Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

One of the things that bug me the most when buying something are the accompanying rebates, but sometimes that is the only way to get a good deal. When it comes to online purchases I like to print off the rebates as soon as I make the purchase, but then the laziness kicks in for a few weeks simply because I don’t feel like filling out the form.

Luckily some of the free PDF readers out there offer annotation capabilities, and so you can actually fill out a rebate form on your computer before it’s even printed. Not only will it save you the hassle of having to handwrite the form, but I’m sure it will save the person on the receiving end some trouble trying to read your handwriting. 😉

Here’s what an example form looks like that I filled out:

So how can you do this? We’ve got instructions below that make use of our two favorite (and free) PDF readers. The best part is that both of the apps also have portable versions, which means that you can fill out rebate forms digitally without ever installing a program!

Both of the PDF readers make use of a typewriter tool, which gives you a lot of freedom to type anything anywhere. To use the typewriter tool you just have to click on the document where you want to start typing, and then have at it. If there are any boxes or broken fields that you need to fill in just insert spaces to even it all out, like I did in the example form above for the UPC.

–Foxit Reader (Homepage)–

In Foxit Reader you’ll find what you need at Tools -> Typewriter Tools -> Typewriter. When you click on this for the first time you’ll see a warning saying that an evaluation mark will be placed on the document if it’s saved. Don’t worry, we don’t plan on saving the rebate form. Right after you get done filling out the form just go ahead and print it… there won’t be an evaluation marks as long as you never save it.

–PDF-XChange Viewer (Homepage)–

In PDF-XChange Viewer just navigate to Tools -> Comment And Markup Tools -> Typewriter Tool to get started. Unlike Foxit you can save the document without any evaluation marks being placed on it, but I’m guessing that once you print the rebate form you won’t need it on your computer anymore. If for some reason you like to save all of your rebate forms then this is probably the better solution for you.

–Overview–

I’m not 100% convinced that typing out a rebate form is faster than writing it by hand, but it’s definitely a lot easier to read than one that’s handwritten. So maybe it’s better if only to help minimize any mistakes that may prevent you from getting your well-deserved money!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 25, 2006 by CyberNet.

Million Dollar Monday

If golf is your game, and you have a few extra bucks burning a hole in your pocket, take a look at the ultimate in Luxury Golf Cars. You’ll be cruising the course in style in mini decked out versions of a Hummer, Cadillac, or a Buick Lucerne. These golf cars are far from ordinary, and because of it, will cost you more than what you might be willing to pay for a full sized car!

 First on the list if the Buick Lucerne Golf Cart for a price of around $17,735.00 for the 4 passenger electric model. There’s also a 2 passenger Electric model for $15,675.00. With standard options such as a custom paint job, tinted windshield, 10″ aluminum sport wheels, and a custom steering wheel, you’ll be riding around in stile.  Other optional features if the standard options simply aren’t enough include:

• Gold bag holder ($245)
• Hard top with Bi-fold windshield ($875)
• AM/FM Stereo Cassette or CD ($595)
• 12 Volt Auxiliary Outlet ($35)
• Turn Signals ($90.85)
• Chrome Tilt Steering Column ($520)
• Rain Enclosure ($595)
• XM Satellite Stereo Player ($675)
• 9hp Gasoline Motor ($995.00)

If you selected all of the optional features would bring your Buick Lucerne Golf Cart up to a price well over $22,000!

Next on the list is the Cadillac Escalade Golf Car with the classic Cadillac front grille, high and low beam lights, front/rear ice chest, 4 seat cart, horn, and clock all standard options.  For around $20,800 this Escalade could be yours! Optional features include:

• Standard hard top ($585)
• Custom Pearl Paint Job ($1000)
• 6 passenger hard top ($715)
• Rear golf bag holders ($200)
• Custom car cover ($325)
• AM/FM/CD Player ($650)
• Chrome tilt steering wheel column ($650)
• Leather seats ($750)
• Custom 17″ polished billet rims ($2000)
• 9hp gas motor upgrade ($1,250.00)
• Water/battery filling system ($375)

Last on the list and my personal favorite is the 2 passenger electric H1 Hummer Golf Cart for around $17,850. It comes standard with a 48 volt club car chassis, burlwood or carbon fiber dash, 6′ spindle lift kit, cooler box under hood, custom upholstery with embroidered H1, and polished chrome wheels.  Hummer is stamped on the rear bumper. And just like the others, there’s a load of optional features that could potentially bring the price to well over $20,000.

So, if golf is your game, and you have anywhere from $15,000-over $20,000 that you’re just not sure what to do with, you’ll have a variety of luxury golf carts to choose from! For a more complete list of some of the best luxury carts available, click here!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 09, 2006 by CyberNet.

