I haven’t mentioned it in over a year, but I’m really using my Forum For Sale/For Trade Thread notifier a lot. I subscribe to the RSS feed that it generates, which aggregates new threads from multiple tech trading forums. I check it with Google Reader a few times a day, and frequently find great deals on used electronics.

Currently it supports [H]ard|Forum’s For Sale / Trade, ArsTechnica’s Agora Classifieds (new!), and AnandTech’s FS/FT Forum (recently fixed). These are the only three forums I’ve used, but perhaps later to include some of the other popular online sale forums…

It’s not perfect, nor complete, but it’s at least fully functional and usable. If you use it, please provide some feedback and let me know what you think.

My old iPod, which is now the property of Kessa, was having some issues after the battery was exhausted. It is a PC formatted iPod, and in its battery-drained state I plugged it into my PC via the USB 2.0 cable to charge and put songs onto the music player.

Once plugged in, it gave the screen as though the battery was very low. Typically it gives this message until the battery is charged a little, then it will go into sync mode. However, in this instance, it would pass the initial charge, then attempt to sync and double beep (I assume signifying battery died), then return back to the battery low screen. I left it plugged in for about 10 minutes, and it cycled through these steps 4 times before I gave up.

As suggested at macrumors.com, supposedly a firewire cable can take the iPod out of this loop-o-doom. Unfortunately, my notebook doesn’t have a full sized firewire port; only a mini firewire port. Luckily, I have a Mac Mini with my HTPC. I plugged the iPod into the Mac with the firewire cable, it charged and synced instantly. If I had a wall or car charger, I bet that would solve the issue also.

My buddy Garrett was shopping around for laptops… turns out the best deal we could find on a gaming laptop was a Dell Vostro 1500. Cool!

Edit: And of course less than 12 hours after we purchased it, there was a $500 coupon. We canceled the original order and replaced it with better specs, $300 cheaper. Amazing.