Routine Order

Hosterio offers reseller hosting in India at very competitive rates. For example, the smallest package is only just $11.08 per year. You get complete cPanel access and a lot more. The smallest hosting account is good for a blog, since space is limited to 20MB. My blog, for example, uses not more than 4 MB of disk space, so far. Hosterio also offers website design services, which covers the entire spectrum of design services. I don’t know what the rates are, but if the hosting rates are anything to go by, they must be affordable for small businesses and individuals too.

If you have more than one domain - it is not unusual for one person to have more than one blog, each dealing with a separate topic, then you might want to check out Hosterio’s multi domain hosting offers. For $100 a year, you can have up to 7 domains hosted on the same account. for $37.77 more per year, you can get the privilege of hosting unlimited domains/sites on the same account. These are powered by cPanel too, which makes managing the sites a breeze. If most of your visitors are from India, or you expect that to be the case, then a server in India would be much better than a server in Europe or the United States. This will provide you lower latencies and delays. Until recently, however, I had been unable to find a host who offers reasonable rates for hosting in India.

Domdat is a website that provides powerful tools to search for expiring and expired domains. I just signed up for the service that costs $25 per month to take it on a test ride. It came highly recommended by a friend who finally found a domain name he liked for his flower delivery service. What’s really cool is that the domain he bought had been promoted by the previous owner, and so he will benefit from all those search results that will lead folks to his site, for free.

Expiring domains are much better in many ways. Since the domain hasn’t expired yet, but certainly will, you can bid and buy the domain as it expires and serve your website with that domain name. This will give you the page rank, the search result traffic, and even some traffic from users of the old website.

The expired and expiring domain names search tool at domdat is very powerful - As seen in the pic above, you can search by minimum Pagerank, number of links in the search engines, whether or not the website is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories and so forth. This can save you money since unlike DMOZ, you need to pay Yahoo upto $200 to be included in their directory - so if someone has already done the grunt work with a domain, you save a bunch of money. You can set up alerts (upto 5) that will send you an email as soon as any of the domain name searches that you define return positive results.

Domain name prospecting is hot right now. A lot of folks buy expired domains and just sit around waiting for their value to appreciate. Already, it is impossible to find websites that have three characters in the domain name, and domain names that are common words. Domdat is one of the tools these guys use, and if you want a leg-up in your search for a good domain name, it is a vital tool for you.

Extreme Cars is a fascinating website with interesting information scattered all over. The site has details of all cars from Ariels to Paganis. I did not know previously that the Italians have been at designing cars since way back in the 1400s when an Italian designed a wind-propelled car. I also learnt the distinction between sports car, muscle cars and super cars. A muscle car is a mid-sized car with large, powerful V8 engines and special trim designed to maximize torque. The golden ago of these cars in the US was the period from 1962-1973. They are not sports cars, since sports cars are usually smaller, two-seater automobiles with a higher than usual weight-to-power ratio.
No list of extreme cars will be complete without the behemoth Hummer, which traces its lineage to the HumVees used by the the US Military worldwide.


I didn’t know they were made in South Africa as well! The new Hummer H3 is cheaper than the rest, and a little bit smaller. The H3 has an amazing 37.5 degree approach angle and cover almost all terrains with the greatest of ease. It is ironic that in the US, most H3s are bought by families with school children - for its space and safety features, or, as I suspect, for the image of being safer in a Hummer. They are a lot cheaper at around $29,995 for a new base H3, and this has helped a lot with customer adoption, too.

Hummers aside, I spent a cool half hour at x3mcars.com going through the list of mythical, almost unreal, vehicles.

Thoughts is a place you can create a free blog. There are lots and lots of free blog providers and this is one of them. I got there by typing in the url, I was just curious to find out what’s at the URL thoughts.com - it sounds like the perfect URL for a blog, or, rather, a journal. Now the difference between a blog and a journal, in my opinion, is that a “weblog” or “blog” is a collection of articles and links to sites, and a few opinions from the writer. A journal, on the other hand, is a more personal thing, written for the benefit of the writer more than anyone else.

Most of the free blogs on thoughts come under the latter category, with most of the posts being introspective and very personal. I wonder if the folks blogging there got there the same way I did, and decided to start writing there that way. There’s also a thoughts forum that seems quite young. Mostly bloggers asking about thoughts, and discussing general stuff. The thoughts.com domain name must be worth a lot, and I hope the thoughts free blog service ramps up to realize the full potential of the domain name.

