Abby Normal

I watched this last week. "Interesting" is one word. Disturbing is a bit more accurate. The ambiguous ending is interesting/disturbing, too. (Any more specific would be spoilers). My wife suggested that it looks like the little girl engineered that ending purposely very early on. I'm not sure she's wrong.

You may be out of luck unless it is similar enough in operation to one of the other models with English manuals. As you probably discovered, the closest model they have with a manual is the 1550--but that manual is only in Japanese.

I don't doubt that he ended it early. Sellers do that all the time when they've changed their mind, sold it locally, want to change the package, correct errors, etc. As long as nobody had bid on it (and it looks like nobody did), then there's no harm, no foul. The only way to know for sure is very easy to do--just ask him.

Er.. I don't think it sold. I think the listing just "ended". There's no indication it was actually purchased through ebay. Unless he sold it locally or changed his mind, I expect he'll be relisting it.

Yeah, $2K for that is insane. I'd say $500-$600 (it includes 275 blanks, after all).

You can generally pick up such an item at your local drugstore or even a dollar store.

People might be interested in how the unit was used. In other words--where was it used and how much was the optical write head was used? If you had someone local who knows how to get into Service Mode safely, there is a place in there that shows how much writing was done--though I don't know whether it is in minutes or hours. I haven't been back in there to test that.

This question has been on my mind since I got my RH1 a few weeks ago. I've contemplated buying a few of the batteries and charging them up to about 40% and storing them someplace cold. I've researched how to keep NiMH batteries alive and that is the recommendation. They warn against freezing them, but that really only applies if you have a really good freezer. The temperature in your average consumer freezer doesn't get low enough to do the damage they are concerned with. So, personally, I would probably stick them in the freezer and thaw them out every few months to make sure they have their 40% charge. On the other hand, I've also considered that the RH1 would still be of use with a battery that can't hold a charge. This is a bit off topic though. If people want to discuss it further it probably needs to be split off.

Heh. As we are all aware, some people have dollar/euro signs permaburned into their retinas. On a side note, some d-bag in Spain posted a couple of homemade counterfeit MDs (i.e. he was touting the content, not the MD) and asking $20+ USD for them. I filed an ebay report and got a response back from ebay Spain. If I'm reading Google's translation right, it looks like ebay Spain just told me to bug off unless I'm the intellectual property owner. It said I should contact the IP owner and if the IP owner wants to ask the item to be removed, they can. I guess in some countries its okay to sell counterfeit merchandise on ebay so long as IP owners don't hire people full-time to challenge items individually.

That's because, as far as I can tell, they are both identical except for the controls and the upload/download restrictions. It's good that you've discovered that they have the thumping bass you've been craving. Does this mean you're not phasing out of MD now?

Well, you can either pony up the Jackson + change for the item from the dozen or so Radio Shacks in Downey or order off of Amazon and pay $15 with shipping or order a few more items you need from Amazon and see if that makes the shipping cost worth it. It's better than a doorstop for a RH10. You have to allow that the transformer in a DC adapter weighs something and thus shipping will probably not be free.

...hears a plaintive cry as Syrius clutches his MD units even closer.

I'm confused. Only the first one he mentioned seems big. The rest seem to fit your purposes--unless there's some reason it has to be square.

I think it looks like a great unit and I'm jealous about stuff like that landing in his lap. However, I'm trying to be a little more conservative with my spending at the moment.

I think FLAC is a superior lossless format. Nearly every reason why it is superior can be ultimately backtracked to "it's open-source". There's quite a bit more hardware and software support for it--the number of devices and programs that support FLAC grows all the time. It's claims to "lossless" can be more easily scrutinized. I'm sure I could think of more--but it'll have to wait as I just got back from a party and I'm suffering from post-carbohydrate gorging crash. Perhaps someone else could help me out. Avrin?

Actually, I was wondering if you can expand on what you're trying to accomplish. Sometimes knowing what the ultimate goal is can reveal ways to get there that you may not have thought of. People will often come to me with a problem--"How do I get lots of music on a single CD?"--when the root problem is "I have this specific situation and it requires that I only carry 1 or 2 things" or something of that nature. Can you back track a bit and tell us why you want to pack a lot onto one CD?

ATRAC Advanced Lossless is a bit of marketing BS, I've found. It's not really that useful. It sounds like you're not using Minidisc so it is even less useful to you. The answer to your question requires you give us more information such as how much music you're trying to fit on one CD and how concerned you are with playback quality.

That's what I mean, though--you had all the documentation. It was signed, stamped, etc by them--that's the sort of thing receipts and documentation is supposed to counter. Did they say your documents were fake? Did you have more than the receipt? (i.e. their official "tracking" slip that they stamp with their seal?) Well, whatever the case--I hope it wasn't too costly for you. I can understand your wariness of USPS under those circumstances--although I'd be inclined to believe it was just a glitch and just not go to that particular branch anymore if I can help it.

Wow--that sucks. I don't think I would've let that stand. What was their justification for denying your claim?

I think there's a paper published on MD reliability somewhere on this site--I don't know about HiMD. I just happen to have a couple unwrapped HiMD discs, so I opened one to look at what its warranty says. It gets more specific and says "for its normal life". One interesting thing that dawned on me is that the warranty is printed on the label backings. I'm definitely not a lawyer ("Not that there's anything wrong with that."--Seinfeld), but this suggests to me that if they really wanted to be d-bags about the whole thing they could claim that the warranty only covers the label. Although I suppose that one could argue that it is reasonable to assume that the words "This Product" refers to the product mentioned higher up on the label backing, namely the disc.

I think this is highly variable. Even in the U.S. shipping can be a crap shoot. The ProTape guys in Texas refuse to use USPS at all. I had something ship from California that took a month to get to me, whereas other things I ordered from Greece arrived within 10 days. I've seen sellers set some pretty sensible policies to combat this sort of thing. They require signed-for insured delivery for International delivery of any item that's worth more than a certain amount. The concern isn't only reliability of the postal services, but fraud on the part of any party. For that reason, it is also a very good idea to take clear pictures that include the serial number of the merchandise.

Yes--with a caveat. Actually, so long as you use the lower "Find" field the settings remain. This is how I create new saved searches--I bring up any older one with my desired advanced settings and then change the search parameters on the "Find" field that's near the result (as opposed to the one at the top of the page).

These aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, that's the only way I can get that setting to stick--by using saved searches.

Simply clicking "Worldwide" isn't enough to show the items I get in my results. You have to go to advanced and choose "Located in" and select "Any Country/Any Region". This will even bring up results that don't specify they ship to your country. What I'm saying is there must be some separate classification that overrides that as well. And yes, there are sellers that won't sell to me even if I ask politely and point out my 100+ transaction 100% rating, but they are the exception. I've since stopped trying to solicit these anyway because for some strange reason European sellers are unable to consistently get a reasonable shipping rate. Some have shipped to me very cheaply--for others the rate is ridiculous.

FYI, if you did bid for him you'd probably have to mail it to him as well. When I try to directly access that item from my local ebay (US), I'm directed to a page warning me it isn't available on ebay-US. I thought this was strange, as I have frequently adjusted my search settings to include all listings, even those not specifically shipping to the US, and have made successful purchases that way (after contacting the seller). I wonder if this is a new thing or if there are just some items I'm not seeing even that way.