Getting A Widescreen TV?

August 25, 2008 · Filed Under Popular Technology · 1 Comment

I have to warn you though, getting a widescreen TV can be a life altering experience.

In a fit of rebellious outrage.. Ok that’s not really it. The truth is, I just got so bored with my life that I decided to go into debt. Now that doesn’t grab your attention unlike the first sentence, does it? But who in his right mind would purposely go into debt just to have some excitement? I hate to burst your bubble but a lot more folks would do worse just for the heck of it. But, but, but, let’s not go into that one. this is not exactly a full-blown rant post. There’s some lesson here.

For example. You have already decided you’re going to ditch your old 29 inch Sony-something for a sleek 42 inch version. Is it really just a matter of choosing how many inches and then going for whatever name brand you like? Unfortunately my friends, the selection is much more complicated than that.

You see if you’re like me you just wanted to lay your hands on one of those really sweet and shiny little things with pictures that come alive right? But you don’t want anything that will force you to break your trust fund. Exactly just like me! Except that I don’t have a trust fund.

Anyway, there are two things that you need to wrap your head around before you reach for your wallet and go for that Sony Bravia Full HD– LCD and Plasma.

I will not educate you on these two. My knowledge are too scant to pretend that I am an expert on these two technologies. But I can point you in the direction so you will be better informed when you make your decision. You know what, I wish somebody had pointed me to this thread before I purchased my widescreen TV. I actually picked the TV with the technology I am leaning to but I could have saved $400 dollars! Gah. What a costly mistake. Oh well.

Here’s a very valuable tip if you happen to be a Pinoy wanting a widescreen TV. Run as far away as you can from those big appliance centers. Go to Theater Works instead. That’s on the 4th floor of Trinoma Mall. They have a price divide (compared with big appliance centers) like you won’t believe.

Oh yeah, I ended up with a 42 inch Panasonic PV8 plasma TV. A very sweet piece of equipment. Unfortunately, I can no longer look at any CRT TV without haughtily comparing it to my little Panny and thinking how much more awesome it is compared to the puny little TV I’m looking at. Hah!

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Free Adsense Optimized Blogger | Wordpress Template

August 3, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized · 5 Comments

Brian Gardner’s Revolution Theme is absolutely amazing. I’ve been using this template for a couple of months now and there’s nothing about it that I can complain about.

Sooner or later a blogger will want to think of ways to make money off his blog and usually the most logical step to make is to start introducing Google’s Adsense. The only problem is that there is such a few number of free blogger templates out there that can successfully integrate adsense into the template. Alright so there may be a few but then again something always comes up that you end up tearing your hair in frustration.

Usually it’s all about the design. You look at a particular template and instantly get infatuated with it. You like it’s form, how it incorporate the latest design trends and how widgetized it is. You can even put in adsense. The problem however is that when you view your blog/site using a different browser, it breaks! And this usually happens after introducing a lot of your own modifications. I’ve fallen prey to this a lot of times.

Usually the site breaker is Internet Explorer. Although Mozilla Firefox is the bomb, a lot of folks are too set in their ways to really leave Internet Explorer behind. And if we’d like to increase our reach, we have to think about the IE users as well. And this is precisely why I like the Revolution Theme. You can view this blog using Firefox, Safari, or IE and you will see the same thing. Not for Flock though, something’s off with that browser.

Revolution is completely widgetized, has a very nice color combination which is perfect for Google Adsense. And, it’s also available for Blogger/Blogspot users. So you have Brian Gardner’s Revolution Theme for Wordpress, and somebody was kind enough to port the same theme for Blogger.

You can download Revolution Theme for Blogger | Wordpress below.

Wordpress - This is just the landing page where you can select whether to download the 2 or 3 column template.

Blogger

Enjoy!

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Quick Tip For Creating Custom RSS Feed URLs

August 2, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized · 2 Comments

I’m sure almost everyone knows this already, but if you’re one of those who have yet to encounter this one, let me spare you some pain. Our basic understanding of RSS feeds is that these are bits of posts or news that can easily be syndicated.

More often than not we look at feeds as a very static thing; i.e. if you want to be constantly updated with the latest gadgets, for example, you subscribe to Engadget’s or Gizmodo’s feed. But what if you want to specifically subscribe to the latest update on the Apple iPhone for example? It’s going to be a hit and miss if you continue to do what you’re currently doing.

Good thing we can now create our own RSS feed URL’s based on keywords. Yep any keyword at all.

For the latest news there are a lot of sources. But for this article, let’s just focus on Yahoo! and Google.

With Google creating your keyword based RSS feed is relatively easy. You just have to choose where you’re going to source it; from their Google Blogsearch or Google News. So the choice is just with blogsearch.google.com and news.google.com. To create your keyword based RSS feed, let’s say ‘Apple iPhone’ for example, you just type those words on the search bar. If you want those two words to be beside each other, place those words inside “quotation marks“. When you click on search blogs or search news buttons, there automatically comes up a sidebar in the left of the screen. Just look for the RSS link and click it. The URL that shows up in the address bar is your RSS feed. Pretty nifty isn’t it?

Unfortunately, this is not the case for Yahoo! But fortunately some really cool dude, Jeremy Zawodny, created a little something so we can still come up with a keyword based RSS feed from Yahoo! News. The link to his little creation is here–> Yahoo! News Search RSS URL Generator.

And how is this going to rock your boat again? Auto blog content man, laser-targeted auto blog content.

That’s it. Hope that was helpful.

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