Zune accessories now available for pre-order on Amazon

Amazon has accessories for the Zune now available for pre-order. Head on over to get a pretty picture of the various accessories available including premium earphones, travel pack, FM transmitter, dock, sync cable, wireless remote, A/V cable, and car charger.



[Via Engadget]

Tags: zune, zuneaccessories, zune accessories, news

Free 128MB Ridata USB Flash Drive

Office Depot is offering the Ridata 128 MB USB flash drive for $12.99 with a $13 rebate. Choose free in-store pickup to avoid shipping costs.

[Via Techbargains]

Tags: free, gadget, shopping

"Zune won't be undercut on price by iPod"

At Zunester blog, a Microsoft developer posted about a week ago that

"Don't believe everything you read."

It went on to say that

"Zune won't be undercut on price by iPod".

Now that details on the Zune are out and it costs $249.99, a whole $0.99 more than the iPod, I have to agree with Zunester's assessment - "Don't believe everything you read." and that includes Zunester.

Tags: zune, news

Flurry is not for me

Flurry [via Tipmonkies] is a new service that lets you access your e-mail and feeds on your Java-enabled phone. You can sign-up for free and download the application to your phone through a link in an SMS sent by Flurry. You will need a data plan on your phone in order to access it. Although I see the value for such a service and have played with it for its novelty, I personally cannot see a use for it. I am a Gmail/Bloglines user and both services provide a great mobile interface to access e-mail and feeds. I can see users of multiple email accounts, email accounts with POP mail servers or feed readers that do not have a mobile interface to their feeds finding this a godsend.



Tags: flurry, email, feeds, mobile

10 uses of RSS feeds that you never thought of

Of course, you can use RSS feeds to keep up with your favorite blogs or subscribe to news feeds, but did you know that you can also be notified of changes in ticket prices for flights through RSS. In no particular order, here goes my list of 10 other things you can do with feeds that you probably never thought of:

1. Get a local guide from About.com.
2. Get free downloads of both music and videos from iTunes.
3. Keep on top of the latest movies with movie reviews.
4. For a movie double punch, keep on top of upcoming movies with movie trailers.
5. If you still cannot get enough movies, you can get notified of the latest DVD releases.
   
6. Get your daily dose of comics.
7. If you missed out on the latest viral video to hit YouTube, you can still catch it by getting their latest, featured, or most viewed videos.
8. Be a smart shopper by getting the latest deals on everything under the sun.
9. Get the latest flight fares to your favorite destination.
10. Get ideas for cooking your next meal with recipes.

Tags: feeds, howto, local, itunes, movies, reviews, trailers, dvd, comics, video, shopping, travel, cooking

Stuff a Blog: online blog editor with rich content

Stuff a Blog [via eHub] is a service to "enrich and extend your plain-vanilla blog post with relevant content". If you are a blog author, then this is of interest to you because it lets you add rich content such as maps, photos, tags, news, Amazon.com product details, etc. in your blog post. You can choose to either generate only the rich content by specifying keywords relevant to your post, or you can choose to compose your post in addition to the generated rich content. Stuff a Blog will then generate HTML for your content that you can paste into the blog editor of your choice (or on your platform).

The Goods:

1. Instant gratification, no registration or account required.
   
2. Integrated blog editor to compose the entire post on one site.
3. Improves the quality of out-bound links, hence improving your page rank.
4. Earn using Amazon.com affiliation

The Not-so-goods:

1. Yahoo! only integration - The rich content is generated using only Yahoo! services, such as Yahoo! Maps, Flickr (a Yahoo! property) photos, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Questions & Answers. In the future, I would expect the service to be expanded to use other services for photos, news, tags, etc.
2. Confusing array of options - The user interface needs to improved to provide help for advanced options such as Amazon.com affiliation and site search. The array of options presented to the user is a little confusing as well with a lot of colors and scattered buttons to update the generated HTML.
3. Post to blog - A killer feature would be to provide the option to post directly to the most popular blogging platforms, such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, MoveableType, etc. by creating a Stuff a Blog account that stores logins for your blogs.

Tags: stuffablog, stuff a blog, blogeditor

Free Ice Cream from Cold Stone Creamery

Via dealcatcher:
Cold Stone Creamery is offering free 3 oz. serving of ice cream this Thursday, 9/28, from 5pm to 8pm.

Tags: free, food, shopping

How to prevent loosing all your money if you are mugged

One of my colleagues’ husband got mugged somewhere in Europe some time ago and lost a lot of his money. To prevent this from happening to him in the future, he has come up with a strategy that is indeed quite ingenious. He carries around 2 wallets - his real one and another "fake" one containing just a few dollars and some expired credit cards to make it seem real. If he gets mugged again, he plans to give away his "fake" wallet to the perpetrators and not have to worry about how much money is in his pocket and losing all his credit cards, IDs, etc.

Sweet!

Tags: lifehack, money, crime

Google Calendar Wishlist

I am slowly migrating from using 30Boxes as my online calendar to Google Calendar for its tight integration with Gmail. I have accomplished this by feeding my 30Boxes iCal into Google Calendar and using the "copy to my calendar" feature in Google Calendar. In the process, I have found a few shortcomings of Google Calendar.

1. "copy to my calendar" - The user interface presented for the copying the event does not have an option to specify repeating events. If you are copying repeating events, such as birthdays (which form the bulk of my copied events), then copying the event becomes a 2 step process. 1) Copy the event without any repeating options specified and 2) edit the event to set your repeating pattern.
2. Quick Add reminders - Google Calendar does not let you specify reminders using the Quick Add feature. I would love to be able to specify

"lunch with joe today 1pm reminder 15minutes"

and have the event created to remind me 15 minutes before my lunch with joe.

3. RSS feeds - Google Calendar should allow addition of any RSS feeds, such as my Flickr photos, into the calendar. This is useful for sites that publish the weather information as RSS feeds. I have worked around this by using the Weather Underground which publishes weather in the iCal format.
   
4. WAP access - http://m.gcal.com/What? No GCal from my mobile web browser?!?!
   
5. More SMS commands - I like that you can get the next event, the agenda for today, and the agenda for the next day simply by sending an SMS to GVENT, but Google Calendar does not have an SMS command for looking up the agenda for any arbitrary day.

Tags: google, googlecalendar, google calendar