Copying it Wholesale: Scamming the Company

NEC logoWhen you get desperate to make a buck and you like a particular brand with good consumer cachet and a nice product range, there are a couple options. You can buy some of their stuff one the sly with bulk level prices and then try and sell them on, you can manufacture your own version of one of their products, or you can copy a vast swath of what they do, manufacturing, distributing and retailing the products as if a representative of the real company.

From the IHT: Next step in pirating: Faking a company

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French Hilarity

I’m going to University in Brussels next year and as I’m not all that great a French speaker (having not studied the language for four years) I don’t have a lot of confidence. Luckily, they have language courses.
The stinger:

You have to take a language test to get onto the language course, and if they don’t think you’re good enough, they’ll send you home!

I so hope that’s not me.

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Web Stores: Freak Version

branch home bagThis is like the coolest collection of shopping sites around. Though Wired News has joined them all together in an article because they’re apparently ‘wacky’, I think they sound great. A $3,000 recycled paper table, buying a cow or flock of geese for a family in a developing country, a website that sells only one product per day and a subscription for monthly underwear delivery through the mail that retails beechwood-fabric panties! Perfect!

Wired News: The 10 Wackiest E-Commerce Sites

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How to Fix an iPod (Renegade Version)

The ways they don’t tell you: the fourth option.

  1. Get it repaired by a non Apple person. A cursory look on the internet tells me this costs around £150.
  2. Get Apple to replace my ipod (the now redundant 40g black and white fella) for £160.
  3. Hand in my old one and pay either £219 for a 30g colour one or £300 for a 60g colour one.

ANYWAY the upshot is that I did some searching on the web and this one bloke suggested, and I kid you not, that when the hard drive does the initial whirring as it starts, you WHACK it hard and that sorts it out. I tried that and….

Read the rest on Viper Squad Ten: Apple Crumble

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