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A fellow computer friend introduced me to a little web tool last week that I thought was pretty cool. It’s called Invisible Hand and it works as an add-on in my Firefox browser. It helps you save money when shopping online and that’s always cool.

When you have the add-on installed and you visit a website or webpage that is a product page for an item, the Invisible Hand kicks in and searches other websites behind the scenes and then lets you know if you could save money by purchasing the item on one of the other sites.

As you can see from the screen shot above, I was looking for a Zune 120GB device on Amazon’s website. The Invisible Hand add-on fired off a status bar at the top of my browser window and let me know I could save $50 if I purchased the device at Geeks.com.

I can click on the button for the site with the lowest price and be taken immediately to the product page for the item on that site.

The only real challenge I see with the tool is that it doesn’t take into account any shipping charges that may be different between sites and in the case above, the product was currently out of stock on the cheaper website.

Perhaps these are improvements that can be incorporated in future releases of the Invisible Hand add-on.

Last night my wife and I went to see Denzel Washington’s new movie “The Book of Eli“. I expected it to be a full-action flick and it appeared that Denzel was going to play the type of guy you just knew not to mess with. I wasn’t disappointed.

We see that the world around Denzel is in some kind of post-apocalyptic event.

Denzel started off the movie with an aura of “don’t mess with me”. It wasn’t long before he was presented with a situation where he exhibited the skill of taking down about six guys that were looking to take him out.

The plot of the movie has Denzel wandering west. We also get introduced to Gary Oldman’s character who’s in search of some kind of book. Gary’s street thugs bring in books for him, but they’re never the right ones. The book he’s looking for ends up being the book that Denzel character, Eli, is carrying and reading.

The book ends up being a copy of the King James Bible. We learn that people blamed the apocalyptic event on the Bible so it was searched and and burned along with many other books. The reason Gary wants the copy of the Bible is that he wants to control people with religion. Denzel’s character is trying to protect the book and deliver it to a better place for the betterment of society. Thus the conflict at hand.

Eli seems to be supernaturally protected by a higher power through his journey and confrontations with bad guys throughout the movie.

The premise of the Bible being the goal of efforts for both sides was interesting. One person wanted it to control people, the other wanted it to continue and be saved for everyone’s enjoyment and encouragement.

There are a couple of interesting twists in the movie, one of which you really don’t catch until the end, but it’s hinted at throughout the movie.

Overall I really enjoyed the film. It wasn’t quite what I expected, but think it was a good story. Not sure how much widespread success this movie may have though. It’s message may not be one that has a lot of mainstream agreement.

If you’ve seen the movie, let me know what you thought.

A friend of mine emailed me today and asked me why his software, Adobe Photoshop Album Starter, opens every time he connects his iPod to his computer. His computer and his software are trying to be helpful, but most of the time in this situation I’ve never thought it was being helpful. Here’s how you try and stop it.

I’m pretty certain this issue is due to a couple of different things happening. You’ve told your iPod to work and function like an external storage device (basically like another USB thumb drive or external hard drive). And/or you’ve asked Adobe Photoshop Album Starter to scan any drives looking for image content to add to your album.

I believe there are a couple of things you can do if I remember iTunes and my iPod correctly. I haven’t had one in a number of years and haven’t had iTunes installed since.
I believe there’s a setting within iTunes that you set to tell the computer to recognize your iPod as a storage device. Look for this setting in Options or Preferences and switch it off. That is unless you do want to use your iPod as a storage device.

Next I would go into your Start-Up folder and make sure that your Adobe software isn’t included in that folder. You can also look for settings within the Adobe software that are telling it to scan your hard drives automatically for new content. If you can find a setting like that, turn it off.

If you really want to make sure it’s not going to startup you can also open up msconfig and make sure everything is checked or unchecked as needed to not start on startup. You can read this earlier post of mine with instructions on how to use the msconfig controls.