Busted Tees Stole My Money

A word of warning - Busted Tees may have a serious great collection of hip tee-shirts, but you may want to pay with a credit card that has fraud protection to be safe. A while back, I impulse-bought a shirt online from their website, but it was the wrong size. I taped the package back up, slapped on the label and sent it back after filling out the exchange form. Halfway into my vacation (returning the shirt was the last errand I took care of before a well-deserved beach week), I realized that I was supposed to include a $6.00 check for exchanging an item (kind of a rip-off, but whatever). I waited a while, thinking that when they received the return, they would contact me for the additional money in order to process my return. They did, after all, have all my contact information on the form. Since I never heard from them, after a reasonable period of time, I contacted their orders department via the email address published on their website. I included all my information again. I have yet to hear back. The email was sent on October 24th, 2007. I guess they really wanted their $6.00. Well, I’d like the $19.98 I spent back (shirt -$13.99 & shipping - $5.99), but since that’s obviously not happening, hopefully I can cost them a sale or two by posting this online.

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Yes, it’s another Twitter post. Couldn’t resist! (By the way, if you are in love with Twitter, too, I have a Twitter feed of all the Twitter news I read here).

• Twitterbar: With the Twitterbar Firefox add-on, you can post to Twitter from your address bar. You just click the icon that sits to the right of your address bar after typing in your tweet in the address bar. This extension is no longer updated, though. Bummer!
• TwittyTunes: from the folks that brought you FoxyTunes, TwittyTunes lets you post the songs you’re listening to with a single-click.
• Twitbin: lets you send & receive tweets from Firefox’s sidebar
• Twitterfox: adds a tiny icon on the status bar that notifies you when your friends update their tweets. It has a small input field to update your tweets, too.

Google Maps for your mobile phone is out now with a new, improved version called Google Maps with My Location (beta). The new version offers several new features, the most important being its ability find your location using either your phone’s built-in GPS or by triangulating your location using cell towers. If your phone doesn’t have GPS, the triangulation feature will get you somewhere within 500 to 5000 meters of where you really are. You can then use the “0″ on your phone to position yourself more accurately on the map. In addition to the “my location” feature, the new version of Google Maps for mobile also has real-time traffic (I could have used this today!), more detailed step-by-step directions, integrated search results, easily movable maps, and even satellite imagery. You can see a demo of the service here. Also, check out the video below for an explanation of how it all works. To get the latest version of Google Maps, point your mobile browser to www.google.com/gmm. Most web-enabled mobile phones are supported, including Java, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices.

SyncTV is a new download service that will make various TV programs available to download on a subscription basis. The video formats used are touted to be of “DVD quality”, and in high-definition, where available. Additionally, the sound quality will be 5.1 Dolby® Digital Plus surround sound. SyncTV’s program library will be organized by channels, and when you subscribe to a particular channel, like that belonging to your favorite TV show, you can download all the episodes of that show for a small monthly fee. Where this type of service differs from iTunes’ “Season Pass” is the fact that, in many cases, these channels will not be just the current season, but every episode of every season of that show. Back catalog! Although a small minority of the video content will be set up on a pay-per-download basis, the majority will be based on this subscription model. Instead of paying $1.99 per show, like at iTunes, an entire SyncTV channel will be available for $2-4 per month.

As SyncTV prepares to launch their private beta, they already have one high-profile partner lined up: Showtime. The network will initially be offering “Dexter,” “The L Word,” and “Brotherhood” (ummm…where’s “Weeds?”), with more to come in the future. Other channels include “Boing,” a children’s programming channel; “Far Out,” a classic programming channel offering shows like “The Bill Cosby Show,” “I Spy,” and “The Invisible Man”; “Geneon,” Japanese anime; “Ultra Z”, a “tween” channel with original content; and “Zone11,” a channel for kids between 6 and 14. It’s odd to see so much children’s television on a player whose featured item is a serial killer drama! However, SyncTV promises there is more to come as they plan on “creating one of the deepest libraries of TV shows available anywhere.” The SyncTV service will work on Windows PCs, Macs, and Linux PCs, but what’s intriguing is that they plan to make it available on other devices in the future, including TVs and portable players. You will be able to play back shows on up to five “home” devices (sound familiar?) until compatible portable devices launch; then, SyncTV will allow you to specify an additional ten portable devices for playback. Whose has 10 portable devices? Maybe they plan for a family of 5 to use the service on each family member’s mobile phone and portable music player?

If you want to sign up for the beta, you can do so on their homepage. Beta testers will then need to download the SyncTV media player to their computer in order to view SyncTV shows.

Those of you who are regular readers know that I recently became frustrated with the limitations of my TypePad blog and then became even more frustrated by TypePad support’s response. I made plans to finally move away from TypePad to everyone’s favorite blogging platform, WordPress. I’ve been messing around with WordPress for nearly a month now (and, as you can see, I have not migrated yet). I know everyone loves it, but, I have to admit, it’s a much different world over there, and the learning curve has been a little steep in some areas. And maybe I’m just used to my restrictions, but the fact that there are plugins for EVERYTHING is almost too much of a good thing. How do you know which ones are good? It seems everything I want to do in Wordpress, I have to google to find a plugin.

