Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten some really tremendous deals on eBay before. The general consensus that I’ve found when talking with people, however, is that they normally make impulse purchases before they take the time to see if they are getting a real bargain. Today we’re going to walk you through a 5 step process that can save you a lot of money in the end.

Ashley and myself ran an eBay business for over a year, and it was quite an interesting experience. From it we found ourselves knowing more about eBay than we ever wanted to, and now our friends always poke and prod us for tips on how they can get the most out of the online marketplace.

1. Search eBay

The first thing that you’ll obviously want to do is search eBay to see what kind of prices they have. Don’t get sucked into the low-priced auctions… no, you’re not going to get a $1,500 laptop for $25. Many people wait until the last minute to bid (a.k.a. sniping), and we’re going to show you the best way to do that as well.

What may prove to be helpful is to checkout the completed listings. On the search page you’ll notice the “Completed listings only” checkbox which will show only those listings that have already ended. If the item you’re looking for is rather common then there should be a fair amount of listings that have already completed, and with those you should be able to get a rough idea of what future listings will realistically sell for.

When sifting through the completed listings be sure to also watch for people who are constantly relisting the same item… especially if it never sells. That’s normally an indication that they really want to get rid of it or they have a bunch that they need to unload. In situations like those you might be able to bargain with them even if all you may get is the shipping fee waived.

Believe it or not eBay actually has their own Deal Finder search engine. When you perform a search on there it will only show items that have zero bids, less than 4 hours left, no reserve price, and free/fixed price shipping. So it is actually different than the regular eBay search engine, and can be beneficial for finding those gems that no one else has come across.

2. Search for Misspellings

Ahhh, we’ve all been criticized at one point or another for not proofreading the things that we write. Well, here’s where you can really benefit from the mistakes that others make. Maybe it’s poor typing skills, a genuine mistake, or maybe they are just in a rush to get a listing done. Whatever it is there are quite a few people out there who like to misspell words in their listings.

So how can you capitalize on the mistakes of others? It’s rather simple actually. There are all kinds of sites, such as Fat Fingers, that will help you search eBay for misspellings of any word you specify. A really good example of this in action would be searching for Oakley sunglasses. You’ll quickly find quite a few different ways that people spell it, including Oakly and Oakely.

3. Shop Around

I definitely don’t see this happening enough with people who buy things on eBay. They naturally assume that if an item is on eBay that it’s gotta be a steal, but that’s surprisingly not the case for most items. Be patient and shop around at some other stores for goodness sake. You have to remember that eBay sellers have to pay rather excessive fees for every item that sells, and they will definitely make sure that those fees are recouped.

When it comes to shopping around I normally do a quick run through on Amazon, PriceGrabber, and Google Product Search to see if any of them point to a better deal. More often than not I can find an item brand new for nearly the same price as some used/refurbished items on eBay… so it’s definitely worth doing your homework.

4. Subscribe to Feeds

When Ashley and I were selling items on eBay for a full-time job one thing that we always tried to do was turnover the merchandise quickly. Ideally we wanted to get the things out as fast as we got them in, and to do that we had to slap low Buy it Now prices on them. What this meant is that the people who took the time to find the Buy it Now listings that still have several days remaining are normally the ones who get the best deals. Most people never look beyond the first page of search results, but that’s normally where you’ll find the most reasonable prices.

If you don’t need the item right away it will likely serve you well to hold out for the low Buy it Now listings. If you use RSS feeds I highly recommend subscribing to a feed for any particular search that you perform. That way you’ll be one of the first people to know when there is a new item listed. To do this just look for the orange RSS button at the bottom of any search results page:

5. Snipe the Auction

The art of sniping is becoming more and more popular on eBay. It’s where someone swoops in at the last second to place a bid, and often doesn’t leave enough time for you to counteract their offer. It’s sneaky, pisses a lot of people off, and sellers hate it. But you can do it with little to no effort thanks to JBidWatcher (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux).

We’ve already assembled a more detailed tutorial on how to use JBidWatcher, and it’s been getting some welcomed updates lately. It’s pretty much an automated sniping system that you can easily setup. With it you can even target multiple auctions for the same item, and it will continue to bid on them all within seconds of them ending. What’s nice is that once you win an auction at the price you specify it will not bid on any of the others! This can save a lot of hassle for people who have to work during the day, and don’t have an opportunity to check on their eBay auctions.

It is possible to snipe an auction without using any software, but I’ve ran into some problems when trying to do that before. When doing it manually I try to leave about 15 seconds left on the auction before submitting my offer, but one time I went to do this and eBay unexpectedly made me login before submitting my offer. Needless to say I wasn’t ready for that and ended up not getting my bid in on time. So software like JBidWatcher is definitely nice to have.

–Overview–

These are the five steps that I feel most people should follow when purchasing from eBay, and hopefully they will help you save some money. Be sure to share your eBay money saving tips in the comments below!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Many of you have an iPhone or an iPod touch. And as Gadget Lab readers, you probably also have a notebook of some kind. And despite the notebook being way more capable than the little handheld, we bet you use the iPhone more and more for checking e-mail, tweeting and a large part of your web browsing.

