Archive for the ‘Cool websites’ Category:
How to Get Free Coke Reward Points
This is probably the easiest way to get free Coke Reward Points that you’re likely to find on the web. All you have to do is sign up at the free auction site Listia. When you sign up, they give you 100 points to spend on whatever you want. You don’t have to spend a dime. 3 Coke Reward points go for around 1-2 Listia points each, so you can win quite a few point auctions with your 100 free credits.
Eventually, you will spend all 100 of your Listia credits on free Coke Reward Points, but don’t worry. If you have anything lying around your house you want to get rid of, you can list it on Listia as a free auction. You get 50 more points for listing your first item. Then you also get however many points your item sells for. DVDs with free shipping, for example, tend to go for 200-500 Listia credits. But you can list anything you own that’s collecting dust around your house.
I guess you could stop at the free 100 points and leave the site, but if you browse around the site a bit, I think you’ll get hooked like I have. It’s definitely addictive. There’s a lot more to buy with your Listia credits than just Coke Rewards Points.
Listia: What if Craigslist and Ebay had a baby together?
If Craigslist and Ebay had a bastard child, it would probably look something like Listia.com. The site allows you to auction off your old junk for “free” and then use the points others bid on your items to buy their “junk” in return. As one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, it’s easy to come out ahead in a transaction like this. I put “free” in quotes because you have to have points to bid on items, and the only way to get points is to give away your own stuff on the site or buy them. You also get a few (100) points when you sign up for an account and 500 more free points when you list you first item. This is more than enough points to grab something cool for free from the site, such as a DVD or video game.
To give you an idea of what points are worth, I recently auctioned off one of my Wii games (Bikini Zombie Slayers) for around 600 points and the DS game Ninja Town for 500 points. A $300 netbook with MacOS installed recently ended for almost 9,000 points.
Besides the stuff other users list, the site also holds their own “Rewards Auctions” where they offer things like TVs, blu-ray players, Nintendo Wii’s, random electronics, and other big ticket items. They offer several of these a week. Currently, I’m saving up my points to buy a big ticket item in a future auction, although I did use a couple hundred points to buy a brand new Rubik’s Cube Revolution Titanium Edition.
If you’re interested in the site, you can check it out here. It’s a very promising site, although currently subject to some user abuse because of their policy of giving free points as soon as you sign up.
Even Disney theme parks are cutting jobs
It’s a bad sign when even “The happiest place on Earth” has to lay off employees. Due to declines in attendance and revenue, Disney says they will be laying off an unspecified number of employees. If I could afford a vacation to Disney this year, I’d probably be a little depressed walking around, knowing that even Fantasyland isn’t immune to our current weak economy. You can read more about this here.
Of course, for you “glass half full” types, I guess this is a good time to head to a theme park if you can afford it. Lines should be shorter than they’ve been in years, although I bet they’ll still be crowded during spring break.
Here’s another positive thing you might not know about. Anyone can visit Walt Disney World or Disneyland for free on their birthday. Click here for details.
The Bigfoot Hoax
Well, it comes as no surprise to most that the alleged Bigfoot corpse that made headlines for the last couple weeks has turned out to be a hoax. It seems extremely unlikely that a creature the size of Bigfoot living in regions populated by humans could have remained undiscovered all these years. Shouldn’t we have a body, indisputable video footage, droppings, bones, or some other tangible evidence by now? Still, if you’re like Fox Mulder and want to believe, there are sites out there where you can meet like-minded researchers and Bigfoot afficianados.
Bigfoot Links
Bigfoot Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot
Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization – http://www.bfro.net/
Bigfoot Encounters – http://www.bigfootencounters.com/
The Shadowlands Bigfoot Page – http://theshadowlands.net/bf.htm
The Skeptic’s Dictionary Bigfoot Entry – http://www.skepdic.com/bigfoot.html
Alliance of Independent Bigfoot Researchers – http://209.85.50.7/~skookum/
Willow Creek-China Flat Museum – http://bigfootcountry.net/home/
Loren Coleman, Cryptozoologist – http://www.lorencoleman.com/
Bigfoot Lives – http://www.bigfoot-lives.com/
The Bigfoot Discovery Project – http://www.bigfootdiscoveryproject.com/
Skeptic World Bigfoot Page – http://www.skepticworld.com/cryptozoology/big-foot.asp
Dropbox: New beta site offers free online file storage
A friend of mine sent me an invitation to Dropbox today, which is basically a site where you can store your digital files online for the convenience of accessing them from any computer in the world. I’d heard a little about the site but hadn’t been actively seeking an invite like many seem to be on various message boards I frequent. Still, free is free, so I gladly used my beta code to try out the service today.
