Consumer Reports released some advice for potential shoppers. Here’s their advice:

Get a receipt or gift receipt. Despite longer grace periods, retailers are becoming more insistent on a receipt in order to get a refund, and they’re more inclined to turn away customers without proof of purchase. Without a receipt, they may offer a store credit for the lowest price the item sold for.

Keep packaging intact. Stores are likely to refuse a return if the packaging materials are open or discarded. Even a missing instruction manual, cords and cables or warranty card can give retailers reason to deny the return.

Be wary online. Don’t just throw it in a box and mail it back. Online returns usually require a packing slip (typically included in any gift order), and a return authorization number. Call ahead to ensure that all requirements are being met.

Don’t break seals or cut out UPC codes. Items like computer software, video games, CDs and DVDs aren’t generally returnable for another title after the seal has been broken. If an item comes with a rebate offer, make sure it works before removing the UPC code to redeem the rebate.

Also, watch out for restocking fees at major retailers, mostly for big-ticket items.

• Amazon.com: 15% restocking fees for computers and fine jewelry
• Best Buy: 15% restocking fees on laptops, camcorders, digital cameras and GPS navigators
• Bidz.com: 15% restocking fee on all items. Plus shoppers have only 15 days to return items.
• Sears: 15% restocking fee applies to electronics products returned without the original box, used, and without all of the original packaging. The penalty also applies to some other products.
• Home Depot: special-orders and some cancelled orders are subject to a 15 percent restocking fee.
• Macys: 10% restocking fee on furniture
• Newegg.com: 15% restocking fee on all major purchases if the box is opened

Blatantly stolen from Consumerist who quoted Consumer Reports.

Google Voice

So everyone is a twitter about Google Voice and using the service for all sorts of things. Having it call you and call a contact to make a “free” call. I’m an AT&T wireless customer and do not have a home land line, I don’t see how I can benefit from using google voice to make calls for me. Let me explain:

My AT&T plan gives me X minutes of talk time per month and “unlimited” talk time after a certain time and weekends. When I call a friend using google voice it calls me then calls them and we can talk. By doing so it’s eating up minutes on my phone since AT&T doesn’t provide free incoming calls (unless something changed I don’t know about). Lets say I use the GV method and call a fellow AT&T customer, now I’m really screwing myself since we both have AT&T and we’re not using our unlimited mobile to mobile talk time.

The only benefit I see here is that if you’re calling someone from a land line and want your GV number to show up on caller ID then you’ll be able to do so for free. Outside of that your paying for hiding behind your google voice caller id?

Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments please.

So it’s been two weeks since I started @OHatDL and OHatDL.com and I thought I’d talk about whats been going on with it.

• Redesigned the website (thanks to Becky over at PodcastDesigns for the cool looking interface)
• Began displaying statistics from the data collected in the DB, looking to expand on it once I figure out what else I want to display.
• Visited the park a few times myself and learned to tune in to what people say and tweet about it. I’ve been overhearing some funny stuff and have been posting it. My latest favorite can be found here: Regret tat
• Began a link sharing campaign with a few Disney forums and websites along with a couple of podcasts, if your interested in doing so please contact me.
• Hoping that since @Oprah is now on twitter I can get some more “civilians” using the OHatDL service.
• People love to share stuff they overhear and people that find the site / twitter account think that @ohatdl is the one posting these and don’t realize that @ohatdl is just a collecting / redistro mechanism for the #ohatdl community.
• People don’t understand the #hashtag concept all that much yet. I have a few plans for that.
  • OHatDL.com now has a submission box as long as you have a twitter account it will do the submission for you. (all it does currently is pass the query over to twitter.com in their input box including the #hashtag, its a start)

So if you visit any of the Disney parks feel free to post your “overheards” by using my service, @ohatdl. I look forward to reading the fun things you hear.

Twitter in all of its simplistic glory was the way to make this happen. So while waiting in line for an ice cream about 20 minutes later I created @OHatDL account and bought the http://www.ohatdl.com domain… all over my iphone I also went and setup the mechanism using a 3rd party to facilitate accepting twitter direct messages to @OHatDL to be tweeted on the persons behalf. After that I sent out the first tweet to the account:

Now we’re cooking with gas: Twitter, GroupTweet, and ohatdl.com. The rest of the day was spent listening to people say goofy stuff and tweeting about it. Since it was almost time for us to go home we only got a few more gems posted.

So next time your at Disneyland and you overhear something funny, silly, odd, or just plain weird send a tweet over to @ohatdl and we’ll share it with the world on your behalf

Not on Twitter? Really? I’ve heard of people like you Head over to http://twitter.com and sign up OR txt message 40404 and you can setup an account via text message.

At the March OC Podcasters meeting I did a presentation on how to get wordpress to interact with some popular 3rd party web applications such as Twitter & Facebook along with sharing posts on social networks. The day started out with me putting the final touches on my Keynote presentation I’d be showing at the event. If you were to ask my wife she would say I spent all day messing with it… and most of the day before too. Never again will I wait until the last minute to prep my presentation like I did this one. I’ve never used Keynote before and was very impressed with what I was able to do with very little effort. I did have a learning curve but that’s to be expected with a new app. After I learned the ends and outs I was able to make interactive slides that didnt require me to go slide by slide to make elements change on the screen. I also was able to get the Keynote Remote app to work on my iphone which is pretty damn cool.

Anyhow, back to the talk… I started out with a quick intro on wordpress themes (I should have included how a widget works in the slides but I did discuss that which you can see in the video) then later went into something new and fresh: Facebook Connect. This tech enables you to allow your readers to login to your wordpress site using their Facebook login info. The plugin I finally settled with was the one developed by sixjumps which took the basics of just authenticating with wordpress to a new level. With this you can leave a comment on the blog and allow the comment to be sent over to facebook. You can also share links from the site to facebook with ease and lastly be able to see who else is using the site from facebook. Pretty cool stuff to be totally honest.

