The Top Insurance Institute for Highway Safety listed their top car picks yesterday:

Large cars

• Buick LaCrosse
• Ford Taurus
• Lincoln MKS
• Volvo S80

Midsize cars

• Audi A3
• Chevrolet Malibu built after October 2009
• Chrysler Sebring 4-door with optional electronic stability control
• Dodge Avenger with optional electronic stability control
• Mercedes C class
• Subaru Legacy
• Subaru Outback
• Volkswagen Jetta sedan
• Volkswagen Passat sedan
• Volvo C30

Small cars

• Honda Civic 4-door models (except Si) with optional electronic stability control
• Kia Soul
• Nissan Cube
• Subaru Impreza except WRX
• Volkswagen Golf 4-door

Midsize SUVs

• Dodge Journey
• Subaru Tribeca
• Volvo XC60
• Volvo XC90

Small SUVs

• Honda Element
• Jeep Patriot with optional side torso airbags
• Subaru Forester
• Volkswagen Tiguan

I’ve been a big fan of my local Craftburger since they opened their Yonge/Bloor location. Service is good and friendly, regular burgers are good, but their gourmet burger selections, including the lamb burger, are excellent.

The Toronto Star gave them 2nd highest rating next to some other new burger joints. We can now avoid Burger King with these places close by.

Burger Bar on Augusta got some even reviews lately both at the Star and on BlogTO. Hopefully they get thier operations running smoother soon.

This article didn’t mention Bamburger – I hope she goes to review it soon.

This laptop reliability survey was released today. It’s pretty clear who the winners and losers are.

In the article itself I’m glad they broke down the laptop failures between entry level and premium laptops. I’ve found the business laptops to always be much better built and more reliable than the consumer (read: Future Shop) models and the data holds true. Netbooks had the worst reliability.

Yes, the Kindle is now available to Canadians. This e-ink reader is the darling of the US for a while, and is now available here, albeit with a few caveats:

• customers will have to order it from Amazon USA. This is a potential disaster because this adds additional shipping costs ($21) and import fees ($31). I’m a little worried that Amazon has rushed this and not thought about the duty and PST/GST consequences – the government is going to add duty and GST and PST on top of when you import. What’s worse, the courier is probably going to be UPS, so customers will also be billed a brokerage fee on top of this. One might hope the “import fee deposit” of $31 will cover these costs, clearly all these charges are more than $31.
• Only the Kindle is available, the Kindle DX is not. That means you do not get the larger 10″ screen, increased storage and rotating display.
• Browsing is turned off. You will not be able to use the Kindle as a web browser. This makes no sense because it’s obvious they have a roaming agreement with a Canadian wireless carrier since you can purchase books wirelessly using 3G. I assume they did this in order to not incur data fees from the carrier. No doubt because our Canadian carriers are probably charging a lot more for data than the American carriers.
• This is unconfirmed but Canadian authors are not available to be purchased via Amazon for the Kindle. I have to look into this more but the licensing isn’t setup for Canadian publishers.
• If the Kindle is here, BRING THE KINDLE IPHONE APP TO US!! No, it’s still not available through App Store.

Update 11/20: CanoeTech believes that the Kindle is using the Rogers network for it’s 3G data.

Nikon lowered prices many products in Canada today due to the strength of the Canadian dollar. Nikon Rumors posted the following new lens prices, only these lenses had new MSRP’s:

• 17-35mm new price $1,879.95 is $70 lower
• 14-24mm new price $2,099.95 is $100 lower
• 24-70mm new price $1,999.95 is $100 lower
• 70-200mm new price $1,999.95 is $120 lower
• 70-200mm II new price $2,499.95 is $180 lower
• 200-400mm new price $6,849.95 is $150 lower
• 17-55mm new price $1,579.95 is $70 lower
• 300mm VR new price $5,399.95 is $200 lower
• 400mm VRII new price $9,749.95 is $500 lower
• 500mm VRII new price $9,349.95 is $400 lower
• 600mm VRII new price $11,249.95 is $500 lower
• 24mm PC-E new price $2,399.95 is $150 lower
• 45mm PC-E new price $2,199.95 is $70 lower
• 85mm PC-E new price $2,229.95 is $140 lower

