Archive for July, 2007
Netflix Gets Cheaper
Posted by Joe on July 23, 2007 · Comments Off
Netflix has cut prices on two plans, according to CNNMoney.com:
The one DVD plan now costs $8.99 a month while the three DVD offering now costs $16.99 a month, matching a similar service offered by arch-rival Blockbuster. Another plan from Blockbuster, called Total Access, costs $17.99 a month but allows customers to return a DVD to a store in addition to having the option of mailing it back.
Gotta love the price wars!
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Easy iPhone Customizing
Posted by Joe on July 21, 2007 · Comments Off
Want to change your iPhone’s background? Just follow this 15-step tutorial involving the terminal app and several Unix commands. Why any serious iPhone fanboy would want to change the wallpaper that, for all we know, was personally selected by Steve Jobs is beyond us.
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InviteShare Returns After Outage
Posted by Joe on July 21, 2007 · Comments Off
InviteShare, the new sharing site for beta invites, has been down for the last day or so. However, the popular service is back up and working now. The sit claims over 16,000 users and over 17,000 invites shared so far. This is an awesome service, and we’re glad to see it live again. Invites are handled for 44 different sites (see our earlier post for a partial list).
UPDATE: A friend emailed with the news that TechCrunch has purchases InviteShare.
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Webkinz Identity Theft
Posted by Joe on July 21, 2007 · Comments Off
Webkinz are real-world plush toys that come with a code to activate a virtual version of the pet on www.webkinz.com. Shoplifters are apparently stealing the code, and leaving the toys behind — giving more value to the virtual toy than the real toy. Fascinating.
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iPhone Cleared Of All Charges In Network Attack
Posted by Joe on July 21, 2007 · Comments Off
Cisco network hardware problems, not iPhones, were responsible for Duke University’s Wi-Fi network outages:
A week after Duke officials traced intermittent outages in the campus Wi-Fi network to iPhones trying to connect to the Internet — and mistakingly assumed that the new devices were to blame — the IT department issued a statement confirming that the problem was Cisco’s, not Apple’s.
The series of outages “was caused by a Cisco-based network issue,” according to the official release. “Earlier reports that this was a problem with the iPhone in [...]
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Typing Is Hard
Posted by Joe on July 20, 2007 · Comments Off
In case you were wondering, Courtney Love is “NOT A TRAINED PROFESSIONAL TYPIST”. Here’s proof, from her MySpace page:
spect these were well to do very famous people a biut older hey alot older than 18 year old guzzlers wich i covered and stopped the bvooze flow on, but grwon up multi miullionare former shaggers and famed majopr label songbirds know better than to siot on a 17TH cebntury lovely table- maybe it was the kid energy in the room, dammed love rat. poo. i am not major lable but lets say that oartyy was a major lable party id stillhave opt pay for everything so its cleaner [...]
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Dog Makes Change
Posted by Joe on July 20, 2007 · Comments Off
The good news: Your dog just vomited up $647 in cash! The bad news: He swallowed $750 . More bad news: To be honest, not all of the recovered $647 came from the dog’s barking end.
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Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Posted by Joe on July 20, 2007 · Comments Off
No, the post title doesn’t exactly make sense, but it was close enough to clever that I couldn’t pass it up. Anyway, Ask.com has announced AskEraser, which will allow searchers to opt out of having their search history stored. It’s supposed to be available by the end of the year. Ask.com will also implement a new data retention policy that will disassociate saved search information from a user’s IP address after 18 months.
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SunRocket, RIP
Posted by Joe on July 20, 2007 · Comments Off
The Browser blog (Fortune Magazine) offers up a SunRocket post-mortem, and makes a good point:
We caught up with Pichinson, who was sanguine about SunRocket’s failure: “This is the risk of jumping into anything new, whether it is a new search engine or a new telephone service,†he says. Well, not exactly. If a Google wannabe serves up lame search results, I’m mildly annoyed and my switching costs are prettty minimal. When I’ve paid money up front for a year of telephone service – one of SunRocket’s signature plans – and my phone company goes under, [...]
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Brad Paisley Geeks Out
Posted by Joe on July 20, 2007 · Comments Off
Brad Paisley’s new video, “Online”, features Jason Alexander as a pizza delivery guy with a MySpace page and a crush on Maureen McCormick (a.k.a. Marcia Brady). Funny stuff. Who thought we’d ever get to see George Costanza in a cowboy hat wailing on a guitar? Or William Shatner making out with Estelle Harris?
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PCs Get Small
Posted by Joe on July 19, 2007 · Comments Off
We’re all about the tiny PCs here at Surflizard. And we’re not alone. Take a look at Wired’s tiny PC gallery.
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5,000 Joost Invites
Posted by Joe on July 19, 2007 · Comments Off
LAPTOP Magazine and Joost are teaming up to give away 5,000 Joost beta invites. I’ve been playing with Joost for a few days, and I’m very impressed. A lot of the content is already available elsewhere on the net, but the Joost user interface and video quality are both very good. Here’s LAPTOP Magazine’s review.
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LaCie 2 Terabyte External Drive
Posted by Joe on July 19, 2007 · Comments Off
LaCie is now offering a 2 terabyte external hard drive for $849. The drive uses Raid 0 for fast FireWire 800 performance.
I’m looking for an external drive, but that’s a little more than I want to spend, even for an incredible amount of storage. They also offer a 1 TB model for 349.99.
