gbnotify.com - very cool Amazon.com tool
Posted on May 9, 2008
Filed Under Cool Stuff, Tools | 2 Comments
I already do a bunch of shopping on Amazon.com. If there price is within about 5% of the lowest I can find on the internet, I’ll usually buy from them just because I’ve never EVER had a problem with an order.
If you shop on Amazon, you probably know about their Gold Box deals. These are a series of 10 or so items that are available to you once per day for a discounted price. As you are shown these items you have the ability to say yes or no, but you can’t go back. The deals are usually pretty good, but your timing has to be pretty good also in order to actually need/want the items that they have in the Gold Box.
One better than the Gold Box deals is the Lightning Deals. These are only became available a couple times a day. They are heavily discounted items, but they are only available for purchase for a couple hours. Then, the deal is gone. The trick is, catching these deals when they are available. What to do, what to do.
A friend of mine has been digging in to the Amazon.com programming API and came up with a fantastic solution; GBNotify.com. Go to the site and either enter in your email address or a cell phone number and during the day as these deals become available you’ll be notified. I’ve been getting the updates for a couple days now. I haven’t found an item that I want to buy just yet, but the discounts on the items are staggering. I’ve seen 70%+ discounts on items go by. It’s almost worth buying the item to sell it for a profit on eBay. That’s not something I have time or energy enough to try out, but hey, somebody out there could turn this in to a nice little money maker.
Where has the geeeek gone?
Posted on April 11, 2008
Filed Under general | Leave a Comment
I can not believe it’s been 4 months since I’ve blogged on geeeek.com. I haven’t had a drought like this in YEARS!! So what’s the deal? Well, it’s a combination of things;
1. Lack of direction
When you get down to it, I don’t really know exactly what I want to do with geeeek.com. Is it a personal blog? Is it a tech blog? If so, do I have time or the desire to stay up on tech subjects to make my site remotely interesting? I have to answer all of those questions with “I don’t know”
2. Lack of time
I got a promotion at work a few months back and it has really chewed up a lot of my free time. This isn’t a bad thing and it’s certainly not a complaint. But, it is what it is. More time at the office = less time at home. Less time at home means less time with the wife and kids. Less time to spend with them = less time for things like blogging and side projects.
3. Other hobbies
Since I don’t really make money from blogging (not much to speak of, anyway), I have to categorize it as a hobby. I have found that my free time has become more valuable to me and spending my free time sitting in front of a computer isn’t always what I want to be doing. I picked up a guitar (that I don’t play enough) and have recently picked up digital photography as a hobby. I’m really interested in learning both.
4. Other blogs
For a while I had a bunch of different blogs going. Some tech, some personal, some hobby and some just silly. I really enjoy blogging and have been blogging at least once a week on a blog I started a few months ago that is NOTHING but my personal rantings. That site is JohnHawkinsUnrated.com.
So, for now, geeeek.com will stay as it is. I can’t say when the next time I’ll post here will be. I’m guessing that if I do pick it back up at some time, it will have a specific focus. Not sure what I’ll do with the archived posts, but I guess I’ll figure that out when the time comes.
Cheers.
One month with Akismet
Posted on December 8, 2007
Filed Under Blogging, Tools | 5 Comments
Last month while attending BlogWorld I had the opportunity to hang out with Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, at the WordPress Meet-Up. One of the topics we spoke about was Akismet, the spam blocking plugin. I had used Akismet a few years back, but had run in to some issues with it. At that time I found Spam Karma and started using it exclusively. A few drinks, a little dinner and some great conversations later, I headed home to give Akismet another shot.
I downloaded and installed the latest copy of Akismet on 2 blogs; geeeek.com and austinsink.com. While this blog has been around for several years, austinsink.com is relatively new and I was curious how it would handle the two. Would I seed any differences between a blog that receives a TON of spam and a blog that receives hardly any.
geeeek.com results
Total Comments: 10,724
Real Comments: 33 (0.30 %)
Spam Comments: 10,691 (99.7 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1
austinsink.com results
Total Comments: 73
Real Comments: 14 (23.72 %)
Spam Comments: 59 (76.28 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1
Overall I have to say I’m really pleased with Akismet. In the 2 months leading up to the switch, Spam Karma had been doing a great job of keeping the spam out of my blog and had zero false positives, but I was receiving a hefty amount of spam pingbacks that were all going uncaught.
I did have a bit of “user error” the first few days I was running Akismet. In the Options -> Discussion settings on WordPress, I had left the following box checked:
This setting was being overruled by Spam Karma. When I switched to Akismet, all comments needed to be approved prior to showing up on the blog. I was under the impression that all my comments were being held up as spam and I was counting these as false positives. I unchecked the box and the comments were flowing freely to the blog without my intervention. All is right in the world again, yeah.
So for now, I’m going to stick with Akismet. It seems to be doing the job fantastically.
Tubemogul.com; continual time saver
Posted on December 6, 2007
Filed Under Blogging, Tools, video blog | 1 Comment
So many tools that you run across on the Internet claim to save you time. When you try them out you find that they save you time initially, but as you use them more and more they have other aspects that end up costing you time. You can get blinded by the initial time savings. When I first heard about tubemogul.com, the first thing I was told was that it’s a huge time saver. When this is the lead-in, I’ve become jaded and immediately look for the catch.
If you are unfamiliar, tubemogul.com is a free service that lets you upload a video to their site and then from their control panel you can have your video posted to several popular video sites, like: youtube, google, yahoo, revver, metacafe, myspace and several others.
Sounds great, right? So far, so good. The upload process is simple. You title, tag and categorize your video one time through a very simple interface. You select the video sites you want to post to, enter your username/password for each site and click the post button. Your video gets pushed out to several sites at once.
With most services, this is where the time savings would stop. Not with tubemogul. Here’s the part that really sold me on the service. Starting the day after you upload your video, tubemogul starts collecting stats for your videos across all the sites where you’ve published your video. You don’t need to log in to each of your video site accounts to see how many viewers you have had. You can check them all from one centralized location.
If you use video as part of your marketing or advertising and you aren’t using tubemogul, you are crazy. Did you miss the part where I said the service is free?
Check it out, you’ll be glad you did.
Running the 2007 Las Vegas half-Marathon
Posted on December 3, 2007
Filed Under Running | 5 Comments
Back at the end of April, I wrote about being Blissfully Ignorant about the run I was supposed to do the following morning. It was to be my wife’s and my first training run with the Las Vegas RoadRunners. As I remember it, that first run was a whopping 20 minute run. It wouldn’t be very long before we were routinely running 6, 7 or 8 miles on a given Sunday.
Fast forward 6 months.
Bright and early yesterday morning, we left the house and drove over to Mandalay Bay. Thanks to me not listening to my wife, we ended up parking way too far away and ended up walking 15 minutes to the convention center. After a brief stay inside the nice and warm conference room provided to the members of the RoadRunners, we headed outside to take our place behind the elite runners and the running Elvi (of which there were more than 150) on the start line for the Las Vegas Marathon. The sun wasn’t up yet, it was quite cold and there were some 15,000 runners behind us waiting to start running.
On our way out to the starting line I was contemplating the nerves I had about running in my first half-marathon. I then thought about the small group of elite runners who probably had a hard time sleeping last night with anticipation for today’s race. While my race was against myself and nobody else, these elite runners are trying to finish first out of 15,000. That has to be a bit nerve-wracking.
Unfortunately, I injured myself about 6 weeks ago. My training was basically put on hold and in the weeks leading up to Marathon day, I had run remarkably little. I knew this was going to be problematic, but I was determined to go out and finish this race. Even if that meant walking the entire course. As it turns out, that’s pretty much exactly what it meant. My average pace time and my overall finish were nothing to brag about. Though, I’m still quite proud to have completed my first half-marathon.
A guy from my office recently completed a triathlon and went on to run the full marathon today. When I was talking to him about the injury he told me to remember that, even though this is the race that I have been training for, that doesn’t mean it’s the only race available. Compounding the injury by over-exerting myself for this ONE race makes no sense. There will be plenty of other races to be run. I took that to heart and really tried to maintain a comfortable pace that would allow me to finish without causing too much pain. The thing is, 13.1 miles, no matter how quickly or slowly you walk it, it’s going to cause some pain.
