MakeUseOf » Nick Volpe

The Top 5 Sites To Find Your College Textbooks

Nick Volpe — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:01:48 +0000

As a college student, I would have to say that for me the most difficult part of financing higher education is tuition. Going to a private institution, and even a public institution, can be a very expensive life cost. Fortunately, there are scholarships and grants scattered all over the place just waiting for students to take advantage of.

With that taken care of, the second most difficult finance in college is textbooks. Textbooks can cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars per semester. For the average undergraduate college student that could amount to approximately $5,000 just for textbooks! As with tuition, there are great opportunities to save a lot of money on textbooks and my favorite methods live online.

These are my top 5 sites for buying, selling, trading, or renting college textbooks :

1. Half.com

Half.com is a subsidiary of eBay which is basically eBay without the bidding aspect. It predominantly focuses on person-to-person or business-to-person sales of books/textbooks, movies, music, and games/game systems which makes it a perfect choice for those who are interested in selling an old textbook or buying one used on the cheap.

Textbook listings give all the necessary information about the text and sorts copies for sale by quality. They also make it a breeze to list a book simply by entering the ISBN number.

Half.com charges a 15% commission to sellers and uses the eBay feedback system for user ratings so you can decide which sellers to trust.

2. Amazon.com

Amazon is one of the biggest, most respected, and most trusted online merchants so it would make sense that it would be a great choice for buying and selling new and used textbooks. Amazon’s textbook section is very identical to Half.com. They charge the same 15% commission for textbooks and pay shipping costs to the seller. However, it may be a bit more difficult than Half.com to sift through used books. This would be a great choice if you are familiar with and enjoy the Amazon shopping experience.

3. Chegg.com

Chegg has a very interesting business model. They rent textbooks rather than sell. This makes getting a hold of textbooks much cheaper and you don’t have to deal with selling them or holding on to them after you are done with the book.

Chegg is the Netflix of textbooks. How it works is simple. You go to the site and select the textbooks you need. You pay the one-time rental price for each book and pay for them to ship it to you. You then keep the book until you are finished with it or you have the option to purchase the book later. When you are finished with the book, revisit the site and you can print out a shipping label for the books you want to send back and you ship them back to Chegg. It’s as easy as that!

4. Socialbib

Socialbib is perhaps the most interesting way to get the textbooks you need while getting rid of the ones you don’t. This site allows you to “trade” books with other “traders.” How this works is you create an account on the site. By default, you have one credit. Credits earn you free books. To gain credits you give away your old textbooks.

So you are essentially trading books for FREE although it isn’t the same person you are getting a book from as the one you are giving a book to but in the end it works out. It is a great idea for saving cash and is worth a try.

5. Buy.com

Buy.com is another great online-only retailer with a great discount textbook section. Buy.com is similar to Amazon in that they sell just about everything from baby things to sports. They have highly competitive pricing and discounts and pretty much takes any form of payment including Google Checkout and Paypal.

Not only do they have great prices on products, they provide inexpensive shipping, and they even compare their prices to the prices of leading competitors so you know you’re getting a good deal.

How do you get your textbooks each semester? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Nick Volpe is a freelance blogger and web guru from techNETWORK.US, a provider of tech news, open source software, web development tools, useful tips, as well as podcasts, tech videos, and much more

Find Other Sites Running on your Hosting Server with YouGetSignal

Nick Volpe — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:40:43 +0000

If you do now or have ever run a website, you know how daunting it can be to maintain a web server. You need to become an expert on many topics like DNS, MX, CNAME, web languages, and so on. Many low traffic sites or beginner sites may be hosted on a managed and shared server to save time, money, and worry. This is a great solution but the fate of this solution depends on all of the clients hosted on the server.

If one site uses too many resources or a bad piece of code, it can crash the server taking down every site with it which in some cases can be thousands of websites. Wouldn’t it be useful if you could see what other kind of sites were on the same server as you?

You Get Signal has just the tool for this. It’s called a “Reverse IP Domain Check” and it takes a site URL or IP address and tells you all or many of the domains pointing to that server. This is a good way to check to see if your webhost or ISP is overselling or if there are very high traffic sites on the same server as you. By using this tool, you can see whether or not that $2 per month hosting plan based out of some guy’s basement in Russia is worth it or not. You will save yourself hours or potentially weeks or months of frustration from crashing sites and slow loading pages.

