It’s a Mortar and Click Holiday Season
It's beyond me how retailers are surviving this holiday season. I have little patience for crowds and lines. I have even less patience for paying more for something just to have it today.
Amazon, with or without the Prime membership option, has to be killing the sales of physical and other online retailers this year. I went out at lunch today with the intention of picking up some sports equipment for my home gym, a couple of Kettlebells and a Bosu Ball. When I walked into Sports Authority, I guess several people had the same idea of running in quickly to pick something up, I've never seen such a long line. I also can't stand the way they rat maze you into the a single set of registers, I'm sure some efficiency expert recommended this set up, but there's something to be said for being able to choose from several registers and perceiving you picked the shortest line possible. My stomach turned as I walked in and spotted the line, despite the sickness I walked back to at least check into the items I wanted to pick up. I found the Bosu Ball set and quickly found that it was $50 cheaper at Amazon and was available on Prime, which means I can get it shipped for free in 2 days or pay $3.99 to have it at my door the next day. I added it to my cart on Amazon's iPhone app and went to take a look at the kettlebells. The kettlebells weren't exactly cheaper on Amazon, but within $20 of the price, I was already saving $50 on the Bosu ball and the rest is saved on not paying taxes and plain old convenience. I added them to my cart and checked out, while standing in Sports Authority admiring the line I wasn't standing in.
Back to my original thought, who were the people in this line, my items will arrive tomorrow and are guaranteed to arrive before Christmas. Unless the rest of retail is not paying attention to Amazon or situations like this, or the typical shopper just hasn't caught on yet, I just don't understand why you'd wait in that line. What happens when the typical shopper smartens up?
Download Pandora songs with Safari
The safari activity window is something else. I've seen this hack done with youtube videos, and I'm sure it can be used on other sites that download the complete content in the background rather than true streaming. I noticed the other day that if you start playing a song with Pandora and disconnect the network cable or turn off the wifi that the song will continue to play to the end. So I popped open Pandora in Safari, on the Mac of course, and clicked on Window and chose Activity to open the Activity viewer. There will be a lot of noise in the viewer, because it shows everything being downloaded by Safari, the best thing to look for is the biggest file, the songs on Pandora seem to start with http://audio-ash... Once you locate the file, double click it, the file will open and download to your downloads directory. You can click to open the file in finder and click the file and rename it to something.mp4 - Now the file is on your computer and you should be able to double click it and play it. You should be able to play the file in iTunes or quicktime, it's not real high quality but it sounds pretty good..
jailbreakme.com DejaVu, iPad2 jailbroken on 4.3.3
Been following comex on twitter for a while awaiting the news that my iPad2 would finally be "free." Well it's here and you should get it while it's hot, at least before Apple puts out 4.3.4. This was by far the quickest and easiest jailbreak I've ever seen, even simpler than the original jailbreakme.com. Not sure if it's still a requirement, but through his tweets, comex recommended going to 4.3.3 first, then just go on over to jailbreakme.com and click the install button under cydia. It's been a long time, good job comex!!
Great Hosting, Low Price, not exactly
Thought I had found a great hosting company, good service, good price. I even paid up front for 3 years. At this point I don't recommend paying for anything for 3 years, not even if it gets you a $5/mo price. It looks great when you see it, $4.95/mo, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains, no hidden costs, 99.9% uptime. I beg to differ. Don't buy any of these claims, read the terms and conditions carefully.
I've had so many hosting experiences, but usually don't have this many problems.
About 3 months after I started hosting with GreenGeeks I got this email from them:
Dear Customer,
This is an automated notification that your account has surpassed the
excessive resource limitations set out in our Terms of Service. This
notice is served to you as notification that your account may be
suspended if action is not taken to correct the excessive use.Failure to resolve the excessive usage will result in account
suspension. You may be asked to upgrade your account to one of our VPS
or Dedicated Server packages if you are unable to correct the excessive
usage.Full Details regarding our Terms of Service and Excessive Resource Usage
policy is found at: http://www.greengeeks.com/legal/tos.phpIf you have any questions or concerns, please e-mail support@greengeeks.com.
