Do not get ripped off on Black Friday...Part One

Do Not Bother with "Doorbuster" deals

Doorbuster sales are highly publicized, big discounts for a few specific products, most of which are in limited supply. The idea is they get the crowd clamoring for savings as soon as the doors open. Ignore them. Seriously, put them out of your head, rip the doorbuster pages out of the store circulars, and pretend they don't exist.

You'll recognize the name and possibly even the model of the HDTV/game system/cell phone/tablet on sale, and you'll salivate at the super-low price, but you'll also probably miss the fine print that matters: "Limited quantities." Big stores get a small handful of these deep discount doorbuster items in, and once they're gone (often before the doors open, if the store hands out tickets for the items hours before the sale), they're gone. If you want to camp out in the cold hours before the doors open with hundreds of other equally savings-hungry shoppers for a chance to win the retail lottery, go nuts. But doing so is a sign of madness.

Where To Watch Finds Where You Can Legally Watch Movies & TV Shows

Movie piracy (and all other forms of piracy) are wrong and we often see public service messages that impress on us the gravity of the crime that is piracy. No doubt you’ve heard claims that piracy harms the entertainment industry and there has been quite the crack down recently with innocent videos being removed from YouTube, and some search results being removed from Google on account of copyright infringement. We’re not going to argue whether piracy is harmful or not, instead we feel introducing Where To Watch to our readers is a much better way to fight rampant movie and TV show piracy. This simple little web app lets you search for any movie and/or TV (any season) and find where you can pay to legally watch it.

Where To Watch doesn’t require you to sign up to the service. Simply type in the name of whatever it is you want to legally watch and it searches its database for it.

You can search for something to watch by using a TV show or a movie’s name, by searching for an actor, or for a director. If you know you want to watch a TV show, scroll down a bit on the home page and when the bar at the top appears, select Television. It isn’t a necessary step though, if you type in a TV show name, the app will find and list it under TV.

As for the results, for movies that may be have be remade over and over or that may have sequels and prequels, like the Batman franchise, you will see a list of all movies ever made. TV show results are sorted by seasons. The viewing options are listed with price details for how much it will cost to buy the entire season for viewing. The results feature the usual suspects; Amazon, Netflix, etc and the app indicates where you need to pay a single price and where you need a subscription to the  service listed.

The only flaw with the app is that it doesn’t take region into consideration when it lists options. Some or maybe all viewing options may not be available in all countries (hence a lot piracy, still wrong). Other than that, What To Watch is what one can actually consider a good and effective tool for fighting piracy and a great way to find HD quality TV shows and movies.

Visit Where To Watch

Why Comcast is pushing broadband data caps that nobody wants?...follow the money

Do you want your home broadband services to have strict data caps like the ones on your mobile data plans? Of course you don’t! But that isn’t stopping Comcast and Time Warner Cable from pushing them anyway.

In case you didn’t know, Comcast this fall started a trial run of capped broadband plans in several markets in the south, including major markets like Atlanta, Nashville and Charleston. The lowest data caps are set at 300GB per month, which the company believes should be enough for the vast majority of its users.

The company explains that it’s trying to shift over to capped broadband plans because it’s trying to adapt to changes in the market — you know, the same market that’s told Time Warner Cable again and again that it doesn’t want capped plans.

“As the marketplace and technology change, we do too,” Comcast writes. “We evaluate customer data usage, and a variety of other factors, and make adjustments accordingly. Over the last several years, we have periodically reviewed various plans, and recently we have been analyzing the market and our process through various data usage plan trials.”

Of course, anyone who has actually looked at changes in the marketplace and technology can tell you that home broadband data caps make absolutely no sense in this context. The amount of things we can do on the Internet now has become more data intensive, from online gaming to watching Netflix streams in 4K.

The growth in these kinds of applications has flourished precisely because consumers have been able to get access to unlimited data on their home Internet services. Doing anything that would inhibit consumers’ use of their home Internet connections or would make them fearful of watching a movie online because they would get slapped with overage fees would therefore hurt the growth of online content distribution.

So why is Comcast really doing this? As Coolio once prophetically rapped all those years ago, it’s about “power in the money, money in the power.” The money part is easy: Comcast would love to be able to hit so-called “data hogs” with overage fees. The power part comes if the FCC gives Comcast the green light to charge content providers more for Internet “fast lanes.” In fact, it’s easy to imagine a scenario where companies that pay for the “fast lanes” also get their services’ data excluded from Comcast’s market caps, just as AT&T has been trying to do with its “sponsored data” program.

Now, Comcast and other ISPs would never be able to get away with this if they faced any sort of competition. People really hate the idea of data caps on their home Internet service and they would flock to non-capped options if they were available — but in many Comcast markets that competition flat-out does not exist.

