Randomn3ss

Yippee yay, it’s earth day!

Earth day was created in 1970 as a global environmental awareness initiative. It is now observed in 175 countries and supported by progressive action organizations such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Earth Day Network. (Thank you Wikipedia.)

Some great, green + fun websites for earth day and beyond:

1. Buy local foods, support local farms. Visit Local Harvest to find local farms and farmers markets. Go out and pet a goat.
2. Carpool. Check out eRideShare to find local peeps that are looking to share rides. You can even search for someone to carpool across the country with.
3. Remove yourself from junk mail lists. Check out GreenDimes, sign up to be removed from junk mailings and in turn they’ll send you a dollar, plant a tree on your behalf, or send you a free green ‘zine. Everybody wins! (FYI: When you sign up for this they will ask for credit card information to verify your identity. Sort of like what paypal does. It’s been a few months since I signed up and so far no funny business.)
4. Once you go black, you never go back… take a walk on the dark side: Blackle is Google powered and eco-friendly.
5. Recycle your goods and get new ones at freecycle. This site will hook you up with a local group that supports the reuse of anything and everything. Although the site is a little difficult to navigate, once you’re in there seems to be a lot of activity going on in each of the different areas. There’s a slightly loved television stand in York, PA with your name on it.
6. Go zero! The Conservation Fund will help you measure your very own carbon emissions and tell you how many trees you need to plant to offset your consumption. I’ve got 16 trees to plant this year to outweigh my emission consumptions. Damn. I had better get started. You can do it yourself or they allow you to make a donation for whatever the cost comes out to be to plant your trees.
7. Get free stuff (by paying for it) at the Sierra Club. Right now, $15 will get you a membership (usually around $35), and a handy backpack for a thank you gift.
8. Be a green person/dog/baby. I bought my dog these organic treats in the shape of little cupcakes that he refuses to eat from a store I found on Green People. They also have eco friendly and holistic business listings for people too. And their travel section has some really neat stuff.
9. Save on gas. With gas prices expected to hit $4 this summer, be sure to get your daily feul economy tips for some serious advice on saving money at the gas tank and saving the environment.
10. Read up. Eco Chick’s blog is as sassy as it is green. And I don’t use the word *sassy* often. Starre Vartan’s website is funny, smart and earth friendly. And how could a girl named Starre not be cool? Be sure to read her list of what not to do for Earth Day. As she says, because mother earth is a woman. Yeah!

It is true, we all need to be a little greener. Without the earth we won’t be here.

April 22 also happens to be the democratic primary in PA, so get out and vote all you registered Pennsylvanians. Polls are open 7am – 8pm, your local polling place is usually within walking distance to your house. Brody and I will be on our way to our designated voting center bright and early wearing our Obama buttons. See you there.

Someone told me that the average time spent on a web page is seven seconds, that includes looking at all ads, photos and reading content. To be honest, I probably belive this statement to be true. There are some exceptions though, some articles I want to read later, in detail, but not right now. This is even truer when the evening rolls around and I’m on instant messenger and friends send me links, or when checking silly things friends send me via email.
There are countless social networking solutions to help you tag sites to visit later, the biggest is probably del.icio.us, followed by Digg, but these tools, along with countless others available are designed for you the user to share the content with someone else. What if you don’t want to share the content, you simply want to access a particular website again without the pain of sending yourself an email or book marking a site in your browser to forget about it later.

My solution for the last two weeks has been Instapaper. Instapaper is a bookmark applet; you add their icon to the bookmark toolbar of your browser and when on a site you want to read later, click it. The applet will then save the link and a short description to your Instapaper site to be viewed and clicked on later. One of the best parts of this service, besides being free, you don’t need to give an email address to create a username! I did create a username and password since I use it at work from time to time when browsing websites on my lunch hour, my Macbook and when at friends houses to retrieve sites that I know I saved there.

There are a lot of really neat details about Instapaper as well, including the ability to use this on your iPhone. Read the FAQ to use the service better, faster and be more productive.

