways to boot into safe mode, and, both of them need you to have a working keyboard that’s recognized by your BIOS (so, if you’re using a tablet PC with a touchscreen, or something like a bluetooth keyboard, you’ll likely need to grab a USB (or PS/2) keyboard to do these actions).

Windows did not start successfully...

If Windows fails to start completely, you may be presented with a screen like that at left (click the image to enlarge), with the option to boot into one of three safe mode choices or to start Windows normally. If you get this screen, you don’t need to do any other actions to boot into safe mode, just use the arrow keys to select which safe mode you want (usually just safe mode for doing things like software removal and system restores) and press the enter/return key.

If you’re not presented with the choice and want to force the machine into safe mode the easiest way to boot into safe mode is to continually tap the F8 key while your computer is booting (to be technical, after the BIOS screen but before the usual “Windows” loading screen). As long as windows is the only operating system installed, you can safely tap away at F8 from the moment you turn the PC on until the startup options appear.  If you have multiple Windows versions installed, when you get to the OS selection screen you’ll need to select the Windows installation you want from the list and then press F8.

Windows Advanced Options Menu

You’ll be shown the advanced options menu (see right), and be given more debugging choices including the three safe mode options (Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Networking and Safe Mode with Command Prompt). Choose the one you want and press enter/return to boot into safe mode.

We’re also willing to review other gadgets (doing this review video was incredibly fun). Feel free to send more suggestions my way via the comments on this post.

View video and product links on youtube 

(article image attribution information)

So, naturally when I heard about republic, their $199 phone and their $19/mth price point I got interested. How they choose to approach not just the problem but their customers is novel and inventive. You don’t sign a contact, and you’re not a “customer” or a “client,” instead republic refers to you as a member and the $19/mth as your membership fee. There are no extras, add-ons or levels of service. Everyone is equal and everyone pays the same $19 monthly fee for unlimited everything-republic-has-to-offer. Even their motto of “the mobile network that runs on freedom” makes you feel a little warm and fuzz inside.

But is it really unlimited? That’s where their technology becomes inventive too. republic splits your usage into “Cell” and “Wi-Fi”. If you’re within rage of a wireless network that’s open or that you’ve previously configured all of your calls, texts and data will route though Wi-Fi and you can use that as much as you like with no limits. In fact, this part of their service puts them more on par with Skype or perhaps Google Voice. But what about if you’re not near a wireless access point? Then things aren’t as limitless, republic has a “Cellular Usage Index” or CUI that they use to check your usage on the cellular networks of their partners and see if you’re using more than a fair share (above the community average) of cellular resources. Their site lists the typical resting point of this average at about 550 minutes, 150 texts and 300 megabytes of data.

As long as you’re not routinely breaking the CUI (using your phone on cellular networks enough to pass the general fair use threshold, you can use republic as much as you like. If you happen to live in a city that has city-wide free wireless, have Wi-Fi points both are home and work or just not typically use a phone that much, republic is probably one of the best deals you can get.  But, what if you’re going on a three-week vacation to Greedyville where there aren’t any free Wi-Fi points and you’ll need to use the cellular network the whole time? Well, thankfully republic isn’t going to boot you off for going over their fair-use limits occasionally, they assure that the limits are “soft” and they’ll work with their members to let them know well before anything would happen to cut off service.

The other potential downside to republic is you can’t bring your own phone, you have to use the LG Optimus (Android 2.3) phone they supply due to the Wi-Fi/Cellular dancing involved. If you need to use an iPhone or a Blackberry, republic isn’t going to be your thing.

I emailed republic for some answers to some other questions I felt their website didn’t answer, and have including those questions and their responses below.

Do you have any current or short-term plans to expand into Canada or the UK with republic wireless?
If you have a republic wireless phone, will it work on wi-fi points in other countries while traveling?

Although we do not currently have plans to expand cellular coverage internationally, wi-fi service (for data or calls and texts to U.S. numbers) will work anywhere in the world…as long as you have a wi-fi connection.

Will ongoing calls intelligently switch between wi-fi and cell networks, or will already ongoing calls drop?

When you are on a call that begins while on WiFi, it will switch to the cellular network if the WiFi signal is too weak or is lost. Conversely, if you begin a call on a cellular network, you will remain on the cellular network, even if you come into range of a known WiFi network that you’ve connected to (for example, at your home).

Do you have any plans for republic wireless to work with hotspot network providers like Fon?

Although we currently don’t have plans in place to offer deals with any specific hotspot providers, our phones will work on those hotspots as long as you have an authorized connection with them.

Is it possible to force the phone into wi-fi or cell mode (if, for instance a wi-fi network is available but is unusable for calls)?

Yes, you may deactivate WiFi. Your phone in “airplane mode” will do this. Or you may simply just turn off WiFi itself. Your calls will roll over to our Sprint carrier when WiFi is turned off. We ask that you don’t make this a habit. Otherwise, well, you are defeating the purpose of our service, aren’t you?