Deal Seekers Will Love Woot.com

Shoppers who love a good deal will find it hard to pass up visiting woot.com on a daily basis.

Woot.com is an Internet retailer that sells one item per day at one low price until the product sells out or the day ends (it rarely ends before the item sells out). Once it hits 11:59pm central time, the previous day’s item is replaced by a new deal, anything from tech gadgets to TVs to hammers. Items are often from recognizable brands and cannot be found at a cheaper price.

Some items are refurbished, but many are brand new and often times released on the website before they are available anywhere else in the marketplace. You cannot purchase items from previous days and you will never find out what products will be released in future days. It’s a day by day thing.

Woot offers witty and informative product reviews and descriptions that are fun to read and sometimes brutally honest, usually poking fun at the item being sold. As soon as a new item is posted on the website, the Woot community will contribute opinions on the product, reviews, and other relevant information.

The company holds a policy to where they are not directly responsible for the products sold. There is no customer support (unless you can get help from the community on the forums), and all returns must be sent directly to the manufacturer of whatever product you purchased. The products being sold are held to high standards and they will not knowingly send you faulty products, but they are not your typical retailer with warranties and a return policy, in fact they discourage returns.

Woot keeps tracks of stats as well, in case you want to know how fast something sold, where it sold best, or what didn’t sell at all. Items sell fastest between 12am and 1am, as soon as a new item is released on the website. You never know how many of an item there will be, so many stay up until midnight to see what new item is on sale just in case the deal is so absolutely amazing that their life would be ruined if they missed it.

The site also offers specials and surprises. A Woot-Off is when a number of products will be on sale for an unannounced period of time. The Bag O’ Crap is sold for $1 and is a random selection usually offering nothing but crap, but once in awhile a person will be awarded with something as grand as a flat-screen TV. “2-for-Tuesdays” is an event every Tuesday where the site sells two or more products at once, and product launches are special events where Woot partners with other companies for a special pre-release of a product.

This is a warning, do not check out Woot.com if you despise glorious deals and interesting products caressed with enjoyable commentary and informative description.

Fallout 3 News: Mod Tools Released, Details of First DLC Made Available, Plus More

This week has seen two new big pieces of news in regards to Fallout 3: the release of the G.E.C.K. mod tool, and the release of details on the first downloadable content for Fallout 3.

Fallout 3’s mod tools, named G.E.C.K. after then Garden of Eden Creation Kit of Fallout lore, were released earlier this week. The G.E.C.K. will allow PC users to modify any aspect of the game to make their own user-created content.

All of Fallout 3’s data is apparently available for tinkering with, including environments such as special locations and towns, written dialogue, characters, monsters, weapons, and so on. From the looks of it the G.E.C.K. will essentially give Fallout 3 fans all the tools that were at the disposal of the Bethesda crew in making the game.

Also, details have been released about Fallout 3’s first DLC, titled Operation Anchorage.

Operation Anchorage will be available for XBox 360 and PC, and will cost 800 Microsoft points, or $10.

The DLC will be set in a government-designed computer-simulation of Alaska, where the player will battle through the liberation of Alaska from the Chinese Army. As players play through this piece of Fallout 3 lore they will experience new weapons, armor, scenarios, a new perk, and the ability to command special strike teams in combat. The campaign will be mostly combat and stealth focused, according to members of the Fallout 3 design crew.

Two other small pieces of news about Fallout 3 were released in the midst of these updates as well. First, Bethesda is planning to make a general update to Fallout 3 to fix various bugs. Jeff Gardiner, lead designer of Fallout 3 DLC, had this to say:

We are releasing an update for all versions of Fallout 3 prior to the release of this DLC. We take pride in fixing issues that are found by our fans and posted in our forums.

Second, the third DLC, titled Broken Steel, will lift the level cap beyond 20, a feature may players of Fallout 3 will be happy about, me included. The 20 level cap was actually the only thing about Fallout 3 that really annoyed me, and I’m looking forward to being able to develop my character some more.

Mac Attack

The message that Macs are now open to virus attacks has been running a muck through blogs and news sites the last few days. Apple has since deleted the entry on their forums that suggested this in the first place.

Apple, which has been known for its advertisements that hit Windows for its vulnerabilities, issued advice on their support forums that to many suggested Macs are no longer invincible and are susceptible to virus attacks. The following is the statement that caused the uproar.

Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.’ It goes on to recommend a handful of products.”

The Apple support forums have now retracted that forum post, letting the world know that the post is not an official statement from Apple. Apple is Unix based and that makes it a harder system for malware to mess with. Macs also have a small market share and viruses need more and more people to become victims for the virus to spread. These two combine to make Macs virtually invincible.

Though Mac users can sigh relief at this, they should be aware that viruses are not the only thing they need to protect themselves against. I’d just like to throw a fair warning to all Mac users out there, you still need to protect what information you have on your computer and put online. Just because you have a Mac does not protect you from money and identity thefts.

