Use Bing.com to get Cashback at eBay

Want to buy something off of eBay that is listed using ‘Buy it Now’ and save some money?  Well, Bing’s Cashback deal is your ticket.  If you haven’t heard, Bing.com is Microsoft’s new Search Engine to compete with Google.  It’s just gone through a name change – it used to be called Live.com.

Bing offers a service called ‘Bing Cashback’ which gives you money back on your purchase if you click on a Bing.com link prior to buying an item.

Click to read exactly how it works.

1.) Go to Bing.com and sign up for a Bing.com Cashback account.

2.) Search for a product and find one that offers ‘Bing Cashback’.

3.) Click on the link, purchase your item on its regular website, and the cashback is yours.

Here’s a detailed example, using eBay.

1.) First, we need to know which ‘keyword’ will bring up the ‘Cashback’ link on Bing.com for eBay.   Keywords ‘Nintendo Wii’ are currently good for a 10% cashback on all eBay Buy it Now items.

2.) Click on the link, go to eBay and buy your item.  You’ll see the ‘Bing Cashback’ logo on your eBay checkout page.

3.) That’s it!  After 60 days Bing.com will deposit the money to your Paypal account.

Step 1  Click on the Images to Enlarge them.

The Bing.com link after searching 'Nintendo Wii' - click on this and you're directed to eBay.

Step 2

At eBay, notice the Bing.com logo at the top, and find your item.

Step 3

eBay Checkout Page, with Bing.com Cashback logo

Dear Moniker customer:

I’m contacting you today to inform you of an unfortunate incident at SnapNames, and to let you know what the company is doing to address it.

Recently, SnapNames discovered that an employee had set up an account on the SnapNames system under a false name and, under this name, bid in SnapNames auctions.  This is a clear violation of our internal policy and was not approved by the company.  We deeply regret that this conduct has impacted our customers.

Extent of impact

This conduct affected a small percentage of SnapNames auctions:

• Bidding affected approximately five percent of total SnapNames auctions since 2005, most of which occurred between 2005 and 2007.
• The incremental revenue from the bidding represented approximately one percent of SnapNames’ auction revenue since 2005.

No matter the level of impact, SnapNames takes this matter extremely seriously.  When the matter was discovered, the company immediately closed the account in question and began a thorough investigation.  The employee has also been dismissed from the company.

SnapNames further discovered that, on certain recent and limited occasions, when the employee won an auction, the employee secretly arranged to refund from SnapNames to the fictitious account a portion of the winning bid amount.

Remedy to affected customers

Though on some occasions the employee won the auction, in many instances the bidding caused the ultimate auction winner to pay more for a name than had the employee not participated in the auction.

SnapNames neither condones this conduct nor wants to be perceived as benefiting from the conduct.  Accordingly, we have decided that regardless of the circumstance, in every auction where the employee’s fictitious account submitted a bid which resulted in a higher price being paid by the winning bidder, SnapNames will offer a rebate, with 5.22% interest (the highest applicable federal rate during the affected time period), to affected customers for the difference between the prices they actually paid and the prices they would have paid, had the employee not bid in the auctions.  The rebate will be available in cash or in credit on the SnapNames platform, at your discretion.

SnapNames has moved quickly to address this situation.  The company has retained Rust Consulting, an independent third party, who will administer the rebate offer.  Within the next week, Rust Consulting will contact affected customers to provide details regarding the offer.

Your business and ongoing relationship are important to us and we can assure you that we have taken all necessary steps to ensure the integrity of the platform and reinforced controls and procedures to avoid any possibility of further breach.  These include:

• Enhanced monitoring of bidding activity for suspect behavior
• Additional controls over financial transactions
• Specific domain name registration policies for employees

In the meantime, if you have any questions, you may consult the FAQs here, or contact the SnapNames support team:

By e-mail:                      support@snapnames.com

Phone:                          +1 (866) 690-6279 (toll-free in the U.S.)
+1 (503) 241-8547 (outside the U.S.)

SnapNames, and all in the Oversee family of companies, are deeply disappointed with this incident.  Since its founding in 2000, SnapNames has been committed to the principles of fairness and trust; the company wants to assure customers—through both words and actions—that it remains committed to those principles.

Thank you again for your business, and for your ongoing trust in SnapNames.

Sincerely,

Jeff Kupietzky                                        Craig Snyder

President and CEO                                General Manager, SnapNames.com

SnapNames

1600 SW 4th Avenue, Suite 400

Portland, OR 97201

An easy way to access both at the same time, without having to log out of one and then into the other, is to simply use two different browsers.  For example, you can log into Gmail account 1 using Firefox, then Gmail account 2 using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and even Gmail account 3 using Google Chrome.

Since each browser keeps track of its own cookies, you can have unique sessions on the same site (Gmail, eBay) without one inferring with the other.