It takes about a minute to fill out the form to sign up for an account and maybe another 30 seconds (depending on the speed of your Internet connection and PC) to install the Dropbox software. Once installed, a Dropbox icon is added to your System Tray at the bottom of your screen, as well as a folder located in your Windows Documents. Drag and drop any file into the Dropbox and it will be quickly uploaded to your online account, accessible by logging into the website or installing the shortcut application on another PC.
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UK file pirates to face the music
It was announced today that British ISPs will begin sending out warning letters to their customers who share copyrighted files on the Internet. Besides the privacy concerns with this, it’s doubtful that it will stem the tide of online piracy. Pirates have always been about ten steps ahead of media companies when it comes to sharing copyrighted files.
Also, I believe the media companies are missing out on a huge opportunity when it comes to online file sharing. Most of what people trade online these days are TV shows, the most popular of which are recent (aired within the last 24 hours) shows. The networks would be better off creating their own torrents of these shows complete with commercials and seeding the episodes themselves. I think if there was a legal alternative for downloading a TV show you’ve missed for free, most bit torrent users would take advantage of it.
The other option would be streaming the shows with commercials as Hulu does. While many people prefer downloads at the moment, I think streaming on-demand content may actually be the future. I’d like to see a day when I can watch any TV show ever made, streaming over my cable or Internet connection onto my television on demand. Whether this will cost a flat monthly rate, a per download fee, or be free and advertiser supported is up to the market to decide.
Hopefully, the TV networks won’t make the same mistake the music industry made and go after their core demographic with lawsuits and alienate them. There will always be pirates. You don’t eliminate piracy through lawsuits. You make it less attractive by providing easily attainable legal alternatives.
Jul 24 – Britain’s six biggest Internet providers have agreed a plan to send warning letters to those suspected of illegal file-sharing.
ISPs had previously argued they were mere conduits and not responsible for content.
But they agreed to the deal after the British government said it would impose legislation if they did not work to curb illegal file-sharing.
Reuters Technology Correspondent Matt Cowan reports.
Roadside America
Roadside America is a guide to offbeat tourist attractions, which you can search by attraction name, town, or state. Visitors to the site can add their own info and photos about local oddities. I was a bit disappointed to find that there are very few listings for the Indianapolis area and many of those are duplicates. We have a lot of weird and wacky places, people and things in Indiana, so if you know of some, please visit this site and add them.
Zilok.com, a site for peer-to-peer renting, officially launches today
Zilok.com, a San Francisco-based peer-to-peer website designed to allow users to rent goods to each other, officially launched today. Whether you’re looking for camping gear, computers, cameras, party supplies, tools, gardening equipment, sporting goods, or dozens of other rarely used items, Zilok is hoping you’ll consider renting rather than buying. They give the example of a power drill, a tool that only receives an average of 12 minutes of use in its lifetime, as one item that may be more economical to rent rather than buy. Zilok claims that there are thousands of other items that people often buy to use just once. Besides being more economical to rent, the site claims that it’s better for the environment as well.
While I find the concept interesting, I’d be nervous to rent out my hundreds of dollars worth of camping gear, for example, without a significant deposit and some sort of legally binding contract. The site seems to have a much larger potential for scam artist abuse than even auction sites like Ebay. I suppose you could ask for a deposit equal to the value of your items to protect yourself from loss, but this would make it unlikely for anyone to rent from you. Still, it will be interesting to watch Zilok and see if they become the Ebay of peer-to-peer rentals.
Investing in domains as if they were stocks
For an enterprising few in the late 90’s, buying and selling domains eventually led to millions in profits. Those with enough foresight to register and sit on one-word dictionary domain names received huge payouts once the rest of the business world caught up with the web and realized they needed great domain names to compete.
Today, most of us couldn’t afford a one-word, high profile domain, but thanks to a new site called Fusu.com, we can buy shares in high dollar domains in order to profit when those domains are eventually sold. Fusu works like the stock market, with domain names replacing traditional stocks. You can sell your shares at any time, and they go up or down in value, just like on the stock market. Or you can hold on to your shares until the domain you are investing in sells, and then you’ll get a percentage of the sale price, which could potentially be a large profit (or loss).
It’s an interesting concept, but whether it will catch on with domainers or not is hard to predict. I do like the fact that you can make a small deposit to the site via Paypal, which allows those of us with Paypal funds from other online ventures to experiment without giving the site our credit card number or withdrawing funds from a bank account.
The Darwin Awards
The Darwin Awards is a website that chronicles deaths that the site owner feels prove the theories of Darwin. The motto of the site is “Honoring those who improve the species…by accidentally removing themselves from it.” Depending upon your personality, you’ll either find the site extremely humorous or disgustingly morbid and inappropriate. Personally, I feel that if comedy doesn’t offend some one, it isn’t really funny. The site has been around since 2004 and excerpts from the site exist in several chain letters you may have received over the years. I make it a point to visit once a year or so to check out all the updates.
