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Giants & Kina Win

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

In case you live under a rock the Giants won the Superbowl tonight in what could be called the greatest Superbowl of all time. An 83 yard drive to win it in the last 3 minutes of the fourth quarter. A few (12) Phenomenal plays by Eli Manning brought him home to mamma as the second brother in as many years with the trophy and the MVP award. Mamma must be proud, the Giants fans sure are. Final Score 17 to 14 Giants. Way to ruin a perfect 18 in 0 season Patriots.

If you tuned out during the commercials this year, or were hitting the keg, don’t worry you didn’t miss much. Well, except this little gem by Doritos:

http://www.hulu.com/embed/u-JoydCJbqS8Uuh2WnDxyQ

For those of you who have been following Kina Grannis (or any of the other contestants) in the Crash The SuperBowl contest, She Won! I’m happy for her. From unknown to household name in only a few weeks thanks to her Two Weeks for Kina campaign. Her Superbowl spot is below:

http://www.hulu.com/embed/nRA_YqhwrSEPB-Rp_G_wCA

The Mercedes Maybach

~ randyaa ~ 3 Comments

My friend Emily E-mailed this to me and I figured I’d share it here.

The car pictured in this note is a Mercedes Maybach. Notice the ‘recliner’ rear seats and the ‘electrostatic’ sunroof. The sunroof turns from opaque to crystal clear depending on the passengers preference.

Maybach 1

Maybach 2

Maybach 3

Maybach 4

Maybach 5

Maybach 6

NOW, STOP DREAMING AND GET BACK TO WORK! (BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT)!

Maybach 7

Save Money Flying With Yapta

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Yapta LogoPlanning a trip? Yapta can in two big ways.

  1. While you’re looking for flights. Yapta has a Firefox plug-in which allows you to tag flights across multiple websites in order to compare prices and track their price changes before purchase.
  2. After you’ve purchased your tickets. This is the best feature in my mind. Much like what PriceProtectr does for common online retail stores, Yapta allows you to list tickets you’ve purchased and at what prices so that it can monitor price drops.

Something you probably didn’t know about most airlines is many offer reimbursements for price drops on air flights. The old saying that everyone on your flight paid a different price no longer applies. Everyone can pay the same price if you’re using Yapta!

Direct from Yapta’s FAQ here’s a list of some of the vouchers and refunds available:

Each airline has a different set of rules and regulations. However, here is a quick look at the policies for each airline. Click each of the airlines for the specifics.
Airline How much it will cost to get a travel voucher? How much it will cost to get a “cash refund” for a non-refundable ticket?
AirTran $75.00 Not Offered
Alaska Free $50.00
American $100.00 Not Offered
ATA $60.00 Domestic
$100.00 Hawaii		 Not Offered
Continental $100.00 Not Offered
Delta $75.00 Not Offered
Frontier $100.00 Not Offered
JetBlue $40.00 Not Offered
Midwest Free within 7 days of purchase
$100.00 after 7 days		 Not Offered
United Free $100.00
US Airways / America West $100.00 Not Offered

The Cloverfield Case

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Rachel and I saw Cloverfield on Friday. It wasn’t planned, in fact I didn’t have a whole lot of desire to see it at least not until I heard everyone’s reaction. That being said my friend Brian called and begged us to go (read: asked if I want to see it) so naturally I didn’t want to disappoint.

Cloverfield was awesome. I thought the hand held cameras would distract you from the storyline and takeaway from the overall movie. It had the exact opposite effect. The movie simply couldn’t have worked as a regularly filmed movie, at least not successfully. The reason it worked so well is the home movie added a very personal touch. In the beginning you laughed with the characters and in the end you cried with them all because you felt you were watching your best friend’s Youtube video. The movie also portrays our current generations desire to document everything and J. J. Abrams doesn’t hide that this was part of his motivation for the movie style.

I haven’t been a fan of a movie’s ending in quite a while but Cloverfield’s ending is the only way I can imagine it. That’s not to say it doesn’t leave you with a sense of ‘WTF’ and ‘damn I hope they don’t make a sequal’ but it works regardless.

If you haven’t seen the trailer I’ve embedded it for your viewing pleasure below.

