My Junkyard

One of the things that you do need when you buy a mac is Applecare. There are many discussions on the internet wether you should or should not buy it, I think you should.  The main drawback is the price of this package. You might end up buying something for hundreds of dollars and never really get to use it (that’s good isn’t it). While Apple overcharges these packs (in my oppinion) you can get a lot of discount shopping online marketplaces like ebay.com It saved me a lot of money at least. Being in Europe you also have the Euro <–> Dollar exchange rate in your favor making this really interesting! 

1. For example: Buy applecare for your Imac in Europe 209,- Euro’s    
2. Or buy Applecare for your Imac via Ebay (or others) 119,- Dollars (about 81 Dollars)

Make sure though that the serialnumber matches your Imac or macbook!

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You want to tweak your desktop a bit? Well just go down to the Iconfactory and download some great new icons! If your on a mac (don’t worry they got windows icons to) you can use Candybar to install them the easy way. Candybar is shareware so give it a try. If you know another tool (freeware maybe?) like candybar that does the trick let me know. I’ll add it to the posting. Beware Candybar is osx 10.5 ONLY!!

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Here’s a small post of some of the blogs I often check. Not a top 50 of Blogs or so, just a few links to nice blogs. The list will grow as my blog will.

http://lifehacker.com/

http://www.problogger.net/

http://macthemes2.net/

If you have some suggestions just let me know via the comments, thanks!

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Please read Part 1 before reading this entry. You’ll find information about installing wordpress and theme selections.

3 Struggle to get pictures on my blog

How can this be an issue you think? Well I’m not the only one who had this problem. Today actually it still is a problem… But I got a good working workaround that suits me fine. I use a Imac to write all this and sofar the Safari browser never let me down. But uploading pictures with Safari seems impossible. I receive an error. So let’s try my windows browser Internet Explorer then. I can easily run windows with Parallels but hey, it doesn’t work either….. It seems to be a bug in WordPress. lucky as I am WordPress comes with a solution. A small upgrade to a newer version out since this week. Quickly I tried to upload some pictures, without result in Safari…. Trying to use Internet explorer gave me the results I wanted. IT WORKS , yes, but only via booting Parallels and running Internet Explorer. I can live with this for a while, no biggy anymore. WordPress please solve this for us mac users

4 Get noticed by google and yahoo

It’s fun to write things, it gives a surtain peace of mind I find. More fun is when people actually start reading things you write and comment on it. Well to be honest I haven’t got that many responses yet. The few I got I really enjoyed. It’s a nice feeling that someone read your entry on a blog, trust me. The interaction part is what I’m hoping for, so if your reading this let me know

First thing to do is to get people notice my site. Hmmm, how to do that? Maybe simple shout it on some bulletin board? That doesn’t sound to friendly to me, I personally hate that, it’s more or less spamming. So maybe I can get search engines to notice me like google and yahoo and many others? How to do that?

Google has a nice site for webmasters (hmm guess I am?) http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/webmasters/ There you can add your site and get all kinds of tips on how to get noticed and improve your site.  It takes time for google to take your site into their search engine and I think I might need to do more, but what?

Yahoo Is also pretty easy, you can submit your link here . There are several options and I went for the free one. Why pay right? I have no idea if I might the right choice here but hey if only some find me…

If you have any good tips on how to promote this blog please let me know via a comment.

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For those who have been following this blog now that there have been some difficulties. Difficulties in several areas. Let me sum them up and tell you how I (think) I’ve solved them.

1. Installing wordpress at my own hosting provider
2. Getting a theme that I like
3. Struggle to get pictures on the blog
4. Get noticed by google and yahoo – promote my blog
5. Add ads to my blog

1 Installing wordpress at my own hosting provider

I’ve written about this earlier, the main issue was that i’ve never had a blog before. First thing to do was selecting a hosting provider. I ended up at one.com. Why? Basicly because it was the cheapest one I could find. I had no idea how long I would be doing this blogging and I did not want to start with a huge budget. Today I have mixed feelings about my choice for one.com but hopefully it will suit me fine in the future. 

So, how to install? Basicly it was very simple, just do the following:

• Unzip the package you’ve downloaded from www.wordpress.org
• FTP all the files to your site (your hosting provider tells you how)
• Run the installation script via a browser. You can use the 5-minute installation guide provided by wordpress.org
• Be sure to know what your databasename and accounts are (provided by your hosting party)
• Than a problem…. ??? It stopped? Now what? I noticed that it stopped running the script. In the address bar I saw that it ended at something like ****-step3 , so I decided to change the 3 in a 4 and it continues to run. So far ok.
• It’s done and it’s working (as far as I can tell)
• Now I needed to modify the standard wordpress installation to my liking…

2 Getting a wordpress theme I like

This is the simple part (is it?). Via the wp-admin tool (wordpress admin tool) you can easily go to the wordpress theme library. Here you can select a theme, there are hundreds maybe even thousands of themes… Select and testdrive the themes you like. The testdrive gives you an impression of what you’ll get if you install that specific theme on your blog.  I couldn’t choose between some of them so I downloaded 4 themes and tried them all. There are several different options per theme. It depends on what the designer put in them.  Today I use the Mukka-mu theme after testdriving several other thems. Thanks for the theme !

I’ll continue this topic later, If you need more information on a subject just let me know via a comment.

UPDATE , continue here

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It keeps getting better and better. The people of macupdate gave us WhatSize first as an extra (only early adopter got this (first 3500). Now they give us Neon Tango. It’s a game !!! I never bought my mac to play games, but maybe you want to. At least now you can if you’ve bought the bundle. If you have not, don’t worry..

You can still buy the complete bundle (without WhatSize offcourse but with 10 other great apps) at www.mupromo.com

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 Today is the last day of the macupdate parallels bundle sale. The counter today hit 11,000 bundles sold. Which ofcourse is a great number… The bundle itself is great please check it out on their website at www.mupromo.com. Don’t worry there is no referral link from me I just want these bundles to be on sale more often. Also you end up with some great software for just a fraction of the prize you would normally pay. 

What’s your oppinion on these bundles? Let me know write a comment!

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Before I bought an Apple Imac I used to stream media to my Playstation 3 with Nero.
This worked ok but was slow since my computer was simply not up to the task(it was 5 years old…). So I tried to find a good alternative to stream audio and movies directly to my PS3 from my mac. The best solution i found (untill now) is Nullriver’s Medialink . It uses the Upnp protocol and I must say i’m impressed the way it seems to work. It’s so fast compared to my old pc solution. You can download a copy to try and see if it works for you for free.
After that you have 30 minutes to test all without any restrictions. After that it will tell you on the ps3 side that you’ll need to register. Seems logical, I will do so directly after finishing this post.
It’s only $20, with the current exchange rates (Eurozone) that’s pretty good value for such nice and easy to manage software. The only thing I’m missing is that it doesn’t re-encode media that is not suitable for the PS3……

UPDATE: wow, that was an easy activation. I bought the software described above and within 30 seconds I was done and had an activation code Ok, I’m off to watch some movies I just finished editing on my mac  

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As a “switcher” I’m still seeking everyday to find out what apps are best for my use on my mac. I’ve already found several sites that give good information.  Here is a small list of sites I almost check daily.

• http://www.opensourcemac.org/ Great site with great apps!!!
• www.macupdate.com Mainly share and freeware. Also gives you discount! And have bundles every now and then!
• www.macheist.com Not sure if it should be in the list, however they have great offers (none at the moment)
• http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx  Apples software page. Be sure to check the staff picks.

Whats nice in the mac community is that there are software bundles. These are limited time offers. This makes it easy as a starter on this platform to get some nice apps for a price that’s only a small part of the normal prize. Examples are:

• www.macheist.com No bundle today
• www.macupdate.com The parallels bundle on sale now! 10 apps worth $474 for $64 now!