On RedFlagDeals Forums, the following new body prices are reported:

• D300s $200 lower
  D3s new price $5199
  D700 new price $2,599

Today’s gadgets are only getting more and more complicated. No longer can you buy that gizmo and widget, and use it until it breaks or something better comes out. Today, when you buy something like a cellphone or even a blu-ray player, over the course of it’s useful lifetime you will be asked to do something like a “firmware upgrade” or a “software update”. In most cases, consumers are left to do this on their own, with little knowledge or support from the companies.

The software experience can make-or-break a good product. Unfortunately, many great product companies don’t realize this and execute it poorly. My Nikon cameras have been the worst offender. For the last three years, Nikon has failed to support their camera owners that use 64-bit versions of Windows like Vista and now Windows 7. This means you cannot use Window’s Explorer or Window’s Gallery to view RAW files created by the cameras without installing additional software at the owner’s expense

Canon recently released two firmware upgrades to their new EOS 7D cameras. While digital camera firmware upgrades are fairly straightforward, owners are not really notified of the firmware upgrades nor the bugs that exist in the camera if they don’t upgrade. It’s up to the owner to stay in the loop and check online for these updates.

Recently solid-state drives received a lot of attention to people buying computers. They offered extremely fast performance and high energy efficiency. Unfortunately, most of the existing drives will have their performance almost halved by it’s poor management of free space after doing a lot of reading and writing of data – performance degrades over time. New operating systems like Windows 7 fix this, however SSD owners that owned drives before the summer will most likely need to upgrade the firmware of their drives in order to support it. This process is neither easy nor well known.

Early adoptors of Blu-Ray players also know this feeling. The first set of were capable of basic movies and features, however when Blu-Ray Live came out, they found out that their players didn’t support it – and some of them didn’t even have the capability of being upgraded. Adopters that went the Playstation 3 route had their investment saved because the PS3 is a connected device – and can be updated online.

Companies need to pay more attention to the software of their products and the process they expect consumers to update them. While ‘expert’ users may have the knowledge and comfort level to perform these upgrades, the average consumer will not. The problem is easier for ‘connected’ devices like a game console or smartphone, but even basic devices like cameras and AV receivers have complicated software in them that rely on software updates to fix bugs or enable features.

I’ve been searching for a place to store my winter tires. Previously I’ve used Steelcase tire but the 5-6 hour wait last fall was just too much. This year on a whim I phoned up Canadian Tire downtown and asked if they had it. They told me this would be the first year offering it and it would be ready in a few weeks. Well last week when they began accepting storage orders and everything went smoothly. They mounted my winter tires and stored my summers. The storage fee is $75 per season, or $150 a year.

They store the tires offsite, so when you want to switch in the spring, you have to call them two days in advance.

I first read about this in Toronto Life, but the full document is available on Lai Wah Heen’s website. It’s a collaboration between Toronto wine expert Tony Aspler and New York sommelier Roger Dagorn. It’s definitely worth a read.

Unfortunately, there was no pairing of Chinese food with “cold tea”.

A wide investigation across Canada collected fish from fishmongers and compared their species with DNA testing. It found many fish sold as an expensive type are substituted for cheaper fish like tilapia. A summary can be found at the Toronto Star. They even provided a photo gallery of common deceptions.

Jailbroken iPhones all have one thing in common, the SSH application is installed on them. This is used as part of the jailbreaking process. Thing is, someone can use this to log into your phone and wreck havoc on it. Especially since the default password is well known.

Follow this tutorial to change the default password of your Jailbroken iPhone. If you’re not jailbroken, don’t worry, you are safe.