Put away your iPod. These music players don’t hold thousands of songs, movies and audiobooks. Their features are limited, but you will get more of a “wow” reaction from them.

First up–the Foxhole Radio. These simple radios were built from scraps of wire, cardboard tubes, razor blades and safety pins by GIs in WWII. Instructions are here–the real challenge is to scrounge up the parts for one of these without spending a dime. Most of the components should be found in the layers of debris in any well-disorganized workbench, though finding a suitable earpiece might be a challenge. If your workbench is too clean to harbor such debris, a kit can be purchased for $23 here, though it seems a bit counter to the spirit of the thing to pay someone to send a piece of wood, nails, and some bits of wire.

How about making your own recordings instead? Think Edison meets the plastic cup–this kit available from the MAKE store is a beautifully-designed Thomas Edison-style device that replaces wax cylinders with common plastic cups that lets you record and play back your own (or someone else’s, I suppose) voice.

Finally, if you want to get really retro, get a music box. But I can never find one with the song I want–that’s where this DIY Music Box kit comes in. You punch out the tune you want on a strip of paper that is played by the mechanism as you wind the crank. Included on the site is a PDF for making the Super Mario Brothers theme! What could be cooler than that?

Morpheus couldn’t tell Neo how the Matrix was first built, I think we’re seeing some interesting groundwork being laid for an ever-more realistic simulations of the earth coming out that will may one day give us the option of choosing to live in a virtual world instead of the real one. Which would make broadband access a vital public utility along with water, gas, and electricity.

First, Google Earth. If you haven’t downloaded it, stop reading right now and go get it. The fact that an interactive model of the entire earth, including detailed satellite imagery, 3D representations of buildings, hyperlinks to user-generated photo albums and a freakin’ flight simulator to fly around all of it is free, as in beer, is still mind-boggling. The thing to remember is that Google isn’t sitting still on Google Earth or it’s web-based companion, Google Maps. There’s a decent chance that since I’ve been writing this post, Google has added another cool feature to its mapping tools that will be the topic of another blog post.

Google Maps’ Street View is pretty cool, but after a while, the speed of reloading the streetview combined with the size of the image makes one feel a bit like a tortoise with tunnel vision. There’s a small outfit called Mapjack that is raising the bar in what they call “immersive street side imagery.” They claim to have done what “others” have done with NASA-sized budgets on a shoestring. Their website shows off three cities that have been “mapjacked”–San Francisco, Sausalito, CA, and Chiang Mail, Thailand. Unlike the GoogleMaps streetview, which shows your street view image as small caption window over your map, Mapjack provides a split screen showing your map below and your street image above in panorama. Your location and graphical indication of your field of view is shown on the map below. You can use the mouse keys to navigate along trails of blue dots running down the streets. Left and right arrow keys allow a smooth, sharp 360 degree view from your location. Google’s street views, while they can be enlarged, and you do get the panorama effect with the arrow keys, to me the Mapjack effect comes across as sharper, clearer, and more immersive than Google, at least for now. Progressing down streets and looking around still entails a bit of click-and-load, but overall, the experience is a clear improvement over Google’s Street View.

Another interesting way of interacting with Google’s virtual world is being developed at the University of Southern California, and it is called Viewfinder. The idea is simple: You’ve got a photograph of a landscape or a building. You want to know where was the photographer standing when he took the picture. The Viewfinder project, when complete, would be able to take that photo and “situate it” within Google Earth. The effect is imagined to be a combination of Flickr and Google Earth, a more efficient way of cataloging on a geographical bulletin board the millions of photos uploaded to Flickr.

These enhancements, if included in the Google Earth simulation, will enrich the experience and make it more compelling. Sooner or later–probably sooner–Google Earth will incorporate these and other features. I can’t wait–I love maps–but the reality is that most Internet users, whether they use Google Maps, or Yahoo Maps, or Mapquest, are getting the same maps and directions that you could have gotten out of Mapquest a decade ago. The added features are great, but Google Earth, as great as it is, has not yet reached an “iPod” moment when the combination of features and the richness of the experience change it from being a just a cool toy to a compelling tool that everyone has to have. If I can just throw a wishlist out there, I’d like to be able to translate the experience of flying over the surface of Google Earth down to the street level, so you can get real-time rendered views for a virtual tour of Amsterdam or Chicago (or more likely, San Francisco will the first city to get the full treatment). Combine the Googleverse with a wireless screen projectd on the inside of my sunglasses–I can match the real world with the Google world.

