The Most Expensive Items To Sell On E-Bay

A very special yacht…with a crap name…

In 2006, a luxury 405-foot yacht (sold by a company called 4Yacht) closed on eBay for, wait for it, $85 million. And that was just the deposit, its full cost was $168 million.

I guess it was water off a duck’s back for the Russian billionaire who (apparently) bought it. The yacht was dubbed the ‘GigaYacht’. How the hell is it meant to float with a corny name like that? Sounds like a name Robocop would give it. And Robocop was cool….back then (‘back then’ being the operative word here).

Playing With Your Gmail Account

Did you know the periods in your Gmail address don't mean a thing? That's right, if you signed up as e.mantra@gmail.com, you'd still get emails sent to emantra@gmail.com. You'll even get emails sent to e.m.a.n.t.r.a@gmail.com, for the wiseacres in your family. Ooh, and anything sent to "googlemail" instead of "gmail." Honestly, it's the little things that blow my mind (and btw, none of the above email addresses belong to us!).

More usefully, you can add a plus sign to the end of your address, and then you can set up a folders in your email that coordinate with that. For instance, say you open an online account with WellsFargo. When you sign up, give your email address as "emantra+banking@gmail.com", then in Settings, set up a filter. In the from box, add in WellsFargo or your chosen bank, in the to box, put in your newly-created emantra+banking@gmail.com address, and the set the filter to put in a folder titled "banking." You can also use this technique when you sign up for something and send their emails to you directly to the trash!

Iguazu Falls, Argentina/Brazil

It’s hard to classify the appeal of watching water rapidly changing elevation en mass, but for one reason or another nearly everyone who visits the Iguazu Falls finds it stunning and very worthwhile. Globally speaking, these falls are far more impressive than Niagara, and their only rival is Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, and that one is far too out of the way for most RTW travelers. There are actually 270 separate falls spread over 2.7 kilometers of curving forest, so the number of unique views of the falls is almost endless. Iguazu is spread between Argentina and Brazil, with each side having a very impressive and different national park from which to take in the views, and there are speed boat rides through the falls, among other things, located down below, so spending most of a day at each park doesn’t get old as quickly as you might fear.

Travelers counting countries also get a bonus as the falls are where Paraguay meets Argentina and Brazil, and short forays into that landlocked country are possible during your visit. You can reach the Iguazu Falls area on long bus rides from anywhere in the region, and also on short and cheap flights from Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. Package deals including a flight, hotel, and tours of both parks are quite affordable.

WINDOWS XP HIDDEN APPS

1) Character Map = charmap.exe (very useful for finding unusual characters)

2) Disk Cleanup = cleanmgr.exe

3) Clipboard Viewer = clipbrd.exe (views contents of Windows clipboard)

4) Dr Watson = drwtsn32.exe (Troubleshooting tool)

5) DirectX diagnosis = dxdiag.exe (Diagnose & test DirectX, video & sound cards)

6) Private character editor = eudcedit.exe (allows creation or modification of characters)

7) IExpress Wizard = iexpress.exe (Create self-extracting / self-installing package)

8) Microsoft Synchronization Manager = mobsync.exe (appears to allow synchronization of files on the network for when working off line. Apparently undocumented).

9) Windows Media Player 5.1 = mplay32.exe (Retro version of Media Player, very basic).

10) ODBC Data Source Administrator = odbcad32.exe (something to do with databases)

11) Object Packager = packager.exe (to do with packaging objects for insertion in files, appears to have comprehensive help files).

12) System Monitor = perfmon.exe (very useful, highly configurable tool, tells you everything you ever wanted to know about any aspect of PC performance, for uber-geeks only )

13) Program Manager = progman.exe (Legacy Windows 3.x desktop shell).

14) Remote Access phone book = rasphone.exe (documentation is virtually non-existant).

15) Registry Editor = regedt32.exe [also regedit.exe] (for hacking the Windows Registry).

