The Cheapest Days to Buy Certain Items

by Kelli B. Grant

We talked to the experts, and narrowed down the best days of the week to buy certain items.

Airplane Tickets
When to Buy: Wednesday morning.
Why: "Most airfare sales are thrown out there on the weekend," says travel expert Peter Greenberg, a.k.a. The Travel Detective. Other airlines then jump into the game, discounting their own fares and prompting further changes by the first airline. The fares reach their lowest prices late Tuesday or early Wednesday.

Books
When to Buy: Thursday.
Why: Price compare between major chains Borders and Barnes & Noble. The former releases its weekly sales and coupons on every Thursday; the latter, every Tuesday.

Cars
When to Buy: Monday.
Why: "Car dealers live for the weekend, which is when they make most of their sales," says Phil Reed, consumer advice editor for Edmunds.com. "On Mondays, the low foot traffic makes it seem like the weekend will never come." That dealer desperation, paired with fewer consumers on the lot, give you more negotiating power.

Clothing
When to Buy: Thursday evening.
Why: That's the day when stores stock their shelves for the weekend, and when many retailers — including Ann Taylor, Banana Republic and Express — start their weekend promotions, says Kathryn Finney, author of "How to Be a Budget Fashionista." You'll find great prices and the best selection. "It's an effort to get people to shop in the middle of the week," she says.

Department-Store Wares
When to Buy: Saturday evening.
Why: Department stores have a lot to mark down for their Sunday circulars, so they frequently start the process on Saturday evenings before store closing, says Finney. "They're preparing for the big rush," she says. Bonus: Even if the markdowns haven't been made, many employees will honor the sale price if you ask. Print out the circular preview from the store's web site, and bring it with you when you head to the mall.

Dinner Out
When to Buy: Tuesday.
Why: Most restaurants do not receive food deliveries over the weekend. "Sunday is the garbage-can day of the week," says Kate Krader, senior editor at Food & Wine magazine. "No doubt, they're cleaning out their fridges. Tuesdays, they're starting fresh." Dining out on that day offers the best odds you'll get a meal worth paying for, no matter your price point, she says.

Entertainment
When to Buy: Wednesday.
Why: Plenty of movie theaters, amusement parks and museums offer extra discounts to consumers who visit midweek. Six Flags theme parks offer a $12 discount to AAA members — three times its usual discount of $4. AMC Theatres offers members in its free AMC Movie Watcher reward program a free small popcorn on Wednesdays. (This summer, it's also the day select theaters offer free Summer Movie Camp screenings.)

Gas
When to Buy: Thursday, before 10 a.m.
Why: The price of oil isn't the only factor influencing costs at your local pump. Consumer usage plays a role, too — and weekend demand is high, says Jason Toews, co-founder of GasBuddy.com, a price-monitoring site. Prices usually swing upward on Thursdays as travelers fuel up to head out the following day. By hitting the pump before 10 a.m. (when many station owners change their prices), you'll beat the rush and the price jump.

Accelerate x.264 1080p movies over the GPU Guide

Watching 1080P x.264 / MKV videos completely decoded by your graphics card
An accelerating GPU Video Acceleration Guide

Yours truly is a big movie buff, I like to playback high-definition content, preferably at 1080P Full HD. But face it, to be able to decode such content in a flawless manner, you will need a lot of raw processing power.

One of my more recent dillema's is that you can playback for example BluRay content fairly easily with software like PowerDVD, assisted by the graphics processor on your graphics card. Such a great feaure, as that GPU can do marvelous things when it comes to handeling that content. The problem with 3rd party vendor software like PowerDVD is however complex, if a file format or file-container is not supported you can't play back that content assisted (accelerated or enhanchanced) by your graphics card. And that's a waste of the GPU and definitely your CPU load.

Much like MP3 was up and coming many years ago, one of the most popular formats is x.264 (not to confuse with h.264 itself). x264 is a free and open library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams.

The x.264 format is often synonym with Matroska MKV, a media file container which often embeds that x.264 content, a much admired container format for media files. Especially the 1920x1080p movies often have some form of h.264 encoding dropped within the x.264 format. As a result, you'll need a very beefy PC with powerful processor to be able to playback such movies, error free without frames dropping and nasty stuttersm as PowerDVD or other PureVideo HD supporting software by itself will not support it.

There is a way though. Today we are going to open up and investigate this topic, we'll show you how you can accelerate x.264 content nearly 100% accelerated and post processed (enhanced) with nothing other than your graphics card.