So, before I committed to WP, I had to check out Movable Type. (You can too, here. The login & pwd is “demo”). Although from the same company that dissed me before, ultimately, it’s about what works best for me.

I discovered that many people abandoned Movable Type a while ago they introduced the pricing structure (for commercial use) and that’s when WP became king of the blogosphere. Apparently, choosing between the two platforms is the blogging world’s version of the cola wars, and WP is Coke.

So without further ado, here are a few things I liked about Movable Type 4:

• Movable Type has a new version, MT4, which “feels” more like what I’m used to from a blogging platform - a polished interface.    
• The thing that really caught my attention about MT4 is the ability to have multiple blogs with a single installation - something that WP is incapable of unless you’re using WP-MU, which, quite frankly, looks hard.    
• Built-in spam control - no plugin needed   
• MT4’s Asset manager is built-in and integrated with native tagging functionality. It’s also pretty sweet.   
• Built-in search of posts & pages   
• OpenID built-in   
• Nifty dashboard with traffic, stats, etc - built-in   
• I read somewhere that if you get Dugg, your MT site stays up and your WP site goes down…something to do with the database…? Anyone who can explain this, please comment!

On the other hand, my favorite things about WordPress are:

• The themes! So many themes! I love the themes!   
• The plugins - yes, there is one for everything.    
• It’s really free. Actually free. No strings.

Obviously, there are a million things that set the two platforms apart, but these are just the main things that interested me. I’m not really concerned with all the nerdy, back-end stuff - only how it affects me. I use web hosts that do the installations for you and offer platform support, so the geeky details are handled. I just want to blog.

I’m torn.

Sarahintampa isn’t my only blog - I’m also a contributor to Channel 10. Catch up with my latest posts over on there! Some recent highlights:

• Upload Photos from Your Camera to the Web
• Windows Live Calendar Launches 
• How I Use Outlook, 7 Tips
• Zune 2 Hacks
• RSS Screensaver

HelloTxt is a website that lets you post to multiple microblogging services at once. The supported services include Twitter, jaiku, Pownce, meemi, tumblr, yappd, and more. If you’re a member of more than one of these services, you know that updating multiple services at once can be time-consuming and usually not even worth your time. Although jaiku will display your Twitter posts for you, many services don’t have any aggregation features. Now with HelloTxt, you can quickly microblog to all the services at once.

Cumul.us is a new website that uses the “wisdom of crowds” in order to to predict the weather. Aggregating weather data from openly available sources and APIs from AccuWeather, Geonames, Google, NOAA, WeatherBug and weather.com, the weather predictions are likely to actually be more accurate than if you were to use just a single forecast. Along with with the weather predictions, you can participate in the community by trying to predict the weather yourself, as well as submitting what you’re going to wear. You can check out what other people are reporting they’re going to wear, too. As you make your predictions, cumul.us goes to the available weather data sources and saves what it was really like that day; then your prediction is scored for accuracy for the conditions and/or temperature. The better your predictions, the higher your user rating. The site’s content floats in fluffy white clouds on a blue background, making this fun web 2.0 “wisdom of the clouds” community worth checking out.

TechSmith, the company that makes the SnagIt screen capture software and Camtasia screen recording software has just launched a genius marketing plan: they are offering the older versions of the these popular software programs for free! By offering the older versions as free downloads, the company hopes to introduce new users to their products as well as convert some of the freeloaders into paying customers, by convincing them upgrade to the latest versions of these programs. If you want to get your free downloads of SnagIt and Camtasia, follow the instructions below.

Get SnagIt 7 for Free

1. Go to ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/SnagIt.exe and download the SnagIt trial.
2. Click here and request your SnagIt 7 software key. The key is emailed to you.
3. Install the program, enter the key, and you’re done!

Get Camtasia Studio 3 for Free

1. Go to http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe and download the free trial of Camtasia Studio.
2. Click here and request your Camtasia Studio software key. The key is emailed to you.
3. Install the program, enter the key, and you’re done!

Thanks to Digital Inspiration for posting this!

Here’s a Blackberry rumor to drool over: supposedly, an touchscreen, iPhone-like Blackberry line is coming in 2008. According to the rumor, the Blackberry 9000 series will be a touch-screen device with a small form factor. Unlike traditional Blackberrys, the 9000 series won’t have the half-screen/half-keyboard look. What it will have, however, is an upgraded multimedia system, which means it should have good mp3 and video capabilities, especially if it’s going to compete with the iPhone. The 9000 series will also be 3G; that would be a killer feature since the iPhone only gets good speed when it’s on wi-fi. And of course, the 9000 series is still a Blackberry, so push email will remain standard. (picture is wishful thinking only)