You may some day encounter a situation in which you will require a wireless internet connection for a desktop computer. Perhaps you have decided to move your office from one room to another in your home. However, the new room does not have the cable or telephone connection you need to bring that computer online.
Due to the popularity of my first article regarding free alternatives to commercial Mac applications, I’ve decided to roll out a second part, shining the spotlight on more free applications for MakeUseOf’s Mac adopters. I hope you’ll like these applications just as well as their commercial counterparts, maybe even more since they’re free!
Jing is a screen-casting program which has come a long way since it first started. Their current version is pretty impressive because it integrates sharing to Screencast.com, Flickr and uploads to any FTP; you’ll automatically get a download link which you can share with your friends (something like Skitch). It does everything iShowU does and it even records from the microphone. The one thing it doesn’t allow me to do is adjust the video output quality. But hey, it’s pretty decent for a free app.
There are lots of things I dislike. Very few things I hate. One of the things that I hate with a passion is speeding tickets. I drive fast as I need to get where I am going. Now in my neighborhood I have a map in my head of all the speed traps. A speed trap is a spot that local police hang out at waiting to pounce on the next motorist speeding along the road.
They sit there hiding and pointing their radar gun. When someone speeds by they are going to get hit with a ticket. Aren’t there SO MANY other ways you would rather spend your money?
You know the old stereotype I’m sure - a Scotsman is careful with his money. A Scotsman loves a bargain. Well that is especially true with me. I hate to overspend and if you want to make me happy, give me a good deal on something. Especially on books. I love buying books (to the point of obsession) and I really hate overspending on them. I used to spend well over 100 Euros a month on books until my girlfriend made it clear it was either the books or her. Since then, I have been looking for ways to cut down on the monthly book budget.
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.
There are numerous ways to manage your money, Wesabe, Mint, just to mention a few but I have always found these to be a bit limiting. Mint for example requires your bank account information which is a major drawback.
I always speak up against all this privacy obsession, but while I don’t care if someone gets to my personal thoughts, I do care if they get to my money. There is a heated debate about Mint’s safety and policies and even if you don’t mind that part, if you have bank accounts outside the US, Mint won’t work anyway.
With gas prices in the United States soaring, the time has never been better to use all resources available to save some money. Check out the following websites for tips and other information you can use to save on money on fuel as prices seem to be going up and up!
GasBuddy has been around a long time now, and it one of the best ways to find out what stations in your area are charging. Stations are updated by volunteers on a daily basis - I am constantly surprised with how often the station prices are updated.
Probably you’re already familiar with the idea of comparison shopping. These are quite useful websites where you can compare product prices from pretty much every online retailer. During the last 3-4 months I discovered a number of cool websites that successfully implemented the same concept to other areas. Check them out.
I’ve tried many comparison shopping sites and can confirm that PriceGrabber is one of the best ones. Simply search for the product you want to buy and PriceGrabber will list all available retailers starting from the cheapest. If you’re not clear about what exactly you want to purchase, then you can browse products by categories and filter them further by specs, features and brand. Products can also be sorted by user ratings and reviews.
Being the type of guy that burns through money I jumped at the opportunity to review Mint. Mint is a finance tracking and budgeting platform much like Microsoft Money or Quicken. But the main difference is it is Online – if you don’t have a problem adding your banking information to Mint.com you can have access to a complete financial overview from any web browser.
Mint has been in Beta for about 3 months now and is showing somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 early adopters throwing in over 2 billion dollars of their hard earned accounts into Mint’s databases. 2 fricking billion dollars? That’s a lot of moolah…
Ebay is by far the most popular online marketplace. So in case you’re looking for a couple of free tools to help you get the best of it than read further. As usual, all free, and nothing useless. Search tools, apps to handle last minute bidding (both from web or mobile), ultimate bargain locater, and some more.
FINDING THE RIGHT ITEM:
Disclaimer: This is a paid review ordered by FreshBargains. Even though the company has paid for the review, our views are still our own and we are allowed to be negative if we want to! Besides, somebody has to pay the bills around here for the wild Make Use Of parties. Beer and girls don’t come cheap these days!
We have actually profiled FrehsBargains in MakeUseOf Directory about a week ago and were going to post it in the latest ‘Cool Websites’ roundup. But FreshBargains folks wanted to go with a full post instead, … we agreed.
Looking for a place to find some good deals or bargain discounts while shopping online for electronics, clothing, accessories, etc? Well, there are a good number of sites out there other than Fatwallet, which everyone in the world knows about. I’m going to list as many really good deal-finding shopping sites that I can, so check them out and see what you think!
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A very cool site that’s a mashup of deals from other sites like Slickdeals, Fatwallet, Gottadeal and lots more. Mostly tech-related stuff, but there are other things also. |
Over the last week I came across a couple of handy services that let users sell their old or broken iPods, cell phones and other gadgets. These aren’t a marketplace-style website but services that WILL buy your gadgets at a sound price. Since we haven’t seen anything of this kind before, I decided to run a quick comparison and see how they stand against eBay. Actually both of the services were already covered in MakeUseOf Directory, but in case you missed it, here is a quick overview:
When I was a young kiddie and the apple of my mother’s eye, I would spend part of my Saturday mornings watching Swap Shop on TV. Swap Shop was presented by British cheeky chappie Noel Edmonds and people would come on the show to swap their trading cards for a GI Joe, or their little brother in exchange for Yoda, and so on. Fast-forward twenty-five years and we now have more or less the same concept online.
NOTE: These sites are pre-dominantly US sites although it may be possible to register a non-US address. Check each site for details.
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