With the iPad, this “casual” use will just increase. Why bother pulling out a laptop when you have the tablet with you almost always? Unless you are rendering video files in the background, we can’t think of much that would need an old-style computer.

The iPhone already has a lot of apps that are better, fuller featured and easier to use than their desktop equivalents. Tweetie (a Twitter client) for iPhone does way more than Tweetie for the Mac, in a much more elegant way. All of the current iPhone applications should “just work” on your shiny new iPad, albeit at original size in the middle of a big black screen, or scaled up to fit. Better will be the tweaked, iPad-specific versions that should be around for the launch in two months’ time.

Here’s a list of applications we can’t wait to see on the iPad.

NewsRack

NewsRack (formerly Newsstand) is our favorite RSS reader for the iPhone. It walks all over the previous RSS king, NetNewsWire (in both Mac and iPhone forms) because it is both richly featured, very fast and easy to use. It works in concert with Google Reader.

NewsRack is so good that I can start my working day in bed with a cup of coffee and my iPod touch, triaging news stories and shuffling them off to e-mail to cover later (I could use Google Reader’s “star” function, but the desktop NetNewsWire still doesn’t support this).

NewsRack is one of those applications that couldn’t have existed without the iPhone, and I’m very excited to see how it’ll be improved for the bigger iPad. Just the addition of bigger pictures and less scrolling would be enough, but a pop-up feed list would make it better than any desktop reader out there. Bonus: Imagine the gorgeous NewsRack view (right) on the big screen.

NewsRack [OMZ]

Newsstand: Probably the Best iPhone News Reader [Gadget Lab]

Instapaper

We’ve written a lot about Instapaper here. I love it and so does our esteemed editor, Dylan Tweney. Why? It does one thing, and it does it so simply and well you don’t even notice: Click a browser bookmarklet when you find any article you’d like to read later, and it’ll be saved. Fire up the Instapaper iPhone app and, after a few seconds syncing, you have all your saved articles ready to read offline.

The real trick is that all the crap has been stripped away, all the links and ads and navigation, leaving you with nicely formatted text and scaled, in-line pictures. It doesn’t take much to see why we want this on the iPad, and according to the developer, Marco Arment, he is already working on an iPad-optimized version.

Instapaper, not iBooks or anything else, is the thing that will turn your iPad into the ultimate, personal, newspaper.

Instapaper [Instapaper]

Instapaper: A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase [Gadget Lab]

Stanza

Another old Gadget Lab favorite, Stanza, is an e-reader application. It doesn’t have the eye-candy of the iBooks app (yet) but when you’re reading a book, that doesn’t matter at all — all you want is text.

Stanza has the ability to read and organize books from many different sources, from the legit to the more underground. It even supports various forms of ePub DRM to keep the publishers happy.

The one problem with Stanza is that it is for the iPhone, and the screen, for some at least, is too small to be comfortable. The iPad fixes this immediately, and if the current owner (Amazon) decides to update the app for Apple’s new device, Stanza could be the go-to default e-reader for iPad owners outside of the United States, who will not be allowed to use Apple’s iBooks.

Stanza v2.0: The iPhone’s Best E-Reader Just Got Better [Gadget Lab]

Kindle for iPad

We know, we know: another reading application. This kind of reveals my thinking about the iPad — I’ll be doing a lot of reading on it. Kindle for iPhone should scale nicely for the iPad, although of course a native version would be welcome.

What’s that you say? If I want a large-screen Kindle, why not just buy the DX? Because it costs only ten bucks less than the iPad, and does a whole lot less (Kindle PDF support is still a joke, for example, and the video is awful). And by using the iPhone or iPad Kindle app, it is a lot easier to trick Amazon into believing you are in the United States so the company will deign to sell you its full catalog.

How to Get the iPhone Kindle App Outside the U.S. [Gadget Lab]

Lightroom

Here’s our left-field, wishful thinking choice, and probably something that will never happen. Lightroom is Adobe’s excellent photo-editing application, and a rival to Apple’s Aperture.

With the news that the iPad will work with a camera-connection accessory, we immediately thought that the iPad would make a wonderful tool for photographers. At the least, you could upload pictures mid-shoot to check them on the large screen and make a quick back-up.

But if the iPad’s photo app is as bad as iPhoto, that’s pretty much all you’ll want to do until you get back to your “real” computer. We want a Lightroom Lite, which would sync to your main catalog at home, but give you all the Lightroom organizing and image-tweaking tools out on the road.

The touch interface is perfect for photo editing. It’s all sliders and zooming, after all. With some creative re-thinking, I can’t see that there’s much in Lightroom that couldn’t work on the iPad. Other than the fact that it’s from Adobe, and that it uses Adobe’s own RAW converter, not Apple’s. Also, $200 is steep for an App Store listing.

