Internet shopping turned up to 11

So, you want that big shiny fancy thing

Eyeballing a laptop?
Thinking about getting a TV?

Or even just a cat carrier

Online shopping is historically much cheaper than physical

So, here is the thing, you can take it a step further.

How?

Step 1: Get a credit card that gives cash back on things.

A few options would be americanexpress prefered blue or bluecash everyday, chase freedom, etc. Make sure you get one with warranty extension.

I listed Americanexpress prefered blue for an unusual reason. It gives 6% cash back in grocery stores. That means buying amazon.com giftcards in the grocery store can actually save you money.


If you can't get a credit card, you could always sign up for the paypal business debit card, which has 1% cash back. You can set it up to use your bank account as a backup source of funds, which makes it function mostly like a normal debit card. 1% cash back doesn't sound like much, but I use it to pay for school, so I made like 40$ in the last 3 months. You get 4 cents per gallon off per 1% cashback, roughly when buying gas. Unfortunately when I asked paypal, they said they don't cover warranty coverage, while when I asked mastercard directly, they said they do. I love mixed information. */sarcasm*

If you have the amex prefered blue card, that's 6% off on groceries (and by proxy, amazon gift cards), 3% off gas, and 1% off general crap. Sadly that card has a 75$ a year fee, which is why a lot of people get the bluecash every day instead.

Chase freedom is pretty badass, because they give 5% of on gas 6 months a year, and 5% off on amazon for the last 3 months of the year.

Now every time you buy something, you get 1% back, and it has a warranty extension of a year.

Step 2: Sign up for ebates and\or fatwallet.

Whenever you are going to go buy something online, check with these site first. They offer cash back on purchases, and they are loaded on coupons. They use affiliate links, so they make cash, and then hand some of it back to you.

For example, right now on both sites, if you wanted to buy a HP laptop from the manufacturer directly, you could get 3% cash back, and a 20% discount on 999.99+, 25% discount on 1199.99+, or 30% on 1399.99+ purchases.

That's a HUGE deal. They also have 2 year warranties instead of 1 year when you buy it from them directly. Oh wait, with the credit cards in question, that just became 3 year warranty.

Yep, that's right, 3 years off the bat without you paying extra for it.

Step 3:
What about other ways? You could sign up for viglink which is an affiliate marketing network funded by google. They have 30,000 online shops which you can make commission off of. I've made like 160$ off of it, barely trying. It's not amazing, but it's not bad.

You make links, give them to people, and then you get paid if they buy stuff.

Sadly, you can't commission off of yourself easily. But hey, what about a significant other? You two can both sign up, and commission off of eachother!


So now you're thinking "3-8%, who cares?"

You were going to buy that stuff *anyways*

8% discount on a 1000$ item? That's 80 bucks dude

That's it for now, leave comments, nstuff below

What microsoft *should* have done with the xbox one

What microsoft *should* have done with the xbox one.
They should have been upfront, with a ruleset like this.

They could have created a "digital market" which players could sell their games to eachother, at a 30% cut, minimum cut of 5$, unless the game is without a publisher, which then it can be minimum 3$. Microsoft could then split that money 30/70 (microsoft gets 30) with the publisher/developer/whatever.

If you want to buy a game, you list the price you are willing to pay.
If you want to sell a game, you list the price you are willing to sell for. Your account would have buy orders and sell orders. If you have the lowest sell order, someone can buy your game immediately. If you have the highest buy order, someone can sell you a game, immediately.

Microsoft could sell the new copies of games at a price slightly above market price using an algorithm, but never higher than 60$.

The publishers can choose to have a sale below that price, at any given point, at their decision.

Then to install a game required an internet check, and once per week you need to run an integrity check. It could run the integrity check every time the console stops being used for more than 20 minutes, up to a maximum of once per day.

All money acquired from selling games, could only be used to buy games.

They could then create a game "loaning" system, that allowed another user to use the game, but with some limitations. If you loan a game, that game becomes a game that needs an hourly check in, for both the owner, and the loanee. Both can't play simultaneously, unless it's multiplayer, together.

If you bought a game in a physical store, when you activate the game, you are given the game at the current market price, and are refunded the difference as xbox credit.

Problem solved.

Jeez windows, lets put you on a diet

So, all of y'all with solid state drives know the bizaareness that is windows 7 or 8.

