Archive for March, 2008
Free Baseball Text Message Alerts for your Cell Phone
Mar 31st
As we all know (or should know) the 2008 MLB season is underway. Of course with most of the opening games taking place early during the day, it may be hard for some of us to keep up. I have recently discovered a site which can help Fantasy fanatics and sports fans everywhere (like me, I’m a big Yankees fan and found this site while trying to get scores for opening day game). This is a site provided by 4INFO.net that basically sends free baseball and sports text messages to your phone regarding score changes, inning-by-inning updates, player stats etc. (it also has other features like weather, news and other sports updates like March Madness, NBA). What makes this so great though is that unlike mlb.com’s text message updates (which are also free from the TeamTXT page), the user has more options to pick what they want—instead of just score and team news, a person can also choose lead changes, inning by inning etc. To sign up for this service from 4INFO all you need to do is create a free account with your email, cell phone number and carrier and phone type (RAZR, iPhone etc.), and then set up the updates you want. Mlb.com’s offer is similar but there you’ll need to only enter your cell phone number and team.
Just something to keep in mind: while these services are free from their respective companies, they do send text messages which cost money. This means that if you want something like score changes, then you should get a big texting plan because you never know how many runs will score in a game (remember last year’s 30-3 Texas vs Baltimore game), also if you want to stop the messages, at any time you could reply stop or stop all to a message sent to you. To get a texting plan may cost more money based on your wireless carrier, and you should check to make sure it is what you want before you buy it and sign up.
Enjoy and Go Yankees 
Example of 4Info from Yesnetwork.com
Make Your Windows Computer look like a Mac
Mar 13th
I, probably like some other people, see some of those cool, new, Macs and want to know how I can make my Windows look like it. Well here are some programs that are cool, easy, useful and free make your computer look and run like a Mac.
1. Safari. This is the ever popular Apple internet browser that is found on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and all Macs. It is a browser similar to the other popular Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 browsers, but adds some cool features of its own. The first of those features are a good RSS reader. RSS are either short quick versions of articles on websites or full versions of articles on websites that can be viewed without necessarily going to the exact website itself. This happens through what is called RSS feeds which are in web browsers (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer), email applications like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, as well as other places and devices. What is good about Safari’s RSS reader however, is that it offers a very quick, simple, and easy way to view the feeds. Another nice feature in Safari is ability to load regular pages quicker. While this feature is only a second or two of difference in most cases, it still is cool and useful. Safari also does something else that I noticed when I used it, it displays websites cleaner with text and pictures appearing much nicer. I’m not sure why this is, but I still find it to be something that will be helpful, especially to people who are viewing the internet very often, or are using it for searching for news articles or pictures. Safari is now out of testing phase (aka Beta) and is available for free at Apple’s website here.
Apple’s Safari browser running on Windows XP (it also runs fine on Windows Vista).
Hulu- A new way to watch TV
Mar 13th
Today a new internet service was launched called Hulu. This service is a joint program made by TV companies Fox and NBC. The goal of this new service is to broadcast TV shows online for free legally (not on YouTube or other sites where people sometimes post them illegally). This doesn’t only include TV shows from those two companies, it also has shows from other networks they own (NBC Universal, Fox Sports, NBC Sports, FX etc.), as well as the NBA, NHL, and other sites. It also has movie clips from their 2 movie companies (20th Century Fox, Universal Studios) as well as other movie companies, and they actually have some of those clips up now from movies like Dodgeball, Napoleon Dynamite etc., free to view on the site. The site is up today and if you want to check it out than just go to www.hulu.com
UPDATE: Hulu now has full movies available for viewing for free.