And then of course is the part where I get so immersed in the Google world that I don’t even know I am living in a vat of gel with a metal spike in my brain, as a kind of human battery to support Google. I’ll pack my Dayquil just in case I get to that point.

I want to talk briefly about bluetooth cellphone headsets, as California’s new cell phone ban is due to take effect in a few months, and I might need to buy one for myself. The decision I face reminds of the plight of Stanley, the iconoclast everyman of absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, played by Gene Wilder in the 1974 film adaptation. In the story, Stanley and his friends are shocked (not surprisingly) when people suddenly begin turning into rhinoceroses. Ionesco takes the allegory for conformity in society to the extreme as more and more people turn into rhinoceroses–what was shocking at first, soon becomes avant garde. Desire to resist tranforms into envy as more and more people change into the large, clumsy, powerful beasts.

Which brings me to bluetooth cellphone headsets. Walk through an airport, an office, a mall, and you’ll see them–bluetooth headset wearers. At first, you could guess who they were–”early adopters”, trying to pretend that walking around with a piece of electronic gadgety stuck in their ear is perfectly normal. Of course, it’s not just early adopters anymore–in addition to the smiling gadget geeks with silver doodads with blue lights on them, there are now soccer moms, and grandparents and teenagers walking around looking like Lt. Uhura.

For me, the decision is not so much which bluetooth headset to buy, but rather, do I join the pod people, and walk around, wearing this ear widget like it is a perfectly normal thing to do, or do I hold out, like Ionesco’s Stanley, refusing to succumb to the inexorable tide of all of humanity tranforming into bluetooth-wearing rhinoceroses before his eyes.

The problem for me is the whole ostentatiousness of it all. It seems to me that the bluetooth cellphone headset, when worn all the time, whether in use or not, is not an adaptation of a functional tool, it’s just the latest incarnation of cellphone snobbery. It’s a way to say, “Look at me, look how tech-savvy I am. I am so indispensable that not only do I need to remain in constant contact with everyone in the world, but I can’t even allow my nonstop communication trunk line to interfere with my hands at any given moment.” It’s all so… pretentious.

So what do I do? If I don’t give in, then in order to use my cell phone in the car, I have to use a clumsy corded headset, or risk getting a ticket from California Highway Patrol. Or do I give in, and join the bluetooth-headset-wearing nerds?

Given that I am already pretentious enough to begin a geekblog post with a literary reference to an obscure French/Romanian playwright , then I guess an electronic cellphone dongle in my ear will fit right in. Bluetooth, here I come. Snort.

I know what you’re all thinking. Here it’s nearly April, and Mother’s day is coming up, and where, exactly, does one go to buy radioactive isotopes? Maybe a glow-in-the-dark Tritium keychain for the kids? Or bit of certified genuine Trinitite–that would be glass that was created from the desert sand by the historic Trinity nuclear test explosion in 1945.The answer is United Nuclear, a website that sells the nuclear tidbits listed above, as well as a variety of other scientific curiosities like aerogel, magnetic ferro-fluid, levitation kits and samples of the kinds of chemicals that they don’t put into chemistry sets anymore.

If you have a passing familiarity with chemistry, and for example, are familiar with what you can do when you mix up aluminum dust with powdered iron oxide and light it, your reaction may range from “hey, cool!” to “oh my gosh!”

United Nuclear can also set you up with a neodymium magnet the size of can of peaches if you want. These things are STRONG–at first the warnings about having to plan your route through rooms with metal objects and computers and losing fingers are dire enough to bring smiles to kind of people who enjoy dangerous things, until you get the part where United Nuclear tells you about a small child who lost a hand when his father left two of them unattended.

As you look through the various “read this warning or die” labels on the site, you might be curious about who is selling this stuff. The owner of United Nuclear is Bob Lazar, who claims to have worked for the government at Sector S-4, which is of course, where the alien spaceships are being reverse-engineered. The lack of any evidence for his claims to have received degrees from MIT and Caltech is due to the government’s erasure of his identity.

Of course it is. In addition to his United Nuclear site has his own website at Boblazar.com, where he provides “recreated” details about his time studying the alien spacecraft.

