So there’s this new live auction website out there called BigDeal.com that I’ve been using.  At first it seemed too good to be true.  I thought it was some sort of scam.  And although the bidding system seems a little more complex than other sites that I’ve used, there can be some really good deals out there.  The idea is that you buy bid tokens, which are worth 75 cents each.  You bid on items that you’re interested on until the timer runs out.  Once the timer drops below 30 seconds is when it gets really interesting because each bid resets the timer back to 30 seconds.  If you win the auction you pay the price at the time the auction ends plus shipping and handling.  If you lose, you have a few options.  You can either pay the difference between the amount of bids that you put in and the retail price.  So it’s in your best interest to bid on things that you would have bought anyway.  Or you can eat the loss and then you get “loyalty bucks” which can be used towards a difference purchase.

I just won an Xbox 360 with Kinect for about $35 plus the $37.50 that I spent on bids to begin with.  Not a bad deal at all.  I could have even gotten the unused bids refunded but I decided to try to win other things as well.  I didn’t.  Some people see this service as misleading, but as long as you read the fine print and use your smarts a little, you should have a lot of fun.  If you would like to try out the service, please use the link I provided and you will get $7.50 worth of bids free, just for signing up.  Again, here is the link: BigDeal.com

Sometimes I find really funny internet posts.

And then I read the comments…

And it completely ruins it for me.  Thanks Internet.

I found myself getting frustrated with my phone the other day.  But then I started to think about all of the problems I used to have with computers back in the day.  These are just some of the ones that I came up with and I’ll add more as I think of them.  Please feel free to comment about your own experiences with technology over the years…

When I bought my first computer (mine, not my family’s)  it had an Intel MMX 200mhz processor.

My new EVO phone has a 1ghz processor, which is 5 times faster.

When I first got on the Internet, it took an hour to download ONE mp3.

Now I can stream them to my phone… from my house.  Or stream podcasts.

When I first got on the Internet it could take 5 minutes to download a picture on dial-up.

Now I can stream HD videos on YouTube  to my phone.

One of the first FPS games I bought was Doom.  I had to bare-boot my machine with a custom AUTOEXEC.BAT in order to play.

Now I can play on my phone.

Rooted HTC Hero (Sprint)

ROM: Fresh 2.0d

Firmware: 2.1-update2 (freshhh)

Kernel:
2.6.29-d30020a8

I removed the HTC default lockscreen using the instructions found here.

I am using apps2sd which allows me to store apps from the Market on my sdcard instead of taking up internal memory.  I partitioned my SD card using “recovery-RA-heroc-v1.6.2.img” after rooting.

I am using ConnectBot to connect via ssh using 1024-bit encryption and connected locally.  I replaced the shell with bash and have it loaded into the app2sd partition to save space.  I can also edit the bash_profile which is located on the FAT32 portion of the sdcard.

I have WiFi Tether and a frontend for WiFi connections called WiFinder.  Both are brilliant apps worth mentioning.

And a screenshot of Duck Hunt from NESoid.  This allows you to play NES games on your phone.

Also… all screenshots were taken with ShootMe with the exception of the Duck Hunt one because NESoid has it’s own built-in screenshot grabber.

Open up device manager and go to “properties” under your hard drive.

Click the policies tab and uncheck the box for “Enable write caching on the disk.”

You should also disable System Restore if you haven’t already.

If this doesn’t work you can also try editing the boot loader settings:

BCDEDIT /set {bootmgr} device boot
BCDEDIT /set {default} device boot
BCDEDIT /set {default} osdevice boot

For those of you out there wishing to make your six-figure-salaries using AdSense… you will not be able to do so by using the free WordPress hosted blog.

If you wish to profit off of your blog using AdSense and WordPress you must use your own web-hosting company of choice. I highly recommend GoDaddy. They have built-in features for WordPress and other excellent features such as shopping carts and search-engine-optimization (SEO).

This site is an an example of what AdSense looks like on WordPress

I seen this at a local mall in New Jersey.  Why this Coke machine needs a computer is beyond me.  And why it’s running Windows in the first place is nothing short of sheer amazement.

For those of you who don’t know what StumbleUpon is… it is a wonderful browser add-on where you specify what your interests are and it will bring you to a random page in one of the categories you specified.  It also acts as a bookmarking site which you can access from anywhere.  You can add friends and stumble their favorites also.  It’s part bookmark part social-network.  You can also share interesting websites with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.  If you choose to install Stumble, please give this page and website a big ol’ thumbs up.

Like a pirate:
1) Scroll to the bottom of your Facebook page.

2) On the bottom left corner, click English: US.

3) When the language selection appears, click English: Pirate.

4) Watch what happens.

Konami Code:
Press up,up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Enter key and magic circles will appear.

After you follow the old Konami code scroll up or down...then the circles will appear.

The only way to get rid of them are to log off or refresh the page.

To launch Facebook Chat in Sidebar in Firefox:

Press CTRL+SHIFT+B to open up the bookmarks organizer

Click on Bookmarks Toolbar

Go to Organize

Click on New bookmark

Type the following address:

      http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php

Tick the check-box the says "Load this bookmark in the sidebar"

To launch Facebook Chat in Sidebar in Opera:
Press F4 to open the Opera sidebar

Drag the above Facebook link onto the Sidebar

A wonderfully horrible error message that I received when I was trying to workaround a problem…