I found out about prosper a few weeks ago and did a self imposed tour of the website. I have to say this is a really good idea that I’m surprised haven’t been done a million times already. Prosper is what I would consider a social loan website. Visitors can borrow money, and other visitors are the ones lending the money. Sounds like someone is gonna get ripped off huh? I don’t know but it looks like it has a good model so that the site can sufficiently act as a loan broker.
Lets say you need some money, You visit Prosper.com and sign up. You create a profile with a picture if you like and you put in all of your income/credit information. Prosper will then pull your credit report and assign you a letter grade. You can then post an ad for a loan. In that add, it will show your letter grade, the loan amount, why you need the loan, and general information about your income. Enough so lenders can determine if they want to loan you some money. It also assign a recommended interest rate for your loan based on the info you filled out when you signed up for your account.
Lenders can then look through the list of people needing loans and decide to help them. The cool thing is that you don’t have to lend the whole amount the borrower is asking. What you actually do is “bid”. You pick an amount and an interest rate and place your bid. the borrower will then accept your bid and you send the money to Prosper. You can bid the whole amount, or partial amounts. The loan will stay open until enough people has made bids to cover the loan.
After the bidding is complete, the borrower will get the money transferred to him/her and will be put on the prearranged payment plan. As monthly payments are being made, the money is then split between all of the lenders and added to their Prosper account. Those payments will be made to you until the amount you loaned and the interest rate has been paid up.
Sounds like a good idea if you are looking for that sort of thing, but I would say read the site carefully before you go lending or borrowing money. I didn’t see anything alarming and everything looked straight forward but its up to you to be comfortable with any website like this.
Ive mentioned my disappointment with the iPhone on my other blog several times, but I do own one, and paid a good deal of cash for it…uuuhh not really, got it for free. A few weeks ago, I decided to Jailbreak it using WinPWN and started playing around with some of the third party apps that are available. Still didn’t find anything too interesting…until today.
It was about lunch time and I decided to go out to get something to eat. Wasn’t sure what I wanted so I remembered a little iPhone app that I downloaded called Streetflow. Streetflow is really a cool little app. I loaded it up and it used the iPhone’s fake built in gps to find out my location then it list all the restaurants that are near me.
Even though Ive been living in this area all of my adult life and was familiar with most places, I did find a restaurant that I had never been too. It also had reviews from other restaurant goers about that restaurant. Yes you can also submit your review of places that you visit to help others that may be in your area looking for somewhere to eat.
Once you find a place to eat, you can click on that place and it will give you more information about that place, including a phone number and street address (all these pics were taken later not the same places I went to earlier)
After getting something to eat, I decided to look at other places that are in my area. I found a place listed that recently closed, that did have a good review so I quickly decided to add a review to let others know that the place has closed.
All in all, this is the first app I found that I would say is clearly worth jailbreaking the iPhone. Maybe this will get added to iTunes when third party app support is finally added. If you have jailbroke your iphone and want more info, you probably already know where to get it. (through the installer). For more information about using Winpwn, you can check out this website.
You know what, I am tired of reading stories about games like Crysis blaming their low sales on pirating. In a recently dugg story at shack news, the creators are sitting back talking about piracy and how its sad, and they are going to forego the PC market as far as being exclusive. They somehow got figures of 20 copies pirated for every 1 sold.
Crytek, I’m here to tell you…
Crysis has (had) low sales numbers because of Crysis.
Ive played a little bit of Crysis, and while I liked what I played, and I thought it was an excellent game when it comes to some of whats being done in the game. It is not the “Big game” you guys think it is.
Its generic and forgetful
Its buggy (at launch anyway)
It runs bad
It was marketed as the game no one can run.
That’s why it has low sale numbers. How dare you create a game where the graphics is the biggest draw but target systems no one has. Especially in today’s gaming age when gamers are over games in a month. There are perfectly decent looking games on the 2 major gaming consoles (Xbox 360 and PS3). If you make a game with future gamers in mind as far as technical specs, then current gamers aren’t going to by the game. You know why? Cause they cant play it.
Yea you can tone the graphics down, but I’m sorry Crytek, the visuals are THE best quality of that game. If you don’t have the visuals, COD4 is good enough and gamers don’t need Crysis. Before looking at piracy, or blaming gamers take a look at your game. Out of all my personal friends that are gamers, none of them has played Crysis. They all think of Crysis as the game they cant run on their system and none of them knows how to pirate games. Those are customers Crytek doesn’t have, that didn’t pirate the game, that they missed out on because of Crysis itself.