UFOs aside, Bob Lazar’s other hobby these days is more closely aligned with items found in his current inventory–the annual Desert Blast that he holds out in the desert where like-minded individuals go off into the sands of New Mexico and blow stuff up. And by “like-minded individuals,” I mean any human male over the age of 36 months.

I don’t know about you, but geek-gift registry is going to be on United Nuclear from now on. After all, there’s only so many USB Rocket launchers one man can have.

Last Wednesday, Hulu.com officially opened for business, offering up free-with-ads video on demand through the browser. The project is a joint venture of NBC and News Corp. Here now a quick look at how Hulu changes the online video-on-demand picture.

A few short years ago, I would have told anyone that video over the Internet was little more than a curiosity. Grainy, postage stamp-sized windows, endless rebuffering, and choppy, out-of-sync audio was the typical experience–given that there was another electronic box in the living room called a “television,” Internet video hardly seemed worth the effort.

That was then, this is now–and Hulu joins Apple’s iTunes Music Store, Netflix, ABC.go.com, Amazon Unboxed and others in actually providing a viable alternative to the TV Set for watching television shows and movies on your computer.

Hulu is different from paid online video like Apple and Amazon in that it’s free, obviously. The programs have what Hulu calls “limited” commericial interruptions, and to be fair, unlike regular TV, the commercial breaks that I saw were limited to one 30-second ad, inserted at the usual place you might find them while watching a TV program. You can pause, go back, and skip ahead to other parts of the program–it seems likely that one might be able to avoid the ads if you were determined to do so, but I found that the advantage of watching a TV show with ads on my computer over watching on TV was that I could simply pop open another browser window and listen for the end of the ad while I checked my email or caught up on my blogs. For now, to a lazy person like me, hacking my way around the ads seems like it might not be worth the bother.

Picture quality, while not high-def, is certainly acceptable on my 15-inch laptop screen, and you can open the window to full screen if you like, or pop the video out into a separate window. It’s also nice that Hulu’s web page works just fine on my Mac in Firefox, which I like.

Now the mechanics of the video experiences are certainly important, but worthless if there is nothing worth watching. What is on Hulu tonight? As a joint venture of NBC and Fox, expect to see a lot of programming from those networks. Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, Family Guy, The Office and House are on the most popular TV shows. Popular movies include Titan A.E., The Incredible Hulk, Master and Commander, as well as some oldies like the Jerk and camp classics like The People that Time Forgot–in short, we’re not talking newly released hits, but even here at launch, there should something that you would mind sitting through that you never got around to seeing.

After all, Hulu is free. Mathematically, free is a lot cheaper than 2 or 3 or 4 dollars that you could pay to rent a movie or buy an episode of a TV show from Apple or Amazon. And even though 3 bucks, to pick the median price for a rental, isn’t a lot, it is still 3 I could choose NOT to spend, especially if there is something on Hulu. For free.

Someone with a better education in business math could draw this correlation better than I could, but here is where Hulu is getting it right and Apple and Amazon might be getting it wrong.

Apple has correctly figured out that when it comes to music, people would rather own, not rent. iTunes’ 99 cent songs hit the sweet spot of what seems like a fair price for a song. And per track pricing allows many people to save money when buying music by allowing customers to buy just the tracks they want, instead of buying an $18 album to get 3 good songs.

Movies and videos a different, though. A 3-minute, 99 cent song is a better investment in entertainment than a one hour TV show that costs $1.99, because I will listen to a song many times. but I’ll probably only watch a TV show once. And for the shows and movies that I really do like and may watch again, the pricing model works against digital downloads, because the more I like a TV shows or a movie, and the more I am willing to buy the video, the LESS likely I am to buy it digitally. I am going to spend more money to get a physical disk with special features, higher video quality, and I so I can have something tangible to put in my collection.

Hulu, on the other hand, has the right content for the right price. When am I going to watch TV on Hulu? When I am home, after work, checking email and my blogs, I’ll pop open Hulu program, and multitask. I won’t care that I am half paying attention, because it’s free.

Hulu does have a couple shortcomings. Content is somewhat limited, for now anyway. It seems unlikely that the catalog is going to branch beyond NBC and Fox offereings, The other is that I am tied to my laptop to watch. I can’t load it my iPod and take it to the gym, and the library could improve, which it will.