What Comcast is trying to gage here is just how far they can push people into accepting data caps before they just throw up their hands and go back to dialup. The best thing consumers can do is just refuse to take any of Comcast’s capped data offers, no matter how much of a “bargain” the company is pitching them as. Otherwise, you’ll rue the day you decided to take the deal that forced you to pay overage fees for watching one too many shows over Netflix.

Mozilla Firefox has a new default search....Yahoo!

Mozilla will make Yahoo the default search engine in the Firefox browser as part of a five-year deal, the two companies announced Wednesday.

The partnership will make bring Yahoo search to Mozilla's desktop and mobile Web browsers in the United States, beginning in December. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mozilla has used Google as its default global search provider in Firefox for a decade but is now opting for "a more local and flexible approach to increase choice and innovation on the Web, with new and expanded search partnerships by country," the company said.

In addition to Yahoo in the U.S., Mozilla is tapping Yandex Search for Russian Firefox users and is continuing to use Baidu in China. Firefox users around the world will still be able to use alternate, built-in search options in the browser—in the U.S., for example, Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Amazon, Twitter, and Wikipedia will continue to be supported, the company said.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer said search has been "an area of investment and opportunity" for the company in recent years.

Ultimate Settings Panel: One Click Access To Windows, Outlook, & Config Manager Settings

With complex programs, the settings are equally complex. Developers try their best to optimally group the settings so that users can find the right one when they look for it but when a program is as complex as say, an email client, it’s still complicated. Ultimate Settings Panel is a new portable app released by Techy Geeks that puts settings for Windows, Outlook 2010, Configuration Manager 2007 and 2012 in a neat list. Click any one of the items and it will open the configuration window for you. The application saves you the trouble of having to wade your way through menus, and sub-menus of options. to find the setting you’re looking for

Launch Ultimate Settings Panel; the UI is a single window divided into five tabs, one each for the settings it lists. The settings are grouped into Windows, General, Outlook 2010, ConfigMgr 2007, and ConfigMgr 2012. The Windows tab lists settings that you would frequently want/need to access such as the Device Manager, Sound settings, Windows Firewall, Windows Update, Remote Desktop, and more.

The General tab is again dedicated to Windows but applies to settings that effect the OS as a whole such as parental settings, file indexing options, file recovery options, the control panel, etc.

The Outlook tab gives you access to options like Clean Auto Complete, Clean Categories, Clean sharing, and more. It’s not meant to help you quickly find out where you can set up an email signature or where you can apply rules to an email. The options are far more limited in this tab though they are still useful.

The ConfigMgr tabs give you access to the Client Applet, CMTrace, Software Center, and an option to uninstall the client.

Ultimate Settings Panel is great for anyone transitioning from Windows 7 to Windows 8 because the settings have moved around somewhat in Windows 8 and users might find it hard to manage them. The app doesn’t act as an intermediary between you and the settings of your OS or Outlook. Instead, it’s like a list of shortcuts. The list itself is perhaps not organized but it’s all there and one click opens the right window for you. It saves time to say the least. If installed on a computer, it canl help system admins aid users when remotely trouble shooting a system by making it easier for the user to find the right settings. The app is new and more options are likely to be added. Check out the Windows God Mode if you’re looking for a few extra items to configure.

Install Ultimate Settings Panel

ChooseMyPC Helps You Find Parts To Build Your Budget PC

Tablets and laptops are exceptionally powerful today right off the shelf. PCs aren’t exactly a dying breed but there isn’t much contrast between a laptop and a PC in terms of power. That doesn’t mean PCs are going the way of the dinosaurs. Avid gamers often build powerful PCs themselves with special attention to comfort, layout, heating, cooling, and ventilation. Now if you’re interested in building a PC but have no idea what to buy and are on a budget, ChooseMyPC is an excellent place to start. It’s a very simple app that asks you to set your budget, select which country you’re in (only four supported at the moment), and whether or not you plan to overclock your system. The app will give you a complete list of parts to buy and you can add other parts to the PC such as an optical drive. The list of parts updates but keeps you under or on budget.

 Start using ChooseMyPC by setting your budget. The app doesn’t ask what you plan on using the PC for, i.e. development, gaming, or entertainment. You can choose to include Windows and an optical drive as well, or if you skip these options, you can add them later when you get the list of parts for your PC. Click Generate Build.

The list of parts gives you some parts that you can edit. The editable parts are ones like the Solid state drive where you can select the capacity. Other parts like the CPU and motherboard can’t be changed. On this same page, you can edit your initial preferences to include Windows and an Optical drive. The options can be reset, and you can include any rebates available on the parts.

When you hover the mouse over a part, it gives you a brief description of it. Click the item’s description and you’re taken to the product page on Amazon where you can buy it.

The app doesn’t take into consideration the purpose of the PC which may be exceptionally demanding like it is if you plan on coding on it. It limits itself to being just a list generator for parts. The location restriction is applied because the app finds parts on Amazon which is also where it finds rebates and prices. If your country isn’t supported, you can still use ChooseMyPC to find the right parts and shop for them yourself.

Visit ChooseMyPC