16) Network shared folder wizard = shrpubw.exe (creates shared folders on network).

17) File signature verification tool = sigverif.exe

18) Volume Control = sndvol32.exe (I've included this for those people that lose it from the System Notification area).

19) System Configuration Editor = sysedit.exe (modify System.ini & Win.ini just like in Win98! ).

20) Syskey = syskey.exe (Secures XP Account database - use with care, it's virtually undocumented but it appears to encrypt all passwords, I'm not sure of the full implications).

21) Microsoft Telnet Client = telnet.exe

22) Driver Verifier Manager = verifier.exe (seems to be a utility for monitoring the actions of drivers, might be useful for people having driver problems. Undocumented).

23) Windows for Workgroups Chat = winchat.exe (appears to be an old NT utility to allow chat sessions over a LAN, help files available).

24) System configuration = msconfig.exe (can use to control startup programs)

25) gpedit.msc used to manage group policies, and permissions

Gaming Coffee Table

This is yet another coffee table from the house of Surface Tension. It masks practically a fast Windows PC and a 19″ LCD flat screen under its hood. They come complete with two sets of real arcade controls as well as a HAPP trackball, which means you can challenge your friends by turning to a two- player mode. An Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 1GB of RAM, 160GB of storage and Wi-Fi connectivity powers the systems. You can even pre- load iTunes and stream tunes to your stereo wirelessly. The system is available to you, all pre-loaded with a collection of 29 games called the ‘Taito Legends’. Your surface tension arcade game table is not limited to the games that are pre-installed because it is MAME-compatible and you can add any game that you desire!

Yours for $6600.

Canon’s 3 in 1 Foldable Mouse

This gadget from Canon is combining three gadgets together into one; a compact mouse, a calculator, and a numeral pad. When folded, the battery-powered device can be used as an optical mouse (1,000 dpi). When you open it, the LT-100KTM turns into a 10-key numeric keypad. It can also be used as a stand-alone pocket calculator.

The LT-100TKM will be available in late July in black or white color for $32. Canon says they expect to sell 15,000 units of the Japan-only device in one year. Not very ambitious.

Google Shortcuts to Save You Time

Google can do more than just help you search websites. So if you can use it to save time, why not? Here are six shortcuts (aka Advanced Operators) to start you off:

1. Weather

If you want to know weather conditions for a particular city, type the word weather before the city name or zip code. For instance:

Weather San Francisco or Weather Melbourne

2. Basic Calculator

Sometimes it is just quicker to type your query into Google than to pull out your calculator, or bring up calculator software. Use these for simple sums:

Addition: + e.g. 17 + 7

Subtraction: - e.g. 23 - 17

Division: / e.g. 23 / 17

Multiplication: * e.g. 23 * 17

Percent: % of e.g. 17% of 23

3. Measurements and Conversions

All measurements and conversions can be calculated by using the word in between various units. For instance:

Currency: - AUD, USD, EURO, GBP: e.g. 43AUD in USD

Mass - kg, lb, gram or g, tons: e.g. 25kg in lb

Numbering Systems - hex, binary, decimal, roman: e.g. LVII in decimal

Volume - gallons, liters or l, teaspoons, pints: e.g. 2 liters in pints

Time - seconds, minutes, days, years, fortnights, decades, centuries: e.g. 1 year in seconds

4. Package Tracking

Instead of going to Fedex, UPS, or USPS, you can now track your package directly through Google. Type the provider first; reference number second and Google will give you the link for your package: For instance:

Fedex 171717171717

5. Booking Flights

By typing in the departing city, followed by the arriving city, Google will offer up a choice of dates and services. For instance:

Melbourne Sydney, or, San Francisco New York.

6. Status of flights

You want to know if a flight is delayed or on time? Just type the airline name or code and a flight number to see the status of a particular flight. For instance:

Qantas 271 or United 77

For more detailed information about advanced operators, check out the Google

Cool Website: http://mintemail.com

http://mintemail.com

Mint e-mail is a bit like one of those websites that give you an e-mail account but it gets deleted after a certain time so you can use it to sign up to things you’re never going to use again. The difference with MintEmail is that instead of logging into a e-mail server the page is shown via AJAX in the current page. so there’s no login.

