Ebay: Get more bids with a good Title

Published on August 22, 2010 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Having upgraded my iPhone from the 3G to the iPhone 4, I decided I’d try to recoup some of my cash by selling the 3G on ebay.

I know a lot of the old tricks and techniques for getting good responses to my auctions like posting a ton of pictures (using my own site to host them for free) and giving a thorough and descriptive summary so that people will feel comfortable that they are getting exactly what I’ve described.

Feeling sure I’d make a descent amount of money, I went ahead and posted my item. One thing that eBay does to try to make things easier for you is they automatically generate an Auction title for you based on keywords you enter for the auction.

In my case, they generated “iPhone 3G 8GB Black ATT”. Sounded pretty accurate for me so I just added “No Reserve” to the end and posted it for a 7 day auction.

I was watching the auction go and noticed that I wasn’t getting very many views or bids. After five days I only had 35 page views and one bid. I decided this was too low and started doing some research on how much similar phones were selling for at auction close and how many bids they were getting.

Ultimately I discovered that Continue reading ‘Ebay: Get more bids with a good Title’

Technorati Tags: , , ,

iPhone: How to display battery percentage remaining

Published on August 22, 2010 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Ever wonder why you have to guess how much juice is left in your battery by looking at the little battery icon on your iPhone. Ever say to yourself “why wouldn’t they just put the battery percent remaining on the iPhone??”

Well, it turns out they did put it there you just need to know where to go to turn it on. It seems that in Apple’s infinite wisdom they decided to leave it turned off by default and bury the setting so deeply, most people would never find it.

Just fire up your iPhone, tap on Settings, General, Usage (yes, Usage?!), and low and behold there is a setting for “Battery Percentage”. Flick that bad boy to “ON” and watch it appear.

.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

How to install VMware VSphere ESXi 4 on a desktop PC

Published on August 8, 2010 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Trying to figure out how to install VMWare Vsphere ESXi 4.0 on a home desktop computer but now sure how? Neither was I but I finally figured it out and I’ll tell you how!

Over the last year, I’ve been getting very involved in VMware ESX installations and rollouts at work. It started with doing several hundred P2V’s (physical machine to virtual machine conversions) then onto the server side and actually configuring the servers. We started with ESX 3.5 then upgraded to ESXi 4.0 which is now known as VSphere.

I took a couple of VMware training classes and realized that there was a lot of capabilites in VSphere that we weren’t using at my company. Unfortunately, since it was a production environment, tinkering and experimenting on the ESX clusters at the office wasn’t an option. I’m the type of person that when I get into a technology, I want to know as much about it as possible. It also helps to learn as much as possible as it makes you more valuable at work and to potential (higher paying) employers.

RESEARCH

My research began to find out what it would take to build a VMware VSphere ESXi 4.0 server at home.

A quick google search showed it was very possible to build a home ESX server, but unlike Windows servers there were very specific hardware requirements. Even tougher, VMware doesn’t list what desktop class hardware you can run it on since they don’t officially support running ESX on desktops. There are a couple of sites out there like Continue reading ‘How to install VMware VSphere ESXi 4 on a desktop PC’

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to add HP SFF SAS Drives to your desktop pc

Published on August 6, 2010 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

I recently acquired some HP Small Form Factor (SFF) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hot swap hard drives from work. We use them for data storage on high end servers because they are lightening fast and the hot swap capability allows you to pull a bad drive and replace it without turning off the server.

These drives tend to be very expensive because of their speed and capabilities. Having a couple at home would be very cool indeed except for one problem: I don’t have a server to plug them into and they don’t easily connect to anything in a desktop computer… Or so I thought!

After tons of googling and trolling the online shopping sites, I finally found a solution that is not only fairly inexpensive but also allows you to connect the HP SFF SAS drives to your desktop computer in a RAID setup!

To do it, you’ll first need to Continue reading ‘How to add HP SFF SAS Drives to your desktop pc’

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

iPhone – How to delete one thing at a time

Published on August 6, 2010 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

When I got my first iPhone, one annoyance to me was that in order to delete a single email or voicemail, etc. I had to tap the Edit button then select the item then tap Delete.

Why on Earth should it take three steps to delete a single email from my iPhone?

Well, it doesn’t!

Next time you want to delete something, just swipe your finger across it from left to right, picking your finger up at the end.

A single delete button will appear over the item, allowing you to hit it and send that email straight to the trash bin!

Make sure you try it on anything presented in list form as well! I have found it works on the iPhone email, voicemail, and notes apps. I’m sure it works on others as well.

Let me know if you’ve found more by leaving a comment below!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

How to easily add space to your DVR

Published on April 30, 2010 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

My cable company provides a Scientific Atlanta 8300HD dvr cable box that comes with a 160gb hard drive. This allows the dvr to record about 110 hours of standard definition (SD) TV or about 22 hours of high definition (HD) TV.

The cable company rolled out HD channels on a separate bank of channels from the SD channels. This meant that I had two if every channel. I could watch CBS in SD or HD.

This has always been more than adequate as I would record general shows like news programs and my wife’s soaps on the SD channel and hi def shows like Discovery Channel on the HD channels.

Recently I got a low disk space warning from my DVR. I was confused as I didn’t have many shows recorded. Upon investigation, I found out that Cablevision had changed how the cable box worked. In an effort to consolidate the HD and SD channels, they made it so that if you had an HD cable box, it would automatically show the channel in HD regardless of which channel you turned to (SD or HD).

This is nice in theory but caused a problem. I was now forced to record my wife’s soaps in HD. The problem is that HD recordings use about eight times more space than SD recordings.

