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.

What’s this? Final Fantasy 7 for NES? Why on EARTH? FF7 was one of my favorite PSX games… if this gets translated to English I might have to give it a run

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.

Received my Harmony 659 tonight, and spent about an hour setting up and tweaking my devices.

So far I’m very impressed with how customizable it is, and how quickly and accurately it detected everything I had. Not everything is perfect yet, but I realize it’s a work in progress. Current issues:

• It doesn’t seem to do everything first try, every time I have to press the “Help” button and have it retry setting everything. It’s a minor annoyance at this point that I suspect will grow.
• It doesn’t blend well with Sofa Control, the app I use to manage the remote actions on my Mac Mini. And by this, I mean I need to use workarounds to make it behave as I want it to.
• There’s no way to have it make the Mac Mini “go to sleep”, which is what I like to do with my Mac Mini when it’s not being used.
• It doesn’t appear to detect which input my TV is on, or at least it gets it wrong more often than not. Like many other TVs, it can’t selected a target input mode; instead it has to cycle through until the desired input is selected. Either 1) it does a best guess whether or not the current input is the target input or 2) it changes from the correct target before it is detected as correct.
• The Xbox 360 doesn’t power on first try, or sometimes even on the tenth try. The same with powering it off. I don’t know if this is an infrared issue with the 360 (since the wireless controllers don’t use infrared, it’s only for the media remote), or there’s actually a flaw to the remote programming.

Besides those hangups, which I hope to soon resolve, I’m pretty impressed with it. I already like how I can control the volume on my AV Receiver, while using the same remote to navigate through the menus on the Mac Mini, and powering or switching inputs on the TV. I’ll post a review of this remote after I’ve used it for a longer period of time.