Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Archive for March, 2007
You’ve Got Mail! My Free Samsung Blackjack Extended Battery Arrived!
Mar 28th
There are only a couple of bummers about the Samung Blackjack on Cingular / AT&T Wireless. One of them out of the box you can tell is poor battery life. They even give you 2 regular batteries to proactively combat this complaint. But who wants to carry around a 2nd battery? How practicle is it? Not much really. And I guess Cingular/AT&T and Samsung listened.
I was excited when I found out about the Cingular offer for a free Extended Battery for those that purchased it recently without one (new boxes are reportedly coming with 1 standard battery and 1 extended battery). But some of the buzz on the next questioned the validity of the offer because there was no letter, text message, email, notice, post on the Cingular site officially pointing people to this basically unpublished promotion. If you called customer service it was hit-and-miss whether the rep knew about the “rebate” plan for the free battery.
So I filled out the web-rebate form and crossed my fingers. Worst case scenario, I lost 3 minutes of my time.
BOY WAS I EXCITED TO SEE THE MAILMAN…read on to see why…
Now unlimited calls to YOU if you have Vonage.
Mar 28th
So, one reason why you go with VoIP services like Vonage is that they offer unlimited calling plans for cheap. And so, plenty of other VoIP Internet Calling services have popped up like SunRocket, which just recently offered an unlimited plan for $8.71/month. So why pay Vonage $24.99+tax for the same thing? That’s what Vonage is worried about!!!
But now, Vonage has come up with at least one differentiator that I find might actually be worth something to the customer vs. marketing speak: local access numbers for people to call YOU. That’s right, not for you to call someone else.
Here’s how it works.
Before, if you lived on the East Coast, and your brother lived on the West Coast, you could sign-up for a “viritual” number through Vonage for $5 extra/month. This would allow you to have a (310) 555-XXXX number in L.A. that would still ring your (212) 555-XXXX Vonage line. The benefit would be that James, your relative wouldn’t have to pay long-distance charges to call you each time. The (310) number would be local call for him, and you get unlimited incoming calls on your Vonage line, so you guys could chat unlimited for free (kind of — remember that you’re stuck with $60/year for that “virtual” number). Great for kids off to college, grandparents, even separate company offices, consulting partners, etc. But all those extra $5/month can add up to connect your big family/network.
Want to shed that $5/month or $60/year? Read on… Read the rest of this entry »
DEAL ALERT: 1-DAY SALE $8.71/month Unlimited VoIP Broadband Phone Service
Mar 27th
This is incredible. We previously reported what a value Sun Rocket VoIP offers with their pre-paid 1 year unlimited service for $199. But for one day only, March 27, 2007, they are throwing in an entire year extra FREE without any catches!
In fact, they still have a 31 day risk-free money back guarantee for their broadband phone service; NO CONTRACTS are required, meaning that if/when you cancel they will issue a prorated refund for unused months. Free acccount activation (Vonage charges), Free equipment (Vonage sometimes charges, or makes you pay upfront for a rebate offer), Free shipping (Vonage charges). They also give you $3 in credits each month for international calls — and 41 countries costs only $0.03/minute to call! (WOW). And of course, all the standard whiz-bang features of Voip, caller id, call waiting, cool multi-phone ring features, voicemail, etc. etc.
So it’s $199 + USF fee which is about $10 = $209 / 24 months = $8.71/month! Why are you still reading this?! Sign-up now!
Take the passive-agressive approach with Google – Let Google Alerts continuously scan the internet for you
Mar 26th
Everyone knows that you can search the internet with Google. But most don’t know that you can also have Google search the internet FOR YOU daily. Kind of like your own internet butler, always on the lookout for websites, blog posts, news articles that contain specific information you are trying to track.
Google has a service called “Google Alerts“. Basically, you enter a list of specific topics that you want tracked. Google will then send you emails with links to web pages that it finds with those search terms.
You can also limit the links to News stories, Blog posts, Newsgroups, or websites (or all of the above). You can also tell Google Alerts how often you want to be notified — each time it finds a single new item, once-a-day digest, or even just once-a-week.
Some of the example or suggested uses for GoogleAlerts is:
One obvious GoogleAlert to set-up is for your own name — make sure you put in all variations including your nicknames, formal names, maiden names, full names with middle names, etc.
After you sign-up, you’ll have to “confirm” the subscription to Google Alerts by clicking on a link in an email they send immediately — so that they make sure you gave the correct email address and that you have access to that email account as well.
I recommend setting up different alerts for different topics. You can set-up up to 1000 different Google Alerts. If you want to manage all of them together, you can log into your general Google Account (free if you don’t have one). Here you can modify, delete, add all your alerts together in one place. Once you start to receive the alerts, you’ll figure out what how to better focus your alerts search terms.
How To Name Your Photo Files (from you digital camera)
Mar 23rd
Here in the United States, we like to do things differents. The way we write the date is one of them — Usually it’s March 23, 2007 in the MONTH DAY, YEAR format. But when you dump your photos from your camera to your computer, using this naming convention isn’t the best, like MM-DD-YY.Cancun-Vacation001.jpg
WHY you ask? Because over time, when you sort your photos files “by file name” in Windows, you’ll find that the files are not sorted by date properly and you won’t be able to find that photo from your vacation 3 years ago as quickly as you should. Your digital photographs will get all mixed up since the YEAR is not the primary part of the file name that is used in the sort in Windows. There’s a better way to name files with dates in them…
Got a website or blog? Put up Google Ads and Make Money Automatically
Mar 23rd
It used to be that everyone in America seemed to have written a book. Now that’s changed to “everyone has a blog”.
But many people don’t know that you can just put a simple snippet of code into the blog template and Google Ads (Adsense) can be automatically shown. If visitors click on any of those automatically matched relevant ads on a page, you get a share of the profits that Google collects from the advertisers. And you don’t have to do anything other than install the snippet of code just once! Nice ROI for that activity!
Here’s a sample snippet of code for the referral ads for the Google Adsense program which will generate the banner ad below.
The regular Google ads shown through the program will be of course just like the text ads you usually see on Google’s website itself. And you’ll make money with each visitor click! Gotta love Google now! 
I love tech, gadgets and the web. Hope you pick-up a useful tip or two here today that helps you use technology to your advantage! Better yet, why not share your own expertise in a comment on a post today to help the other readers that land here for answers!