A real ad found on Craigslist from a creative seller.

Dear Techlife,

As a long time reader, I was excited by your column “Modern Day Alchemist.” (Editor’s Note: Column titled “Modern Day Alchemy“) I had read your experience with Freecycle and while that was good, my stuff is worth money to me. So how do I turn that stuff into both empty space AND money? Your column on Ebay and Craiglist was great. It inspired me to start the process using Ebay. I have sold a few things and it seemed pretty easy. So first thank you. But then I ran into a dilemma, for a heavy item,  a TV, I don’t want to ship it so how do I know what to list it for on Craigslist?  Any help?

Spring Cleaning for Profit

Dear Profit:

Your signature was so awesome it became the title to this column. What a wordsmith. Interestingly Techlife offices have a story for you, but be prepared for the twist.

Many years ago the Techlife offices bought a 36″ Sony television. In those days it was the largest picture tube on the market.  It was great TV, with a beautiful picture on a flat glass screen. The massive television weighed nearly 300lbs and was bulky and awkward. Moving the television always took at least two adults. Shortly thereafter the era of HD was unleashed. The Sony did a great job early on keeping up with the quality of the first HD sets on the market. Visitors often asked if we had a new HD TV because the picture was so crisp.

Over time HD sets improved and then the second phase of television development occurred. Thin. From plasma to LCD the surfaces became larger and the depth became smaller. The world was excited by crisp HD images on a canvas not thicker than, well, a canvas. “Thanks for the history lesson, professor. I just want to sell my TV.” I can hear you thinking.

As our story continues Techlife decided it was time to get a new thin HDTV. What to do with the Sony? As you noted Ebay is not an option leaving Craiglist.  I used two methods to research price.

Search Craigslist for the model number and compare existing listings – This was simple but unlike Ebay, Craigslist doesn’t provide data completed sales data. Sometimes you see the same item listed a second time with a reduced price which is a clue. Craigslist can be a science.

Search Priceonomics for the model number and compare existing listings – Priceonomics is a startup (Dec. 2011) with the goal to be “the price guide for everything.”  They started out with price guides for 50,000 categories of used items including: bicycles, televisions, speakers, monitors, turntables, computers and cell phones. The “simple” goal to have price estimates for everything bought and sold. Ambitious aren’t they? As of this publication they have 21 categories and 163 sub-categories.

Great. I had a price range, I took some photos and listed it for $10 less than the lowest end of the range on Craigslist just wanting it gone.  And nothing happened. People don’t want to pay for a big bulky TV when they can buy a sleek thin one I reasoned. Next I turned to Freecycle, someone out there would want it for FREE. Of course the same problem existed. Who want’s a behemoth when svelte is in? Finally I reached out to my network and offered it to a non-profit. Happily a few group homes replied and were eager.  One showed up with a truck and picked it up.

The twist? Figure out first off if what you have is worth selling or would a donation better serve everyone. “Profit” might just be you having more free space than you had before.

Look out! This is a warning to everyone who has ever bought a digital camera, and for all those future digital camera purchases. Don’t install the software! The first thing many readers are saying is, “Wait if I don’t install the software, how do I get my photos and movies off the camera?”

Here’s a secret the camera manufacturers don’t want you to know, you already have that software in most cases. That’s right, the cat is out of the bag. Now any good hardware company will argue you “need” their software but in reality  you don’t. Unless of course you do, tricky camera makers.

A few weeks ago a Techlife reader was taking their new camera out for a spin. They shot some photos and recorded some video and got back to the computer to transfer it. Lo and behold they had never installed the included software so they asked me if they should. What do you think I would say? The title of this column should clue you in.

“How do I get my photos and video off the camera then?” they asked.

Cameras are big thumbdrives

Cameras are truly big storage device enclosures with a lens. Obviously they do much more, but to your computer they are just another drive. If you pop out the portable storage often times an SD card,  a computer can accept them with a USB card reader. The camera company often preaches for a user to connect the camera via included cable directly to the PC. Of course then the more modern operating systems attempt to detect the type of camera and then offer a dialog asking what you want to do.

Since most start up guides explain you should install their software first, the dialog box has you naturally choosing the “camera software”. But look at the dialog box from the Techlife computer (see image). Notice the Secure Digital Storage Device, that’s the card taken out of the camera and put in the computers SD card reader.  I then have three Picture Options and some other General Options.  The simplest option is often the best.