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Harry Potter And The Buy It Now
Posted by Joe on July 19, 2007 · Comments Off
What would you do if your copy of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows arrived 4 or 5 days before the official launch? I would probably do exactly what this guy did:
The first thing I thought upon seeing the book was, “Boy, somebody screwed up.†Hallows is famously scheduled for release at midnight on July 21, more than four days after my copy arrived.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, my second thought was, “Hey, this thing’s probably worth more than 18 bucks between now and then.†It was a matter of minutes from that thought to taking a blurry digital [...]
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Where Search Engines Send Surfers
Posted by Joe on July 18, 2007 · Comments Off
Rankmon ranks web sites based on search engine visibility by analyzing over a million search results pages. The top ten:
wikipedia.org
amazon.com
about.com
yahoo.com
nextag.com
ebay.com
tripadvisor.com
google.com
bizrate.com
epinions.com
See the entire list of one hundred at Rankmon.com.
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Disney Adds Multimedia Content To Boost CD Sales
Posted by Joe on July 18, 2007 · Comments Off
How do you get people to start buying CDs again? Put more stuff on there, obviously! Disney’s Hollywood Records label has introduced something called CDVU+ (pronounced CD View Plus) that incorporates a digital magazine and various other goodies onto the CD. The Jonas Brothers’ self-titled debut album will be the first CDVU+ title, and will feature these extras:
— easy-to-navigate digital magazine format.
— 50-page interactive digital package is printable and can be downloaded and then accessed both on and offline.
— Song lyrics, 10 different video segments [...]
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Zecco Gives It Away — Free Stock Trading For The Masses
Posted by Joe on July 18, 2007 · Comments Off
With the Dow closing in record territory lately, it might be a good time to mention Zecco. This upstart online stock broker gives new meaning to ‘deep discount’, charging nothing (zero, nada, zip) for basic stock trades. There are no account minimums or hidden fees, and each account gets 40 free trades a month (but not more than 10 in any given day). In addition to a free trading platform, Zecco.com includes blogs, forums and educational resources.
While the viability of their “free” business model remains in question, the site itself has a loyal following and offers [...]
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Pick The Best Of The Best
Posted by Joe on July 17, 2007 · Comments Off
Time.com has picked the 50 Best Websites of 2007 (isn’t that a bit premature?), and has invited readers to rate their choices. At the moment, Mozy, StumbleUpon and Weebly are in the top three positions, but there are a lot of great sites in the list. If nothing else, you might find some fodder for your bookmarks.
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When iPhones Attack
Posted by Joe on July 17, 2007 · Comments Off
iPhones are playing havoc with Duke University’s Wi-Fi networks:
The Wi-Fi connection on Apple’s recently released iPhone seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke University.
The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the Durham, N.C., school’s pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time.
This seems like it should be pretty easy to work around, but the article says that Apple hasn’t been very helpful so far. [...]
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Vonage Offers Parachute To SunRocket Customers
Posted by Joe on July 17, 2007 · Comments Off
Vonage is offering a special deal to SunRocket customers who want to keep their current number:
Vonage, a leading provider of digital phone service, is offering a way for SunRocket customers to transition their phone number over to Vonage, and also receive the added benefit of two months free service. Customers receive this benefit when they sign up for the U.S. Residential Premium Unlimited Plan.
Upon request, potential customers can rest easy knowing qualified phone numbers can be transferred over to Vonage and expedited at no charge. Vonage offers over 25 features at no additional cost, such [...]
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Unlimited Storage For Ever And Ever
Posted by Joe on July 17, 2007 · Comments Off
ForeverSafe.com is online storage with a twist — they promise never to delete your data, even if your paid subscription lapses. The site offers 10GB of storage for free, or unlimited storage for $59 a year. ForeverSafe claims that even if you stop your subscription for many years, you can renew it at any time and pay the $59 annual access fee to have all your data available once again. This may be a feature worth paying for, assuming the company proves itself reliable over time. The best advice for data backup remains the same: never put all your eggs in one basket.
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Harry Potter And The Torrent Of Bits
Posted by Joe on July 17, 2007 · Comments Off
The latest Harry Potter novel has been leaked onto BitTorrent:
The secret is out. Pictures of every single page of JK Rowlings latest book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” appear to be available on BitTorrent days before the book goes on sale. According to the Web site TorrentFreak.com (site is down right now) the book is available as two files from BitTorrent.
PC World confirmed a book that appears to be “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” is available. I looked at the first ten pages of the apparent book and if it is a fraud it’s a very convincing one. [...]
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Kate Nash Used GarageBand To Cut Album Tracks
Posted by Joe on July 17, 2007 · Comments Off
Up and coming UK singer Kate Nash reportedly recorded several tracks on her debut album using just her laptop and Apple’s GarageBand music software package. That’s a pretty good endorsement of the software, and of changing technology in general.
Nash is just 20 years old — I wonder if most people her age realize how amazing it is to be able to generate a studio-quality recording from a few thousand dollars worth of equipment (which can also be used to play games and order books). I suspect not — each generation takes the previous generation’s technologies for granted, [...]
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Soldering Meets Recycling
Posted by Joe on July 16, 2007 · Comments Off
If you’re a new or budding electronics hobbyist, go read Brandon Uhlig’s article about identifying and salvaging electronics components. Brandon provides pictures and descriptions for most types of components to help you build up a home electronics lab at no cost. Warning: There will be a quiz at the end.
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Write A Facebook Application, Go To California
Posted by Joe on July 16, 2007 · Comments Off
Facebook application developers are in high demand:
The going rate for a hit new product from a talented programmer on social networking sensation Facebook is tens of thousands of dollars, a plane ticket to California, and a job.
You can’t blame companies for wanting to cash in on the Facebook buzz, but I’m not sure how long this level of excitement can last. In other words, you may not want to quit your day job to write that killer Facebook app.
Filed in: SL
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