You read that right, you can tune and balance a car - not just the wheels. Yesterday, at the Midas garage, I overheard a mechanic telling a guy with a mirage that maybe he needs to get his engine balance. I thought, “yeah, right, get more money out of unsuspecting folks.” I might have been wrong. There is a whole website dedicated to car tuning, and there’s some info there about engine balancing. Turns out that a properly balanced engine reduces vibrations, and thereby improve “feel” and performance. The balancing act consists of getting the weight of pistons and connecting rods to match.


In addition to the vibration, I also have an issue with my idle speed. If I set it as low as I’d like, the engine sometimes dies on me. Maybe I need to get in touch with some carburetor tuners. It would be nice to know someone who does this for a hobby - the price of repairs is getting high as it is, and I really can’t fork out the dough for “tuning” and “enhancement”. Lately, though I have found mechanics who provide their services out of vans on Craigslist. One such just fixed my CV joint the other day, at half the price I would have had to pay a “shop”.

I was trying to choose between the Digital SLR (or even SLR-like) camera offering from Canon and Nikon. A google search led to me what looks like an excellent resource for digital camera reviews. The Test Freaks review pages are unique after a fashion. They aggregate reviews on specific camera models from across the web. Few sites succeed in adding value without adding too much original content. The page on the Digital Rebel XT, for example, leads you to many reviews. Not that I need to read too many more reviews to be drooling for one of them big boys!

Since I am not rich enough to afford a full featured, robust dSLR for pursuing what is essentially a hobby, I have been eyeing the Nikon D70, which seems just right for my purposes. You shouldn’t really compare the D70 to the Rebel XT or the Rebel XTi from Canon. They are worlds apart, but the D70 does seem to fit the bill as the perfect hobbyist dSLR. Try out “Serious” photography without breaking the bank. From the Nikon D70 reviews page on Test Freaks, I get the picture that the camera lacks a good white-balance adjustment feature and also a vertical grip. As for the grip, I can only say if its really gonna bug me after I have tried it for a day or two. Unfortunately, one can’t touch and feel things over the ‘web, so I guess I will have to find a brick-and-mortar store to try out the camera. It will be sizable investment for me, and I don’t want no second-guessing.

Let me try this once:) You can get your own free Zune player at myzunefree.com. All you have to do is sign up for one or more of the offers on display after you login, and complete enough offers to get one credit. You could get the one credit for completing just one offer, or, if you choose to try the several free, no-cost offers, you may need to follow through on more than one of the offers to earn your credit.

I’ve long been curious about these schemes, but this Microsoft Zune offer has a great FAQ that addresses the questions I have had in the past. In fact, the first question in the FAQ links to a video from the BBC that explains how these schemes work. Then there’s more:

How can you afford to give away a Microsoft Zune for free?
Our sponsors pay us a commission for users to try out their products and services. That is then used to purchase your Zune MP3 player or other related product.

The basic reason I signed up is because I have been wanting to try Blockbuster’s online video renting scheme for some time now. So I will just cancel my Netflix subscription and give Blockbuster a chance to impress me. What’s really cool about Blockbuster is that you can exchange the movies you get in the mail at any BlockBuster store, and instantly get a new movie! So unlike Netflix, you don’t always have to wait for the next movie to arrive in the mail! So as far as I am concerned, this is a win-win situation. I get the $9.99 for the first month Blockbuster rentals, and if enough of you choose to sign up for the free Zune offer, I might get a free Zune as well. If the blockbuster deal doesn’t cut it for you, try some of the other free, or even $1 offers. You can’t lose, especially with the money-back offers. So sign up for your free Zune now!

I haven’t got much work done over the past two days. You can blame Sims 2. For those of you still fortunate to retain complete control over your time, the Sims 2 is a very addictive game by Maxis, or Electronic Arts. The original Sims was perhaps the first “real life in virtual life” game - sort of like the precursor to Second Life. I would even say that graphically and gameplay-wise it is MUCH better than Second Life.

