Threadless is having a $9 sale on all t-shirts for today, 9/9/09. I just bought a ton. Go do it!

Threadless Sale!

I just solved a problem and thought you may find it helpful. I couldn’t access the internet and pressing the little reset button on my D-Link wired router solved the problem.

I have multiple computers connected to a D-Link wired router. One of these computers stopped being able to connect to the internet suddenly yesterday. It just stopped working correctly and couldn’t even get to Google. I ran through more steps than I needed. I first checked that the software firewall on the machine wasn’t causing a problem. I released and renewed the ip address multiple times. And I tried Windows XP’s “repair connection” feature which flushes out some of the cached data and replaces it with new data from your connection, in the hopes that outdated data had somehow become stuck in the machine.

What had me stumped was that I was getting an ip address but I could not connect to the internet. I couldn’t even connect to the router. I was receiving exactly 1 packed from the router (presumably with the ip address) and nothing more (you can see this in the connection details where it shows Sent and Receive packets). Could squirrels have chewed through part of the cat 5 cable? Is that even possible with it still running, albeit incorrectly?

In the end the solution was pressing the little “reset” button on the back of the router. I have no idea what happened to it that would keep one machine working fine and one not, but it works again… for now. I hope that helps someone else out there. Always try resetting the router. But don’t hold down the reset button because it will erase your settings and bring you back to the factory defaults before you set things like passwords. So to recap: briefly press a router’s reset button whenever something weird starts happening with your connection. If that doesn’t solve it you have bigger problems to deal with.

The Threadless back to school sale is back. Prices have recently gone up since they switched to better-quality shirts, so it’s a $12 sale this time around. Hit ‘em up for some nice shirts. I know I will. Sale should end soon. Possibly by September 7th, but don’t delay.

Threadless Sale!

Need an idea for a gift for your father? Father’s Day is coming up fast. Only a week away on Sunday, June 15. Amazon.com has created a page with some gift ideas. Click the banner ad below.

I have been wanting to get some solar-powered lights for a while now. The ones I find online have reviews that range from them being cheap-looking, to poor quality, to poor receivers of solar power, to just plain bad. Does anyone have any experience with solar lights? Anyone who can lend a recommendation or suggestion.

To get the conversation started, I was looking at these Westinghouse stainless steel lights on Amazon (link).

It appears that the Boombox application on Facebook has been removed by its developer. This was an application that let you select songs to display on your Facebook profile. They played in a small Flash area, loading mp3s found on the internet. I’m guessing it was a legal issue. I did notice two days ago that the Flash part wasn’t loading and the application wasn’t working right.

This facebook listing for The Boombox app’s owner Adam Mosseri (link) now returns no results, showing that the person deleted their Facebook account. Very fishy.

I am now looking for a new application to load on my profile that does the same thing. Unfortunately I do not remember which songs I had listed.

Here are a few alternatives:

• iLike
• Audio
• And a lot more in the Facebook Music application directory.

Sources: Blog confirmation I used to make sure I wasn’t just going crazy, Boombox review

How did I miss this? It looks like GoDaddy hosting added support to run Cron jobs sometime last year. And here I thought I had to keep coming up with innovative ways to work around their lack of the feature.

For those who don’t know cron jobs are a way to perform functions based on a timing mechanism. So you can have a script called every hour or ever day at a certain time.

PrivatePhone was/is a service from NetZero that provided you with a local telephone number that sent calls directly to a voicemail system that you could then listen to online or over the phone. They are now discontinuing the service as of February 19th 2008, and so since I used them I had to look around for some alternatives. They are offering to transfer your PrivatePhone number to another company, but the prices weren’t attractive to me.

So far I have come up with two. eVoice and Grand Central. Grand Central was bought by Google not too long ago, and I am currently using it. You need to signup for an account through their site because it is still in beta. I signed up to reserve a number and was notified almost immediately that they were offering me an account, so the wait time doesn’t seem to be too long (or wasn’t for me yesterday).

Grand Central gives you a local phone number that you can have ring any number of phone numbers. You are able to choose what town the number originates from (state, town) and then select one number from a list of a few they have available in that location. I chose a number that coincided with my PO Box. You can then have the number ring you at your leisure. The Grand Central website is very easy to use and makes it easy to figure out how to do what you want to do. Caller ID can either show the caller’s phone number or the Grand Central number. I chose the latter because then I know when a call is coming from the Grand Central service and I can choose to ignore it and let it go to voicemail. I don’t know how the service is but it’s from Google and so far it’s free.

