Home Improvement Tool and Toy Reviews

As mentioned last week I was not going to camp out this year in front of Best Buy for their Black Friday specials. The main reason for this was that they did not have any deals like the Toshiba laptop deal they did last year.

Well that just changed - they have an even better deal then they did last year.

This year they have another Toshiba laptop WITH a Canon color print for $229 after all of their instant rebates. That makes camping out a whole lot more tempting.

The only issue that I face now is that it is supposed to be cold on Friday and possibly even rain here in the Austin area.

What to do now…

Yep, I am a Black Friday camper. I camped out at Best Buy last year and scored some really good deals. I sold the laptop I bought for almost $200.

In looking over the ads this year I have to say that I am really disappointed with the offerings. The laptop I bought last year for $250 was a Toshiba so I had no problem selling it. This year the cheapest laptop is a Compaq at Circuit City and is $299 AFTER a mail in rebate - Not worth it.

This year I will avoid the crowds and actually enjoy a good night’s sleep.

I know, I know. I just posted 2 weeks ago how I was not going to spend the money on an economy car. As a recap the main reason for not getting a car with better gas mileage was that I could not get anything with less then 50K mikes on it for the $8k that my Xterra was worth.

I was going round and round in my mind trying to figure out what I as going to do while I saw the gas prices going higher and higher. In talking with my wife we finally came to the conclusion that trying to get a car with 50K miles on it for $8 was not going to happen. With that we decided that we needed to spend more and take on a payment. Also, if we were going to take on a payment then we might as well get something that is pretty new that was we can keep it for a while. Our online parameter was we wanted to stay under $200/month for a car payment.

Previously my heart had been set on a Scion XB but the while looking for a used one I remembered that Nissan, Toyota, and Honda had recently come out with some very fuel efficient baseline cars. I started searching and discovered the Nissan Versa, Toyota Yaris, and the Honda Fit. All these cars started around $12k for the base line models and went up from there. I decided right then that I would rather have one of these cars - brand new - instead of a used Scion.

The wife and I went to look at cars. (more…)

I am one of those procrastinating people like most. Because of that I  have lacked a backup of my important files. The most important thing on my computer are actually all the photos of the my kids. Since we hardly ever print the photos out if my hard drive got hosed we would loose a ton of memories.

I had looked at online backups several months ago and had decided that I was going to use Carbonite since I had read so many good reviews of them. I even told a coworker about Carbonite and he said he was going to use it also - neither of us did.

Recently I installed Vista and was extremely disappoint so I wanted to try the whole OSx86 thing to get Mac OS X running on my Dell. Because the install deals with messing around with partitions (when dual booting) I did not want to take the chance with all of our pictures. Therefore I restricted myself to having a complete backup somewhere in case things went bad.

The first thing I did was check out what people were saying about Carbonite (blog search rocks!). Some people were not-so-happy with them and had mentions Mozy. Another quick search of Mozy found that people were generally happy with their service.

(more…)

As mentioned before I got a SanDisk Sansa e250r MP3 player for Christmas. I was replacing a 512mb MP3 player that I had gotten free from my Napster subscription.

The main reason for wanting to get rid of the 512mb MP3 player was that I could only get about 5 full albums on it. The e250r had 2GB of space so I expected to get about 20 albums on there.

To my disappointment I was only able to get about twice as much on the e250r. The reason for this was that it was preloaded with almost a gigabyte of music that they wanted you to subscribe to Rhapsody music service to continue to listen to. Some of the music was cool but not 1GBs cool.

Unfortunately it took a little digging but I found where all the preloaded music was hiding out and was able to delete it.

This is where it was hiding - \system\music\

There are 275 .rax files in this locationby default from the factory.

UPDATE: You will also need to delete the PP500.DAT file under the System\data directory. This will delete the entries from your database. I had deleted the songs but they wee still showing up in my Album, Artist, and Song lists.

Now that I have more space I have some ripping to do to fill my Sansa back up again.

Technorati: MP3, MP3 Player, Sansa e250r, iPod

We all know that you do not get near what your car is worth when you go to the dealer to trade it in. The reason why most people do that though is that selling it on your own can be difficult. The most difficult part of selling your car can be getting people to actually see it and then connect with them.

One site that help in that area is lemonfree.com. Lemon Free has cars for sale from private owners from various sources around the web. I looked up a Nissan Pathfinder in Texas and found a great price.

The cool thing is that if you are trying to sell your car their service is free which means even more money in your pocket.

Technorati Tags: Used Cars, Lemon Free, Cars for Sale

So the wife and I went to local electronic store to look at new DVD system for the car so that when our youngest son starts to face forward he will be able to watch TV also. If you don’t know a DVD played in the car is a life saver. I recommend one for anyone who has kids.

Right now we have a portable one who’s screen only tilts one way. They now have ones that can tilt different directions and even spin around. We are looking a portable one instead of one that mounts in the car because they are about a third of the cost. Also you can take the portable one out of the car. The overhead models are stuck there.

Anyway, we found one that we liked and I was about to buy it when my wife suggested that we look online to see if we could get it cheaper. I did look at the Best Buy web site but it was the same price. I then remembered about the couponchief.com site I mentioned before. Sure enough I went to their Best Buy Section and snagged a coupon for 10% plus I got free shipping.

Cool!

Technorati: Best Buy, DVD Played, Coupons

There has been a lot of talk going back and forth concerning Voice or IP (VoIP) and whether people should switch to it or not. First of all you need to understand what VoIP is and Cisco can help you do that at their VOIP overview page.

I currently use a form of VoIP at home through Time Warner and actually use equipment from Cisco at work for VoIP. (more…)

This rocks! You can totally put a Google Gadget on your web site. So below how I put BeJeweled right in this post with a simple copy and paste of the code. Cool huh?

Technorati: Google, Google Gadgets, Blog, Blogging

Actually you do not need to know how one works (unless your an aircraft mechanic then please understand it) but in case you were wondering or wanted to impress a girl the next time you go the aeronautical museum you can whip out the knowledge of how a gas turbine works that you learned over at the rolls-royce.com website (there cool tutorials can be found in the education section).

Yeah that’s right, I said Rolls Royce. They don’t just make fancy cars, they also make jet engines that power a lot of the airlines that people fly on everyday.

Anyway, it is not quite as exciting as Mythbusters but the do break it down in plain terms for us simple folks. Check it out and give your new-found knowledge a whirl on your friends.

Technorati: Rolls Royce, Jet Engines, Science, Tutorials