Later I went into some plugins to connect wordpress with Twitter: TwitterTools by Alex King, TwitMe by Johnny Mast and Tweetbacks by Joost de Valk. I love Alex and Joost’s work and their plugins kick some serious ass. TwitMe and its dev are new to me but there are some great features he put into that plugin. Lastly I discussed sharing posts with friends using using Joost’s plugin Sociable and ShareThis.

One thing I learned with this is the power of the masses… If your doing a presentation on social media or new media, get your audience involved by asking them to get their friends involved. At the beginning of the demo I put a tinyurl link up on the screen and asked everyone to hop on twitter and send that link out to as a tweet so we can get some people in the chatroom. I also learned to have a videotape in the camera before using a sony camera as a videosource. Ends up that without a tape the camera goes into store demo mode and did all sorts of fun with the video demoing how you can do mosaic and sepia and other things. Next time I need to drag Jacob Morales out and have him record me with his kick ass setup.

Below are various ways to consume the content:

YouTube Video of me doing the presentations:

SlideShare of the Presentation:

PDF and KeyNote if you’d like to use these files for your own presentation.

Below is my Creative Commons info for this project.

WordPress 3rd party web service by Jason Tucker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

• CapsuleRebel
• Colors
• CapsuleNeo

Leave a comment with your questions.

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WordPress announced today their new iPhone app WordPress for iPhone. I’m actually blogging this using the application and it works quite nicely.

Yesterday I tweeted about the need for a solid blogging app for the iPhone, typepad has this sort of app currently but didn’t support wordpress.

I’m stoked!

WordPress blog post about WordPress for iPhone

Download the app for yourself at the App Store

Below is what this app looks like on the iPhone.

One of the things that I miss when using an editor such as this is that I can’t use any of the wordpress specific functions. One of which is PodPress for when I’m posting a podcast. Or using custom fields for when I’m wanting to display some embed tag that wordpress will normally muck up using the EmbedIt plugin. To be quite honest I could just save the post as a draft and then add in those tags or use those wordpress editor only features from the website. EmbedIt mainly just makes it so that wordpress wont mess up the tags and begin replacing things. You pop in a token {HTML1} into the editor and using the custom fields areas you’d put in HTML1 as the field name and the embed tag as the value. Without having to do all that XMLRCP (the way that these blogging applications interact with the blog software) bypasses the area of code that wordpress would use to change these embed tags so it’s not really affected by that.

It looks as if video does post just fine using Windows Live Writer and wordpress without the need of Embedit. If I were to try and edit this post in wordpress then save if I’d imagine it would break the embed and really mess things up.

Lets see how many more times I’ll use this editor.

The Grove

I attended the first ever Los Angeles WordPress Users Group yesterday at The Farmers Market in LA. I’ve never been to The Farmers Market before so it was a pretty cool experience. Typically when I’m in LA I got to downtown or the west side never where the farmers market is at. I parked in The Grove parking lot since I didnt have cash to pay for the parking near the farmers market. I was a bit early so I took a stroll around The Grove so I could tell Jen about it. It’s an open air mall with a great water feature and places for kids to play and a food court.

The Users Group

12:00 came around quickly and I made my way to the Farmers Market. I found the Starbucks that was listed in the directions and then walked inside to see the actual farmers market. Shops, food an walk up eaterys were intermingled. It was interesting to see how they all worked together, people buying poultry at one place and crepes or mexican food in another. Sandwich shops, tourist info and LA themed items along with produce were all over the place there. I made my way to the place that was selling delicious smelling crepes and saw Douglas E Welch along with Jason Cosper. They were commandeering adjacent tables as they became free and I sat down at one of them and greeted everyone. It seems as if most of the people knew each other to some extent. I knew 2 people and only one of which I’ve met before, Douglas. It’s funny, I met Dougas at the Podcamp AZ event held late last year and now I’m meeting him at another event. We also had him recently talk at the OC Podcasters meetup a few months back too.

This meeting was mainly just a meet and greet, there was no structure to it and no set agenda. I talked to the people around me and nodded at the folks at the other end of the table. Jokingly someone asked if there was an IRC backchannel we can all participate in. Andy from netZoo cranked up his MacBook and got on yahoo’s live service to stream some of the event while also checking the scores of his fave baseball team. Slowly people were getting up to grab some food from the places here at the market. I strolled around a bit and went to the crepes place to get an egg and ham with sun dried tomatoes, it was delicious. Next time I think I’ll try the Nutella with strawberries those seemed to be selling fast. I talked to some of the people there about my wordpress installations and the various hacks and plugins I used with them. It seemed like most of the people there we’re bloggers and only a few of us were Podcasters. I think thats why I didn’t know many of them since it’s a variation of the same animal with the only commonality being a blogging platform and RSS for delivery.

Podcamp

After the event and some group pictures (see below) I stuck around for a bit to talk with Jason about the Podcamp Socal (LA?) event. We talked about possible known locations to hold the event and various people we should get involved in the planning of it. He’s done a few Barcamps and other events in the past so it was good to talk to him and get a feel for what I was getting myself into. I was very pleased what I heard and after talking to him I think that SoCal does need a PodCamp even more than I realized.

• Flickr Photos tagged: LAWPUG
• Upcoming Event: LAWPUG

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We talked about my background, my podcasts, MAME, Xbox hacking, Asterisk, WRT45G hacking (with DD-WRT) and other fun stuff.

Give it a listen:
Geek Week on A Geek and his Wife podcast – Tucker Time
Subscribe via iTunes