Adobe Adds Speed, Flickr Integration to Lightroom 3 [Gadget Lab]

This is my wish-list, and with the exception of the last item, these are already certain to appear. What about you, Gadget Lab reader? What current or imagined apps do you want to see? Tell us what and why in the comments.

This article was written on August 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

I don’t think there is any doubt that CCleaner is among my favorite applications, and it looks like it is going to stay that way. Thanks to this tiny program I, along with several of our forum members, have been able to clear up gigabytes of files that are no longer needed…thereby reclaiming valuable hard drive space.

Just today CCleaner 2.0 Beta was announced with several new features. The feature that I’m excited about the most is the exclusion list, which lets you select files and/or registry keys to be ignored by the application. This is a big deal because there are some things that shouldn’t be removed, and doing so could render an application unusable.

Tip: When going through the installation process there is an option (selected by default) to install the Yahoo! Toolbar. Make sure you uncheck that box if you don’t want an additional toolbar to appear in your browser.

Here’s a full list of all the new features, as well as a screenshot of the exclusion list in action:

• Complete rebuild in C++ – With the requirements for a portable version, 64-bit compatibility and Windows Vista increasing against the limitations of the old architecture. We decided to rebuild the entire CCleaner application in highly optimized C++.
• Faster analyzing and cleaning – Each scanning process was rewritten from scratch and fully optimized. The result being a noticeable speed increase in all areas.
• Portable – CCleaner can now run from a USB thumbdrive and be installed/run on a computer without a complicated setup process.
• Compact – The rewrite removed all external file dependencies, so the main EXE is now half the size of the original program and support files.
• Exclusions – It is now possible to specify files, folders and registry keys to ignore from the cleaning process.
• Redesigned User Interface – The original CCleaner user interface was looking a little dated, so the GUI was redesigned with a modern look, but without sacrificing speed or usability. New icons were created for the interface and the main program icon was updated with a more modern style.
• Loads of little tweaks – Too numerous to mention them all separately, we’ve tried to improve CCleaner in all areas.

Download CCleaner 2.0 Beta

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on August 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mozilla has announced the winners of the Extend Firefox 3 add-on contest. This is where extension developers submitted their add-ons to try and win prizes like a MacBook Air, and the winners definitely deserved it. I did submit our CyberSearch extension to see if it’d win, but it looks like it didn’t make the cut.

What extensions did scoop up the win? Here they are sorted by category:

Best New Add-ons

• Pencil – Lets you create interface prototypes. [our coverage]
• Tagmarks – A visual tagging system for bookmarks. [our coverage]
• HandyTag – Suggests relevant tags for the page you’re bookmarking.

Best New Add-ons Runners Up

• Webchunks – Firefox implementation of the Internet Explorer Webslices feature, plus more!
• Badges on Favicons – Add informational badges to the tab favicons.
• Devo – A command launcher for Firefox.
• Close ‘N Forget – Close the current tab and forget about the visit.
• Callout – Makes the notification services of the Operating System available for web pages and Greasemonkey scripts.
• Reasy – An RSVP reader.

Best Updated Add-ons

• Read it Later – Allows you to save pages of interest to read later.
• TagSifter – Browse bookmarks by tags.
• Bookmark Previews – Sift through bookmarks using a cover flow-like interface. [our coverage]

Best Music Add-on

• Fire.fm – Direct access to the Last.fm music library.

Congrats to all of the winners! There are some other extensions I believe deserved to win, such as Foxmarks in the “best updated” category, but there’s not much any of us could have done since a panel of judges was designated to make the decision.

If you’ve tried out any of the extensions mentioned above let us know which ones you think deserved the win, and which of your favorites should have taken home the crown.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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We weren’t sure things could get any more interesting with Microsoft’s mobile rumor mill, but along comes Zune Boards with some tantalizing findings in the latest Zune software update. First up is the eEndpointFamily files, which lists all the compatible hardware — ZuneHD, for example. Also found, however, were entries for “PmxPure” and “PmxTurtle.” PMX, if you recall, seems to be a reference to Microsoft’s
Premium Mobile eXperiences group, the remnants of the Danger acquisition who have been whispered to be working on Project Pink. As for Pure and Turtle, let’s go back all the way to September 2009, when we first heard those names as the initial Pink duo — there were some supposed renders, too. If that’s not enough, two PMX table entries pointed to a snippet of text stating that “Studio members” can “View and manage pictures and videos taken with your phone at the Studio,” followed by a link that for now redirects to Zune.net. Could the mysterious Project Pink and the oft-rumored “Zune phone” be one in the same, with some “Studio” service for uploading media to the cloud? Is this all some red herring perpetuated by some amused Microsoft staffers? We don’t know, but it’s mean to tug at our heart strings like that, Microsoft, and worse that it makes Mobile World Congress even more painful to wait for. #tmdp

Zune software references rumored Project Pink devices, a video upload service? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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