Bottom line: Hulu doesn’t suck. Check it out.

The Internet’s collective library of images is vast. A quick Google image search can quickly locate a picture of pretty much anyone or anything. Flickr is not only a great site for hosting your own photo albums, but the ability to search and browse other people’s photos is a pastime in itself. The problem is that in 2008, even with broadband, and 2 gHz processors and gigabytes of RAM, web surfing is still something of a click-load-scroll and click again affair.

PicLens is a Firefox extension for Windows or Mac that takes the flat, utilitarian view of a Google or Flickr image result and turns it into a 3D wall of images. You can zoom in or out, and scroll down the wall with speed that literally might make you dizzy (my wife had to ask me to stop to prevent her vertigo from kicking in). Read on for more details.

iPod users will be reminded of Coverflow–the recent Apple iTunes update that allows you to browse your iPod songs as a 3-D stream of album covers flipping across your screen. Coverflow was cool enough for Apple to include it as part of OS X 10.5 as part of the file browser, but it’s important to note that Coverflow on the iPod is basically just eye-candy. It doesn’t really help you find an album or song any faster, it just makes browsing your own collection more fun, cool, and interesting.

But PicLens is different, because you’re not browsing songs on your iPod, you use it to view pictures. It changes the taks of sifting through image results on Google or Flickr from click and load to almost the same experience as picking up a coffee table book and flipping through the pages as fast or as slow as you want, with the ability to poke your finger on a page and stop, then keep flipping forward or back.

PicLens works with Google Image Search, Flickr, Photobucket, Smugmug, Yahoo, and Deviant Art. Once installed, images results from these sites that are PicLens-enabled show a small “play” triangle when you mouse over the image preview. Clicking launches the interface; you can use your mouse, trackpad, or arrow keys to move around in the “wall of pics” as it loads. Clicking on an individual pic gives you a quick enlarge, and clicking again fills the screen. You can do new searches from within PiclLens on any of the supported engines, and clicking an arrow in the top left takes you the web page search result of the highlighted pic.

PicLens is free. Go download it already.

There’s nothing new about electronics kits–I had one as a kid from Radio Shack, and I remember sitting over my desk, cutting and stripping wires and hooking up battery clips and the like. My problem was that the kit ended up as an unholy tangle of wires and loose clips and cardboard cutout diagrams after my first attempt to make a project, and the kit seldom survived the first attempt to wire up a telegraph key or flashing light. That’s why I was impressed with Snap Circuits electronics kits when I was looking for an electronics kit for my son.

All the Snap Circuits components–resistors, transistors, ICs, LEDs–are mounted on solid, durable, clearly labelled plastic modules with familiar metal button snaps that you use to connect them. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Legos understands instantly how to put the pieces together, which makes building the prediagrammed experiments in the books provided with the kits easy. Even better, once you’ve built some of the circuits in the book, experimenting and making changes to see what happens is just as easy.

Snap Circuits makes a pretty good spectrum of kits for different budgets, starting with single-project kits that include just a handful of pieces, to different levels of comprehensive kits, and the impressive Snap Circuits Rover, which allows you to put together your own radio-control car. All the kits have interchangeable parts, so you can combine the parts from two kits to make your own projects. Snap Circuits also sells “upgrade” kits that give the missing pieces to build the projects in their more expensive kits.

I’ve had experience with their customer service department as well. I had a malfunctioning rover base just a few days after the kit was opened on Christmas day. I corresponded with their email support team and promptly received a new piece in the mail.

Snap Circuits isn’t the cheapest electronics kit out there, but the pieces are durable enough to survive being handed down from an older brother to a younger brother. That alone makes the kit a solid investment… as well as a good stepping stone to future father/son projects with soldering irons and breadboards.

A cursory glance of the latest Fords, Chevys, Toyotas and cars available from any of the other big automakers in any given year reveals little in the way of truly new or revolutionary features. A redesigned cupholder here, a different color backlight on the instrument panel there, but when you think about it, there is really not a whole lot of difference in the the basic four wheels, four doors, gas-powered car that you can buy today from those our parents, or even our grandparents drove.