Although the “Reverse IP Domain Check” is an extremely useful tool for website owners, YouGetSignal.com also offers other utilities, some unique and some common. They offer the popular WHOIS Lookup Tool so you can check out who owns and manages a domain name, Phone Number Geolocator to find where a call originated, Port Forwarding Test to see if a port or ports are insecure on your computer, Visual Trace Route Tool to visualize the route of network traffic, and the nifty Network Location Tool to locate a physical network on a Google Map. YouGetSignal was originally created as a project from a Brigham Young University student but in my opinion is a very helpful collection of web tools in network and website management.

What web services or applications do you use to manage your networks or websites? Let us know in the comments.

ManyCam – Do More Things With Your Webcam

Nick Volpe — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:51:56 +0000

There are so many things you can do with a webcam or camera hooked up to your computer. You can do anything from take a picture to film a movie. There are many expensive programs that replaces elaborate hardware video and audio mixers but with the power modern personal computers contains, there is little reason to spend the money or learn these applications.

Maybe you want to use your webcam for multiple things at once, maybe you want add graphics, or maybe you want to have the ability to switch between multiple video sources such as a video capture of your desktop. If so, there are applications that can accomplish this.

ManyCam does all of the above. It is a free utility that lets you apply some more advanced features to video capture. If you use a webcam, DV cam, or simply want to capture your desktop, this program can get the job done with minimal fuss. Plug in your devices, make sure they are installed properly, and launch ManyCam. When the program is launched it will populate the notification area/system tray with an icon.

Add Effects

The first thing you are greeted with is the ‘effects’ tab. This tab allows you to add dynamic and static background graphics, cool objects, text, and more which complements your image or video capture. The options are not the most professional and sophisticated but it’s much better than I would expect for a freeware app that requires little setup. ManyCam also allows you to download new effects and graphics from their site.

Selecting Sources

There is also a ‘sources’ tab. This tab allows you to switch between connected webcams, DV cameras, and video capture devices. It also allows you to stream images, videos, and your desktop to any devices that accept video capture sources such as online streaming services (Ustream.tv, Stickam, Mogulus, etc.) or video chat programs like Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, Skype, and ooVoo.

All in all, this program is really cool for adding effects when you are chatting with your friends or when you want to show someone your desktop. It is not, however, a free solution to expensive video editing/mixing software but should be an alternative for simple needs. I find this program most useful for switching between multiple cameras on a computer to change camera angles without moving a single camera around when video chatting with people online. All you have to do is open ManyCam, go to your programs settings and select ManyCam as the video source, then switch between cameras within ManyCam.

Have you ever used video effects or video mixing software? What programs do you use for this and what do you use them for? We want to know so leave your comments and feedback below. We’d also like to know what you use your webcam for so please let us know about that as well.

(By) Nick Volpe is a freelance blogger and web guru from techNETWORK.US,a provider of tech news, open source software, web development tools, useful tips, as well as podcasts, tech videos, and much more.

The 3 Best Programs for Subscribing to Podcasts

Nick Volpe — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:59:50 +0000

There has been much confusion in the past as to what exactly a podcast is. To ease some of the confusion, it is basically an online show which can be in the form of audio or video that is downloaded on demand. Most notably, podcasts utilize RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS might even be how you subscribe to Make Use Of and podcasts work the same way. However instead of text posts you would be downloading audio or video.

An example of an audio podcast is Make Use Of’s own podcast. The real confusion sets in with the term ‘podcasting’. Despite the word “pod,” you do not need an iPod or any type of special device although you could use any device that supports mp3 files. So the big question lies in what is the best way to subscribe to your podcasts. The program you would use to subscribe is called a ‘feedreader’, ‘aggregator’, or ‘podcatcher’ and these are among my favorite recommendations for this.

Miro – This is my favorite client. Miro by default runs in your system tray to periodically download your subscribed podcasts as new episodes are available. When you open the program, it displays the Miro Guide which is a great directory of podcasts by categories. When you subscribe to podcasts, they list in the left sidebar and display the appropriate album art next to its name creating a clean organized list that is also capable of utilizing folders for more elaborate organization.