[ifilm]2913955[/ifilm]

Old and Busted, Meet New Hotness (Apple TV Take 2)

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AppleIt’s been said before but I’ll say it again. Blueray and HD-DVD have lost and the media wars don’t matter. I thought it was going to take a lot longer than this but Streaming HD content is here. Enter the new and improved (and cheaper) Apple TV. Every Tech Blog in the world is making announcements from MacWorld 2008 and the most important announcement isn’t really the new streaming rentals, iPhone update, Time Capsule or even the new MacBook Air. The most important announcement is their Apple TV Take 2. They even admitted their first version was a failure. That’s a big step for a company like apple.

Rent High Definition Movies Directly from Your Widescreen…rent movies from a catalog of over 1,000 titles by the end of February, including over 100 titles in stunning high definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound, with no computer required.

That’s it. Move over Blueray and HD-DVD, Your days are numbered. With the new ability to forgo the computer and rent or buy directly from your living room at a price point lower than most Blueray or HD-DVD players out at the moment why would you do anything else?

Apple is definitely a forward looking company and I’m glad they’re making the push for streaming media. My only wish is that they’d realize that some people would rather pay for a subscription service than pay per use.

Fix Those Pesky Unread Shared Items

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

I’m a fan of Google Reader. I’ve written here before about their new improvements and how great it is to work in an iterative development area where improvements happen daily.

Even a great team has a failure once and a while. They recently added the ability to see your Google Talk Friend’s shared items within Google Reader. While this shows that Google has great plans for integrating their services, I’ve had problems with this feature right off the bat and from what I understand I’m not the only one.

My biggest problem was that the counter of unread items would go up but my ability to read said items was gone. I could no longer get updates of my friend’s shared items essentially rendering the feature useless. If you’re like me you’ve been plagued by the following screen since they introduced the feature:

Shared Item - Wrong Count

Thanks to Graham the helpful Google Reader Guide we now have a solution and it’s easier than you think.

  1. Make sure you’re logged into Google Reader and goto Settings -> Friends.
  2. Scroll down until you see the user who’s items won’t update correctly.
  3. Click Hide. You should see a picture like so:

    Hidden Google Reader User

  4. Go back to the main page by either clicking ‘<< Back to Google Reader’ or the Google Reader logo.
  5. Your friend should no longer appear at all in the ‘Friends Shared Items’ list.
  6. Go back to Settings >> Friends.
  7. Find Him/Her again.
  8. Click ‘Show.’
  9. Go back to the main page again.
  10. It might take a second but they will appear in the list again. Once they do they’ll have a small red ‘new!’ next to their name. Click their username.

At this point you will have their new shared items displayed. From now on things will act normally and you can mark the items as read as you see fit.

These instructions are a complete interpretation of Graham the helpful Google Reader Guide’s original post.

Get Your Money Back with PriceProtectr!

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Price Protectr LogoPrice Protectr turned 1 this December. I didn’t even know they existed until 2 weeks ago, I wonder how much money I could have saved if I did?

Price Protectr is as simple as it gets. Their claim is to save you money by helping you take advantage of online retailers price protection guarantee. In their words:

Sit back and relax. If we notice the price drop any time within the price protection period, we’ll send an email your way (and we’ll keep sending them if the price keeps dropping).

To use their service all you do is fill in the URL to the item you purchased. They then give you it’s title & current price. They assume you are buying it at that price and that you bought it today, but if not you can change both values. Once you’re finished setting up the item you simply fill in your E-mail address and click the protect me button. You’ll get a confirmation E-mail and then anytime the price drops you’ll get notified via E-mail as well.

There is no requirement to create an account, however if you wish to, creating an account gives you a few additional features such as tracking all of your savings.

At launch they only had 6 retailers. I’m not sure which ones, but I would guess sites such as amazon and buy.com topped their list at the time. Now they have over 70 different retailers listed and it’s still growing!

Consumers, don’t fret! Buy that IPod Nano or that PS3. Stop worrying about whether the price will drop in another few weeks or not and buy it now! Price Protectr is here to save the day!

