TeCheap Winterized

As the temperatures start to cool off, in the Northern Hemisphere anyway, I have a couple of tips for you to make winter as tolerable as possible.

The first is a new offering from Google designed to help you avoid the flu. It’s the Flu Shot Finder overlay for Google Maps. Just enter your location into Google Maps and it will give you a list of locations near your area that are offering the seasonal flu shot, the H1N1 flu vaccine, or both. While you have to call to get fee information, it does give you a convenient list that you can call down to compare prices and double-check availability. (Thanks to Search Engine Land for the heads up.)

Last year, Google also came up with a map to track flu trends by tracking how often flu symptoms were searched for in different geographic areas. This map, at Google.org, shows a country breakdown, and if you click on any particular country, you can also get a state by state, or region by region map. There is also an interesting graph showing the time of each year’s flu season.

Along with keeping an eye on the flu, Lifehacker has some good tips on protecting yourself against wasted money on heat. Along with a couple of more standard tips, the tip most interesting to me involves attaching bubble wrap to your windows in order to add pockets of air. This helps keep the cold out and the warm air you are paying for in. The other nice thing about this method is that , if you are like me, you have a lot of bubble wrap lying around from packages that are sent from on-line retailers.

Since some of those packages may be holiday gifts, it is time to remember that Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are coming. I plan on talking more about Black Friday as it approaches, but the first place to find out info about it is BlackFridayInfo.com. They’ll have early looks at all of the ad scans that they can get a hold of and can let you know about some great deals.

Do you have any TeCheap ways of getting ready for winter? Let me know in the comments.

Charting a Course for News

I’m a serious consumer of news. I read, listen and watch a lot of it. Sometimes though I get caught in the trap of only reading stories that I find interesting. Certain major topics do not interest me enough to follow up and read about them as much as I probably should. I still don’t really know what Rihanna said about Chris Brown, so sometimes I need something that will force certain items to my attention.

One website that I’ve found that can do that is Newsmap. Newsmap is a colored-coded grid of stories that uses Google News to prioritize the most significant stories of the news day. Stories that have had more written about them are relatively bigger in the grid and have their headline in a larger font. Clicking on any of the stories will bring up the story where you can read more about it.

It defaults to having all categories of news, but if you want to limit it to just certain sections like health or technology, you can just click the appropriate check boxes and the grid will reorganize itself. It’s a nice little way to visualize the news.

At the 10000 Words blog, they have a great list of other news visualizers if you are interested in looking at news in a different way. There is the popular Newser tiled headlines with pictures, but this type of layout tends to make me focus on the interesting pictures instead  of finding good stories.

Another interesting visualization is 10×10, which offers a 10×10 grid of story pictures taken from Reuters, the BBC and the New York Times RSS feeds. It is very focused on international stories, but the way that it works is worth noting. It analyzes the words from the RSS feeds of these stories and computes the most important words of a particular hour. Then it will associate a picture with each word. Often times, the result will be that the same picture will come up multiple times, which lets you know that a story is worth looking at more closely. I would prefer if looked at a larger amount of time than an hour, because you will often get stories with no picture or only a very few stories and lots of repeated pictures.

How do you find news content? Have any interesting tips? Let me know in the comments.

Making Craigslist Look Good

Craigslist.org is a very useful site that a lot of you are probably already familiar with it. It’s how I got my apartment and a lot of my friends and colleagues have done the same. My major problem with the site is the design. It’s about as interesting as the newspaper Classified ads that’s it is replacing. The really sad thing is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Check out Craiglook.com. Using only the data that is already on the Craigslist site, you get a much more easily usable way to search for the types of ads that you are looking for. A few navigation tips though, the front page looks like it has check boxes, but they are actually links, so I would either use the text entry at the top or click through the category first. This minor hiccup, however, does not prevent the site from being a big improvement over the Craigslist site itself.

Makeuseof.com also had a few useful Craigslist tools that I would like to mention. The first is one I’ve mentioned before on the blog is called Typobuddy. This little site will check Craigslist (and eBay) for common typos and misspellings to see if it can find additional listing that may not have gotten much attention. This is a sneaky way to get a little more value for your search time.

The last site I want to point out is Weekend Treasure.com. This site uses Craigslist and other listings to help you find garage and yard sales that are happening in your area. Simply type in your zip code and a series of pins will pop-up on a Google map for you to check out. This makes it a very simple, but very slick tool for finding potential bargains.

Do you have other ways of getting the most from Craigslist? Let me know in the comments.

All Work and No Play Makes Techeap a Dull Blog

It would have been nice if I had been able to write about the new Windows  7 release and share my views on it. However, I never got the release candidate and it is no longer available. If you are using it, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Since I can’t write about that, I will write about some interesting gaming websites I’ve come across.