In Sims 2, you do the regular stuff, like keeping your character happy, finding him/her a job, teaching and training your characters etc. What makes Sims 2 really special is all of the mods and effects that you can have. You can download these from other websites, and as I discovered, you can even can get a lot of the sims 2 downloads for free. Most of these downloads are for outfitting your characters - there’s bikinis, stylish outfits for teen sims - just about any kind of garb you can think of. But it does not stop there, you can download things like floor tiles, walls and carpets to spiff up your interiors too. All of this is free stuff and if you are the “serious” gamer, you can find sites where you can download stuff for a price.

Let’s hope I never graduate from Pimp My Sims and not lose sight of “real life”. I have declared a 2-day moratorium on the Sims. Let’s see if I can keep my resolution

There are lots of websites where you pay less than retail prices to get your electronic gizmos, sports equipment, digital cameras - well just about anything. There is even a site called Dont Pay Retail though it is for the Australian market. So how do all these merchants that show up in a price comparison at sites like pricegrabber.com actually manage to cut costs so low?

For one, there is a heavy markup on the price by the time it hits the shop floor. If the price the retailer paid for a product is, say $100 per piece, the “retail price” at which it is sold will be a minimum of $160. Yes, that is a 60% markup. And that is the minimum - much higher markups exist in real life. So the resellers who sell stuff after buying them in bulk can still make a profit by selling the same product for $120. However, they might be paying $110 per piece since they don’t buy in the huge volumes retailers do. Add to this the savings resellers pile up in terms of renting commercial space, decorating the store, hiring the foot staff, the cashiers, the parking space etc, as compared to the retailers and it all makes sense. Oh, and I did not come up with this stuff all by myself. I found an article that explains the cost difference between retailers and resellers at the blog for the don’t pay retail website:

You decide where your money is going.
Do you like the flash associated with a retail store?
The friendly floorstaff, the neatly presented product displays?
Is the warm cushy feeling worth the extra money?
We didnt think so.

The common retail myths listed at dont pay retail makes for good reading too.

What would suffer, you ask? Customer service, if the reseller decides to save even more money! So get started with one small purchase with a reseller and call them up and see how they follow up on a request. What is the wait-time on the phone? How courteous are the phone staff? Are they willing to let you customize your order after it has been placed? These are just a few of the things you should watch out for when ordering the first time. I personally have stopped buying stuff offline, especially electronic goods. Earlier today, I wanted a 2.5″ inch hard drive to USB connector to retrieve data from a dying laptop hard drive. I stopped by at Radioshack, willing to pay up to 150% of the price I can get online, but you know what, that cheap piece of equipment - a couple of cables and connectors - was selling for $25 at radioshack, when I can easily find offers that sell the same thing for $6 or less online - this deal on slickdeals for example. So that is a 400% markup. You must be nuts to shop retail anymore, really - unless you are really in a hurry.

Web sites that don’t provide an RSS feed with updates annoy the hell out of me. I mean, do they think we are still living in the 90’s or what? I have been searching for a solution that tracks changes to web pages and automatically notifies me of the change through email. I finally found a great solution: changedetect - webpage monitoring services. They offer a one-click webpage monitoring system:

No logins are required to setup web page monitoring with ChangeDetect…
In fact, you do not even have to visit the ChangeDetect website at all…
Just surf the web as you normally do and, with one-click, monitor your favorite web pages and save as you go.

It is totally free, and has some really cool change monitoring features - my favorites are auto-login and support for https websites too. So you can monitor protected pages which require a login. The benefits of changedetect include improved privacy and a highly adaptable feature set. This is a LOT more than what I was looking for, and amazingly enough, it is free! They also have an extensive list of frequently asked questions for all of your questions.

I really love it when someone takes a tool beyond being cheap hack to a well-document, feature-rich utility like changedetect.com. I wonder why I never heard of it before or read about it. Hope this article comes in handy for others who are looking for a similar tool.

There are many websites that allow you to download ringtones, and most of them offer a free ringtone as soon as you sign up. So how do these companies make a profit?

Selling ringtones and call-back tones (which is what your callers hear when you haven’t picked up the phone yet) is a $2 Billion market in the US alone! Most of these websites are affiliates for some other business that makes their bread and butter selling cellphone services, like ringtones. These services often have tie-ups with specific cellphone carriers, such as T-mobile, or Verizon. Now the way they make money is, somewhere in the subtext of the agreement you hurriedly click through on the way to downloading the free ringtone, you agree that the company will charge you for a monthly subscription through your carrier. That’s right, even when they don’t have your credit card, they still can charge you through your phone bill. The carrier profits, the company selling the service profits and the website which sent you their way profits.