Below is more information about the offending account:
account "greatweb" (domain name greatwebguy.com) is found consuming the following amount of resources:
Average CPU = 8.98 %
Average RAM = 4.25 %
Average MySQL = 0.1 %
Oh, I thought it was "unlimited", when in fact it was "ummm limited" I check out the Terms, they weren't lying. I took all the fancy bells and whistles out of the blog, lightened up the page, reduced the number of posts shown on the home page, the usual stuff you do to make your site have less impact. I hummed along for another 2 months until one day I routinely brought up my site and my home page was replaced with "Hacked by Psycho TN" and a laughing skull. Not really sure how the site was exploited, it's a shared host, I had limited FTP as much as possible, but in every directory of every site I had hosted on this account the index.php had been replaced and an img.php had been added. I cleaned up all the sites and got them running, most were WordPress installs, so replacing the install pretty much fixed and I cleaned up and reinstalled the plugins and the themes. I removed all but my essential FTP accounts, changed passwords and notified GreenGeeks of the issue, they scanned the site and told me that WordPress was a security threat. One week later I opened my site again to find a blank screen, the entire site had been deleted, my guess is by GreenGeeks. They have no backup, and offer no help. All I've asked of them is that since they can't keep their shared servers secure and my sites were missing in action, that they refund the remaining 2 and a half years of my hosting, I think that's fair. After all, they're not providing the service that they said they would. Instead I get responses like this from their Tech Support manager:
Hello Jason,
Not a problem, as per our Terms of Service refunds are only issued as per our 30 day money back period. This was agreed on by you during the signup and checkout.
Thank you and have a great day,
Josh Dargie
GreenGeeks Support Manager
support@greengeeks.com
Not sure what else to do, but blog about it and complain to the Better Business Bureau. Watch out for GreenGeeks and their fantastic claims. It's only a matter of time, before you realize it's not such a great deal after all.
Angry Birds ringtone on jailbroken iPhone without iTunes
For some reason today, boredom or whatever, I was hell bent on getting the Angry Birds theme song onto my iPhone to replace that stupid Marimba ringtone. First task was to find or make the ringtone, I found one offered up for free here http://www.angrybirdsnest.com/2010/08/angry-birds-theme-song-ringtone/. Not quite sure yet how I was going to manage getting the ringtone on to my phone, I copied the link for the theme song from the web page, http://www.angrybirdsnest.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Angry-Birds-Main-Theme-Song.m4r, and emailed it to myself.
Now that I had the link, through trial and error I figured out the rest. There are a couple of apps you'll need to have in order to download the ringtone and get it to the proper place on your iPhone. The first app you'll need is iDownloader, you can find this app in the appstore for $1.99, or you can go after it the unconventional way using Installous, that all depends on your moral integrity or lack thereof. The second app you'll need is iFile, which can be found in Cydia, yes your phone will need to be jailbroken to accomplish this, iFile cost $4.00 in Cydia - but again depending on how far you'll go for "free" it can be had on certain repositories. I know I'll see comments about how you could do this all with iFile, or use iFile and the Safari downloader from Cydia. Well i couldn't get the webserver on iFile to start and I happened to have these apps on my iPhone already so this is what I used to make it happen, if you already knew how to do this you could write your own blog post about it...
- Start by opening iDownloader and pasting the link into the Address bar, you'll be asked if you want to download the file, let the file download.
- Once the download is finished launch iFile, click the gear on the left of the tab bar to open the Preferences page, turn on Hidden Files and Application Names
- In iFile, navigate to /var/mobile/Applications/iDownloader/Documents/Downloads/, you should find the File you downloaded, Angry-Birds-Main-Theme-Song.m4r. Click Edit, Select the File, click the far right action icon on the Tab bar and select Copy
- Now in iFile navigate to /Library/Ringtones/, click Edit, click the same icon as the previous step and select Paste
- Open the settings app, click on Sounds, Ringtone, you should now see the ringtone in the list, select it and enjoy
Sure you can use this technique for any ringtone file you can find on the internet, but I think the Angry Birds theme song makes an excellent ringtone, enjoy.