The first is actually for “optical productivity,” that is looking like you are being productive. At Can’t you see I’m busy! You get a series of games that actually look like they are business documents. There is a block-busting game that looks like a word document, a game where you are flying a rocket between two line graphs and a game like Super Collapse, where you click on groups of the same color in bar graphs. They are pretty basic games, but they do look pretty convincing office suite software.

The next site that I found was Jeopardy Labs. This would probably be most useful in an educational environment, but you could probably fine a use for it at a party. Basically, you enter a series of answers and question on to a Jeopardy board, and then you can use the website to run the game. A player choose a category and dollar amount, you click on the question and ask it. Then you apply the points for correct and incorrect answers. The important thing that confused me is that you have to do the scoring in the page for the question. Otherwise, the question won’t be taken off the board. The about page explains using the site well if you have any questions.

The final site that I’ll mention is TheSixtyOne.com. This site combines a music site with a quest system. This is very similar to achievements if you’ve seen or played an Xbox 360. The way it works is that you get bonuses for performing certain activities (usually for listening for certain types of songs) on the site. These bonuses give you extra votes (or hearts) to denote the songs that  you like and have them move up the charts. It’s a very interesting system and can be kind of gratifying when you complete a little quest. If you want to sign up for the site, you should use my name (zargonddg) as a referer. (It’s one of the quests. )

Have any cool games or relaxation site that you want to let others know about?

Add them in the comments.

It’s a Secret to Everybody

Pardon the obscure reference (bonus points if you recognize it without Google) and my unexpected time off last week, but I’ve got a new interesting, bit of free stuff on the web for you today.

This week, I’m going to talk about an unusual offering called Mystery Google, but this requires a bit of a side trip to explain what really brought this to mind.

A fellow blogger heard about a fellow who went to a cafe in Japan. Nothing too unusual so far, but the interesting thing about it is that you don’t get what you order and pay for.

You actually get what the person in front of you ordered and paid for. It seems a little strange so an example might be in order. Let’s say the cafe gets three customers a day.

Person A orders a cookie.
Person B orders a hot dog.
Person C orders 2 nachos.

However, what they receive is different.

Person A actually gets whatever was ordered last the night before.
Person B gets a cookie.
Person C gets a hot dog.

And the first customer tomorrow is going to get 2 nachos.

Pretty interesting, but you do have to be able to eat a variety of things in order to try this sort of cuisine. Food allergies or vegetarianism might lead to some trouble.

Anyway, Mystery Google works on the same premise. You actually get the search results of the person who did a search before you.

I just did a search for “It’s a Secret to Everybody” and got the search results for “Mistery Google,” which basically gave me the misspelling search results for Mystery Google. While that isn’t terribly creative, I have gotten some interesting results during other test searches.

Another search lead me to Kittens, which led me to the lolcatz website. Something that I had actually wanted to see what the fuss was about. This site mostly contains pictures of cats with sometimes humorous captions, but many of them seem to be inter-related and only funny to those in the know. I did like this one though.

In any case, this may be an opportunity for you to pick up some additional knowledge on a subject that you had no idea you were interested in. There are caveats though. I have gotten content inappropriate for younger folks trying to gross out the system. You could imagine people at the restaurant ordering liver and Limburger cheese or something worse.

Get any interesting results? Let me know in the comments.

I am A Tech Blogger, AMA

For those unfamiliar, AMA stands for ask me anything. While looking around for an interesting topic to talk about this week, I came across something that I visit periodically but hadn’t really thought of as a good resource.

You’ll find it on Reddit.com (pronounced like read it) and it is called “IAmA.” The interesting thing about it is that people from all walks of life come on this community and answer questions about their lives. Right now, people are asking questions to a K-Street Washington lawyer, an ex-Mennonite, and a guard for Iraqi detainees.

There are a number of fascinating conversations, and if you want to sign up for an account you can also ask your own questions. Reddit also works with a ‘karma’ points system, so that people can vote up conversations that are interesting and vote down conversation that are juvenile or spam. This system really seems to improve the conversation and get interesting topics to the top of the lists.

Some responders respond more quickly than other and some conversations have been proven to be false, but a good majority of the content is accurate and very interesting.

One word of warning though is that it can definitely be a big time sink. Sometimes you can get involved in threads of conversation and realize the you’ve been reading about other people’s lives for an hour.

If you are willing to take that risk, however, it is definitely an interesting place to check and learn about your fellow humans.

Any questions? AMA in the comments.