You can also profit - the trick is, instead of fishing for free ringtones, if you really are interested in getting a great ringtone, sign up with a good ringtone download site, and be aware of the subscription. After you get the ringtones that you need - maybe within a day or a week or even a month, just call your service provider, or the company you got the subscription from to cancel the subscription - of course, to do this, you need to write down or otherwise remember the details of the subscription and also find out before signing up what the exact procedure for letting go is. Most service providers allow you to cancel by sending a text message with “quit”, “stop”, “cancel” or “unsubscribe” in the message. For example, if you sign up through my ringtones hub, you will be getting the service from Blinko, and their terms clearly mention how to manage your subscription:

For help, text “HELP” to 42222 at anytime. To cancel your service, text “STOP” to 42222 at anytime. For questions, please contact Blinko’s customer service at www.Blinko.com/care or call 1-800-971-2271.

Find these things out before you sign up. Knowledge is Power - know what you are doing, and don’t be a jackass by expecting the world for free.

The world’s first fully touchscreen Phone is not the iPhone (which I wrote about earlier). It is LG’s Prada phone.

Image Credit: Mobile Phones

Ooh, doesn’t it look sexy? The phone is limited to tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 with EDGE data, and so will not be too popular in the US from the get-go. It’s smaller than the iPhone and it has a 2 megapixel camera (with Schneider-Kreuznach lens and LED flash). It is also Bluetooth 2.0 enabled (what phone isn’t eh?). It’s already listed as a top-seller at the UK mobile phones site. It totally sucks to be in the US of A, for those of you who are there. First there was the Nokia N95 which became popular in Europe way before it was launched in the US, and now this. The US has some serious technology lag, except when it comes to junk like the PS3 which hit the stores in the US first.

The sad part is that most of it is free samples. I can’t see what the catch is, since it looks like you have to apply for most of the free offers.

The website does have a lot of discount vouchers which seem to be absolutely free. I will be watching the site to see how good it is. I regularly browse fatwallet’s forums looking for deals, and those forums are busy, and I mean really busy. I wonder why no one has come up with a simple service on a website. Here’s what I would like it to do: Given a person’s postal code, and a grocery list, it should come up with a list of cheap grocery coupons tailormade for that person with the best deals across the various shops near the person’s house. One would think that with modern technology, that should be easy enough to do. A google search returned no such sites. Lots of money to be made with referral links etc, I suppose. Someone take my idea and run with it, please. Oh, and don’t forget to give me a royalty for borrowing my idea

The BoGolight is so named for being “Buy one Give one”. These are unique solar powered LED flashlights that are still bright enough to read by at night.

The flashlight has a solar panel which charges regular rechargeable cells in 8 hours. Once fully charged, it can provide light for upto 4 hours. It has 6 powerful LEDs that light things up enough to read by at night. Like the website says, you can dangle a bogolight from your back pack when camping and it will be charged and ready to go by the time you are ready to pitch camp.

The unique concept behind the light is that when you buy one for use in the US, you can also choose an NGO that works in the developing nation. The NGO gets a free copy of the flashlight and $1. The company also takes care of shipping the light to the organization of your choice. Sounds too good to be true? Well, it almost is - it has received press coverage, even from the NY Times. Learn more about the bogo light and buy one now.

I had written earlier about Plasma TVs, and thought maybe the decision was easy to make in favor of Plasma TVs, but now I am in doubt again. I read a whole bunch of LCD TV reviews today and they do seem to have their own advantages vis-a-vis Plasma TVs.

Here’s a few advantages LCD TVs have over their Plasma counterparts - they are lighter, brighter, have 1080p resolution, have less glare, and are versatile for a whole format of digital signals. However, they suffer from a low viewing angle and lesser black levels.