The website also generates your account name and even copies it to your clipboard ready to be pasted but if you’re that picky about your e-mail you can create a custom one as well as being able to set up a custom e-mail forwarder to your address which can last longer than 4 hours which is what you get with an account.

Attract Women By Doing Six Things

I've done a lot of research on this topic, and I believe that women are most attracted to these six thing:

1) Means (Wealth, possessions, gifts to them or providing for them)

2) Power (Influence, Leadership, provide safety)

3) Fame

4) Looks (Including height)

5) Exclusivity (Royalty, already married, hard to get, affiliation)

6) Personality (Humor, creativity, romance, intelligence, mystique etc.)

Now, numbers one through five is largely out of your immediate control. If you're not rich, you're probably not going to get rich this week. If you're not famous or tall, you're probably not going to be in a hit movie or grow 6 inches in the next 24 hours.

So that leaves us with number six, PERSONALITY.

The good news is that as far as I'm concerned, your personality is your GREATEST ASSET in the success-with-women game.

Fortunately, it's the one thing you can change. And it's the one thing that can OVERCOME all of the rest. After you've done what you can to look your best, etc. you have to develop a personality that's absolutely magnetic. Now let's talk about how you can do just that.

By the way, the one quality that attracts women the most (and keeps them attracted) is not something that they can initially 'look' for. It's the way they FEEL when they are with you or thinking of you. In the end, if you don't have wealth, power, fame, or looks you're going to have to use your personality to make them FEEL good. In the end, your personality is the most powerful weapon you have.

Windows XP Hacks - Tips & Tools for Optimizing Your OS

How This Book Is Organized

This book is not a mere tips-and-tricks compendium that tells you where to click, where to drag, and what commands to type. It takes advantage of XP's flexibility and new features, recognizes that there are specific tasks you want to accomplish with the operating system, and offers you bite-size pieces of functionality that you can put to use in a few minutes. It also shows how you can expand on their usefulness yourself. To give you this kind of help, the book is organized into 13 chapters.

Chapter 1, Startup and Shutdown

With XP, startup and shutdown can mean much more than turning on your PC or selecting Shut Down from the Start menu. With hacks in this chapter, you can change the picture that appears on the startup screen, speed up the sometimes endless startup and shutdown processes, hack the Registry to control many different aspects of startup and shutdown, customize multiboot options, and much more.

Chapter 2, The User Interface

XP lets you change the way it looks and works more than any other version of Windows and this chapter shows how to do it. Want a speedy, stripped-down version of the OS? It's in here. Want to build your own themes and find thousands more online? It's in here as well. So are hacks for controlling the Control Panel, Start menu, and taskbar; creating transparent windows; and building your own cursors and icons. It also shows you how to make your PC look and work like a Mac, and how to give Linux a try without having to actually install any software. The hacks don't stop there, so interface hackers might want to head here first.

Chapter 3, Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer provides a basic window into XP and lets you manage files and folders, among other tasks. When hacked, it does much more as well. This chapter shows how to customize folder icons and balloon tips, improve the context menu, find files fast by mastering the indexing service's query language, get more disk space by using NTFS compression, keep your PC secure with encryption, and more.

Chapter 4, The Web

You probably spend a significant portion of your computing life on the Web, so why not make the most of it? Want to find information fast, straight from your browser, without having to head off to sites like Google? This chapter teaches you how to do it. You can also kill pop ups, stop spyware, surf anonymously without a trace, and speed up file downloads. If you host your own web site, you'll find out secrets of using the built-in Internet Information Services (IIS) web server. The chapter also shows you how to hack the free browser Firefox, which some people consider the best browser on the planet. In addition, it teaches you how to surf the Internet ad-free and shows you how you can literally Google your desktop by using Google technology to search through your email and files. There are many more hacks here as well.