After the race we ate a bunch of the goodies that they were handing out at the finish line. We then went home and ate some more. Took a nice warm bath, took a short nap, iced my leg, napped some more and then got up and ate again. And, as if that wasn’t enough activity for 1 day, we headed back to Mandalay Bay last night for the Social Distortion concert at the House of Blues. General Admission tickets means you stand up the entire show. After the beating we put our legs through earlier in the day, this made for a very uncomfortable time. We stuck it out as long as we could, but eventually had to head home early.
I had an amazing time yesterday. I know for sure I’ll be back again next year. Hopefully by then I will have run a few more half-marathons. Next year I would like to finish in less than 2 hours and 30 minutes. We’ll see how that goes.
Here are a few photos I took:
Video Blog: 11/27/07
Posted on November 27, 2007
Filed Under Geeeek Stuff | 6 Comments
This is my first shot at video blogging. Leave me a comment and tell me if you love it or hate it.
Here’s some companion links from the video blog:
What to do when Firefox bites the dust
Posted on November 23, 2007
Filed Under Geeeek Stuff, Tools | 3 Comments
Last night the power went out at our house. Not once, but twice. After the first outage, I restarted my computer and set out to do a little web-surfing. When I opened FireFox and went to CNN.com, it was immediately apparent that something wasn't quite right. CNN looked like the image to the left. Other sites I visited were having similar issues. I went through every possible option screen and was not able to solve the issue. When the power went out the second time, I decided to pack it in for the night.
When trying to fix the issue the following morning with a clear head, there was still no luck. At this point it's looking like there is a corrupted file that's causing Firefox to act up. I was left with one option: re-install Firefox. As easy as that may sound, there's more to it than you might think.
The problem is, if you go to Control Panel and use the Add/Remove programs feature to get rid of Firefox, after you are done, there are still several files and registry entries remaining on your machine. If you then re-install Firefox, it's possible that the corrupted file may not get updated and your Firefox install will still be messed up. This is what happened to me the first time.
Here are the steps you need to take in order to completely remove Firefox from your machine BEFORE reinstalling:
- (optional) Export your bookmarks (video how-to)
- (optional) Create a list of currently installed extensions
- Uninstall Firefox using the Add/Remove Programs function in Control Panel
[Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Mozilla Firefox] - Remove application data that's not automatically deleted in the previous step be deleting the Firefox directory located here: c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\
- Delete the previous Firefox install directory located here: c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\
- Remove registry entries for Firefox using Regedit [Start -> Run -> regedit]. Search for and remove the following entries:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxHTML]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MozillaPlugins]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Mozilla]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\MozillaPlugins]
Once you've completed these steps, restart your machine. Use Internet Explorer to http://firefox.com/ to download the latest version of Firefox. Once you've installed the new software, you can import your bookmarks, reload your extensions and if all goes well, your Firefox install will be good as new. Thankfully, mine was.
As smooth as I made this sound, my battle with Firefox last night/this morning didn't go as smoothly as it should have. To start with, I forgot to backup my bookmarks so they are all gone. However, one funny thing did come up. When using the "Add/Remove" programs, menu, I had to chuckle when I saw the status for how often I used FireFox says "rarely". Considering I use the software for several hours every single day, it makes me wonder exactly how much time you must put in for that rating to say something like "often".
Hopefully you won't need this information any time soon. But if you do, I hope this helps you out.
Must have geek gadget: Wireless SD card
Posted on November 20, 2007
Filed Under Cool Stuff | Leave a Comment
This just might be the coolest new product I’ve seen this year. This Wireless 2GB SD Memory card from Eye-Fi is a casual photographers dream. Rather than taking the photo, downloading to your computer, resizing and THEN uploading to your photo sharing service or social networking site, this card cuts out the middle man men. You simply take your photos and upload wirelessly. The built in software will resize the images automatically on the fly based on your preferences. The photos are simultaneously saved to your computer in their original format.
Here are some of the technical details:
- Uploads photos automatically from Eye-Fi Card inside your camera. Built-in Wi-Fi connects to your home network
- Provides free and unlimited photo uploads to your computer and your favorite photo or social networking website. Photo transmission is secure and private
- Supports sharing and printing websites, including Fotki, Shutterfly, dotPhoto, webshots, phanfare, Picasa Web albums, flickr, TypePad, Wal-Mart, snapfish, VOX, smugmug, facebook, photobucket, Kodak Gallery, and Sharpcast
- Handles full-resolution jpeg images and intelligently re-sizes photos if limited by your chosen photo or social networking website
- Fits digital cameras that use SD memory cards and offers 2 GB of memory to store photos on the card
Now, if they will just hurry up and make an XD version, I’ll own this in a heart beat!
