Tag Archives: amazon

Buy Your Own Modem: Save $120/year and Get Faster Internet

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money fire photo

Hello Comcast

If you’ve got Comcast internet you’re probably “renting” their cable modem for something INSANE like $10 a month.1

Stop it.  Just stop that nonsense right now.

You can buy a brand new modem off Amazon for $65 (shipped with prime!), hook up the modem in 5 minutes, and have Comcast authorize the new modem in about 15 minutes.  It will pay for itself in about six months, last years, and as a bonus, you’ll almost certainly have faster internet access than your neighbor who is still using the rented modem.  Here’s what you do:

  1. Buy the “ARRIS SURFboard SB6141 DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem – Retail Packaging – White” from Amazon.23  It is possible that some of the models have changed.  You can confirm the latest Comcast compatible models here.
  2. Follow the directions from Xfinity/Comcast to activate your modem
  3. If you get hung up, you may need to call up Xfinity/Comcast at 1 (800) 934-6489.  They had to take one additional step to authorize my modem on their end, but the process was painless.

Switching car insurance or brown bagging your lunch might save you a little money.  But, I have to tell you, it was immensely satisfying to save money, not pay Comcast as much, and speed up my internet connection all in the same morning.

  1. Photo by Images_of_Money [↩]
  2. The white plastic injection molded shell is $65 and the black plastic injection molded shell is $100.  Heck, they can paint mine yellow for an extra $35 [↩]
  3. Yes, that’s an affiliate link [↩]

Dogs and cats living together!

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Real wrath of God type stuff

Real wrath of God type stuff

I’m basically through with CD’s.  I don’t even want the ones I have.  I would much rather just have the MP3’s since they’re just so much easier to organize and play.  This has been the case for a while now – the last time I bought a physical CD was four years ago.  The CD before that was eight years ago.

I was looking at buying an album off of Amazon the other day only to discover it was $3 cheaper for me to buy the physical CD, which comes with an MP3 “autorip” copy in my Amazon account, than to just buy the MP3 album in the first place.  Three dollars isn’t enough to make a tremendous difference in my lifestyle, but at the same time, that’s 1/3 the cost of the CD + MP3 album.  I can’t imagine why I would want to pay $3 more for the MP3 album when I could save $3, get the CD and MP3 album, and give or throw away the CD.

Interestingly, now that the United States Supreme Court has upheld the “First Sale Doctrine,” at least in relation to international textbook sales, I wonder if I’m perfectly justified in buying the CD+MP3 for $9 and selling off the CD for a modest amount.  (Are there still used CD buying places?!?)  After all, it’s not as if I’m making unauthorized digital copies, I’m just selling the physical CD and keeping the digital copies I purchased… right?

WordPress II

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I tend to see the world through WordPress eyes.1 When I find (or write) a clever bit of script that would be useful to a WordPress website, I tend to convert it into a WordPress plugin.  I did this with my PieChart Plugin and a few other knick-knacky plugins.

I just noticed Cryozap Cyrozap‘s Amazon affiliate link converter PHP script.

It occurs to me that it would be relatively easy to build a WordPress plugin that searches through a post/page, finds Amazon links, and then turns them into affiliate links…  I think this could be useful in several of my sites, actually.

Update:  Cyrozap – sory fore mispellnig yoru mane.

  1. You see, the subject is WordPress double-I, as in WordPress I’s, as in WordPress eyes… [↩]