When you’re traveling, your bags can be heavy enough before even adding in your laptop.  The sizes of laptops have gone from relatively heavy in weight, right on down to the ultraportable laptops we see today that weigh a fraction of what earlier computers weigh.  These computers also make traveling a bit easier by making your load a little lighter. Here are some of the best Ultraportable Laptops we’ve come across:

Asus S6F

Price: $ 1.999.00

Alright, while this one may not be exactly affordable, it does have some great features, one of them being its’ looks.  How many laptops have you seen come with a leather lid? This one has a textured, chocolate-brown lid.  The Asus S6F comes with a core duo processor, and has a good battery life of around 4 hours and 51 minutes..  It fits into the “ultraportable” category by measuring 10.7 inches (wide), 7.5 inches (deep), and 1.5 inches (thick).  To top it off, it only weighs 3.4 pounds. There are certainly ultraportables that weigh less than that, but 3.4 pounds is a comfortable laptop to carry around. The screen is 11.1 inches (wide screen), and has a resolution of 1366×768.

Of course because it is ultra portable, it does have a compact keyboard that might throw you the first time that you go to type.  It’s also missing some of the ports that you might be accustomed to using. On CNET, it received a rating of 7.9 out of 10 which is very good.

Sony VAIO VGN-TXN15P/W

Price: $2199.99

Again, not the most affordable option, but it’s portable! If portable is what you’re looking for, checkout the Sony VAIO VGN-TXN 15 p/W. One thing that’s really cool about this computer is that it has built-in cellular and Bluetooth! One major difference between the VAIO and the Asus S6F is that it’s a Core Solo processor (versus the Core Duo). Battery life is amazing and estimated at 10 hours! It’s also quit a bit lighter than the ASUS S6F and weighs in at 2.8 pounds. The sizes of bot the Sony and the Asus are relatively similar with the VAIO measuring 10.7 x 7.6 x 0.8 to 1.2 inches thick. 

Again, it’s portable which means it has a compact keyboard. It even has room for some media player launch keys like play and pause. The screen measures 11.1 inches and has a resolution of 1,366 x 768. Some of the extras– it has two USB ports, FireWire, VGA, headphone jack, and microphone jack. CNET rates it an excellent score of 8.0 out of 10. I think there’s no doubt that the 10 hours of battery life is able to wheel in a lot of buyers who are looking for an Ultraportable.

Lenovo ThinkPad X60s

Price: $2172.00

Last on the list is another not so affordable option, but one that has a great rating.  CNET gives the Lenovo ThinkPad an excellent score of 8.4 out of 10. It is the lightest in weight of the computers we’ve talked about, weighing it at a mere 2.7 pounds. Being both light and thin is what gives this computer a lot of attention.  It has a CoreDuo processor, and measures around 10.5 x 8.3 x 0.8 inches and has a 12.1 inch display. It does have a compact keyboard, but keys are comfortable to use. Another main difference between the Lenovo and the Sony VAIO is that is has lots of ports you might use. Other features you might be intrigued with are the fingerprint reader, and a nice long battery life.

While the options that we have mentioned aren’t extremely affordable, they do have a lot of great features.  If you’re looking for something that’s more affordable, checkout the Averatec 1000 Series of 10.6″ windscreen portable notebooks. Prices range from just over $1000.00 to around $1300.00. It weighs only 3.6 pounds and is a good alternative is you’re wanting an ultraportable computer!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 12, 2006 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

The art of eBay sniping has been around for, well, as long as eBay has existed. Auction sniping, for those unfamiliar, is when someone places a bid on an auction seconds before it ends. This helps to ensure that no one has time to outbid them or unnecessarily raise the price. You can do this manually by bidding on the eBay site, use an online sniping site, or by using a software program.

The problem is that there aren’t many sites or software that do the sniping for no cost…and if the solution is free then it is probably very limited in its capabilities. An example of an online site that offers free sniping is AuctionStealer but they say that the bids are only successfully placed 97% of the time whereas the paid version of the service has a success rate of 99.9% along with shorter sniping times.

A great program that runs on your own computer is Auction Sentry. I have used it for the 10-day trial and it has a lot of advanced options that anyone would surely love. Even thought the $15 price tag is not that much I was still determined to find a freeware solution. It was only the matter of minutes before I stumbled upon the open source JBidWatcher.

First, let me start of by saying that there is no installation required after you download JBidWatcher. When you run the executable it will ask where you would like to store the configuration files on your computer which is important for backing up your information.

Another thing that it requests is your eBay information, which is obviously needed to do the sniping on your behalf and to retrieve things from your watch list. Believe me, it is really nice to be able to browse eBay and add things to your watch list as you find them. Then, after you are all done looking around you can have JBidWatcher download all of the items that you are currently watching.