So now that I solved the mystery of the missing disk space, I wanted to find out what I could do about it. I hit Cablevision’s website hoping Continue reading ‘How to easily add space to your DVR’

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Gigabit connection not working on Dell Dimension 9200 (XPS 410)

Published on March 27, 2010 in Technology. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , .

I’ve had my Dell Dimension 9200 (also known as the XPS 410) for a few years now and have been connected to a Netgear WGR614 router which has a maximum wired speed of 100mb. As I have been acquiring a lot of wireless N equipped devices, I decided to upgrade my router to the Netgear WNDR3700 wireless N router with Gigabit wired network ports.

I have a Windows Home Server and my main machine running Windows 7 (Dimension 9200) which both have gigabit network cards in them. I thought it would be awesome to have a gigabit router which would allow me to copy very large files between machines at super fast speeds. This is where all of my trouble began.

My shiny new WNDR3700 gigabit router is delivered and I am psyched to get it online. I power it up and start connecting my machines. First, my Windows Home Server which is running on a Dell Optiplex GX620 slimline. I connect it and watch the router port light turn green which means it’s connected at gigabit speed. Sweet!

Next I connect my Dimension 9200 and watch as it blinks green a few times then promptly switches to an amber light which means it’s connected at 10/100mb. What the hell?

I check my router settings and make sure I’m running the latest router firmware just to rule out a router issue. I even pulled out a gigabit switch I have to see if the machine would connect to that at 1000mb. It would not. That rules out my new router.

So my troubleshooting begins. Continue reading ‘Gigabit connection not working on Dell Dimension 9200 (XPS 410)’

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

iPhone 3g Home Button Fixed – Kudos to Apple

Published on September 23, 2009 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , .

open iphoneAbout a month ago I noticed that the Home button was getting less and less responsive. The problem was intermittent, but it was getting more and more frequent.

I would sometimes have to hit the Home button two or three times before it would register. A friend told me that he thought that the issue may not be the home button, but the iPhone software itself. He explained that since he upgraded to the iPhone 3.0 OS that he had experienced some lag and slowness and had also noticed that when he hits the Home button that it may take an extra second to respond.

I performed my own trials to test this possibility and found that the phone didn’t respond at all. I also later updated to 3.1 which fixes most of the lagging issues, but it didn’t resolve my problem.

I decided to head over to the Apple Store to let them have a look. As usual, the place was a complete zoo with people falling all over themselves in there. I find it weird that the store is always so full of people since I never actually see anyone buying anything.

mac geniusI headed over to the tech support line to talk to a “mac genius” (are they really that full of themselves to come up with that title?). There are lots of people on line and nobody in sight tending to any of them. I finally see a woman in an apple tshirt over by a table with a computer on it. I walk over and briefly explain the problem with my iPhone. She looks at me with pity in her eyes and explains that “there are no more reservations available to see a mac genius today” then then motioned to the Continue reading ‘iPhone 3g Home Button Fixed – Kudos to Apple’

Technorati Tags: ,

How do I take a screen shot or picture of my iPhone screen?

Published on May 19, 2009 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: .

While trying to explain to distant friends how to do something on their iPhones or to show them what an application looks like, I always wished there was a way to take a picture or screen capture of my iPhone screen and send it to them.

screenshotNormally if I was on a computer I would just hit the Prt Scr button and paste it into an email.

Well, lo and behold, the iPhone doesn’t come with an instruction manual and there are many things it doesn’t do that it should, but there IS a way to take screen shots.

When you’re on the screen you want to take a picture of, just press the round main button and the power button (top right) at the same time and let go of them together.

The screen will quickly flash white and the iPhone will make a camera sound. Now go into the “Photos” app and look in “Camera Roll” There you’ll see the screenshot. From there you can forward it by email, or hook up your sync cable and copy it to your computer.

Technorati Tags:

How to beat Tap Defense on the iPhone

Published on May 15, 2009 in Technology. 1 Comment Tags: .

tapdefenseWhile there are different strategies for different maps, the one strategy that I’ve found to work regardless is you must manage your gold early in the game and raise your interest rates so that you’ll have enough gold in the later levels to buy upgraded towers.

  • - My Tap Defense strategy is pretty simple. Use Arrow Towers with no upgrades as much as possible early in the game. Do not spend gold on more expensive towers like canons and water in the early levels.
  • - One Cannon Tower costs about the same as two Arrow Towers. For about the first half of the game, having more arrow towers is just as effective and in many cases more effective than having only a few Cannon or more expensive towers.
  • - Do not build more towers than you realistically think you’ll need to beat the level. It’s very easy to want to throw in an extra tower for good measure, but every gold piece you can save in the early Tap Defense levels
  • - Upgrade your interest rate! It may be more fun to research new towers, but they won’t help you beat the game if you can’t afford to upgrade them later. I use all of my Halos except the last two on level 43 to upgrade interest.
  • - Don’t spend a lot of gold building fancy towers just trying to beat the bosses. You won’t lose much by letting a Devil or Hellbat get through, but you will completely mess up your chances of beating the game if you spend ¾ of your money trying to build expensive towers to stop them. The bosses are usually two to three times more powerful than the creatures in the levels before and immediately after them. Save your gold!
  • - Place your towers strategically. Anywhere there is a corner on the path or a U shaped turn, should be the first place you put your towers. Those should also be the places that get upgraded towers later in the game as they can shoot at the enemy for the longest amount of time.

Below are screenshots and brief descriptions of each level as I went through a game to show you how to beat it. It’s not a perfect game on my part, but I just wanted Continue reading ‘How to beat Tap Defense on the iPhone’

Technorati Tags: