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Site Seeing
By JULES ALLEN Feel free to browse Shipping is extraI bought a couple of Sony phones from one of Yahoo's merchants. It's funny how $40 worth of phones end up costing nearly $60 when you add in shipping. If I weren't such a shut-in, I would have canceled the order and left the house to buy them at a store. If you're sick of being taken for a ride with high shipping and handling fees, this site is a welcome relief. In addition to reporting lowest prices, as many price-watch engines do, it has a calculator to map tax and shipping to your ZIP code. It's much better than the shipping price range many places offer. My experience has been the low shipping price is never available to my hovel. Share and share alikeWired.com/wired/archive/10.05/superuser.html Here's an interesting comment on the state of file-sharing affairs from Wired's online magazine. It seems as if the whole world is hooked into file-sharing networks, but what I find particularly intriguing is the attitude of regular people when it comes to the subject. Rather than seeing music and file sharing as stealing intellectual property, they see it as almost like borrowing a tool from a neighbor. Information really does want to be free, I suppose. I've also discovered eMusic, a great way to get perfectly legal, high-quality music for a monthly fee. The jazz section is fabulous. Segway into reviewwww.Bricklin.com/segwayride1.htm Surely you've seen and heard the buzz about the Segway, the two-wheeled transport device from inventor Dean Kamen. Most of the gushing media accounts come from folks lucky enough to have spent a few minutes buzzing around a carefully orchestrated, supervised test area. Few have spent any real time with the machine. One of those lucky enough to have put the thing through its paces is computer guru Dan Bricklin. Here you'll find his in-depth analysis of this remarkable if not expensive human transporter. Name that tuneAs the blur between art as entertainment and art as a way to get you to buy stuff continues to blur, sites such as this actually have a use. One side of me finds it sad that I have to watch the garbage jammed in between dumbed-down TV to find decent new music. But the other half is too busy sucking down Pepsi products to really care. Call it designer apathy, if you like. If you can't name that tune from a recent commercial, bookmark this one. Swiss Army messengerI've been living with a Mac OS X-powered iBook for my primary computer since the 14-inch screen version came out. I continue to be delighted by the useful and often free software that authors such as Indigo Field make available for this computing platform. This oh-so-useful utility allows you to have one program to log into instant messaging services from AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and Jabber. That means more memory freed for other programs. This well-behaved program performs better than its commercial counterparts and doesn't cost a dime. You can donate a few bucks via its Web site if you really dig it, though.
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