How to get your Photos without Camera Software

1. Under General Options choose Open folder to view files
2. You will see a basic folder view with all the files
3. Simply choose the images you want and copy them to the folder on your computer
4. Then delete the files off the SD card

No additional software was needed. It was easy and something most users are comfortable with doing; copying files from one place to another.

Camera Makers Fight Back

Bringing us back to the Techlife reader, who followed this How to with ease for their photos. Then asked about the movie files.  After careful review it seems the camera shipped from the manufacturer set to record in a non-standard format. Worse there was no mention of this anywhere and the only way to access the few movies were, you guessed it, the software that shipped with the camera. The simple fix, switch the camera to record in a standard movie format and ignore the installed software once again.

New Camera? File Basics

For all new camera purchases, take a few test shots and test movies before you do anything.  If your the files are easy to copy to your computer with the additional software great. You’re done. If they aren’t, change the file format the camera saves in and try again until you do.  In the end the camera should have files that allow you do use the software you want to modify the still images and the movies, not the other way around.

And what of our Techlife reader? Happy to report the movies are now set to record in a standard format, and we should see a lot of new cat videos on YouTube.

Click. Click. Click. There is not much more satisfying a sound. Sorry I realize because this Techlife you likely think I meant the sound of a mouse or a keyboard. Actually something much more clickable – LEGOS! There have been countless articles, fan sites, acronyms (AFOL, SNOT) and more created for this very physical toy which has grown in spite the of the evolution of the digital age. It’s a testament to the creativity and simplicity that allows anyone to sit down and start playing immediately.

But this is Techlife, and we want to provide five very different LEGO experiences in the online world. Our summaries won’t do these justice, so please jump off and explore them all.

Life of George

Help George with your building skills. A LEGO official product that combines a free iPhone/iPod app with physical brick set. This takes the best thing about LEGO; the ability to create endless new things with the same bricks and combines it with an interactive story about George. The challenges you are presented with help move the story along. A race against the clock puzzler combined with a cool snap a photo of your creations to check accuracy make this a really unique meld of physical and digital and story and game. (may contain an easter egg or too)

Rebrickable.com

Rebrickable makes replay endlessly amazing. It’s the ultimate unofficial LEGO replay resource. LEGO sets always provide instructions to build the pictured item. Some sets even allow for a few more items from the same pieces.  Simply enter some existing LEGO set numbers you own and the power of the database sparks to life. As of this writing, 6436 sets and more than 1 million parts power the database and the suggestion engine often provides multiple sets you could build with your parts on hand. Even better there are photos to help you along the way, just like real LEGO instructions.

Cuusoo

Unusual name. Still in beta. Cuusoo is an official LEGO site that is a simple to use crowd sourcing tool. Non-employees who are fans for LEGO submit designs they have built. If the designs reach 10,000 supporters, LEGO turns on the production of these into official sets with the designer sharing in the proceeds. To date three projects have hit the 10,000 supporter mark including a submarine, a satellite, and most recently a Minecraft model. Interesting to note how LEGO really adds value in helping design the models after they reach evaluation.  The creative initial Minecraft model is quite different from the production model, Minecraft Micro World which looks even better.

The Brothers Brick

Earlier I mentioned AFOL, and The Brothers Brick is a blog for Adult Fans of LEGO. Started in 2005, the same time as Techlife, The Brothers Brick is a showcase for LEGO creations from around the world. They sprinkle in new set releases, news about events, and even a bit of education. I learned and built a Studs Not On Top (SNOT) creation after reading about how many AFOL use this method to showcase how the small bumps that connect one brick to another are hidden with this method of building. One of  The Brothers Brick contributors was a bit part in helping get the Minecraft Micro World built on Cuusoo.

Rebrick

Rebrick is another LEGO official site also in beta. The site attempts to form a community of users around LEGO creations. Rebrick promises in multiple places it won’t use the site to advertise or market. With a name that’s confusing compared to Rebrickable, contains less high end quality builds and writing than highlighted on The Brothers Brick and lacks the interactivity of Cuusoo, Rebrick is worth exploring for a few minutes.  It has an easy-to-use tool to bookmark and share things found in other online locations. Re-brick could use a bit of a re-think.

