Filed under: Office, Productivity

You’re paying way too much for moving boxes. At least, that’s the premise behind BoxCycle, a site that lets you purchase and sell boxes cheaply to others in your area. If you’ve got a business that purchases more boxes than it needs, list them for sale, and a buyer will come pick them up. If you’re moving and you need to purchase boxes, just put in your zip code and pick some up near you.

BoxCycle isn’t quite perfect. Most of the boxes we could find were in the New York/New Jersey area, so hopefully a bit of publicity will get more listings up in the rest of the country. BoxCycle also takes a cut for facilitating the transactions, much like other online marketplaces. Although I think the idea behind BoxCycle is a good one, the infrastructure to buy and sell boxes locally is already out there: it’s called Craigslist. Other than encouraging people to redistribute their boxes locally instead of throwing them away, which is commendable, it doesn’t seem to bring anything new to the table.

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Filed under: Products and services, Marketing and advertising, Target Corp. (TGT)

Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) has started selling a Blu-ray disc player for what’s probably the lowest retail price you can find one at: $229. I’ve stated many times in the past that this new format won’t catch on with consumers until retail prices routinely get to less than $200, so this new price from Target is nearing that mark. Of course, panicked U.S. consumers probably won’t be buying any Blu-ray players the remainder of this year as they watch what wealth they did have evaporate in the markets.

The Target model is an Olevia brand player (yes, that’s an off-brand), which marks a $70 reduction from a current Sony Blu-ray player that is being sold alongside the Olevia player for $299. Still, unless there’s some breakthrough difference that Blu-ray manufacturers and retailers can market correctly, most U.S. consumers will stay with their progressive-scan DVD players that sell for $75 or less and have a perfectly fine picture (although not true high-definition).

So, perhaps sometime in late 2009 — roughly a year from now — the market will see $99 Blu-ray players and regular consumers may finally feel the urge to purchase one and begin re-purchasing their movie libraries in yet another format. That is, until super-duper, high-fidelity Purple-ray players hit the market sometime in 2014 and the cycle repeats yet again. Perhaps by then, we’ll all be out of this economic funk and won’t be protecting our cash hoards, however tiny they may be by then.

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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

My mouse has two buttons, and dammit, I’m going to use them both. The Windows context menu is a trusted tool, and I rely on it heavily.

Moo0’s Right Clicker makes several welcome additions to the default options. I particularly like the folder bookmarking feature, which makes it a snap to navigate between folders in any explorer view. Couple it with the copy to and move to features, and managing files and folders in Explorer is much simpler.

It also adds a “go up” option to the menu - much quicker than mousing up to the Explorer toolbar - and the capability to duplicate a file’s name or full path to the clipboard. Right Clicker’s duplicate feature will spawn a new window with the current location (even from a file dialog). I find this particularly useful when I’m uploading or editing something and notice some file system untidiness that needs to be addressed immediately.

Right Clicker is available in free and paid versions, and my only real gripe is that the advanced options are all visible but grayed out. You know, just to remind us what we’re missing out on. Still, it provides a nice set of functions that context menu aficionados are sure to welcome.

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