So I am hoping the Big Three pay attention to this little number coming out soon from RinSpeed–the sQuba. If an electric two-seater that can drive right into the water and dive to a depth of 10 meters sounds like something out of a James Bond movie, it should. Rinspeed boss and designer Frank M. Rinderknecht is a Bond fan, and was inspired 3 decades ago by the submersible Lotus Esprit designed by Q branch in The Spy Who Loved Me, and the sQuba is the result. The primary difference, of course, is that Bond’s Lotus was just movie SFX, but the sQuba actually works.

That said, there are a couple differences–dare I say compromises–that had to be made to bring the submersible car off the big screen and onto the road and/or water. Unlike Bond’s Lotus, the sQuba dives underwater with the top down, meaning you get wet. Bring your own dive mask, but the sQuba does include integrated air tanks and regulators behind the headrest. Also, you better not be in too much of a hurry to get anywhere underwater, as your top speed is about 3 km/hour. That also rules out diving anywhere you might have to deal with even the slightest current. On the surface, you can manage 6 km/hr.

So, if you’re the kind of person who happens to drive by large bodies of water that are clear enough to enjoy the underwater view, don’t have any appreciable current, and you often feel like impressing the attractive Soviet spy in the passenger seat, and you’re both in the habit of wearing wetsuits when you go out for a drive, then this is the car for you.

OK, so I’ll admit, it’s not the most practical ride in the world. But what can I look forward to in my next new car from Detroit? A sunroof with an integrated cupholder? Downloadable customized “your door is ajar” messages for 99 cents each? Please, people–it IS the future. At least Rinspeed is trying.

The eternal question that begins, “I wonder what would happen if I …” is the foundation of modern science. Galileo was actually the first person of note decided it might be worthwhile to put the long-held scientific principles of Aristotle to the test by the simple experiment of taking objects of different weights and dropping them to see one actually fell faster than the other (note: they don’t). I’m taking a look here at two cable TV shows that take on What If questions and answer them by trying it and seeing what happens–although what usually happens is an explosion of some kind. But that’s a good thing.

Number 1: Brainiac: Science Abuse

I first discovered clips from Brainiac via Youtube and Google video, where some of the show’s more popular clips have been posted. I’ve since seen more of the Brainiacs, who are now running for their 5th season. They are broadcast in the US on G4TV.

The show’s “Science Abuse” motif is appropriate on a number of levels. Their idea of what might make a good experiment can run from the genuinely intriguing if somewhat silly idea of making a high school wind ensemble play their instruments after taking a breath of helium, to the rather obvious but still compelling question of what happens when you put various metal/flammable objects in a microwave oven. The Brainiacs seem to love nothing more than an explosion, so there is an entire series of microwave oven experiments that never end well for the microwave oven.

There is also a series of liquid oxygen experiments that tend to combust, and a personal favorite, the thermite series of experiments. Thermite is mixture of aluminum and iron oxide powder that can be ignited into what chemists call a “violently exothermic reaction.” It doesn’t actually explode, but you don’t want to be near it when it catches, and as a by-product, it creates a red-hot flow of liquid iron that will melt through the engine block of a French car. What’s not to love about that?

Number 2: Mythbusters

On the US side, anyone who has had Discovery Channel on their cable lineup has seen the Mythbusters–Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman–try to figure out which of our deeply held beliefs about things like airplanes suddenly losing pressure or cutting a samurai swords in half can actually happen. The show began its first season by examining urban myths–those friend of a friend stories we’ve all heard–not to figure out if they did happen, but by figuring out if they could have happened. Jamie Hyneman-he’s the guy with beret, the white shirt and the walrus mustache–and his partner, Adam Savage–have been building props for the movie business for years, so their approach is to re-create the condiitions of the myth as closely as they can to see if, for example, a penny dropped from the Empire State Building will go through your skull like a rifle bullet. Although they are not scientists, they take a scientific approach to solving their myths by clearly identifying their assumptions about the conditions, recreating them as close as possible, and in the end, determining if the myth was plausible, unlikely, or busted. The good news is that like the Brainiacs, the Mythbusters seem to operate on the principle that all experiments must end with an explosion of some kind. Which is good.

So which show wins the Geek Challenge?

Both shows, despite their different styles, have their appeal–plenty of explosions in both, with a smattering of scientific justification thrown in. There is, however, a crucial scientific difference between the two shows that tips one of these Geek Challengers to victory.