Id even go so far as to say those pirated numbers are inflated because of how you chose to market the game, not how well the game is or the interest. Most of the pirates that downloaded the game did so not because they want to play the game and get it for free, they want to see what all the hubbub is about but don’t want to pay money for a game they know they cant run. Many probably never even installed the game once it was downloaded, and the ones that did probably never even played more than an hour.
To me, bragging about a games graphics is silly if you cant get those graphics on the standard hardware. What achievement is it to pack in graphical features no one can take advantage of? That would be like selling an HDTV with no HD content anywhere to be found…what a minute, that was done. But you get the picture.
Try making a good game that can run on standard PCs and if it gets pirated, then complain. Dont blame your mediocre game on gamers
I usually don’t care too much for reality TV, honestly, I feel like its ruining television. After saying that, I have to admit that I have absolutely fell in love with Hells Kitchen. The first episode I saw, I thought Chef Gordon Ramsay was an arrogant, rude, foul mouth prick…excuse my language, but that’s what I thought.
Since then, I have watched every episode that aired. I love Hells kitchen. My thoughts about Chef Ramsay hasn’t changed, but there is more to him than my initial impressions. But I was curious, has anyone ever tried to punch him in the face? So I went to Google, and looked to see if there was anything like that online. I didn’t find anything, but I did find out about another Gordon Ramsay show called Kitchen Nightmares. Happen to catch an episode or 2 (actually I bought the DVD) and watched them. He was still all of what I said above, but he does really care about what he does. everyone that has ever been on his show has probably left with some very valuable experience. Anyway, I know this is a little off topic of this blog, but figured you might want to check him out, so heres an episode (from Hulu.com)
I know I got a tad bit excited when I first heard about Microsoft’s attempts to buy Yahoo. Since then, a lot has happened, A LOT. Yahoo rejected the bid, Microsoft threatened a “hostile” takeover, Yahoo urged the stock holders to not give in and eventually Microsoft backed down.
That was the end of it? Nope, Microsoft got back in the picture, not to make an outright buy but to collaborate. Yahoo were open to those talks then started talking with Google, Microsoft offered to buy a portion of Yahoo (8%) then Yahoo burned the bridge and made a deal with Google.
Microsoft finally said they were through and have no interest in Yahoo. Case closed!!!
uhh, not quite. I just happen to check out Techmeme and what do I see at the first headline?
Sources: Microsoft And Yahoo Talks Back On
The article was posted over at Tech crunch and in short, the story now is conflicted. Some say talks are back on for a full buyout others say its search only. All I know is my excitement about a possible “Microhoo” has turned into a solid “not this again!!“
In my house, in my computer room, I have a closet that contains several PC cases, old power supplies, sound cards, video cards, old motherboards, ram… My closet has become a graveyard for old computer parts. Like I have said from the start of this blog, I love working on, building, repairing PCs. With that love comes a collection of old parts.
What do you do with those old computer parts?
Your not going to ever put them in a computer that you use anymore, they are old, which is why you replaced them. At the same time, they a in perfect working order, and you spent money on them, so you hate to throw them away. Here are a few ideas to keep that clutter down
Sell them on eBay, or Craigslist!
Put those old parts up for sale. How you do it depends on which method you decide to use to sell. If you use eBay, post the parts individually. Post the old CPU, post the ram as a set, post the old video card. People sometimes look to eBay when they need parts that they cant find anymore at other stores.
Craigslist on the other hand, people are looking for deals or good buys. On Craigslist is where you piece together packages to sell. Take the old motherboard, processor, video card and stick of ram, put it together as one package. Give it a good price
Create a media server.
Sometimes those old PC parts were replaced because they are old technology and just dont cut it for what you want to do anymore. Example: I once had a pentium 133 processor, the motherboard and ram that was used with it just sitting in my closet. I cant play Crysis or even run Vista with those components. I can however piece those together in an old PC case with a old 20 gig HDD and connect it to my network and store music on it. Now I have a music server that can be accessed from every computer in my house. Take those old parts and piece together a Music/Media server that everyone in your home can make use of.
Build a starter PC for a beginner or the less fortunate.
Do you know what I did with that Pentium 133 cpu and other parts I talked about above? I built a starter computer. This was many years ago, but at the time, my parents didn’t have a PC and had never used one. They had no interest in PC’s at all, but in this day and age, everyone should have some PC experience. I gathered all those parts, built a starter PC and gave it to them. It jump started their love for PC’s and gave them an easy cost effective way to get familiar with using a PC. Builting a PC like that out of old parts is also good for kids.
Donate your PC to your local schools?