BlogWorldExpo: Expo Hall Review
Posted on November 10, 2007
Filed Under Blogging, Podcasting | 1 Comment
For being a first year conference, the expo hall had a pretty decent turn out with regards to exhibitors. Here’s a completely random list of some of the booths I visited and a bit about their product:
- Utterz.com - I have to be honest with you, at first glance I thought to myself, “so what.” Posting to my blog from my phone is something I can already do, so I wasn’t immediately sold on the idea. But, once I saw that you could post audio, video and text I was now interested. But the kicker for me was the fact that you could post to your own hosted WordPress blog, blogger.com account, facebook and other, well, ya got me. I’m a user now. You can check out my post from the expo floor here.
- SharedBook.com & Blurb.com - If you are looking to create a printed book of your photos or blog posts, both of these companies seem to be able to handle the task. I am quite surprised at just how inexpensive this service has become. I’m looking forward to creating a book of my trip to Alaska next year.
- Yovia.com - There are several pay-to-blog type sites out there and I have to say, I don’t think I’m a fan of any of them. I’ve signed up for a few but have never written a paid post on my site. Yovia, however, seems to be different in their approach. Rather than butcher an explanation, I’d suggest you head over to their site and give it a read.
- Unique Blog Designs - Sure, anybody can download a new theme for their blog. There are 1000s of them available free. But, if you are really looking to stand out, these guys will work with you to come up with a design that matches your tastes, your needs and your vision.
- BlogCatalog.com - When I met them in the expo hall, I had no idea how big they were. After a quick trip around their site, wow! Thousands upon thousands of blogs broken out in dozens of categories. You can browse by country or language as well. If you have a blog, you should definitely get yourself listed in this directory!
- Lijit.com - This is a pretty slick tool. If you produce content on a blog, myspace, youtube, flickr and/or several other sites, why not let your readers search all your content at once? Lijit provides a widget (or wijit, as they like to spell it) that well let your readers search all your your sources from a single search box. Very cool concept.
- fix8.com - Not everything you download or install has to be a productivity or money making tool, right? What’s wrong with just having some fun? Spruce up your video chats or youtube videos with all sorts of video overlays.
- techsmith.com - How could my list be complete without talking about one of my favorites? I’ve spoke several times before about the Jing Project. While they still don’t know exactly what will become of Jing, the employees absolutely love it and are dying to talk to you about it. They want every bit of feedback they can get their hands on. I think I made a new best friend when I told them that their service was something I would gladly pay a monthly subscription fee to have access to.
I, of course, didn’t mention everybody. There were quite a few others at the show and even more I met who didn’t have a booth. Be sure and check out these forward thinking companies. They are going to be the ones who help drive the development of new and more exciting/productive/useful tools that we will all benefit from. I hope you all had a successful show and look forward to meeting up with you next year to see what’s new!
BlogWorldExpo: Day 2 Sessions
Posted on November 10, 2007
Filed Under Blogging, Podcasting | 5 Comments
It’s quite possible that day 1 of BlogWorld was so good that it set my expectations too high for day 2. After such a great day Thursday, I had really high hopes for Friday’s sessions. Though, after looking back at the schedule, be the titles alone I should have realized the content wasn’t going to be as strong. Nevertheless, here’s a report on the sessions I attended today.
The opening keynote speech was given by Anil Dash from (Live Journal, MovableType and Six Apart) followed by Leo Laporte (This Week in Tech).
Anil spoke mostly about openID and Google’s new Open Social, both of which I had heard of but didn’t know much about. The concept for Open Social being that apps written for use on social network sites should be able to be used across multiple sites and not tied to a specific site. With the growing number of social networking sites available, this should make life easier for both developers and users. I’m quite interested to see where this goes.
Leo spoke mainly about the differences between Main Stream Media and New Media and how we are moving away from being an audience and instead being a community. Moving away from the monologue and moving towards dialog. He also talked about how podcasting (though, he hates the term Podcasting) is currently a wide open medium in that there are no set rules for engagement. You don’t have to be sitting behind a desk wearing a suit to report the news any more.
