RyeBlog

Today is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s. As you may know from past years, this is the happiest day of the year. From noon until 8pm, you can gorge yourself on free ice cream. Those of us going to the Ben & Jerry’s in Provo, Utah get the added bonus of getting to be near the large biker gang BACA (Bikers Against Child Abuse - I kid you not). See you there!

My record is seven or eight cones, I can’t remember. I don’t think I will be going for a new record this year as I actually have a job and a family now - but if anyone here beats my record let me know. (I wont require proof - but you must be able to list off the flavors you ate and the order you ate them in.)

Tons of people search the web for PayPal codes, but they pass right over the easy-to-find PayPal rebate. From now until March 31st, buy anything online at a place that accepts PayPal that costs more than $30 - and you will get a $15 rebate from PayPal. [yes, even eBay is included] This Rebate, however, is not instant. (Is anything at PayPal that involves you getting money instant?) They will drop the $15 rebate in your account by May 8th they claim.

It’s pretty easy. Just go to the above website and register your PayPal email with them (it’s a PayPal site, don’t worry) and then you are eligible for the rebate. That’s all you have to do.

This is not meant as a comprehensive set of hardware recommendations for MythTV. There are many other sites you can easily google to find that kind of information. This is soley focused on building a MythTV box on-the-cheap using Black Friday sales.

Introduction to MythTV

MythTV is a free open-source DVR package. In addition to the basic features such as pausing and rewinging live TV, MythTV does things that other more expensive DVR systems either don’t to or don’t do well. Here are some things MythTV can do for you:

• Pause Live TV
• Rewind Live TV
• Picture-in-Picture*
• Watch a show while recording another*
• Automatically skip commercials
• Back up your recorded TV onto DVD’s
• Enable any computer on your network to watch live TV
• Enable any computer on your network to watch recorded TV
• Listen to music
• View slideshows of your digital photos
• Browse the web
• Play vintage NES and other games
• Rip DVD’s to your hard drive for safe backup and later viewing
• Re-encode your LiveTV recordings to go on your iPod
• Let you schedule your recordings from a web interface
• Record HDTV signals
• Tons of other stuff

* depends on your tuner. you need two tuners to do things that involve two channels, or an HD input source for HD stuff

Building a MythTV Box using Black Friday Sales

The basic MythTV setup I’m going to recommend is one where you have a backend and a frontend on the same machine. There are other ways of setting up a backend, but this way is an easy way to get started.

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Free Cone Day is one of the happiest days on earth. There are plenty of new flavors to keep you busy all day. So - request time off of work now before everyone else does.

Experience has shown, that if you want to get a ton of free cones - get there right around noon. In the evening, it gets very busy.

For those of you lucky enough to be in a market that Redbox is in - (see Redbox Locations map to see if you are one of the lucky ones) - you are in even more luck now.

The other night Aubrey and I decided that we should try out Redbox. After all, there is a McDonalds that is less than three minutes away from our house. When we walked in, I was slightly annoyed to have to wait behind some girl who seemed to be taking a while. She redeemed herself, however, when she turned to us and said “Oh, you know about the codes, right?” and proceeded to spout off about six or seven promotional codes for us to use.

I remembered one of the easy ones she said. “Greg” - I typed it in, and sure enough - free rental.

I realized that for one person to have that many redbox codes - she must either be a 1337 redbox hAx0r - and she used a device Q gave her to access the inner workings of the boxes memory to extract the codes - or there is some website that just gives a list of tons of codes.

Lucky for the rest of us, there is a website. They keep a constantly updated list of Redbox codes - codes that work across the whole United States - and codes that only work in specific regions. Codes are given scores, and the higher a code’s score - the more likely it is to work for you. They are listed in descending order - and they show the last date that they were used in the list.

In the comments on the website, one guy in Salt Lake claims to have rented about 50 movies from Redbox - and only paid for one… Let that be the standard the rest of us strive for - except for the paying for one part.

Here is the Mother of all RedBox codes lists.

Papermate makes pens. They want to make better pens that people like. They have a survey online that you can fill out - and as a “thank you” for filling out the survey they will email you a code that you can use to get a free song from iTunes.

As far at the free songs go - only get “one per real person…” or else you will be struck by lightning.

The also have a promotion that packages free song codes with packs of new pens - thus making the day of every supply-shopper in the small business community…

Get your free song here

Microsoft has a page where you can answer a few easy questions and get a free USB thumbdrive with a Microsoft logo on it. Delivery will take 6 to 8 weeks, and you don’t really have to get all of the questions right to get one.

This was on Digg.com earlier, so they probably had hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) of people already log in and request one… but they still have the page up, so you might still be able to get one. Worth a shot

Link: Microsoft Free Thumbdrive

One of the best parts about being a college student is the fact that you can get academic pricing on software. This means that instead of shelling out only $119 for a Student version of Maple 10 instead of $2000 for a “my-boss-paid-for-this” copy of the same exact software. It also means that you can buy cheap hardware and other student-oriented things.

The best place I’ve found to buy academically-priced stuff online has recently become a RyeBlog sponsor. (Honestly, I did like them before they started writing me checks… They are the fastest and cheapest online academic store - period.)

You can visit them at: AcademicSuperstore.com

They will need some kind of verification that you are a student. For BYU students, this is as easy as going to Route Y and clicking on the “Student ID” link and copying the image that it has of your Student ID and emailing it to them. They are required to have such documentation, and they are pretty easy to deal with as far as getting it to them.

Some things you will find an easier time getting from the Bookstore - but the Bookstore doesn’t stock anywhere near the amount of crap that these guys do. (Interestingly enough, AcademicSuperstore.com has much cheaper prices on things such as Calculators and voice recorders than the Bookstore does… so I guess their pricing is more “academic” than the bookstore)