Java is, however, required to run JBidWatcher which means that this is also cross-platform (available for Mac, Linux, and Windows). Okay, let’s get into some of the nitty gritty…

–Options–

I really love the configurability that JBidWatcher has to offer via the Options. You can configure all sorts of things like the ability to synchronize its own internal clock with eBay’s current time. That is extremely important because if your clock is offer by the smallest amount of time it could cause your snipe to be placed after the auction has already ended.

In the “Sniping” tab is where you can alter the number of seconds before the end of the auction for the sniping to occur. I recently won an auction using this software and had it set to place my bid 8-seconds before the auction ended. It was placed so quickly that I could have probably gotten away with 3-4 seconds but if you are on a slow Internet connection, you should allow enough time (around 10-12 seconds).

Also in the Options, you will see an option to “Display Thumbnails” which might not make sense right away. When you look at the listings on the main screen it doesn’t show any images, but just hover your mouse over a listing and it will show you a nice snapshot of the auction. Not having the images displayed on the main page of the program makes the interface more condensed which I  prefer over having the images embedded. After all, how many times do I really need to look at an image for the same auction?

–Search Manager–

JBidWatcher even has a built-in searcher that can be set to do eBay searches at a given interval. By using this, you can be notified very quickly after new auctions are added for a particular item that you might be hunting down for a great deal. The only thing that I didn’t like about this is that the search results are added right into the “Current” tab where you have all of your snipes listed. If you do a vague search it will quickly clutter up that screen and is hard to keep it organized.

I would prefer to see a search tab so that I can pick and choose from that what listings I actually want to keep track of. This feature might be useful for certain items and certain people but I think I’ll stick to it importing items that I am currently watching.

–Multiple Snipes–

Lastly, I wanted to cover one of the most prominent features of JBidWatcher: Multiple Snipes. This is great when you see several listings for the same item and you just want to put in a maximum bid for all of them. Using the Multiple Snipes feature you can do just that and as soon as you win one of the auctions for your designated price, it will not bid on any of the others that are part of the Multiple Snipe group.

To use this just highlight the items in the main window that you want to be part of the Multiple Snipe group and then go to Auction Menu -> Multiple Snipe. Enter in the maximum price that you want to pay and it will do all of the hard work.

A word of warning: if two of the auctions end within seconds of each other then JBidWatcher might not be able to confirm whether the previous auction was won/lost and may bid on the second one as well. This works best if there is plenty of separation between the multiple listings (I would probably do a minimum of 30 seconds).

–Overview–

If you are an eBay user then I am sure that you’ll find value in using sniping software. This not only works for the United States eBay site but also for several other countries…so users from around the world can start to snipe their auctions and save some money!

Download JBidWatcher

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on September 30, 2006 by CyberNet.

Weekend Warrior

If you plan on taking a road trip or a plane ride anytime soon, here’s a few ideas on what you can do to keep your sanity and occupy the time using puzzles (although some may drive you nearly to insanity).

First on the list is Magic Cube 4D which is a fully functional 4D Rubik’s cube.  It may sound simple, but it’s far from it! It’s one of those things you’ll tell your friends about but never actually attempt to do it. Just looking at it is confusing enough! This 4D cube has an insane amount of possible states:

1,756,772,880,709,135,843,168,526,079,081,025,059,614,484,630,149,

557,651,477,156,021,733,236,798,970,168,550,600,274,887,650,082,354,

207,129,600,000,000,000,000.

If you’re wanting to give this 4D puzzle a try, visit Superliminal.com where you can just click the button for the Java version and choose to open the file. It will launch immediately so no installation is necessary. 

–No Computer Required Puzzles–

If you’re without a laptop or you just want something you can manipulate, visit bedlampuzzles.com where you can purchase a variety of puzzles for a variety of levels.  There are wooden, metallic, and special finish bedlam cubes. Another unique puzzle is the “tiwstable conundrum.”

With the “Twistable Conundrum”, again it looks easy but don’t be fooled. You have to line up all of the numbers, colors, and symbols.  In reality, you’re solving three puzzles in one.

Another “no computer required puzzle” is the Platinum Bedlam Cube Puzzle (pictured to the right).  The cube is made up of 13 different unique pieces which can form a cube with 19,186 solutions!

–Additional Cube Puzzles –

Wikipedia has a lengthy article on Rubik’s Cubes.  They give a good list of a variety of puzzles, all of which will help you occupy your time in the car or a plane! Some of the puzzles are:

• Magic Polyhedra
• Rubik’s Clock
• Rubik’s Magic
• Alexander’s Star
• Pocket Cube
• Rubik’s Revenge
• Professor’s Cube
• Square-1

Whether you’re in a car or a plane, with or without a computer, there’s a variety of cube games and puzzles to help you keep yourself occupied!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com