Have another online place you love to explore the world of LEGO. Share it.

Money. You work hard for it. You save. You look at how you can amass more of it. It hasn’t been since the sell an item on Ebay how-to of  ”Modern Day Alchemy” that Techlife delivered an article about money. (Editor’s note: “Modern Day Alchemy” was the most recent published syndicated Techlife column.) (Author’s note: The proceeding editor’s note is completely fabricated for artistic license, but it did look highly impressive.) So prior to the how-to on using Ebay, the last time I spoke of money was back in 2009 with “Freecycle – Give, Get, Save“.

One thing readers often comment about is their confusion after reading a column. Upon hearing this remark, like any good columnist I make plans how the next time I will just dial it back. Make it easier to understand. But then you get deep into a subject about online cartography, such as “Why North is No Longer Up” and realize, maybe there are readers who don’t know what cartography means or what how it would relate to immersive photographic cartography. And right there a reader says, “I’m lost, I didn’t realize I picked up the New England Journal of Medicine.” Clearly they are lost because cartography is the study and making of maps and likely would be a minor side bar in the New England Journal of Medicine. I wonder though; “Hey you, yes you, the reader. Your epidermis is showing.”

In an effort to bring a bit of fiscal responsibility to Techlife-  Wait sorry, in easier terms, in an effort to showcase how to save you some money I have a simple piece of advice for your online shopping. Don’t checkout. Of course I don’t mean, never. That would make it hard to get anything purchased. Instead it might be better to say, slow down when checking out. When you purchase anything these days, many people as suggested by an early Techlife column, are conditioned to read reviews. Learning from other users the positives, negatives and little tricks of products and services helps improve decisions and buying habits. This is being a smart consumer.

I specifically said “save you some money.” You are nodding your head, saying to yourself, “I stuck with him this long, let’s see where he is going.” There are many sites that exist to offer online shopper’s coupon codes, Retail Me Not is easy to use and user driven. The site has coupon codes for more than 150,000 sites. The strength of the site is the data around each coupon code. Users can rate the codes providing a success rate of each code. A recent search for Amazon.com coupon codes found the average discount was $40. There were 20 codes listed as “active” which means more than 50% success rate and recent usage. There were another 32 codes listed as unreliable, which is based on success rates less than 50% and age of the code.  What this means is with more than 50 coupon codes for just a single site, albeit a popular one, Retail Me Not is a site to visit EVERY time you are starting to make an online purchase on any web site. Be sure to share how much you have saved? To date I have saved over $500 using this site. Savings like that is habit forming.

As the new year begins, time to think about fall clean up. You know the clean up you said you would do to be ready for the holiday season. Oh yeah, now you remember. That one. Time to evaluate the 1980 toaster oven instruction manual and the -. Wait what’s that? You said the manual is garbage? Well have I got a story for you. Anything to procrastinate the clean up right?

In a previous Techlife, “Freecycle – Give, Get, Save“ I highlighted Freecycle, a service for getting rid of items to local community members. Many readers still refer to that column but add “their” items have value; like the gold plated fondue set, never opened? Or the slightly used collection of every MAD magazine that has Star Wars on the cover?  Easy answer, use Ebay or Craigslist depending on the item. Raise your hand if you have?

A Simple Ebay How To

Ebay and Craigslist both are 17 years old. Yes, really. Here’s the primer for a seller. Ebay gives your item view to a worldwide audience and handles the financial transaction smoothly while taking about 10% of the final sales price. The seller handles shipping.  Craigslist offers a sales tool with a more local focus and charges nothing for listing and selling relying on the two parties to meet and exchange cash and goods.

A friend had some Nintendo DS games which sell well on Ebay, so we collected the inventory. My friend had smartly kept the instruction books and boxes too. While reviewing things he realized he sadly had lost a game.

“Guess this instruction book and box are garbage.”

My simple reply was, “It costs nothing to list on Ebay.”

“C’mon this is garbage. The game is missing. I’m not going to list it. Waste of time.”

“Let me try.”

“Fine, have at it.”