Retailers probably love this because it will mean more people will throw caution to the wind and buy it now! I wouldn’t be surprised sometime in the future to see Price Protectr partnering with retailers and advertising in their stores.

What concerns me with Price Protectr is a question that often accompanies these web applications. How do they make money? It doesn’t seem like there’s any kind of a business model for them to turn a profit so will they last? Who knows, but I’m sure to take advantage while they’re here.

Send a Kwiry From Your Cellphone

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Kwiry Text LogoI hear and see things I want to remember all the time. I used the voice notes on my phone for a while but I always seemed to forget they were there. A few weeks ago I was thinking it would be great to be able to send a text message to store little things I think of throughout the day. I even tried writing an application that allows you to send text messages to Google Notebook. Unfortunately Google’s Data API doesn’t allow pushing data to Google Notebook so that was a bust.

A few days ago I found Kwiry which does exactly what I was looking for. Kwiry allows you to send a text message which is saved as a ‘kwiry’ (pronounced query) on their system. It then sends you a notification using any method you’d like including E-mail, SMS, RSS etc that you have a new saved kwiry. There is also a social aspect so you can see your friend’s kwiry’s and they can see yours. I find this feature completely useless and unwanted so I’ve disabled it by setting all my kwiry’s as private. Social networking doesn’t improve everything. Social networking is not a golden hammer even though most new services think it is.

Kwiry stores your texts in their system. Once they’re stored and you get notified (using whatever method you prefer) the links they provide send you to the Kwiry website itself which then gives you search results using your desired search engine.

I love Kwiry and it’s functionality but I’d much rather use it without logging into their system since the functionality it provides is really quite simple. To do this I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that switches the links to point directly to the search engine of your choice. All you need is the base Search URL (Google’s would be http://google.com/search?q=) and the feed URL to your kwiry’s.

Use this Pipe to replace the links in your kwiry feed to your desired search engine.

Web Visio Clone : Gliffy

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Gliffy LogoI’ve slowly started moving to online document management using Google Documents. Unfortunately they lack a Diagram utility (like visio) of any kind and so I went searching for one. Luckily enough the people at Gliffy agree. The Web is a perfect platform for such a collaborative sort of document like the diagrams you can create with Visio. At this point in time they don’t support the ability to import Visio or other Diagram type documents, but just the ability to use an online tool to build diagrams so that they can be shared and collaborated on is awesome.

Gliffy also allows the diagrams to be embedded anywhere on the web as long as they’re public. You can also get many different sizes including a thumbnail version. Private documents are provided as well but that requires a paid subscription to their service.

The service itself is very responsive and in fact allows building diagrams much quicker than doing so in clunky bloated client side applications such as Visio. As with any web application one of the key benefits is also that your created document is available anywhere and no client-side software is needed. An example I threw together quickly is below.

File UML Diagram

Youtube Subscriptions via RSS

~ randyaa ~ 4 Comments

YouTube Subscription FeedYou’re probably aware of the subscriptions feature in YouTube. It allows you to ‘subscribe’ to users (or channels) who’s videos you enjoy. This means when you sign into YouTube you’ll get a list of videos updated by the users or channels you’re subscribed to.

This is great but unfortunately YouTube doesn’t provide any other subscription update notification systems besides logging into the site itself. For someone like me who doesn’t like to visit sites without a particular goal in mind this is annoying to say the least. I’d much rather know there is a new video I care about before visiting YouTube.

At first I thought YouTube simply didn’t support syndication of any kind. However; with a little bit of searching I found they have a whole list of different types of RSS feeds that are available. You can create an RSS feed for anything from a ‘tag search’ to the ‘Top Rated videos.’ They don’t yet have a way to create an RSS feed of your subscriptions. That’s where I come in.

I’ve used Yahoo Pipes to do things in the past but most of them were very custom and not usable to anyone but myself without quite a bit of effort. This time around I thought I’d make one that’s parameterizable to allow anyone to build an RSS feed of their subscriptions. I have created a pipe that does just that. You simply provide your username and the number of videos you want displayed in the feed. The Pipe does the rest and you can subscribe to it using any feed reader you’d like.

I’ve published it on Yahoo Pipes public page and you can now use it as well. So check it out and let me know what you think!