If You’ve Got Unlimited Texts…Use Them

Followers of this blog know that I am not a fan of text messages or more specifically the crazy rates cell phone companies charge for them. These 160-character (and by the way, when’s the last time you got a 160-character message from someone) communiqués can cost 20 cents a message.

However, some people have avoided this problem by getting unlimited text messaging. One option to take advantage of this is to send and receive massive amounts of messages, but that doesn’t show much creativity. One way to really take advantage of unlimited texting is a new service called DotGo, which I heard about here from the good folks at technologizer.com.

DotGo allows you to send the domain name of a website in a text message to them. The top-level domain (e.g. .com, .org. .edu) will determine the number that what number you use for the text message. The number is actually spelled out using the letter values on the number pad, (DOTCOM address go to the number 368266.) which makes it easy to remember.

You are then sent a text message with a description of how to interact with the website you’ve entered. When you use this website techeap.com, you’ll get a list of the last ten blog posts (in 3 separate messages) and if you wanted to read any of them you would just reply with the number for that entry. Dotgo would then send you a series of text messages until the whole article is sent.

While this may not be the most efficient way to read a website, many other website are much more optimized to use this technology. If you use enter Google or Yahoo and a search term, DotGo will return some of the top hits. There is a simulator on their website, but it was not working for me when I tried it.

One very useful integration for me was with NJTransit. You simply send them the message NJTransit and the locations you want to go between, (for example “njtransit nypenn woodbridge”) and they will send you back a schedule of trains.

Some queries got returned faster than others and my tests were mostly done during off-hours, but the service was pretty speedy overall. While this certainly will not replace browsing on a web-enabled cell phone, if you don’t have an advanced phone and you need a way to get information, this may be exactly what you need.

The service is free, but some of the sites it has integrated with will have ads embedded at the end of messages about them. They promise and I haven’t gotten any spam or other unrequested messages from them. All of the tests I did, did not have any ads, but I’m sure that will change as the service matures.

Is this something that you might use? Let me know in the comments.

It’s Like Being Friends…with Audio

Sometimes you come across an interesting service that seems useful, but you aren’t exactly sure what to do with it.

Well, that’s the situation that I’m in with AudioPal.com. My previous post (if you linked here from somewhere, you can go to the main page at www.techeap.com to see both posts) shows you what this service is.

You go to AudioPal.com, call a toll-free line, enter a personalized code, and record a message. You give them an e-mail address to send the code to link it to your website. It also offers integration with many blogging services, including this one at WordPress.com. This makes it pretty convenient to add it to your site.

The drawback is that it only offer :60 of recording time. That really isn’t very much to do anything that amazing. I could see doing a contest or giveaway using a system like this. However, if you had a decent microphone at home, you could probably record something with better quality by yourself.

The site is very easy to use, and I’m impressed that they are offering this for free. This is serving as a way to market their other site at Sitepal.com. There you can get speaking avatars to talk to people logging in to a web site at a variety of different price points.

Now I’m left with an interesting service with which I can’t figure out any useful things to do.

Do you have any ideas? Let me know in the comments.

AudioPal Widget

The Redbox of Doom

It’s the cheapest legal way I know of to see one new DVD release and this, if you take their word on the subject, means doom for the movie industry.

In my area, it’s called Redbox, but other similar companies include DVDPlay, Moviecube and DVDXpress. The idea is that you pick a movie from the machine, put in your credit card and out pops a DVD. You are charged a low amount (usually $1) each day that you have it out. If you lose it, you are charged $25 for not returning it and that’s the end of the transaction.

These machines usually pop out around grocery stores and pharmacies, which are very happy to have people coming back to them every day with a chance of picking up a few extra items.

The machines make money because there is very little overhead and increasingly they are able to get DVDs at wholesale cost, so it takes very few rentals to make a profit. Finally, some of the owners of the machines sell the DVDs as used after they’ve been rented out for a while, so they make money on both ends of the arrangement. Consumers pay much less for renting the DVDs than they would from a rental store and much less for buying a used DVD then they would pay for it as new.

Of course, as the New York Times reports, not everyone is happy with this arrangement. 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Brothers are refusing to sell DVDs to Redbox until 28 days after a DVD has been released. The thinking goes that who will pay full price to buy a DVD or rent it from the cable company with the markup that they charge when they can get it from Redbox for a dollar.

Sony, who is one of the companies that has signed a deal with Redbox, got them to agree not to sell their DVDs as used and instead the destroy the DVDs after they left the boxes. This is probably one of the best solutions for both sides, as DVD rentals can still happen at a reasonable rate, but the movie companies won’t cannibalize sales of their DVDs.

It will be interesting to see the development of this market as Blockbuster plans to enter the market with their own line of kiosks.

Have you used these kiosks? Are they in your area? Let me know in the comments.