Miro is free, open source, cross platform, and perhaps its most unique feature is BitTorrent support which allows Peer-2-Peer podcast downloads rather than the traditional Server-Client downloads.

iTunes – This option is the most common option and mainly where podcast downloading originally began. The podcast subscription feature is a feature of the iTunes Music Store which makes it a little more difficult to figure out and not quite as straightforward. However just about every podcast is listed in its podcast directory.

iTunes, unlike Miro, does not minimize to the system tray forcing you to have the iTunes application open if you want to download episodes of podcasts. If you do have an iPod and that is how you listen to podcasts then you will want to use iTunes as podcasts download automatically to your iPod when you sync it with iTunes as you normally would.

Juice – This option is another open source solution. It is cross platform and has a very simple look. The interface is not as elegant as the others but offers a very straightforward method to download the podcasts you want. Unlike iTunes, Juice is an application intended specifically for podcasts and functions much like an RSS text feed reader.

What do you use for podcast subscriptions? Please let us know in the comments.

(By) Nick Volpe is a freelance blogger and web guru from techNETWORK.US,a provider of tech news, open source software, web development tools, useful tips, as well as podcasts, tech videos, and much more.

Securing Third Party Software With Secunia PSI

Nick Volpe — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:45:45 +0000

For a Windows user, the first order of business, at least for me, is usually security. Securing your computer means installing security software like a firewall, anti-virus, or spyware removal. It also means checking Windows updates and keeping your own installed software up to date. Updating your own software has always been a manual process or automating on a software-by-software basis. Depending on how many applications you run and what you use them for, this can be a fairly tedious process.

Thankfully, the days of manual software updates may very well be over thanks to efforts by a security firm called Secunia. Secunia has developed a great piece of software for Windows users called the Personal Software Inspector (PSI). They also offer the Network Software Inspector (NSI) for commercial users.

PSI is a free software application that indexes your currently installed programs and applications and checks for known vulnerabilities. So how is this helpful? Well, Windows Updates will check for applicable updates for your operating system, furthermore Microsoft Updates will update all of your Microsoft products. That leaves all of your other software up to you to keep track of security issues and vulnerabilities. If you’re like me, this is a lot of software and it’s not fun to keep track of. This is where PSI comes in.

This piece of software, by default, runs in the background to constantly monitor new applications and new updates. It is very light in system resources for what it does and you can turn off the background process. When you run the application, you are greeted with a friendly interface that updates you on the status of your system with charts that detail the total amount of programs you have installed, how many are insecure, how many are patched, and how many are no longer supported, or “end-of-life”. Tabs are provided to separate the insecure programs from the end-of-life and patched, or secure programs. The program gives you direct access to downloads, details about the program, and an option to re-scan the program in the event you fixed it yourself.

With the help of this program, anti-malware programs, Windows Updates, and safe practices you should be one step closer to an all around safer and better computing experience.

WordPress vs. Drupal – Content Management Systems

Nick Volpe — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:05:05 +0000

Do you remember back in the days of Web 1.0 before Google was really a verb and before Flickr lost the “˜e’? That was back when static web pages plagued the web. FrontPage and Dreamweaver were the common tools of webmasters all over. However, the world has changed. Programs are more so on the internet these days than they are on your computer. Sites like Facebook and MySpace try to add the most functionality to your online world making actual pieces of local software less and less appealing.

With that all being said, what is a “webmaster” to do when content and a clean interface are really what they want? Should they create an HTML page in Dreamweaver and update content directly on the page every time one of their writers submits an article to them? Theoretically they could but that would make their life more difficult than it really has to be. Instead they should turn to a Content Management System, or CMS.

Content Management Systems basically keep the content separate from the interface of the website while maintaining a clean look and endless possibilities. The next question becomes, what are my options and what should I use? In reality, there are very, very many options, but only some of the options really matter for personal users.

When I look for a CMS for a personal blog or website I look at a few key things:

Functionality

Price : If it’s for my personal website, it’d better be FREE! Also, be wary of how the software is licensed and how you are entitled to use the software.

Security : How fast are security vulnerabilities fixed? How many people contribute to bug fixes, etc.?

Extensibility: This goes along with functionality. Does the CMS offer plug-ins or extensions? That is, can I add functionality and expand my site if I wish to do so in the future?

This article is going to focus on two major Content Management Systems that, in my opinion, are the only two that matter or have something to offer for everyone. You can, of course, dispute this in the comments. Let us know what CMS you use or favor.