We took a simple, clear photo of each game and the box and instructions, figured out a fair cost for shipping and clicked “sell” on Ebay. We built the listing page of each item by adding our photo and a clear easy to understand description. By starting  the listing price at a penny we hoped to generate some excitement and take what the market would bear. And yes we did this for the “garbage” too. We listed the box and instructions only, highlighting no game was included. The auctions began. It was fun and entertaining watching page views climb, seeing more and more people watch our auctions. (Watching is Ebay’s way of letting a shopper keep an eye on an auction without committing.)

Everything was getting bids except the “garbage.” I took my lumps and ribbing, always pointing out there were people watching the box and instructions so maybe a last minute bid. And then all the auctions ended. My friend was right. We did not get a single bid for the garbage. So I asked, if I might re-list the garbage. The laughing increased five fold, and the joking increased too.

Except suddenly it was I who was laughing with a few days to go someone had bid the minimum .01. Game on. When  the auction came to an end – $7.00 for garbage. Laughing turned to thank you.

Ready, set, get cleaning. Share with Techlife  your best Ebay and Craigslist stories in the comments. Good or bad, weird or zany, let’s hear it.

When you see a headline like “Drive for $1000, Alex” you may think Techlife’s electric car column is on its way. (Hint: Nissan, Tesla or Chevrolet when you drop one off, my outlet will power not just a review.) So if not electric cars, maybe this is about Google’s self driving cars that were on real roads with live drivers. Strike two. How about if you stop guessing and just let me tell you? No? You want to keep guessing? Bingo. That’s the “Drive” I am talking about.

We have covered so many unique folks to date, in just 2011; Connor Dunn of TabCloud, Jared Fanning and Michael Baldwin the cartographers, Josh Nimoy, Aleksandar Rodic, Chris Milk for coders of Open GL, Jeremy Young the amazing artist and let’s not forget my mom and her gmail hack. What did all of these people have in common? Ok, that was rhetorical – I set you up to say “Drive.” So as we explore a time in the calendar when some people take it easy, I wanted to share the story of drive. Instead of just sharing one person, learn about the passion two vastly different people bring to what they do.

Earlier this year I covered the amazing feat of IBM Researchers in “What is a computer overlord? Meet Watson.” Their goal was to have a computer be able to understand and beat the best human players of all time in a game of “Jeopardy!”  Well, be amazed again; meet Roger Craig, the all time Jeopardy! single day money winner.  He did it in just his second match, beating Ken Jennings record. Roger went on to become a Tournament of Champions winner as well.

This was no accident. This was pure drive. Roger details his dominance, with a look at his training methods. He used popular Jeopardy! site J-archive to build a private web learning tool around the data. Just to prove it works, he allowed three other friends to train with it. Each was a contestant who also crushed their competition (though they remain anonymous at this time.) His brilliant move, dismantling learning as he knew it.  His drive led him to re-learn, how to learn. Re-read that again. He taught himself a new way to learn.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You are sitting there nodding right now. Saying, yeah but Roger’s very smart to begin with and that helped in his quest. Drive has no barriers. Meet Kenny Brooks, door-to-door salesman. In just seven minutes he will have you wanting to buy his product.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Yeah, right? I don’t think so,”  you are saying to yourself. For years you have been conditioned to  not trust door-to-door folks, and be a skeptic. Kenny does more than show his drive, he details it for the listener. He explains himself and his goals, along with his role models. His drive is clear and direct but the delivery gets you laughing and excited. With nearly 1000 comments some claim this video to be phony, even so Kenny’s methods and his style show the human drive to immerse yourself in the challenge.

As the year winds to an end, and we begin to look ahead, pick your passion, and drive it into next year.

Is Techlife really declaring it is the king of something? Well of course not loyal subjects, I mean readers. Kings are people and Techlife is but a vessel to share knowledge. And what is it again that I rule you ask? Tabs? Sit back and let me explain the kingdom of web browsing and open tabs.

Modern web browsers all employ the concept of tabbed browsing. A tab is a way of storing many browsing sessions in a shared window. Need to look up something but want to keep search window open as well, just open the search in a new tab. Visiting Facebook and need to read an article in your stream, open it in a new tab . The advantage of a new tab is your existing window remains as you left it. There is no hard and fast data on tab usage but in a recent unofficial Twitter poll, my usage of more than 60 concurrently open tabs outdistanced the rest by more than 35 tabs. (As I write this there are 73 open tabs in two browser windows.)

