Newsletter Top Product: CD Storage Units

Michael And finally, this issue's top product: the CD storage units from Discgear, which Angelika once gave me as a gift. Since I am known to prefer starving over living without music, I tend to accumulate quite a few CDs. I always immediately throw away the small plexiglass boxes (so-called jewel cases) in which CDs are sold these days, as they are the most useless invention since the bendable straw. Had I kept all of them so far, my CD collection would be taller than the Bank of America building in San Francisco. Instead, I use the futuristic-looking boxes made by Discgear, which are only about 30 cm wide and can hold 80 CDs (nowadays, there are even ones that hold 100!). A refreshing alternative to the 300-mark-but-only-hold-60-CDs stands from certain yuppie stores. To retrieve a particular CD, there is a slider at the front of the box that you set to a number between 1 and 80. When you then open the lid, the selected CD pops out, and you can easily pick it with your fingers and place it into the CD player. Also, each CD has a small sticker indicating which box and position it belongs to, in case 20 CDs are lying around the apartment again because you were too lazy to put them back in the box, it's easy to find the slots to stash them were they belong.

But that's not all: On the front of the case, you can attach a table of contents that assigns a title and an artist to each number. However, the software that comes with Discgear is somewhat subpar and not recommended. But since I'm in the field, there's more: On my website, there's a program that searches for a keyword you enter (for example, "Red Hot Chili Peppers") and then tells me in which of my Discgear cases and at which positions CDs from this band are located. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to send them the small Perl program. And in my monthly column for the German Linux Magazine, which I've been writing columns for for almost five years, I've introduced a small program for labeling the case ( https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgabe/2002/03/perl/perl.htm ). The Discgear storage is available at www.discgear.com, not particularly cheap, but very practical. Drives the yuppie stores to ruin!