Chapter 5, Networking

XP was built for networking, and this chapter shows you how to take full advantage of it. Tweak your DNS settings for faster Internet access, make your home network run better, use command-line tools for trouble-free network operations, or get the most out of using the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for making inexpensive phone calls. This chapter helps you get the most out of XP's powerful, built-in ability to connect.

Chapter 6, Email

Email is both the greatest productivity-booster and the greatest time-waster known to humankind. This chapter ensures that you'll stop wasting time and get more out of email. Slam spam, open blocked file attachments in Outlook and Outlook Express, get better email software, and retrieve web-based email using a normal email client. And you'll learn many ways to get more out of Google's email service, Gmail. There's all that and more here.

Chapter 7, Wireless

It's an unwired world, and XP is at the center of it. XP was built with wireless in mind, includes built-in wireless discovery of networks, and because of that, makes it easy to set up home and corporate wireless networks, as well as connect to hotspots when people travel with their laptops or PDAs. So, in this chapter, you'll find out about wireless hacking everything from war driving to finding wireless networks, protecting your home wireless network, using wireless encryption, solving hotspot woes, and more.

Chapter 8, Security

From the moment you turn on your PC and connect to the Internet or a network, you're in danger. Snoopers and intruders can try to get into your system; crackers might try to install Trojans to take control of your computer or turn it into a zombie and use it to launch attacks against other PCs or web sites. The hacks in this chapter, though, will show you how you can use the Internet and networks, and still be safe. You'll learn how to hide files and folders using encryption, how to test your PC's vulnerabilities, how to use firewalls to harden your PC against attacks, how to punch holes through firewalls, and more.

Chapter 9, The Registry

If you're going to hack XP, you'll need to use the Registry. It's that simple. This chapter goes beyond merely teaching you how to use the Registry and how it's organized (although it covers that in detail). It also shows you how to hack the Registry itselffor example, by offering hacks on how to use .reg files to edit the Registry safely, and how to track and restore Registry changes.

Chapter 10, Applications

XP comes with a basic suite of built-in utilities, with the emphasis on basic. But you can hack these basic utilities so that they're much more useful powerhouses. Store multiple clips on the Clipboard, extend your real estate with virtual desktops, build a better backup strategy, take better screenshots, or use a universal instant messenger. In addition to utilities, an operating system needs applications to do much of its work. So, this chapter shows you how to hack them as well. Have older Windows applications that have a hard time running under XP? This chapter shows you how to make sure they run. You can also use command-line shortcuts to customize how each application runs, open and create Microsoft documents without Microsoft Office, and more.

Chapter 11, Graphics and Multimedia

In XP, Windows gets serious about multimedia and graphics for the first time. In this chapter, you'll see how to get the most out of them, with hacks for saving streaming audio to your PC, making videos with Movie Maker, sharing music without the spyware, and converting images easily. Music lovers will find several ways to hack iTunes and how to take advantage of the new music format Ogg Vorbis.

Chapter 12, System Performance

No matter how fast your PC is, it's not fast enough. This chapter shows you ways to hack XP to juice up its performance. Get the most out of your RAM, use the Performance Console to speed up system performance, and use a variety of Registry hacks to make XP run. For those who have upgraded to SP2, or are considering it, you'll also see how to combat SP2 upgrade woes.

Chapter 13, Hardware

By itself, an operating system can't do a thing; it needs hardware to run on. In this chapter, you'll see how to use XP to hack your hardware. Remap your keyboard, set up a direct cable connection between PCs for a quick-and-dirty network, uncover "hidden hardware" with the Device Manager, and get better resolution on your laptop and your LCD screen. And yes, there are more hacks here as well.

Energize Your Body and Spirit with fruits

What are your favorite fruits? Strawberry, kiwi, watermelon, plum, and avocado are loaded with many health benefits. These fruits are great as snacks throughout the day.

