Published May 30th, 2008
in Money Saving Tips.
Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration shares a very simple hack that allows you to read a few popular magazines for free in digital format. The titles include Popular Mechanics, US News, Car and Driver, Macworld, Readers Digest, Penthouse, Playboy and a few more names.
The hack is based on the fact that Zinio Labs allows iPhone owners to browse these magazines for free from their phones. The ordinary folks without iPhone can enjoy the same privilege if they convince Zinio they are using the phone. How is that possible? In fact pretty simple. Switch the browser user agent settings and make Zinio web server think you are running a different browser brand/version than it really is, a trick very similar to referrer spoofing used for free access to the WSJ.
Follow the steps below to get the user agent configured, then open zinio.com/iphone in your browser and enjoy your free magazines!
Using Safari browser
Since all Apple developers are geeks they built in this functionality right into the web browser. Here are the steps you need to follow if you want to change the user agent in Safari:
- Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced and check the option that says “Show Develop menu in menu bar.”
- Open the “Develop” option in the browser menu bar and choose “Mobile Safari 1.1.3 - iPhone” as the user agent.
Using Firefox configuration
Firefox have hidden the user agent behind advanced configuration settings. Here are the steps:
- Type “about:config” in the browser URL and click enter
- Right mouse click on the list and select New -> String in the menu
- Enter “general.useragent.override” for the preference name and “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3″ for the value
Reset the property after you are done reading (this setting is global and will affect other websites).
Using Firefox plugin
A little bit more user friendly solution involves this plugin. After you install it in your browser, open the plugin options and define a custom user agent with these settings:
- Description: iPhone
- User Agent: Mobile Safari 1.1.3 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
- App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
- App Version: Version/3.0
- Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3
Switch to this user agent whenever you want to read the magazines.
Using Internet Explorer
Changing user agent string in Internet Explorer requires fiddling with Windows registry which I generally don’t recommend. If you feel challenged, this MSDN article has all the details on how this can be done.
Source: How to Read Popular Magazines on your Desktop for Free at Digital Inspiration
Published May 29th, 2008
in Interesting / Other.
One of my dream geek projects (ssh, don’t tell my wife ;-) ) is to upgrade my laptop to an SSD storage. I do most of my freelance work on a laptop and I would love to see increased battery life and improved data failure tolerance such an upgrade promises. Besides, I hate it when the thing heats up so much that I have to place a book between my laptop and my lap to avoid getting burned.
The falling flash memory prices look really encouraging. Already today I can buy a 8GB SD card for $27 or a 16GB flash drive for $58 (after rebate). It would make one think that there should be good deals on solid state hard drives as well since they have lower size constrains than e.g. SD cards. In real life however the opposite is true. There are really no SSD bargains out there.
The prices on solid state disks have not come down, at least not nearly as much per GB as other flash media. I have looked around and while there are some high performance SSD’s for servers for sale, there are really not that many offerings in the general consumer market. It looks like solid state media hasn’t hit the market yet and low volumes keep prices high. Ultimately after digging through the price comparison sites for half an hour I have found just one product that didn’t have an insane price, this 32GB SATA compatible drive by Transcend for $165.
I could probably get 320GB for that price if I went with traditional storage type. The prices on regular hard drives have come down too and this is another reason why SSD’s don’t get broader acceptance despite the news like this. The higher HDD volume demands dictated by digital music and video adoption also keep SSD’s out of market.
Do you have a laptop? Have you considered an upgrade to a solid state drive? Please share your experience.
Published May 24th, 2008
in Money Saving Tips.
Did you know that if you go to Amazon’s Todays Deals page, login to your account, and scroll down to the section titled “Yan’s Quick Picks” (that of course would be your name) the merchandise offered there is priced at a 5% discount off the ongoing sale price?
Amazon builds this list daily based on your past activity. Things you have purchased in the past are used as the basis when this list is compiled. You can see what kind of stuff gets there by visiting the “recommendations” page (click on the “recommendations” link on the top of the Amazon home page when you are logged in).
The neat thing about the Quick Picks is that they can be easily influenced by simply claiming an ownership of a similar item to the one you want to buy. For example if I wanted Sony PSP I would go to the PSP 2GB Memory Stick product page, scrolled down to “Rate This Item” and clicked on “I own it” check box. If after doing so you go to the “recommendations” page you will notice quite a few PSP related products including this PSP 2000 Console.