Another company I found is eVoice but I haven’t used them and I wasn’t able to find any reviews on them. But it is from the same company who operates eFax, so how bad can it be?

If you have tried any of these services please comment with your impressions so that others may learn. Also, feel free to suggest alternatives for us all to try and document.

I recently read a PC World article about a Google page that has a form where you can report a malicious website (a site with bad content like viruses and the like). It’s a new feature that Google unveiled (announcement). I found that Google will validate a url passed to it and insert it into the form. I thought this would be much better if you could click a bookmark in your browser and automatically pass the url of the current website to the Google form. So I created a bookmarklet (bookmark with javascript) and here it is.

Drag the bookmarklet link to the bookmark area of your browser. And when you click it a new window will be opened showing the Google form with the URL of the bad site filled in for you.

Bookmarklet: Report Malicious Site

Spread the word so everyone can help get rid of bad sites. Enjoy, from Jason of JasonBlogs.com.

Amazon has been working on an eBook reader for the past 3 years and they just unveiled it. The Kindle can be bought for $400 from Amazon.com and it uses e-ink technology with a host of other great features. It was developed by Amazon, along with the accompanying Kindle Store where you can buy books, magazine subscriptions, newspaper subscriptions, and blog subscriptions that get sent to your Kindle over Sprint’s EVDO network. It doesn’t cost anything extra to access Sprint’s network, which is a big plus that helps offset the price of the reader. What follows are some of the details of the reader and store, along with my thoughts.

• Electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper.
• Simple to use: no computer, no cables, no syncing.
• Lighter and thinner than a typical paperback; weighs only 10.3 ounces.
• Holds over 200 titles. SD card support for more storage capacity.
• Audio: 3.5mm stereo audio jack, rear-mounted mono speaker
• Content Formats Supported: Kindle (AZW), TXT, Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4), MP3, natively; HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, MOBI, PRC through conversion
• Wireless connectivity enables you to shop the Kindle Store directly from your Kindle
• Buy a book and it is auto-delivered wirelessly in less than one minute. More than 88,000 books available, including 100 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers.
• New York Times Best Sellers and all New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise. Other books are less.
• Long battery life. Leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day. Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging. Fully recharges in 2 hours.
• Unlike WiFi, Kindle utilizes the same high-speed data network (EVDO) as advanced cell phones—so you never have to locate a hotspot. No monthly fee for access to network.
• Includes free access to Wikipedia.org and a built-in Oxford English Dictionary.
• Email your Word documents and pictures (.JPG, .GIF, .BMP, .PNG) to Kindle for easy on-the-go viewing. They convert it into the right format and can send it to your Kindle for $0.10 or send it to you for free and you can transfer it to the Kindle with the usb connection

You can transfer MP3s or audio books to the Kindle. And you can listen to the MP3s separately or as background music while you read if that’s something you like to do. You can bookmark pages, or annotate them using the QWERTY keyboard. And there is a built in digital cursor that scrolls along the side of the page allowing you to select page lines. It is controlled by a scrollwheel. There are big buttons on the Kindle that let you go to the next page or back a page. It is all very intuitive according to published reviews.

A great feature is the switch on the back to turn the wireless single off. Great for planes and other places you can’t use a cellphone or wireless device.

Video: Neil Gaiman discusses the Amazon Kindle.

From reviews by people that actually used the Kindle it seems to work well. The e-ink is easy on the eyes, and the reader was designed with usability in mind. It’s ergonomically designed to feel like a book. It’s the same size as a paperback book and it ways a little bit less at 10.3 ounces. Amazon thought of everything. I’m almost tempted to buy one to check it out. I want one. But I might wait for some more hands-on reviews, and until more of the books I want are available from the Kindle store.

Buy it or find more info: Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

Hands on Reviews and Interviews around the Internet
Newsweek: great interview with Jeff Bezos and background on Kindle and the book market.
ZDNet Hands on with the Kindle: This ugly duckling has potential
Engadget hands on, and some extra details
Gizmodo

Buy it or find more info: Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device