However, TVs like the Sharp Aquos above reduce these differences even more. This Sharp AQUOS LC-52D62U LCD TV, for example, has a native 2000:1 contrast ratio and a dynamic contrast ratio of 10,000:1. Its Multi-Pixel technology and advanced black TFT panel further reduce the advantage of Plasma TVs. So what’s it gonna be, a Panasonic Plasma or a Sharp LCD? The price of the LCD TVs alone makes me tend to lean their way. Let me see if I can find a good deal on either brand.

Here’s an amazing example of how the same thing, or almost the same thing can come in various shades of free. I have been looking high and low for software that helps me help family members without their having to jump through firewalls, setup VNC and play with port forwarding setting on the router.

Fogcreek’s copilot is the first candidate for such a remote desktop solution. See the demo. It helps you help someone over TightVNC. The copilot website acts as a go-between helping you connect your desktop to that of the person you are helping. The downside is price - copilot is not free, though it is built upon TightVNC which is free - both in terms of price, and the freedom to build on. Fogcreek’s copilot costs $5 per day (if you buy their daypass). I can pay for it, no problem, I thought, but then I found crossloop.

Crossloop is the free equivalent of Copilot, as it is free for use. You ask the person you are helping to download the software and install it, by clicking “Next” a few times. Then you ask them to be the “Host”. The UI can’t be simpler - it has two tabs - “Join” and “host”. So after they setup their machine as a host, you get a number/code to enter in the “Join” tab and you are connected. It uses TightVNC too, as listed on the page about Crossloop’s technology, so it is essentially the same as FogCreek’s Copilot.

CrossLoop promises much, and I can see myself promoting this among my own little circle of friends and coworkers. It is ideal when you want to connect to a friend’s PC. I wish it worked on Linux/Mac systems though. Copilot works on Macs too. Of course, if anything I said above is incorrect, or if there are any better tools, please let me know.

Nasa unvieled the James Webb Space Telescope earlier this week. The telescope is named after a Nasa administrator who was in charge during the moon-exploration Apollo era. It has a huge reflector thrice the size of Hubble’s and will gaze farther into the past of the Universe than anything else ever has. See, the farther a telescope can see, the farther back in time we can go. Light from the earliest events in the Universe haven’t yet reached the earth - they might have reached the extent of the telescope’s reach though - so this telescope will let us peer right back to the very verge of the universe’s creation.

Image credit: BBC

A full-scale model is on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in the US capital, Washington DC. The telescope is expected to have a life span of about 10 years, and cost many billions (almost $4.5 billion) to create. It is an infrared telescope and will have a huge sunshield to keep it cool - the cooler the IR telescope the better its resolution. In its final position, the telescope will be over 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth.

I can’t wait for the pictures, if Hubble was good, this can only be better!

I am still trying to decide between an LCD TV and a Plasma TV, and so have been doing some research online. Did you know that Plasma TVs have been around since ‘92? Fujitsu invented them in 1992, and Plasma TVs have been available commerically since 1997. Wow, that is a long way going back!

Don’t the Panasonic plasma TVs look great? To its credit, Panasonic has built the largest commercial plasma TV at a massive 103 inches. The Plasma TV Reviews site also goes on to explain why these are better than LCD TVs. Briefly, they offer wider viewing angles and better black levels that drive a much higher contrast. So it makes sense to buy a plasma tv for viewing DVDs and HD tv. There aren’t too many HD channels coming down the pipe right now, so it has to be about the DVDs.

The InternetFrog.com Speed Test Tool is by far the best I have used. No clicking, no nothing, just visit the site and get your connection speed displayed graphically. Here’s my speed:


Isn’t that cool?

There are some really cheap broadband offers in the UK - when compared to what I pay to Time Warner/Road Runner here in the US, the offers across the pond seem so much better. However, one thing I don’t get is if whether these deals are for DSL or for cable internet. I am somehow a little suspicious of DSL, and also, if I do get DSL then I will have to get a phone line on top of the DSL connection.

Another strange thing about the UK boradband market is that AOL seems to be a major player. If you were to compare broadband offers in the UK, you’ll see AOL offers competitive rates, and yet they are not the cheapest - this must mean that they have no trouble finding subscribers and that they can afford to quote higher prices. On the other hand, in the US, you will be hard pressed to find AOL DSL customers. Indeed, if you search on google for “AOL broadband“, the UK site shows up first, you will have to scan further down the page to even find the AOL US broadband link. Looks like AOL has lost and conceded the battle for broadband in the USA.