First off, see if there are any better prices out there. Traditionally, Best Buy is not the best source for cheap systems.

Next, I live in Vancouver, Washington. We have a 7.7% sales tax. Right across the border is Portland, Oregon — 0% sales tax. That’s instantly going to save me $100.10. In order for this to work, you have to go into the store, not online; unless of course you’re willing to just have it shipped to someone who lives in Portland.

Next, search for coupons for Best Buy. These are somewhat rare, but there are some 10%-off-anything coupons that surface from time to time. Make sure that what you are buying falls into the “acceptable categories” as explicitly noted on the coupon. Can’t find any currently.

Next, find gift cards. Ask your friends if they have any they want to sell. Look at online for sale forums. Check eBay. As long as the person selling the gift card is reputable, this is a great way to save money. For example, I just purchased a $250 Best Buy gift card for $238 buy it now -$23.80 for Bing cashback, -$4.76 for eBay’s cashback incentive plan, -$2.38 because I paid with PayPal through my credit card. That makes the final price for this $250 gift card $207.06; a 17.18% discount.

Next, as I mentioned previously, pay with credit card (assuming you pay it off, and have a cash back incentive plan). This is an easy 1-2%.

Finally, don’t accept any upselling that Best Buy will try on you. You don’t need the extended warranty, you don’t need the new peripherals. Don’t be a sucker for their highest margin area of the business.

With these principles applied, I’m going to take a $1400.10 laptop (including tax) and get it for $1084.80 (5*207.06 + 50 – 0.50).

Then I realized that I couldn’t even leave a comment myself. I received an email from a buddy saying he had a similar issue.

So I checked the logs:

WordPress database error Table './{db_name}/wp_comments'
is marked as crashed and should be repaired for query SELECT * FROM
wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY
comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 15 made by require, require_once,
include, get_sidebar, locate_template, load_template, require_once,
dynamic_sidebar, call_user_func_array, WP_Widget->display_callback,
WP_Widget_Recent_Comments->widget

Went to the mysql database physical location and did the following to fix it:

# myisamchk wp_comments.MYI
Checking MyISAM file: wp_comments.MYI
Data records:    3914   Deleted blocks:     347
myisamchk: warning: Table is marked as crashed
- check file-size
- check record delete-chain
- check key delete-chain
- check index reference
- check data record references index: 1
myisamchk: error: Found 3913 keys of 3914
- check record links
myisamchk: error: Keypointers and record positions doesn't match
MyISAM-table 'wp_comments.MYI' is corrupted
Fix it using switch "-r" or "-o"

# myisamchk wp_comments.MYI -r
- recovering (with sort) MyISAM-table 'wp_comments.MYI'
Data records: 3914
- Fixing index 1
- Fixing index 2
- Fixing index 3
- Fixing index 4
- Fixing index 5
- Fixing index 6

For $25 you got a barbeque lunch, a full day of speakers, a t-shirt and an open bar that night.

Hard to refute, I am interested in all of those things

Today I found a similar better service: {10 digit cell number}@messaging.sprintpcs.com, which will send a text to the phone with the first 160 characters of the email, because that’s the limitation of the text-messaging protocol. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great substitution for a service that is going away.

$149.99 original price with Buy it Now.
-$15.00, -10% coupon in my ebay messages
+$6.99 shipping
= $141.98 paid.

(in 60 days)
-$45, -30% Microsoft cashback.

Overall amount: $96.98.

This Windows Mobile 6.1 device should be a good upgrade from my WM2003 Palm Treo 700wx, but I think the feature I’m most looking forward to is the GPS — and there’s gotta be some auto-geotagging settings.

I spent about 4 hours over the weekend playing around with the source to no avail. If I could find a working patch, I would have applied it and submitted it upstream… that would have been ideal of course.

So I instead used the haxy method, wrap the nonssl nntp requests in stunnel, therefore effectively accomplishing the same goal. Here is the setup I used in Ubuntu:

# superuser assumed
apt-get install stunnel4
vim /etc/stunnel/snntp.conf
# put in the following
foreground=yes
client=yes
[nntp]
accept  = 127.0.0.1:119
connect = SECURE_NEWS_SERVER:563
# /put
stunnel4 /etc/stunnel/snttp.conf 1>>/var/log/stunnel.log 2>&1 &

Then in Torrentflux-b4rt, enable NZBPerl (ensuring prereqs match first), set the server hostname to 127.0.0.1, add your username/password to the list, and give it a try. Of course inspect /var/log/stunnel.log if there are any issues. Worked like a charm for me.

I saw this today when my browser (Firefox 3.0.1 — latest on Windows XP — patched) wouldn’t let me copy and paste text. It would be the same potentially malware [http://windowsxp-privacy.com/?id=...] result every time I CTRL-V’d. After some digging around, I realized that it was localized to my browser (I thought for sure it was a system issue at first), so to fix the issue, I closed the browser and re-opened. The issue was resolved.

Considering the manual effort required to update Flash, combined with the fact that I usually only install Flash when a computer is built and never update it, this leads me to believe this issue is widespread and not going to be fixed anytime soon. It’s a minor annoyance, but still, a pretty neat little exploit.