Archive for category technology
Cool Christmas Gift Idea
Posted by Randy in technology on December 12, 2011
Looking for a cool gift for Christmas? I found a cheap little device that would be awesome for just about anyone, or you could even get colorful cool socks. It’s called the WikiReader. For around 20 bucks, you get a device contains the entire Wikipedia encyclopedia in English. It comes with a four gigabyte SD card. It has a touchscreen display with an onscreen keyboard. Your information will always be up-to-date because there are updates available for the device quarterly. For $20, it’s a hell of a deal. Wikipedia has over 3 million topics and contains the equivalent of 1,000 volumes.
Some people may dispute the accuracy of some of the things in Wikipedia, because it can be updated by anyone. This is very much a testament to open source in general. Even though anyone can edit Wikipedia, it can also be checked and verified by the community. I’ve always found that Wikipedia is as accurate (and sometimes more so) than any World Book or Britannica. Here’s a link to the item:
http://bestsellingauctions.com/index.php/shop/comments/220910497098
This is one of my new sites. It is designed to add better communication to auction listings. I’m really excited about the site, and I’m looking for participant in the community.
Double-Edge Razor Bliss
Posted by Randy in technology on September 1, 2011
My father used to have a comb-over and I always said, “if I go bald, I’m going to shave it all off”. Well genetics is hateful to some of us, and I indeed went bald quickly after the age of 19. Being a man of my word (usually), I started shaving my head after the denial stage. I’ve been shaving it ever since. I’m almost 34 years old, so I have quite a few years of shaving experience. Today changed everything though.
I’ve been using a Fusion Power for about a year. Before that I used a regular Fusion. Before that I used a Mach-3 Power. This goes all the way back to the Gillette Sensor. It was a two blade razor. I’ve been using mult-bladed razors for at least 10 years. The more blades the better, I’ve always thought.
I’ve been stupid. The multi-blade razors have been tough on my skin AFTER the shave is over. They shave close and really aggressively. Your skin is smooth after you shave with them but the next day you’ll have ingrown hairs and bumps. I’ve read that this is a result of the lifting motion of the first few blades on the razor. This lifting motion was once regarded as a break through for close shaves. I remember the commercials. The first blade lifts the hair out of the skin and then the next blade either lifts further or cuts the hair. This actually cuts the hair so that it settles under the skin. Thus the reason it produces a lot of ingrown hairs. The hairs grow back the wrong directly.
Some ideas are great, but are later found to have negative effects. This is one of them.
So, on with my story. I started reading about double-edge razors and wet-shaving in general. I found that there were a lot of people that really take their shaving seriously. I watched video reviews on Youtube of razors. I shopped on Amazon for the perfect razor. I ended up buying one of these:
This is the best purchase I’ve made in a long time. It came in today and I had to immediately shave with it. It’s amazing. I can’t describe the difference, but it’s makes you want to shave. It shaves like a knife through butter. It glides across your skin. It’s just amazing. Plus I bought 100 blades for this thing for a whopping $14. This is the cheapest, most amazing, and close shave I’ve ever had. Read up on double-edge shaving. It’s well worth the time and you’ll save a lot of money.
Streamlining e-commerce
Posted by Randy in Internet, Internet Money, technology on March 2, 2010
E-commerce has been around for a while now. Ever since the early day of the internet, people have been making purchases online. It has become much better over the years, no doubt. At the same time, it has become a very complicated beast.
I recently started a class on e-commerce. We are actually in our first week of class still, but one of the first discussions has centered around a diagram that lays out the steps involved in a typical e-commerce setting. Looking at it has led me to realize that e-commerce is much more complicated than it should be.
I have a prediction for the next decade or so. There are some forms of e-commerce which have already emerged as forerunners of a new type of system. People don’t want to go through a 12 step process to make a purchase online. We make purchases online because they are convenient. I would much rather go shop, when I’m trying to decide what I want to buy. However, if I know what I want to buy, I would much rather purchase it online.