Oh yea, did I mention that it’s free? There aren’t even any ads on the site!

Late last night eBay sent me an email officially announcing all their changes, some good, most not. Here’s a breakdown and what it means to you.

Reduced listing fees. You’re not going to hear me complain about this one. 2008 guidelines:

• Lower insertion fees
• Making gallery free
• Lower fees for gallery

Reward for great sellers. OK, this is pretty much bullshit if you ask me. You get better ranking in search’s based on how detailed the person who bought your item was when they left you feedback. I’d safely say that one out of every three transactions I do on eBay, buying or selling, the other party never leaves feedback. Even after I’ve sent them a message to make them aware that I did indeed leave positive feedback and would appreciate if they did the same when they had a moment. How it affects you as a seller:

• More search exposure through Best Match
• Fee discounts for PowerSellers
• Increased protection for PowerSellers

Feedback changes. For me, feedback is the only way that buyers and sellers can keep each other honest. These, are not in the best interest of the users of eBay in my honest opinion.

• Buyers will only be able to receive positive Feedback
• Positive repeat customer Feedback will count and Feedback more than 12 months old won’t
• Negative and neutral Feedback left by the buyer will be removed for transactions in which a buyer doesn’t respond to the Unpaid Item (UPI) or if the member is suspended

I want to know who thought it would be a good idea to stop sellers from leaving negative feedback for buyers who don’t pay? Why is negative feedback going to be removed if the seller is suspended?

Last week I took part in a blog writing project over at fellow blogger Daniel’s site, the focus being tutorials. I feel that I write pretty good tutorials so why not submit one and see how well I do.

In total, 71 people submitted tutorials covering a wide range of topics. The interesting part is that those 71 writers will determine whom the winners are by listing a top list of tutorials comprised of those 71 articles. So, here are my three top tutorials from the project:

• How to write a letter of complaint to your bank. The power of a written letter has, in some ways, been forgotten with my generation and those younger. We do everything in the now via email, text message and phone calls if we have to be bothered to pick up the phone at all. The written letter, when done properly, holds a good amount of weight, in my opinion, more than an email letter. This tutorial covers how to approach your bank with confidence and in a manor as to not come off sounding like a jerk. Banks are, for most, a necessary evil, we all need them, hate the fees, horrible hours and staff who are usually slower than road kill. Six easy steps in this tutorial could lead to a well written letter to waive a fee, get you better customer service or even a shiny new pen!

• How to RSS like a rockstar. For more than 2 years now I have been attached to iGoogle RSS reader and have grown the number of sites I track via RSS to nearly 60, all separated won by categories. Sadly, many people still don’t understand what RSS is, how to use it or why it rocks so much. This tutorial covers all the bases from soup to nuts and will get you reading feeds in no time.

• How to list an eBay auction for maximum profit. So I’m a little vain. In the last several months this article has been read nearly 11,000 times, clearly a few people found it interesting. I put a lot of time and energy in writing what I’ve learned over the last 7+ years selling on eBay and think that this article should be in any top tutorial list.

While showing a friend OPENhulu last night, the glorious service that streams TV shows to your computer, I noticed a new feature, FULL SCREEN MODE! I was initially a bit iffy on the site before this, as the size of the streaming video was fairly small and the site has a ton of ads. Now, with full screen mode, I won’t need to rely on bittorrent sites to acquire shows I’ve missed.

Additionally, the list of shows is growing, rapidly. OPENhulu also seems to be pretty proud at the announcement of their forums being open, but I’d avoid them for now. Nearly every post is some form of spam and they have, what appears to be, no form of moderation yet. Hopefully the can get that issue worked out soon.

Here is an interesting project to send a message to a loved one, a friend, or just because you can and want to. For 30 euros (about $60 usd) your short message will be sprayed on a wall in Palestine that is currently separating people and families. Info on the wall can be found here, most of the money will be going to Palestinian NGO’s (independent foundations) doing the work. They will fund small social, cultural and educational projects with the money earned (from buying bicycles to fixing the roof).