WordPress

The first CMS to highlight is called WordPress (which is what Make Use Of runs on). WordPress was started in 2003 and is released as free, open-source software, meaning it is developed for and by the community. WordPress is a very functional, extensible, and easy to use blogging content management system. With WordPress you can create just about anything from a family photo journal to large scale news site.

At WordPress.org, you can find the open source software that you can run on your webhosting service. It takes a little bit of know how to set up but if you’re lucky, your webhost might have an auto-installer for it. For those of you that don’t have hosting or don’t want to get into the configuration and setup, WordPress.com gives you your own free WordPress blog. It is like a blogging social network of sorts. WordPress is very secure and reliable because of its large user base and development backing. It is extensible through thousands of plug-ins to use on your WordPress site. Your site can grow as you grow.

Drupal

The next CMS is Drupal. Drupal is an open source content management system framework which means you can build anything from a static two page site to a high traffic social network. With this huge pool of flexibility comes a much more advanced set up and configuration. It will take you longer to get your site ready but it may make more sense in the long run.

The latest version of Drupal 6.x, gives a very clean admin panel with status and error logs so you can track most errors and know when your installation is out of date. This applies to all of your modules (referred to as modules in the Drupal community), themes, and core. Drupal, like WordPress, is extremely extensible and secure. It also has a very large user base and developer base. Best of all, Drupal is my favorite price – free!

If you are developing a website or online platform, take into consideration WordPress’ ease of use and Drupal’s framework capacity. Check out their websites and real world examples, be sure they have themes or plug-ins that you do or may need later so you can be future-proof for whatever may happen in your website’s potential future. Good luck and may the best CMS win!

(By) Nick Volpe is a freelance blogger and web guru from techNETWORK.US,a provider of tech news, open source software, web development tools, useful tips, as well as podcasts, tech videos, and much more.

Cool Windows Media Center Alternatives

Nick Volpe — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:05:59 +0000

Increasingly, more and more people are turning to internet-based solutions to consume their content. Many of them are switching to solutions that hook up to televisions. I find the best solution with the most control is a Media Center PC. Some people, however, do not turn to this option due to the lack of flexibility in the Windows Media Center software. I am going to tell you about some of the best FREE Windows Media Center alternatives that I have found.

MediaPortal ““ MediaPortal is an open source alternative to the Windows-based Media Center software.

It is compatible with Windows only and sports a customizable interface that, by default, looks very similar to the Windows Media Center interface.

The main benefit to this program besides being open source is its vast collection of plug-ins.

This makes it very simple to add utilities to the application such as new functionalities, skins, and numerous codecs.

GB-PVR ““ This open source solution is very similar to MediaPortal.

In contrast, however, GB-PVR requires a more advanced pre-configuration but provides more plugins than MediaPortal out of the box.

This program also seems more to have minor bugs here and there but is a worthy alternative.

MythTV ““ This solution is a very complex solution but provides probably the most flexibility out of any media center alternative I have seen to date.

The previous mentioned solutions install on top of the Windows operating system. MythTV, however, runs on top of a Linux distribution or Mac OS X on a dedicated machine. This means you have to use the computer for MythTV only and nothing else. For many people this is probably not an ideal solution as it requires knowledge of Linux and hardware that is compatible with Linux.

This solution is for advanced media center users that are looking for a much more advanced solution. Not only does this machine run off of a dedicated box but also has built in gaming, webbrowsing, news, telephony, and DVD ripping. MythTV can be used standalone or in conjunction with multiple MythTV servers to create a “cluster” of media centers that can perform various functions.

TVersity ““ TVersity is perhaps the best of both worlds in regards to MythTV and the other mentioned solutions. It installs on Windows PC and allows you to create a library with the media on that machine as well as internet content and stream it across your network.

It includes support to stream content to a plethora of devices such as Xbox 360, Wii, iPhone, PSP, PS3, as well as other PCs on your network. With some advanced configuration you can also stream your media across the web, however I find it to be a more worthwhile tool for home network usage.

On the downside, TVersity doesn’t support TV tuner cards which means it cannot be used as a DVR or to watch live TV but the vast list of supported devices should make up for it.

Note :

This is by no means a complete list of media center solutions currently available. Most of these solutions are for more advanced users to configure so please be aware.

Have you any suggestions about these or other Media Center solutions? Let us know in the comments below.

Nick Volpe is a freelance blogger and web guru from techNETWORK.US, a provider of tech news, open source software, web development tools, useful tips, as well as podcasts, tech videos, and much more.