Online purchases are more convenient, offer more selection, and are less expensive due to the more globally competitive marketplace. It’s not as timely in regard to actually receiving the product. One has to wait for the product to arrive through shipping. Today, shipping has been streamlined to the point where it’s almost not a good argument. I would much rather wait for a product to ship to me than fight the crowds at the stores.
Think about a trip to your local Wal-mart. They have fifty checkout lanes but only five are open. They could handle a massive amount of people, yet you almost certainly have to wait in line every time. This is, of course, unless you are like me and only go at 3am. At 3am there is only one lane open, lane 17 next to the cigarettes.
The point is, no matter how many customers there are in the store through the day, there are always lines at ever cash register. These lines keep people in the stores. It makes them spend more. The longer you are in Wal-mart. The longer they have to convince you to buy something else. They do this, not through pushy salespeople, but through subtle subliminal advertising techniques that deal with your senses of sight, smell, and hearing. They’ve found that the best way to get someone to spend more money, is to make them stay in the store longer, and at the end of the visit, they put you in tight quarters with many “must-have” items. They also put things like candy and tabloids there for you to grab while you wait.
This technique is being tested within e-commerce itself. Let’s dig into this more and discuss how people make money online.
Making money online is dependent upon one thing…Traffic. Traffic is THE major factor in making money online. If one has traffic, the rest is pretty easy actually. Some people will tell you that you have to have targeted traffic or a certain type of traffic, but that is non-sense. The only real requirement is TRAFFIC. With traffic, you can find a simple way to make money.
That’s what these sites are thinking when they make the checkout process so difficult, and this theory probably holds a lot of weight. It most likely does create more income for the sites. If they customers spend more time browsing your site, they are more likely to buy more stuff. Here’s one thing to consider though. How annoyed with your site does the average customer become after a given amount of time.
Apple has done one thing completely right over the past decade. Some people think that Apple is great because it made such a great media device when it created the iPod. You may feel that the iPhone is simply the best phone ever made. All of these are mere opinion. All of these are things you would hear fanboys of Apple spout.
I agree with us trade data that the iPod is not an amazing product in the personal media device category. It’s merely a mediocre product. The really amazing product in this situation is the iTunes store. Now, along with the AppStore and the BookStore, Apple has created a digital marketplace that is superb. These stores don’t offer the typical e-commerce atmosphere. They make the buying process a one-click process. THIS is why the iTunes and AppStore is better than most others. They meld their hardware products such as the iPod, iPhone, iMac, Macbook, and Mac Mini to their stores of digital products.
Their version of e-commerce takes a 12 step process and turns it into a three step process. Those steps are browse, buy, and use. They have found that the faster a users gets through the buy step, the faster they can get back to the browse step.
In the future, we will see a lot more marketplaces like this. Others have already appeared, such as the Playstation Network.
This is the new way to sell things on the web.
Resetting WordPress Passwords Manually
Posted by Randy in Open Source, SQL, technology, Web Development on January 10, 2010
I’ve had to do this for my wife and her mom both, so I thought I would share this with anyone who needs to reset a WordPress password. I personally love WordPress. You can build any type of site with it, not just a blog. If you have created a WordPress site but haven’t visited the admin dashboard in a while, you may have forgotten your password. I thought that WordPress would email you a lost password, but maybe they didn’t put in their correct email address. It could have also been the installation script they used through cPanel. Whichever the case, they couldn’t get into their dashboard and they needed their passwords sent to them.
There’s a very easy way to reset that password through SQL. Whether you are using phpmyadmin or some other SQL client to access your databases, you’ll want to use the following SQL statement to reset your password:
1 | UPDATE `wp_users` SET `user_pass`=md5('password1') WHERE `ID`=1; |
You can change password1 to whatever you want. I’m amazed that WordPress passwords aren’t stored with more encryption than a simple MD5 hash. It’s secure enough, don’t get me wrong. I’m just surprised that the WordPress developers didn’t opt for more.
Oh well, I hope that helps someone in a pinch.