I’ve seen this same concept from people who live near a beach who will write a message in the sand and take a photo for you of it, but this project carries a bit more meaning to it. I’m also thinking you could use this to help promote websites, companies, bands, etc.

Create your unique mark with send.a.message

As I grow older I watch less TV and enjoy life and friends more and more, however there are a few shows I enjoy and try to follow. I’ve already showed you how to watch TV shows on your time, not the networks, however this requires the use of bittorrent software and some time to allow for downloads. This poses a problem if you are at work on a lunch hour and just want to watch some TV or stuck at an airport for an hour. An hour is enough time to download a show, usually, but not enough to watch it. Streaming TV comes into play now.

Hulu.com offers free streaming TV and aims,

to provide you with the web’s most comprehensive selection of premium programming across all genres and formats – television shows, feature films, clips, and more.

That sounds great! Especially since they have some premium shows available now, there is no software to download and plays in nearly every web browser, only an internet connection is needed. One problem, it is private beta only and who knows when you may actually get approved for it. Not to fret, there is a solution.

OPENhulu.com has somehow found a way to exploit Hulu and streams nearly every show that is available from Hulu using the embed feature (thanks for clarifying Brandon), no software to download and install, nothing special needed to play the shows, just a high-speed internet connection and a web browser. There is a downside to this goodness though, but I don’t really view it all as so negative that it detracts from the fact that this is free. Ads, lots and lots of ads. They need to make money, I’m OK with that and understand it, there is also a five second ad before the show starts. Currently there is no way to make it go full screen [that I am aware of] and there is no way to save or export the videos to save locally to watch later or put onto a video iPod or similar device.

So if you missed your favorite show and don’t want to bother learning how to acquire shows via bittorrent, OPENhulu is a great second solution to watch your favorite shows without waiting for them to come out on DVD.

As of about 10:50am EST, Google’s web based email Gmail is dead is not responding. What makes it worse is that Google Groups are giving a 500 Internal Server Error when trying to view them. It took more than 10 minutes to get my email to load properly, trying to send a message has resulted in this cryptic message.

Searching Google for this term has proved all but useless, since the first 10 pages of results are links to Google Groups pages, which are dead as well. If someone kicked the plug out of the wall that runs the Gmail & Groups servers, please plug it back in.

I can’t tell you how many cardboard forts I made as a kid with my friends. The best one ever was when a friend’s family got a new refrigerator the one year and let us go to town with the box, making one of the best forts ever, but sadly I don’t have photos of it. Cardboard boxes are one of those items that everyone seems to have laying around, saving them for something, storing miscellaneous crap in them, like my Mother, or just putting them in the basement or closet to save for wrapping a gift or mailing something out. Point is, we all either have some lying around or can readily get them. Now it is time to put them to use and function, and have some fun doing it with the kids, big and little.

Foldschool.com is a site providing templates for anyone to download and create amazing furniture, all kid sized, but I’m sure with some ingenuity one could make it adult sized as well. The site is 100% add free and asks for donations if you like the site or have downloaded something. Given how cool this site is and the fact that it is ad-free, if you use their templates, throw them a few bucks.

If any readers do indeed make furniture from these templates, I’d love to see them. Please shoot me a message via the contact page; a follow up article featuring the furniture you create would be rad.

I found a site the other day totally by accident that has such a simple and great concept, it’s amazing that no one told me about it before. FreeRice.com asks you simple questions, for each question you answer correctly they will donate 10 grains of rice. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but there is no catch! No junk mail showing up at your house, nothing to buy, simply answer some questions and help feed some hungry people. Since the site launched on October 7th, 2007, more than 1.7 billion grains of rice have been allocated for the hungry. The running totals are really amazing. FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

So put on your thinking cap, answer some questions, help feed some hungry people. Please use whatever social bookmarking site you are a part of (StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, etc.) to help move this site forward and get some more traffic to it.

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