Summer is upon us and with that we are blessed with an abundant of fresh fruits and vegetables. I love fruits of all kind. Strawberries, avocados, kiwi, watermelon, and plums are among many favorites for many people.

The health benefits of these five fresh fruits are listed here.

Strawberries

Strawberries have excellent sources of fiber, more vitamin than an orange, and can maintain normal blood sugar levels by just eating one cup.

Strawberries also can clean out harmful toxin in the blood, and remove tartar from teeth, plus strengthen the gum.

Avocados

Avocados supply lots of cancer fighting antioxidants. If you think they are loaded with fat then you are right, but the fat are monounsaturated fat, which are good for you fat.

Avocado has been used to aid people with sexual problems, help with digestive and circulatory problem.

Kiwi

Kiwi can help reduce blood clotting, which can contribute to heart attacks. Two or three kiwi a day equal a daily dose of an aspirin. Best of all, kiwi is all natural, and gives no side-effect. Kiwi is also high in fiber which helps protect from heart disease, diabetes, and colon cancer.

Kiwi is also known for uses in treating wheezing, and coughing.

Watermelon

Watermelon contains a good source of potassium, vitamins A and C. Just two cups of watermelon provides 18 milligrams of cancer-fighting antioxidant lycopene, more than in a medium tomato.

It is also advised to keep watermelon at room temperature since they have much higher levels of antioxidants (beta-carotene and lycopene) than those that keep in the refrigerator. They are even better than freshly picked melons. Cool watermelon a few hours before cutting and serving since once cut, it should be refrigerated.

Plum

Plums come in many different colors, and provide a good source of vitamin C, A, B2, beta-carotene, and potassium. Plums are also a great source of dietary fiber.
Plums help to reduce and protect the symptom of cold, flu, asthma, heart disease, stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, and cancer. It also helps absorb iron in the body, and a great natural laxative.

Stock up on these fresh fruits and eat them as often as you can. Most of these fruits are small in sizes, so eating two or three servings a day is possible. Healthy mind, healthy body, and healthy spirit will yield a better life.

Eye Opener: Issued In Public Interest

What are VoIP phones?

VoIP phones are telephones which connect to VoIP networks instead of to the PSTN.

VoIP phones with Ethernet connections
VoIP phones with Wi-Fi / 802.11 connections
VoIP phones with dialup modem connections
Software VoIP phones
VoIP phones with Ethernet connections

A VoIP phone with an Ethernet connection is the easiest type of VoIP telephone to use. Instead of a standard telephone RJ-11 connector to plug into the PSTN, these phones have RJ-45 connectors to plug into Ethernet networks.

The Ethernet connection is used to connect these VoIP phones to the VoIP server or VoIP gateway.

VoIP phones with Wi-Fi / 802.11 connections
Wi-Fi (802.11) VoIP phones provide the same service as Ethernet VoIP phones, but they do it wirelessly.

A Wi-Fi enabled VoIP phone connects to a VoIP server or VoIP gateway through your existing Wi-Fi network.


VoIP phones with dialup modem connections
VoIP phones with dialup modem connections are very similar to VoIP phones with Ethernet connections.

Instead of connecting to an Ethernet network, these VoIP phones dialup over the PSTN to VoIP service providers.

Using a VoIP phone with a dialup modem connection requires a regular analog POTS telephone line, but enables long-distance and international calls to be made over VoIP networks, usually at a significant savings.

Software VoIP phones
Software VoIP phones turn your PC into a VoIP telephone.

Software VoIP telephones are less expensive than the choices listed above, if you already own a personal computer.

Hardware for Software VoIP phones
Software VoIP phones use the PC's sound card, speakers or earphones, and microphone. This hardware works to emulate a telephone, even though this is not what the PC was designed for.

For better ease-of-use, many companies manufacture USB VoIP phones. These devices give your PC a normal-looking telephone handset or headset.