Windows 7 or 8 64 bit has an initial install size of around 18-20gigs. It can be upward to 50 gigs if you're not careful.


Wait, 50 gigs? HOLY SHIT MAN, WHAT KIND OF BITTY FOOD IS THAT OS EATING?

Well, it's not exactly the OS data persay.

There are 4 massive sections to windows, and 2 of the 4 get massively expansive, the more memory you have.

WinSXS gets huge
Virtual Memory gets huge
Hibernate.sys gets huge
SoftwareDistribution gets huge
So, what the pronged stabby utensils are these things?

WinSXS is a folder that contains a copy and a dynamic link to every single version of every single DLL you ever needed, for every software you have installed. This was created to fix the missing DLL hell that existed in XP.

Uninstalled unneeded applications, regardless of the drive the app is installed on can remove a lot of it. It's imperfect, but it works. There really isn't much else you can do here.

Virtual memory for some reason is set to match your ram. That was fine during the days when people had like 1 gig of ram. If you have 16 or 32 gigs, that's obnoxious. Sometimes it's set to be a dynamic variable, which is even worse because it causes horrific fragmentation.

If you open up a file explorer, find "computer", right click it and press properties. Then click advanced system settings, then under the advanced tab, under the performance section, press settings. Switch to the advanced tab, press change, select custom size, and set both the minimum, and maximum size to 2048. Press Ok until you're out of this mess. The next time you reboot, your virtual memory will be 2 gigs.

Fixing hibernate.sys is easy! Just get rid of it.
Press start (or open start screen), type cmd, rightclick on it and run as administrator.
Let windows user account control approve it's usage, if it asks.

In cmd, type
powercfg -h off

Press enter. The next time you reboot, you will no longer be able to hibernate. Do note, on windows 8, this will slightly increase boot times. If you're on a SSD, you won't care too much though. To reverse it, powercfg -h on works.

This file on a 32 gig ram system is 32 gigs. That's frightening.

Ok. What the heck is SoftwareDistribution? It's a data storage location for all of your old windows updates.

It's typically found at C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution
On windows 8, it currently can't get big, but on windows 7, it can take up a few unnecessary gigs.

Finish all of your windows updates, as normal (do them, right meow!), then reboot, and then delete the entire contents of this folder. If something won't delete for whatever reason, delete everything but that file.


Doing all of this will slim a WTF HUGE windows 7 or 8 install down to 10 to 14 gigs. This is much more manageable on a SSD


OH btw guys, if you ever use a virtual machine of windows, all of these steps will also apply! Save your space, guys.

Do note guys, if you try these things on windows 2008 R2 or 2012 server, particularly as a virtual machine, I recommend playing around with the virtual memory quantity as necessary. On 2012, you may consider NOT disabling hibernate, because it can increase boot times, which increases downtime during reboot, or the time to load an instance on a cloud provider.

Now I want a cup of tea, cheers!

My Journey With Knitting #1: The Legend of Zelda Triforce Eagle Blanket

Hay guiz! Pun Intended here again. It's been far too long since I've poked my head in, hasn't it?

Let's all have a group hug!

Some of you may have seen floating around tumblr a knitted blanket with the Triforce Eagle on it from The Legend of Zelda. If you haven't, well now you have.

Intel haswell, build advice

So, you may have noticed intel haswell just came out.
I'm not going to into reviews. Haswell uses less overall platform power, and is about 6 to 10% faster than ivybridge at a given clock speed. This is simply build advice.

I helped a friend come up with a build for his computer, so I investigated the available hardware.

As usual, asrock offers a good deal with crap warranties. Asus has high end parts, that cost more. Everyone else is somewhere in the middle.

What threw me off though, was the prices.

Battle of the video players

There are tons of media players out there. A lot of them are good, but which one is the best? It's really frustrating to dig through all the information, so here, this is what I know.

Massive Anime Marathon

Seriously, I need to rename this blog sometime. I started off with a tech blog, and moved onto a much broader variety of things.

Recently, I've been on a massive anime kick. I watched ghost in the shell, evangelion, gurren lagann, angelbeats!, and rosario+vampire.

I wanted to watch some anime before I went to Anime Central, and after I got back, I just didn't stop.

This has been tons of fun.

Any ideas on what I should watch next? Leave comments below.