Why so many open tabs?

I use tabs for Techlife research of course. As well as keeping tabs on news of the day, shopping takes a few tabs for research and reviews, another for price comparison and yet another for the actual online store.

“So it came to pass that The Tab King began to worry about losing all the tabs.”

With all the open tabs Google Chrome rarely crashes and even when it does restoring the tabs is pretty easy. But yet, there are times when restoring the tabs is not easy and tabs are lost. I’m sure the astute reader says, what about Xmarks, the solution from a previous Techlife column? Bookmarking each tab is more of a chore and less a solution for short and mid term tabs.

The Elegant Evolution

Faithful reader Rob who has emailed back and forth suggested a new tool he found, TabCloud by Connor Dunn, a student at the University of Warwick, UK. This amazing tool allows a user to save the current tabs. But it does more. It lets you save them to the cloud. (Quick sidebar: The Cloud is another way of saying the internet, or more accurately not saved locally on your computer.) By saving your tabs to the cloud, TabCloud let’s a user access them anywhere.

“So faithful subjects of the realm, The Tab King was worry free and the brave reader Rob granted knighthood.”

Epilogue

“As The Tab King began to prepare for sharing the discovery of the brave knight Sir Rob with the loyal subjects, the King made yet another discovery.”  

TabCloud has an Android application and an iPhone and iPad webapp! The apps allows a user to access their saved tabs on their mobile device as well and it is as simple to use as the Chrome and Firefox extensions.

Data can be beautiful. Upward trending profits, doubling your donut intake,  increased use of kleenex instead of a kid’s sleeve; each one tells a story. Then overlay that data with a map and suddenly you begin to see regional trends such as the combined donut intake and increased use of kleenex means  upward trending profits for stores in various locations that sell both these items. Pretty standard stuff.

Recently Techlife’s Facebook page shared one of these such maps titled “The United States of Football” by Jared Fanning as seen on Visual.ly.  But of course in my brain there was something that clicked. I had seen this before. Where? The internet is after all a big place.  So I promptly forgot about it.

As I was preparing the new column I was reviewing an interesting site called The CommonCensus Map Project by Michael Baldwin. The approach this political scientist took was removing zip codes from the question of “Where do you live?” Michael instead attempts to understand “Where do you think you live?” Using the idea your community is not always your town’s name or zip code was the premise when the site started in 2005.

The CommonCensus Map Project starts with a simple survey of just a few questions. 61,000+ have since inception have participated. Michal admits the sample size is tiny compared to the people counted in the US Census. Admittedly he has partially moved on and the project isn’t up to date. But the maps are still interesting to look at and provide some interesting commentary on people’s state of mind. Notice how large the geographic region of living “near” Salt Lake City and Denver is compared with anywhere else.  How could you use the map?

After adding my own data to the map project I noticed there was a spin off project – The CommonCensus Sports Map Project. Had we found The United States of Football’s data source by accident?

Michael tells the story how The CommonCensus Sports Map Project blossomed from the initial project and shows sports fan affiliation by sport across the US. He started by focusing on NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and NCAA Football. The NFL has had more than 35,000 contributing fans, with MLB right behind. Following is a small drop to near 32,000 NCAA football fans contributing.  The NBA has had near 27,000 and the NHL just over 25,000 fans contributing their views on which teams they affiliate with based on location.

So for the first time we have The CommonCensus NFL Fan Map and the United States of Football Map. Readers you be the judge what say you?

Sharing this corner of the world with you takes the effort of many. It starts with folks who make and do amazing things from a 15 year old artist to my mom’s hack of Gmail to IBM’s researchers who built a thinking computer in Watson. While Techlife shares some things you have seen, and some you haven’t the goal is always the same giving some focus to these talented people and their efforts. It’s great when organizations get behind sharing too. Often they do it to showcase their own wares, while providing a spotlight on the exceptional. So for all the print and mobile readers, spend some time with “GL doesn’t stand for Good Lookin’ but it could” in a full screen browser, it’s worth it.