Some of these items will be making their way to your Quick Picks page the next day and going forward. To help Amazon decide what to add there you may want to remove the items you don’t need by marking them as “Not Interested”. The first time around this procedure took me a while since Amazon logged quite a bit of my past activity. You can speed things us by using the “Fix this” link which tunes up the criteria used for the recommendations.
I followed the steps above and surely enough the Sony PSP showed up the next day in my Quick Picks. The price was $161.49 which is 5% or $8.50 off the on going sale price ($169.99). Is 8 bucks worth a day wait for you? It is for me and I wish I knew about this trick before I bough my Sony camcorder this past holiday season. 5% on a pricey item like that comes to pretty good savings.
There are a few things that you need to remember before you try this out. You are required to make at least one purchase at Amazon before you start seeing anything in your Quick Picks list. Only one Quick Pick can be redeemed per day. Once you add the item to your shopping cart you have 60 minutes to complete the checkout process before the savings expire. You can find other restriction at this page but these above are the most important ones.
Published May 22nd, 2008
in Business: Strategy.
What does it take to dominate web search? One might think a search engine that produces quality results is all that matters, and this is exactly how Google stole the game from Yahoo, Netscape and others back in 90’s. What can you do though if your product has not been that great but you have a huge amount of cash burning your pockets? I am sure Bill Gates and other folks at Microsoft have been asking themselves this same question.
Buying your way into the dominance
Back in October 2007 Microsoft acquired a startup called JellyFish which sort of pioneered CPA model of doing business in the search world. As a way to get things going they offered a cash back incentive to the customers who bought products via their search engine. The idea is not exactly new and there is a whole class of sites called Rewards Programs that build their business around cash back. What JellyFish has done differently was that they promoted the search aspect of it. Many of the rewards sites back then didn’t have a convenient search function, and some required you to sign up for an account before you could do anything. JellyFish prominently displayed search on the front page and only required you to sign up before you make the purchase.
Yesterday Bill Gates announced at the Advance08 conference about a new project Microsoft is undertaking to get on Google. They call it Live Search cashback and the entire initiative essentially boils down to integrating into Live Search the JellyFish idea of CPA based product search. Consumers can get to the savings from the main Live Search page by clicking on the “Get Cashback” icon in the top right corner, or by going to Cashback.com, a domain Microsoft acquired for those unfamiliar with Live.com brand.
Good for consumers, bad for affiliates
The way all Rewards Programs work is by paying consumer a part of the affiliate commission they receive from the merchant when the consumer buys something using the program. Microsoft’s move into the niche essentially popularizes the cash back concept and makes it available to broader masses, which no question is good for consumers. Just as cash back credit cards, rewards programs is a great way to save while shopping.
On the other hand, the fact that Microsoft has become a “super affiliate” may not do well with businesses who rely on Live Search to bring in sale leads or do affiliate arbitrage. This is clearly a conflict of interest here and will cost Microsoft some of the adCenter customers.
As for the long term Google vs. Microsoft aspect of this move, it is clear Microsoft is desperate and is trying different things in an attempt to gain the search market niche. I will be curious to see how another acquisition they made recently plays out in that aspect.
Published May 18th, 2008
in Interesting / Other.
When I was leaving for work last Thursday I noticed a big pile of dirt on my neighbor’s front yard. A group of men were gathered around a hole in the ground. I approached to find out what was going on and the men pointed at a stretch of wrecked copper pipe. It looked like someone had bitten a chunk out of it. The pipe connects my neighbor’s house to the water main and had to be replaced.
I later spoke to my neighbor and he said his family noticed a pressure drop, spotted water coming out of the ground in the front yard, and called the service. $8500 is the repairs bill that they are now facing.
Our homes were built 5 years ago at the same time and have exactly the same design. My neighbor said I should start saving money. The service people suspect that the cause is either defective pipe material or poor job the builders have done with the piping, but in either case the owner is the one to take the hit since neither manufacturer nor the builder can be held liable.
I called my Allstate agent and she explained that the home insurance will not cover the cost since no damage is done to the house. This is really bad news for us, and all I can think of right now. My friend told me of a family he knew who had a similar problem with their house and within 2-3 years all homeowners on their side of the street had to eventually replace piping.
A desperate idea to move has visited me tonight; especially since we were planning to do so when kids grow a bit (public schools in this area are not very good), but then I thought that I would need to disclose any problems with the house to the buyer, and while this problem at this point is only hypothetical, it can easily scary away a potential buyer.
So it looks like a deadlock at this point and I can’t think of any way to avoid the upcoming financial disaster. What would you do in my case?
Photo courtesy of atlef at flickr