That’s it for now, if you have a good resource for apps let me know i’ll add it to the list.

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Wel I started this page basicly to get some frustrations out on the net. Some decent misuse of power and computers in general. Besides that I would like to show all of you some decent mac applications and things that keep me busy. Whats on my mind and what is frustrating me….

Offcourse starting a page like this is in principle low cost. It’s only a few dollars per year so what? Well, some people make a lot of money writing blogs, thats all they do? Can you live of a blog? I assume you can if you have pages about hacking / porn and things like that. But how can you make a small blog like this at least turn break even? I’m really interested in that. It’s not the costs that are making me think I have to urn some money, no, I’m just woundering in general….. So what can we do?

For starters, for now the only way to make some money seems to attract a lot of people to your blog and make them click ads? There are several companies like google who provide ads like this one below:

But does that work? I myself never click on these links…. So why would someone else click on it? They seem to addept to the stories on the page? So maybe some people might be triggered. Some might even be click happy

Interesting a big crowd seems to be the trick. What are your experiences on making some money? All the links I get via google feel sponsered and end up in being sale pages for adprograms

How to get more hits / money etc. I have no clue. I need to maybe redesign my site and make it look much nicer. Besides that I need to get into the top searchresult at google and yahoo. But how to do that? A lot of questions and I intend to find answers !!! Send me you tips and experiences via comments or mail (checky@myjunkyard.nl)  and lets break even  

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Yess, it’s been a few days and they had to bring down the unlock levels a bit but all software is unlocked.

This means that the full package / bundle is now open to all who like to buy it. I have and I must say I love it. I won’t be pushing my referral code on this page since I think the people at www.macupdate.com don’t need to pay me  

As a new mac user I love using parallels and you can’t get it anywhere cheaper than via this bundle. The other packages are also really nice to have. Before I already mentioned what applications are included in the bundle. So if you need some of the apps (they are great) GET THEM WHILE YOU CAN

Only a few days and then the bundle is not for sale anymore!

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Previously I informed you that it was possible to activate Vista quite simple via a bios hack. See below…. Now it’s even simpler with the work done by CLoNY. The original crack was made by Team Paradox. The one click version with automation was created by CLoNY.

Follow this link for more information and explanations……..

Even more info can be found here

Some addition info should be given. For example: Why do I post this? One of the reasons is not to use vista for free. I don’t even own a windows machine….. I use Apple’s macs. So why post this. One of the reasons is that Microsoft was hitting me with WGA alerts even though I was using a LEGAL windows XP Pro license. For some reason (no clue what it was) It was not seen as an official license… I called the local support and they gave me 1 option. JUST BUY A NEW COPY GRRRR….. That’s it…. So maybe there are more people like me and bought a license in good faith and got disappointed and scammed by M$. This software at least open some windows . However I do not think this is a good thing to use it might be your final solution. So just buy a mac and you don’t have to be affraid of these kind of scams……

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A little sooner than I thought the Sound studio application got unlocked. The reason that the app was unlocked quicker than I thought was that Macupdate has brought down the unlock levels. Things are really speeding up now!!! The next app to be unlocked is BannerZest a really cool application to create all kinds of banners. If you haven’t bought the bundle yet… DO IT NOW  You maybe even get some extra apps as the first 3500 buyers did. It gets better and better.

Check it out at www.mupromo.com for yourself!

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Macupdate has dropped the unlock level of their software bundle just now.

There are only a few more copies that need to be sold before the Sound Studio app unlocks.

Get it while i’m writing this only 73 more need to be sold……

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Well, as a new mac owner I have bought this bundle yesterday. I must say it has some really handy apps. Below you can see the list of apps provided. There is a small downside to this list…… Some apps are locked…

The only way to get this unlocked is for you guys to unlock it for me Depending on the sales of this package more and more packages get unlocked. So get over to Macupdate and buy it. It’s a good deal!

As you can see it looks great, let me know what you think.

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