[Zachik]

Update on my foray into attempting to acquire a couple of these. Notice I say "attempting". Immediately after posting the original I was quickly awarded a receipt for PayPaling them some money for three different models. Within a day after that, I received a "tracking" number for a shipment that apparently was stuck somewhere in Shenzen. Every time I checked status on that number, it never moved. Fast forward to last Friday. I received a small, very flexible package from China Post. I knew right away it couldn't be my box 'o clocks. The cynic in my thought it was going to be three pictures of them! The package contained three scarves of some oriental style, red in color with what looked to be a dragon silkscreened on them. I emailed them saying they screwed up big time and asked how they were going to fix the problem. Not sounding very apologetic (something I found very strange seeing as orientals have always been extremely apologetic when they've been shown to have made a mistake), they told me to send the package back with a tracking number and once they had received it, they would refund my money, or ship something again. My Spidey Senses were definitely tingling at that point! Yesterday, I went to the post office to see how much it would cost to send this little package back to China. $17 to just throw it into the bin and hope for the best, $57 if I wanted a tracking number, after filling out a bunch of Customs forms. Uh, no. Not for $5 worth of nylon fabric plus a couple more months' wait to see if I get screwed over again. On my way out the door back to my car, I threw the package in the trash!

Moral of the story - if it looks to be too good to be true, it most likely is, but not in the way you think! I could've probably made a case with PayPal to get my money back, but it wasn't worth it. Yeah, I paid roughly $100 to order the clocks. In my younger days, I drank more than that in one night of bar hopping. Another lesson learned!

I had the EXACT same experience, to the letter! Here is my "clock":

Their customer "support" insisted the shipping company screwed up and shipped the wrong item by mistake. Seeing your post - I now 100% believe it is a scam and not an honest mistake!
After they insisted I ship back the stupid scarf before they refund me - I filed a claim with PayPal, who almost immediately refunded me the entire amount.

 

[Daniel Johnston]

I ordered 8 furnace air filters on Amazon for $60. I was sent a dum dum lollipop and a thank you card with a bogus email.

Needless to say I got my money back.

 

[sam6550a]

I had the EXACT same experience, to the letter! Here is my "clock":

Their customer "support" insisted the shipping company screwed up and shipped the wrong item by mistake. Seeing your post - I now 100% believe it is a scam and not an honest mistake!
After they insisted I ship back the stupid scarf before they refund me - I filed a claim with PayPal, who almost immediately refunded me the entire amount.

I am surprised that they did not claim that "Something was lost in the translation".

 

[Zachik]

I was sent a dum dum lollipop

I hope you remember what your mom told you...

 

[GumbyDammit223]

I am surprised that they did not claim that "Something was lost in the translation".

Just to make sure they got the correct idea in my email to them, I made sure to copy the Google translation to Chinese at the bottom of my English text.

 

[macdonjh]

Wow! Thanks for posting @Roy G. Biv

That is indeed a beast of an amp!

The metal base alone weighs 200 lbs!

I had never heard of WMA before but I had a look on their website this afternoon.

The company's base- the 200 year old 'Oswald's Mill' in Eastern Pennsylvania- looks fantastic.

I'd love to hear that amp.

I don't think I'll be buying one though...

After a year of waiting, your new listening room deserves only the best. Don't by shy, head on over to RB HiFi and order some EMM Labs for your new digital front end, too.

 

[valiant66]

a PSA:

My laptop is in the shop. It has all my web passwords. Now I have to reset all my site passwords as the laptop may not survive its stay.

Everyone, please get a cross device syncing password manager. Otherwise, we'll miss you when you can't log in to head-fi anymore. Well, at least some of you. I'm sure everyone has their own list ....

Jason, for sure. We'll definitely miss him...

FWIW I use 1password. Works everywhere I need it, and (I just looked) I've got over 3000 passwords stored.
.

 

[valiant66]

One of the things I like about my Kindle is the backlight: when I wake up in the middle of the night I can read with my Kindle without turning a lamp on. Not having a room light on makes it much easier for me to fall back to sleep.

A long time ago (no, I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, yes I recall trivia from my youth) somebody at Readers Digest read that lower contrast was better for legibility and that green was good for your rods and cones, so they printed a few issues on a pale green paper stock until the outrage arrived in the mail. In honour of that brave, foolish experiment I set the background colour of my kindle app to a shade of green I find pleasing. Works well at night to not burn out my retinas reading in the dark and is much less annoying than the Blue Light correction default the device uses.
.

 

[Roy G. Biv]

FWIW I use 1password. Works everywhere I need it, and (I just looked) I've got over 3000 passwords stored.

I use 1Password also. I'm somewhat impressed with 3000 passwords. I only use 170 and I thought that was a lot until now.
I used to use an encrypted spreadsheet to manage everything but I've become a believer in password manager apps.
Before the naysayers chime in about potential breaches/hacks, I get it. But I'm content with my chosen path.
I found the graphic below on the interwebs so I can't speak to it's accuracy but my master PW is 48 characters long with upper/lowercase letters, numbers and symbols so I feel safe against any brute force attacks.

 

[oryan_dunn]

I really like that Apple is rolling out PassKey. That should give a good boost to FIDO. Hopefully more people will get on board with public/private key exchange instead of passwords, then it won't matter if a website is hacked.

 

[Roy G. Biv]

I really like that Apple is rolling out PassKey. That should give a good boost to FIDO. Hopefully more people will get on board with public/private key exchange instead of passwords, then it won't matter if a website is hacked.

I will get more familiar with key exchanges as time permits. Having had some terrible experiences with iCloud/Keychain I'm inclined not to go with an Apple product, tho.
I'm not an Apple hater, btw. Both of my computers, both phones and both tablets are Apple devices.

 

[oryan_dunn]

I will get more familiar with key exchanges as time permits. Having had some terrible experiences with iCloud/Keychain I'm inclined not to go with an Apple product, tho.
I'm not an Apple hater, btw. Both of my computers, both phones and both tablets are Apple devices.

The nice thing is it's an industry standard. There are other ways to hold your keys. One that is popular is called Yubikey, and it's a little thing you can put on your keyring. Just like keys, you can also make backups and store them in a secure location. Holding them on your phone behind your bio-metrics is just easier, and assuming Apple doesn't mess up, should be a much smoother process for normal humans.

Some links, though it doesn't take long to get into super technical detail
https://developer.apple.com/passkeys/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDO2_Project

 

[Zachik]

I use 1Password also. I'm somewhat impressed with 3000 passwords. I only use 170 and I thought that was a lot until now.
I used to use an encrypted spreadsheet to manage everything but I've become a believer in password manager apps.
Before the naysayers chime in about potential breaches/hacks, I get it. But I'm content with my chosen path.
I found the graphic below on the interwebs so I can't speak to it's accuracy but my master PW is 48 characters long with upper/lowercase letters, numbers and symbols so I feel safe against any brute force attacks.

Awesome! would take hackers 2m years to guess my 18-letter long password (pppppppppppppppppp)

 

[Ripper2860]

Mine is 16 character alphanumeric with upper and lower case, numbers, and special character. 972bn years for a brute force crack, but hackers don't really use brute force attacks. They target website/server vulnerabilities and hack in hopes that...

1) They store credentials in unencrypted format.

-- and --

2) That folks resuse the same credentials for all their accounts.

 

[Daniel Johnston]

I hope you remember what your mom told you...

And I should mention, the lollipop went straight to the bin.