The first breakout session I went to on Friday was “Blogworld Workshop - Producing Fun and Engaging Content“. This was supposed to be hosted by Brian Clark (copyblogger.com), but he was unable to attend. Instead it was hosted by Liz Strause (successful-blog.com). When I first walked away from this session, I was feeling pretty negative about it. But, after sleeping on it, I realize that it wasn’t bad, just different than I was expecting. I ended up taking away some very interesting tid-bits of information. For example:
- successful blogging is 20% writing and 80% connecting
- Don’t lecture - talk
- Every blog post doesn’t need to be completely flushed out. Let your readers add to it through the comments.
- In corporate blogging, be helpful, not hypeful.
- To make a post sticky it must have a head, a heart and let the reader know how it will fit in their life
The next session was “Leveraging Social Media for Your Company” hosted by Tom Gerace (gather.com) and Don Crowther (Affiliate Marketer). This turned out to be a great session. Tom and Don each spoke for a minute or two at the beginning and then asked the audience for some questions. They got 6 or 7 questions written down and then started going through them and providing answers in general terms that would apply to most everybody.
I could write an entire post just on the content from this session, but instead I’ll leave you with just a few things to think about:
- Two keys to success: Participation and Add Value to the Conversation
- If you aren’t talking about your products, others can be (both positively and negatively)
- Don’t pitch, constantly give and be transparent
- Provide access to information or even to resources not normally available
Next was “The Lazy Guide to Producing Great Podcasts” hosted by Glenn Reynolds (glennandhelenshow.com). Glenn hosts a popular political podcast where he conducts interviews. He pointed out immediately that he had nothing to do with the title of the session. He went on to discuss the equipment he uses (both software and hardware) along with the process he goes through to produce the show. He gave several low-cost tips on how to make your podcast sound as good as possible. While I normally steer clear of anything and everything dealing with politics, Glenn’s speech was informative and entertaining.
To close out the expo, the final keynote was given by Mark Cuban (blogmaverick.com). You may know Mark as being the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Or, you may know him from one of the other myriad of projects he’s involved with. For me, this was the first time I had ever heard him speak for longer than a sound-byte on Sports Center. I admit I knew very little about his background, but I did know that he had been writing a blog for several years (though, I’ve never read it). After listening to Mark’s speech, I’m going to have to give his blog a read.
Mark told several quick stories, but the one that stood out to me most was about how blogging and other new media outlets are going to change the way people get their news. A few years ago Mark had done a 6 or 7 question interview with the Dallas Morning News via email. A few days later when the article was printed in the paper, it looked nothing like the interview that had taken place. So Mark took all the back-and-forth emails that had gone on for the interview and posted them on his blog letting the readers know exactly what was said originally. If you think about it, that’s really, REALLY powerful and should give major news outlets reason to look over their shoulder.
For a first year expo, I’d have to say BlogWorldExpo did a great job! Every session I went to started on time (give or take 3 minutes), none of the sessions felt over crowded, the registration price was quite reasonable and the information gathered was invaluable. Not to mention the amazing amount of networking that gets done on the expo hall floor, at lunch and dinner and in the halls between sessions. I’m already looking forward to next year’s expo. I hope to see you there!
I have but one request for next year’s expo. In every session, there needs to be power strips available for the mass amount of laptops. Cheers!
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Recently Written
- gbnotify.com - very cool Amazon.com tool
- Where has the geeeek gone?
- One month with Akismet
- Tubemogul.com; continual time saver
- Running the 2007 Las Vegas half-Marathon
- Video Blog: 11/27/07
- What to do when Firefox bites the dust
- Must have geek gadget: Wireless SD card
- BlogWorldExpo: Expo Hall Review
- BlogWorldExpo: Day 2 Sessions
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Re: Why aren’t you Blog Rushing?
I got it on my site as well. You have to make sure to post frequently...By: Omni
Re: gbnotify.com - very cool Amazon.com tool
Actually, it is very possible. I have seen some items go for up...By: Elections
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Do you think you can earn any money from reselling those...By: Vaibhav
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Here’s what I have done to combat spam comments on my blog (and yes,...By: Andy
Re: One month with Akismet
is in place -