A lot of schools now have classes that teach kids about PCs and working on PCs. Donate your old computers, or PC parts to your local school so the kids will have something to work with instead of just listing to a teacher talk about it. The best thing is (other than for the kids) many times, donating a PC to a school or some organization like that can be claimed on your taxes.
Trash it, but do it the right way
If you don’t want the hassle of anything Ive mentioned so far, you could just trash it. There is a correct way to trash your old PC components though. If you check around, many places like Office Depot will accept old PC parts so they can dispose of them properly. Check around.
The other night, something happened that required me to do a little research. My wife has a really old PC. I keep saying Im going to upgrade it. right now it is super slow, even for a casual PC user. She finds a lot of times she has to use my Laptop or other peoples computers to do certain things.
Her daughter was working on a school project she and couldn’t finish it up because the PC kept giving her problems. After that night, I decided to stop procrastinating and do the upgrade. All I needed was a motherboard, processor and maybe a stick of ram.
After checking Newegg, Pricewatch, and a few local stores, I remembered that I still had the P4 3.0 ghz processor from the laptop that I spilled soda on a while ago. I was thinking all I need to do is get a motherboard and a stick of ram, that should cut about 40 or 50 bucks off the price I was looking at paying. After looking for a while, I decided to check craigslist to see if there was someone in my area selling a mobo that would work with that P4 processor.
I didn’t find that but I found a guy selling an AMD Athlon 64 chip, Motherboard, a low end geforce card and 1 stick of 512 ram for just 10 buck more than I was looking to pay for the P4 compatible motherboard.
RIght then I thought “that is a good deal, but I don’t want to buy a slower CPU when I have a nice speedy one here” (Speedy is relative to what is in my wife’s current PC). I put it out of my mind and went back to looking at Motherboards for the P4 processor.
For some reason, I decided to check performances comparisons and found out that the Athlon 64 cpu I was looking at is actually faster than the P4 that I had. Then I remembered…. AMD was performance king for a while!!!
Intel was lagging behind for Id say a couple years and it wasn’t until the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo released did they get back on top. That wasn’t too long ago, but I forgot all about it.
A friend of mine got a new PC recently. When he got home he setup everything else he had at his desk to the new PC. Of coarse, the new PC had Vista installed, so there were some things he wasn’t familiar with. He asked me one day how to scan a document in Vista. He said he used the software that came with his scanner and it didn’t work. He then proceeded to call the manufacturer of the Printer/scanner he had and the tried with no success.
I asked him did he use the scan wizard that was built into Windows, and he said there is no scan wizard and he had looked.
As you all know, in Windows XP, all you have to do is go to control panel and there is a handy “scan your pictures” wizard that takes away the need to use the scanners proprietary software. He was right, it isn’t in the same spot in Vista. There is a “scanners” selection in the control panel but thats basically for the properties and settings, not the same scan wizard that I’m use to.
I eventually found it, and its easy. Its now called “Windows fax and scan”. For you impatient people, all you have to do is type the word “scan” into the start bar and the link to it will display. If you want to just click away at icons, heres how you would get to it without typing.
Something as simple as resizing a picture can be quite the task for someone that either lack the knowledge or software to do so. Yea if someone ask you about making a picture on thier PC bigger or smaller, you can point them to a few places that offer free software. You might even cause more confusion, now you may have to show them how to install and use the program.
One easy way to get your Pics the size you want is to use a simple web based pic resizer. Picresize.com does just that. You just upload the picture, pick a size you want, and download the finished resized version of that picture.
Simple
Yea I thought so, Ive actually used the site and recommended it to people that I thought would get too confused if I tried to explain the new free Photoshop express, Paint.net or Microsoft’s picresizer (which are all excellent choices if you choose to use them.
Recently I bought Age of Conan, I hadn’t played an MMORPG in a while and Ive been hearing so much about this game that I wanted to find out what all the hype is about. Before I play any MMORPG, I usually go and read up on everything about the game so that I have some clue as to what to do when I purchase the game.
One of the comments Ive found to be pretty common is that the game had relatively high system requirements. I started to wonder if I could even play this game on my laptop. After doing a little more research I ran across a little website that will till you if you can run your favorite games.
Can I run AOC on my PC?
That is what I wanted to find out. If you head to systemrequirements.com, there is a little web app called “Can you run it?” Its quite simple but worth a bookmark.
To start there is a list of games that you can pick from, every game isnt listed but enough are there that you could find something that would give you a good idea of what the game you want to play will fare on your PC.
After you pick the game, you get a message asking for your permission to run the app on your PC, Click yes and it will run a test on your computer and spit out the results.
So, if you are curious if your PC can handle Crysis, Age of Conan or any other game, just head over to Can You RUN it?
How is it..., Web 
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