Some viral attacks walk right by the Mac operating system and attack your browsers or get you through email. Beware, your machines may still be safe from attacks, but you are not. Just a little reminder from zMogo.

A Taste of Vanilla

Vanilla is a free, open-source forum software that approaches discussion forums from a different perspective, and with great success. At first glance Vanilla may appear to be a simple blogging software, but beyond the skinny commenting system lies an uncluttered discussion format that brings forums back to what it’s all about, the conversation.

A server with PHP 4.1 and MySQL 3.23 is robust enough to run Vanilla forum software. Upon a fresh install, Vanilla looks plain, empty, maybe even a little too simple. Gone are the smileys, gone are private messages (replaced by a whisper system that allows users to whisper comments or topics to one another), gone is the WYSIWYG editor and many of the other forums devices we have all grown accustomed to. Avatars are of minimal stature and there is no option for users signatures ¢â‚¬â€œ what!?

Instead what you get is a forum that brings you back to the basics. The discussions are the main focus, not the individual users nor the fancy graphics. The pages load lightning fast and, thanks to some subtle AJAX, posting is quicker than any other software I have experienced. Speed and simplicity is nice and all, but you want to use a software that doesn’t throw away all of your favorite features, don’t you?

Not to worry. Though the Vanilla user base is still fairly small, a number of developers have created many powerful add-ons and extensions for the software that are a piece of cake to install. You can bring all the editors and smileys back that you want and keep out what you don’t. Language packs, themes, statistics, profile editors, and dozens more extensions are at your whim to adjust everything from private messages to page layout. You literally have endless possibilities at your disposal to create the web forum of your dreams. There are even extensions to make the already speedy system even faster.

Vanilla is truly a next step in forum design. Where other forum software succeeds, Vanilla pushes it to the next level. Through simplistic design and infinite customization, Vanilla has become my favorite forum software thus far.

Past experiences with other software has led to user complaints and too many error messages to count. Since I’ve switched to using Vanilla on my websites, I have not encountered a single error. The only complaint from users I have had is at the beginning of their experience with the software, but after a few weeks of getting to know the new system those gripes fade away and they come to enjoy it as much as I do.

Creator of Vanilla forum software Mark O’Sullivan hasn’t stopped with Vanilla though, he’s working on a new forum software project that he intends to raise the bar with even higher. Garden is a multi-application PHP based software that will improve upon the success of Vanilla. Speed increases, further user customization, out-of-the-box friendly urls, new licensing model, and a new hosting solution combine to be only the tip of the iceberg for what Garden will offer. I am eagerly awaiting its release.

If you run any websites and use or have been curious about web forum software, I would strongly suggest giving Vanilla a try. Go beyond the first impressions though, delve a little deeper and you will begin to uncover the treasures hidden beneath the veil of simplicity. If you don’t want to or are unable to install your own version of Vanilla right now, I encourage you to check out the lussomo community and experience the software as a user. I’m sure you will come out of this experience thinking a little differently about modern web forums.

I have only begun to describe to you all that Vanilla has to offer. You can only find out by experiencing it yourself. Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the software.

The Addiction of StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon has carried many web surfers deep in the night, into the wee hours of many mornings by offering a never ending stream of interesting randomness that is always just a click away.

It’s an adventure. Your clicks bring you to visuals and sounds you never would have expected to find on the internet. Before stumbling existed, web surfing consisted of search engines and links given to you on web forums or by friends on IM. Surfing used to be a mundane process where you knew what you were looking for and only needed to find a way to get to it.

Stumbling has brought us unseen destinations, exciting vistas of information and opinion and stupidity, the exotic dangers of a random NSFW page, and the mindless time wasting flash games we would never have found otherwise. StumbleUpon has given people a reason for being on the internet when they have nothing else to do but explore.

Everything is within your grasp, everything is only a click away. Whether you know it or not, when you stumble your way through the internet you are set on a quest. Your quest is to see the entirety of the internet, its best and its worst. The more clicks you take, the deeper into the web you travel and the more difficult it becomes to leave. You enter a vastness that is impossible to comprehend, yet it is all veiled behind the mask of the click. That click, the next one might take you to something wonderful, some amazing thing no one else has seen before, you might discover the next greatness that will make you an internet rock star to your peers. One click, just one more, just one more, one more…

Parents have always told their children that it is best to take things in moderation, this also applies to the click of StumbleUpon. Most stumble addicts out there know who they are, and that’s a good first step. No more stumbling through papers and meals, no more stumbling until the crack of dawn scares you into your bed. We can enjoy StumbleUpon, but we must not abuse it. The world misses you, and we only want to see you again and we hope you are doing well.

It is the evolution of the web. We’ve moved past railways and roadways and are now flying through the internet, teleporting from destination to destination. There is a new world to explore, and its all at your fingertips, just one more click away…