Ali Kuru

I like Philips, and I’ve never thought twice while buying their goods. Not only I trust their quality, I also recommend their products to everyone around me. But the company officials severed my trust to Philips last week. Here is the story;

I’ve bought a pair of Philips earphones (SHE 3600) 6 months ago and, because they use a weak adhesive material putting it on while manufacturing, the rubber cover of the left earphone dropped last week. Since it is impossible to wear the naked earphone because of the uncovered sharp edges after the rubber cover dropped, I’ve decided to call Philips for help. I thought that 2 years warranty Philips offered is still valid, why not use it?

I called the toll free number written on the warranty and they gave me the number of the local service center.

I told my problem to the Philips representative at the local service center. She told me that “because the dropped part is an accessory, Philips doesn’t produce any replacements for it”. After a few seconds of shock, I told her back; “How could this part is considered as an accessory? It’s impossible to use the earphone without it because of the underlying sharp edges. If it is preventing my usage with its absence, then it is obviously a necessary part for the functioning of the earphone!”. Then I told her that if they are not producing spares for this part, they should replace the earphones. She told me that they can’t replace the earphones unless the sound is problematic or there is no sound coming.

After I felt the dead end, I left the service center and called the Philips customer care again, and told them her response to my problem. The lady on the line approved their approach to my problem and told me pretty much the same things. I told her that it’s written on the warranty that the “whole product, including all parts, is under warranty of Philips”. She told me that the warranty only covers “malfunctions”. Meaning; only sound complaints about the Phillips earphones are considered worth giving repairs or replacements under the warranty, according to Philips.

Well, that sucks.

I always believe that there are little or no differences between products of competing well-known consumer electronics brands and what makes a company “big” in its league is the customer support.

I can understand not producing spares for a product which itself retails between $15-20. But, if you are offering 2 years warranty to that cheap-labored product, you must at least show the courtesy of offering new one instead of lowering your reputation, which doesn’t come easy.

I’ve recently started using Disqus for the handling of this blogs’ comments. Service has really nice features, including integration with Facebook Connect, which unfortunately seem to mess with your statistics if you are using StatCounter or Google Analytics (I’m using both).

There is a solution posted on the Disqus blog and I’ve got a tip for you if you are using WordPress, which will allow you to include the given xd_receiver.html on your blog only when necessary, to reduce the front page size.

If you wrap the given code on the Disqus blog with the WordPress conditional tag is_single(), mentioned xd_receiver.html (and the javascript that its calling) will only included in your post pages, where the comment form should appear. See the code below;

<?php if (is_single()) { ?>
<script type="text/javascript">
var facebookXdReceiverPath='http://alikuru.com/wp-content/files/xd_receiver.html';
</script>
<?php } ?>

If you are allowing your visitors to comment on your WordPress pages too, you might want to change the is_single() with is_singular() ;)

Update: Disqus has launched an update and Facebook Connect caused messy statistics issue seem to reoccur. Here is another workaround.

These screens are installed to show advertisements on public transportation buses at Mersin for a while now, and I was thinking that they are probably powered by embedded Windows. Today, when I was coming to campus, system produced an error on the boot loader screen and I’ve noticed it is running Debian! (Click on the image to see its bigger version)

I’m not sure whether the drivers or the owners of these buses are aware of this, but they are showing a good example of making money by using open source :) Congrats for their clever choice!

Technology tour organized by Turkcell (Turkey’s prominent cell phone operator) and Microsoft was here in Mersin today, where both Turkcell and Microsoft’s representatives try to tell about their future perspectives to the students.

Turkcell’s Gökhan Yıldırım, who is talking about “technology” and still using “Internet Explorer 6” on his notebook, talked about 3G and the technologies they are thinking to build around it, such as media streaming, integration with home and car automation systems, mobile internet etc. I know, if you’re visiting this blog from Europe or U.S., you are probably thinking “what is so new about it?”. You are so right, nothing new about this for the rest of the world. (more…)

According to my birth records, it’s been 30 years since my official hello to the world, so this “Hello” here is not actually coming from me, but from WordPress, which is a software I use to publish this blog.

It is a tradition around programmers to make their software print out the phrase “Hello World” to prove their initial code is actually functioning. You can read more about the idea behind this from Wikipedia.