Made to showcase Google’s Chrome browser and the advanced features it can support, Chrome Experiments is a site with a curated “best of the best in cool” all showing off user-submitted works. (Techlife ran some tests and some of the developers were kind of enough to still play nice with others, so the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera Browser might work just as well.)  In just over18 months the site has posted 277 works, starting with the first one “BallDroppings” by Josh Nimoy which has gotten nearly 5 stars from over 1500 people. It reminds me a lot of Line Rider.

Some of the best works involve animated water you can interact with in the browser, such as “Chrysaora” by Aleksandar Rodic and “WebGL Water Simulation” by Evan Wallace.  The first is a collection of jellyfish and the second is a simple ball in pool of water. But when you consider both are using just the browser to render and animate you begin to understand the genius behind these works.

As expected there is quite a collection of games, all of which aren’t built in Flash which has been a common building block of web based games.  ”Dots, the Game” by Nicolas Smith and Aviv Keshet, “Z-Type” by Dominic Szablewski, “Asteroids, Inc.” by Jarred Draney, and “Word²” by Massively Fun are all examples of the future of web gaming built right in the browser.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Techlife favorite of these Chrome Experiments is an interactive digital short using Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” by Chris Milk and Google Creative Lab. Sure the team works for Google, but it does not diminish the effort.  For online viewers we have embedded a screen capture of the interactive experiment, but trust me it doesn’t do it justice compared to typing in your own childhood address and it building a custom show for you. (Be aware not every address works.) This has taken music videos to the next evolutionary stage of development. And I like the direction.

As a final fun, enjoy the “Shaun the Sheep” by Google Chrome Team, clearly an entry by the team that has all the tricks at their disposal. They don’t disappoint.

As the future of browsing evolves into what we see here, the enjoyment and fun of even everyday work and entertainment should keep interfaces and applications from all looking and acting the same. I like the future.

*So what does GL stand for then? Nothing fancy, just “Graphics Library.”

We have an implied relationship. You the reader, me the writer. You the question asker, me the answerer. Techlife enjoys being your answer source, but dear reader you should know the world is one big three year old. With an endless supply of questions; Where do you turn for answers? (There’s another one.) While Techlife is great and Wikipedia is good (see what I did there?), sometimes your question can’t be answered by either fountain of knowledge. Enter stage left – Quora. (getting its name from Question or  Answer and a self created plural of the word quorum.)

Quora (rhymes with “nora”) is the resource for your inner three year old. It offers up questions by users and answers by really smart people. Quora has done a great job of allowing an expert’s answer to be voted upwards as the best answer to a question, while also allowing multiple answers in case a breadth of knowledge is what’s needed. Do we need some examples? Sure we do.

Is it fun for movie stars to kiss other movie stars on-screen?

So right away a great question. Even better the best peer-reviewd answer at the time of publication was by Ashton Kutcher who said:

It totally depends on the co-star. Seann William Scott in Dude, Where’s My Car?… not so fun. Natalie Portman… not an awful day on the job.

Right away you know this isn’t Wikipedia. What else you ask? Here are a few I have answered:

Has anyone in the public sphere ever reached the pinnacle of three entirely different disciplines like Arnold Schwarzenegger has?

The answers on this question have many luminaries in society listed with Leonardo Da Vinci leading all vote getters with Painter, Scientist, Engineer and Inventor.  My submission was Bill Gates who as a computer engineer developed the BASIC programming language, went on to create Microsoft and lead them as a business titan, has authored two best sellers and finally is the world leader today in philanthropy and getting other wealthy people to follow his example.

How do you know who is answering your question and their level of expertise? Each person has a profile page that can link to other social media profiles. On that page you can see what kind of questions they have asked and answered recently, what topics they follow and who else they follow.

Another one I answered is something that crosses physics with paleontology but I just applied a little common sense to get the second best answer to date.

Could a Tyrannosaurus Rex bite through a modern day tank?

My answer backed  up with some science was “NO” quite simply because the T-Rex couldn’t open his jaw wide enough  to take a bite. My counterparts in answering this question are Andy Lemke, a polymath IT Architect with knowledge of nuclear engineering and physics and Gary Stein a retired CTO.

So am I being replaced? According to, “What are telltale signs that you may be facing a mutiny and/or coup?” It looks like I am going to –

*Note that every question mark in this article has a question on Quora tied to it, comment on which one is your favorite question used. There are some unique ones.