This is one of those long overdue posts that I’ve thought about for quite a bit and that I should have completed a long time ago, but that did wait till today for a series of different reasons.
You might have noticed that my wishlist contains some items that are correctly classified as “electronics”. Up to last July or so, Amazon UK didn’t ship that stuff to Italy at all; since then, they said that they do ship them to Italy. Since from time to time I could use some gadget but I don’t need it hard enough that I would get it by myself, I thought it would have been a decent way to handle the wishlist to put some stuff in there.
Unfortunately, it seems like Amazon does not allow for the items to be shipped to Italy by using the wishlist, even though it would be sent without a glitch when ordering it myself. There seem to be two reasons for that: Amazon always tries to add the cheapest option to the wishlist, which often times is a “Marketplace” option, and since they require an explicit authorisation to give personal addresses to those sellers, it doesn’t work when sending something to someone else.
Also, interestingly enough, they have no problem to send the electronics from the German Amazon website (which is how Thomas was able to send me the MX Revolution mouse), since they still ship from the same warehouse it seems. I guess this is just one more Amazon failure (the last one I wrote about was from an year and a half ago).
At any rate, I have for now cleared up the wishlist so that all the items in it are actually available to be sent (they are all books, CDs or videogames); if you want to send me an appreciation token, those are definitely welcome; if you wish to make a more function donation, you can either send me hardware directly (contact me in case you’re interested to know what I’m looking for — right now one thing would definitely be an 8-port Gigabit switch since my 5-port one is exhausted, and another thing that I’ll probably never stop needing is accumulators, or rechargeable batteries if you prefer; ~1000mAH AAA or ~2800 mAH AA are definitely welcome), or you can use Amazon gift certificates, with those I’m able to order the hardware by myself.
And by the way I also learnt the hard way myself why I should pay attention about ordering hardware from Amazon: I ordered a Belkin powered USB HUB… and it arrived – quite obviously thinking about it in the aftermath – with a British power socket. Which would have been a good thing for the Nokia bluetooth headset (so that I could use it to charge the phone when I was in London) but which wasn’t as good for an USB HUB. I still have to find a complete solution for that.
Anyway, to make this announcement less useless, I wish to thank user99, Carlo and Daniel for their improvement to Autotools Mythbuster which has been updated today. Thanks guys!
