From dtv2009.gov: “At midnight on February 17, 2009, all full-power television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting in analog and switch to 100% digital broadcasting. Digital broadcasting promises to provide a clearer picture and more programming options and will free up airwaves for use by emergency responders. If you do not have cable TV or satellite TV, and use only an antenna, and do not have a TV in your home with a built-in digital tuner, you are eligible for a $40 coupon toward a converter box from the feds. Hurry! Supplies are limited! [https://www.dtv2009.gov/]
Archive for the 'E-commerce' Category
Stopping the telemarketing calls: Register your home phone AND your cell phone at the official donotcall.gov website. You simply enter in your numbers and your email address. They send you a link by email you must confirm to finish your registration. Since I registered my numbers, I haven’t had a telemarketing call in over a year.
Stopping (most of) the junk mail:
(From obviously.com) The amount of paper junk mail sent each year in the USA is staggering - some 4 million tons, nearly half of which is never opened. Even if you recycle there are still enormous environmental costs in terms of ink, energy to produce deliver and recycle the paper, recycling inefficiencies and loss of virgin forest to create the high quality glossy paper much junk mail uses. There is a lot you can do to reduce the cost to the environment and your own time: Continue reading ‘Leave me alone’
What is Woot and who’s behind it? Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it’s taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 – by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we’re still the lovable scamps we’ve always been. But don’t take our word for it: see what the online community has to say at this Wikipedia article.
Basically Woot! is a website that sells one item every day. Once that item is sold out, that is it for the day. You can get a steal of a deal on some things. If you have the means, I highly recommend checking it out.
There is an awesome feature in Windows called a “Recycle Bin.” It works like this, you delete a file and it goes to the recycle bin. When you empty the recycle bin, the file disappears, but the file is still on your computer. The file will remain on your hard drive until the computer needs that space for something else. So, if you have accidentally deleted files and emptied them from your recycle bin and cannot find a copy anywhere or you reformatted your computer and need some of those old files back, you could go to Best Buy and pay the Geek Squad at least $259 to try to find those files, or you could find them yourself using software off the internet. There are many programs to choose from in all price ranges. Undelete by Diskeeper is only $29.95.
Once you purchase, download, and install your recovery program, run a scan and you should see a list of available recoverable files. From what I remember when I had to do this a couple of years ago, the process is pretty straightforward. If you find and recover that deleted file yourself, you just saved yourself about $230.
If you have a few minutes during the day in front of your computer, you have the ability to earn extra money by participating in online surveys. The surveys are quick and painless and I don’t get spammed like I thought I would. In fact, I have never received spam from any of the survey companies I signed up with. There are no commitments and signup is easy. I recommend the following sites that pay cash for completed surveys:
There are referral benefits offered with the above survey companies, so once you sign up from the above links, use your referral links to invite others.
I pay all my bills online through US Bank’s free Bill pay feature. You can pay everything from Ameren bills, water bills, credit cards, and everyone else that comes calling every month. US Bank prints the check and physically sends it to the payee for free. You can set it up to pay all your bills automatically every week, 2 weeks, month, etc. If you have the means, I highly recommend signing up with your bank.
To burn a CD or DVD (using your computer to write files to a CD or DVD disk using a ‘laser’), you need:
- electricity or a really big battery
- a computer
- a CD or DVD-burner (don’t waste your money on a CD burner, go for the DVD burner)
- blank CDs or DVDs (CD burners only burn to CDs, DVD burners burn to DVDs and CDs)
- software for burning
- files to burn
Hopefully, you already have #1 and #2, but for the burner, click here. Blank DVD disks can be purchased locally or at K-Mart, Target, etc. or online. Nearly all the DVD burners sold now are multi-format, meaning they burn to all types of disks (+R, -R, +RW, -RW, DL, and CDs).
Installation directions can be found here.
Software should come with your burner, but if not, you can right-click on any file and click send-to, and then click on your CD or DVD drive. Windows will then prompt you to burn those files to disk. For CD and DVD software, go here.
You can surely handle accumulating the files needed to burn to a disk (family pictures, backup copies of your DVDs, TV shows you downloaded, etc.).