Brainiac cheats.

There is much in science that blows up or can be made to blow up or catch fire, or if need be, dropped from a crane and smashed, and a flimsy argument can be made that it is scientific to do so. What you CANNOT do, however, is try to make something blow up, fail, then drop a black powder charge in as an emergency explosion stunt double, and claim that your original experiment worked. This is exactly what Brainiac did in one of their first season’s most popular segments on alkali metals. These metals, which include lithium and phosphorus, combust on contact with water, and apparently the idea was to drop a AAA battery-sized slug of rubidium and cesium into a bathtub of water and film the mayhem. These two elements–referred to by present Richard Hammond as “the dog’s nuts of the periodic table”–were encased in a water soluble plastic sleeve and dropped in a bathtub while the crew ran for cover. The results were impressive–described respectively as a hand grenade, then a depth charge going off in a bathtub–but they were also faked.

It seems that while cesium will react quite impressively with water, the way the boys were trying it wasn’t working. The problem was that the cesium sank to bottom of the tub, where the reaction was effectively snuffed out by the volume of water. Rather than blow the expense of a days shooting, the producers decided to fake the explosions instead with standard special effects charges.

Other scenes have been reportedly faked as well, for the same reasons, although word has it that the producers, having been caught out by the Internet, have learned their lesson, and they don’t fake anymore. However, even without faking, there is decided lack of rigor in the way some experiments are conducted–for example, responding to a viewer email about how best to mitigate smelly feet, the Brainiacs simulated smelly feet by smearing test subject’s feet with stinky cheese. Seemed like they were going for the laugh here at the expense of a possibly meaningful result.

Mythbusters, on the other hand, present their efforts warts and all. Experiments that fail, fail on camera. Things that don’t go boom that were supposed to might eventually be coaxed into exploding, but it’s always clear that results are being deliberately pushed over the top. Even the Mythbusters themselves all appear under their own names, and their interactions are seldom scripted. Some of the Brainiacs appear under their own name, and some under psuedonyms–and there’s the rub. Brainiac can throw a white lab coat on someone and call them Doctor or Professor, but more than likely, he (or she) is just an actor.

Congratulation, Mythbusters! Mythbusters has their own website here, and you can buy episodes of the show on iTunes.

Brainiacs, please, keep it real. You can read more about them here.

by Mr. Alex of Geekfoolery

Just six weeks ago, Christmas gifts were opened, and gift givers gauged the reaction of their giftees–was that a polite smile, or a genuine, “Wow! That’s cool!” Despite the vast array of product research available to any consumer with an Internet connection, it’s still a tough call to know if gift is going to get used and enjoyed, or is it going to end up on a shelf in the back of the closet, or exchanged, or worse–regifted.

That’s why this post-Christmas review is coming in mid-February. I picked up a Rubik’s Revolution for the kids almost as an afterthought. I wasn’t 100% of what it was, but the kids had asked for Rubik’s Cube, and this looked OK and was only about $13. In the shopping cart it went as continued searching for the kid’s “main” gift.

Unlike the original Rubik’s Cube, which requires a learning or discovering a fairly complex series of moves to solve the puzzle, Rubik’s revolution is simplicity itself. It looks like a shiny Rubik’s Cube, but the sides don’t rotate. Instead, the center square on each face is a lighted recessed button. The instruction sheet describes six different variation on the same game of simply pushing the button that is lit. That’s it, basically… a face lights up, and you have to spin the cube around, find the lit square and press it. Allowable time between presses gets shorter and shorter, and pressing the wrong button ends the game. There are two person variations, other similar themes.

What’s fascinating about it is how compelling this simple game is, for pretty much anyone who picks it up. Kids, of course love anything that beeps and lights up, and the fascination derives from rules simple enough to follow and succeed at. Older kids I watched play the game derive different strategies for turning the cube to get to the lit face faster. Get on the two person game with adults and it’s as compelling as eating potato chips. It can get a little noisy and exciting, but that’s all part of the fun.

We’ve taken the cube to friend’s houses, and their kids master the game in seconds and remain fascinated for… well, maybe not hours, but a long time, anyway.

There were more expensive, more complicated, more involved toys under the tree, but I have been amazed at the lasting appeal of this thing. At $13, it’s a bargain anyway–the fact that it will get used is icing on the cake.