Yeah, it’s incredibly simple, but very useful.  Thank the browser wars!

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Canon Rebel XT

Canon does not seem to provide a driver for the Canon Rebel XT camera that is compatible with Windows Vista 64 bit.   This leaves you with the option if purchasing a compact flash reader to transfer you photos – but, not anymore.

All you need to do to get Windows Vista 64 to recognize your camera is to change one setting in your camera’s setup screen.  Turn on your Canon Rebel XT, Press the ‘Menu’ button and go to the 2nd menu.  Then, under ‘Communication’ change it from ‘PC Connection’ to ‘Print/PTP’.  Yes, it seems counter intuitive but it works!
That’s it.  Told you it was easy.

One more video after the break.

1.) A tribute to Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear.  Sadly the last episode in the series (ever??) today.

2.) Some amazing trials riding in Ediburgh.

This example is setup to redirect to another page in 2 seconds. When a page contains this JavaScript, it will be redirected to another page that you specify in the “window.location=“. You can change the number of refresh seconds by changing the “move()’,2000 to the number of seconds you’d like.

Example:

1000 = 1 second
3000 = 3 seconds
Place this code between the <head> and </head> tags

<script language=”JavaScript”> var time = null function move() { window.location = ‘http://www.yourdomain.com’ } //–> </script>

Place this code in your <body> tag

<body onload=”timer=setTimeout(’move()’,2000)”>

The free trunk after a little work.

Ever since I scored some great vintage camera gear the other week, I’ve been keeping my eye on the Craigsist free section in Marin for any potential finds, and today I came up lucky.  It was advertised just as ‘Old Steamer Trunk’.  No picture, no further description.  Just a phone number, which I called within 8 minutes of the ad being posted.  I was already the 2nd person to call, but they weren’t able to pick up the trunk right away.  Just my luck – so off to San Rafael (just 5 miles up the road).

The trunk was definately cool looking, huge and dusty.  A bonus though – it included the key to the lock.  I was able to fit it in the Saab without problems, thanks to the fact that is has the roofless option.  The ulitity of this car (1993 Saab 900 Convertible) is suprising.

So, I got the trunk home, cleaned it off with a wet rag, rubbed some furniture polish on it, then some wax and put it in the living room.  Above is the ‘after’ pic, here’s the ‘before’.

Trunk in the Saab

The offending capacitors on the B&W 600 speaker.

I bought some great (I thought) speakers at a thrift shop on Valencia in San Francisco the other day.  Amidst all the usual crap Sanyo and Matsui plastic junk, I spotted some all black speakers on the bottom shelf with the B&W badge.  Knowing that they make a quality speakers, I overlooked the holes in the speaker grill and the bruised corners and took them the checkout to pay my $25 finders fee.

They felt nice and heavy, and when I plugged them into my Beomaster 1900 amp, they sounded pretty good.  Until I moved the balance control over to the left speaker.  All mids and lows, but no highs.  I removed the grill and confirmed my suspicion – the tweeter wasn’t working.  I opened up the speaker and, woah, just a loose wire.  The red wire wasn’t connected at all, so I connected it and waited for victory.  But it didn’t come, still nothing out of the tweeter.

All the blue caps will be replaced.

So I opened up the speaker again and took out all the soundproofing.  I looked at the connection box, and spotted the problem.  The capacitor had a white ooze all over it, and the plastic underneath it was melted.  It seemed to me that, in audio nerd speak, ‘the caps were blown’.

After a little consulting at AudioKarma.com a friendly audio expert reccmmended some new caps for me.

Since the 2.2 ohm 5W resistor was in the trouble zone, I would just replace it. The issue looks like it was caused by the resistor getting too hot.
If you want to, you can replace the 2.2 ohm resistor with a single Mills 2 ohm resistor, rather than 2 resistors to get an exact value, I didn’t know how anal you are about getting things perfect (I am)

Okay, so order two of these http://www.parts-express.com/pe/psho…Number=027-242
two of these
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/psho…Number=027-238
and two of these
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/psho…Number=027-244
and two of these
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/show…rtnumber=005-2

So, there you have it, my next project.  Stay tuned.

Comparing the stats for Toprural delivered by Google Analytics with his own 3rd-party solution, he finds that, while his own system (AT Internet’s XiTi) says 37.8% of visitors come via Google, GA says it’s 71.8%. The core of the problem, he discovers, is the good old cookie window. It turns out the default cookie window Google ascribes to visitors that arrive on a site via Google is six months. Six months!

So, every visit a user happens to make to a site for the six months after having once visited that site via Google is ascribed to the search engine. The standard window for display media is 30 days, a sixth of the length Google has opted for, while we’re typically asked to assign search cookie windows of a couple of days at most.

Read the full article here.