Why use a graphics card you might ask ? Well, first off, there are many software solutions at hand, the fantastic ffdshow, which is an open source DirectShow decoding filter with excellent image quality. But for it to be able to handle 1080p, you will need fairly decent hardware, especially if you flick on filters like image sharpening. Another option is to purchase CoreAVC, which is a codec that allows extremely efficient x.264 playback, assisted by your (preferably) multi-core processor. CoreAVC is extraordinary, however on bigger HD TVs you'll notice that this codec forfeits a little on image quality.

Running into CPU (system) bottlenecks or forfeiting on image quality is not something we should accept in the year 2009, especially when we have modern graphics cards that could easily handle this content.

Companies like ATI and NVIDIA have been evangelizing that their graphics cards are the best thing invented since the wheel was discovered, especially for that high-definition content playback. See, the graphics processors in your (reasonably modern) graphics card have excellent decoding, accelerating and post-processing (enhance image quality) functionality as they have dedicated core logic built in to the GPU to do exactly that.

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Backtracking EMAIL Messages

Backtracking EMAIL Messages

Tracking email back to its source: Twisted Evil
cause i hate spammers... Evil or Very Mad

Ask most people how they determine who sent them an email message and the response is almost universally, "By the From line." Unfortunately this symptomatic of the current confusion among internet users as to where particular messages come from and who is spreading spam and viruses. The "From" header is little more than a courtesy to the person receiving the message. People spreading spam and viruses are rarely courteous. In short, if there is any question about where a particular email message came from the safe bet is to assume the "From" header is forged.

So how do you determine where a message actually came from? You have to understand how email messages are put together in order to backtrack an email message. SMTP is a text based protocol for transferring messages across the internet. A series of headers are placed in front of the data portion of the message. By examining the headers you can usually backtrack a message to the source network, sometimes the source host. A more detailed essay on reading email headers can be found .

If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express you can view the headers by right clicking on the message and selecting properties or options.

Below are listed the headers of an actual spam message I received. I've changed my email address and the name of my server for obvious reasons. I've also double spaced the headers to make them more readable.


Return-Path:

X-Original-To: davar@example.com

Delivered-To: davar@example.com

Received: from 12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com (12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com [12.218.172.108])
by mailhost.example.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 1F9B8511C7
for ; Sun, 16 Nov 2003 09:50:37 -0800 (PST)

Received: from (HELO 0udjou) [193.12.169.0] by 12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com with ESMTP id <536806-74276>; Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:42:31 +0200

Message-ID:

From: "Maricela Paulson"

Reply-To: "Maricela Paulson"

To: davar@example.com

Subject: STOP-PAYING For Your PAY-PER-VIEW, Movie Channels, Mature Channels...isha

Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:42:31 +0200

X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21)

X-Priority: 3

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="MIMEStream=_0+211404_90873633350646_4032088448"


According to the From header this message is from Maricela Paulson at s359dyxxt@yahoo.com. I could just fire off a message to abuse@yahoo.com, but that would be waste of time. This message didn't come from yahoo's email service.

The header most likely to be useful in determining the actual source of an email message is the Received header. According to the top-most Received header this message was received from the host 12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com with the ip address of 21.218.172.108 by my server mailhost.example.com. An important item to consider is at what point in the chain does the email system become untrusted? I consider anything beyond my own email server to be an unreliable source of information. Because this header was generated by my email server it is reasonable for me to accept it at face value.

The next Received header (which is chronologically the first) shows the remote email server accepting the message from the host 0udjou with the ip 193.12.169.0. Those of you who know anything about IP will realize that that is not a valid host IP address. In addition, any hostname that ends in client.mchsi.com is unlikely to be an authorized email server. This has every sign of being a cracked client system.


Here's is where we start digging. By default Windows is somewhat lacking in network diagnostic tools; however, you can use the tools at to do your own checking.

davar@nqh9k:[/home/davar] $whois 12.218.172.108

AT&T WorldNet Services ATT (NET-12-0-0-0-1)
12.0.0.0 - 12.255.255.255
Mediacom Communications Corp MEDIACOMCC-12-218-168-0-FLANDREAU-MN (NET-12-218-168-0-1)
12.218.168.0 - 12.218.175.255

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2003-12-31 19:15
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

I can also verify the hostname of the remote server by using nslookup, although in this particular instance, my email server has already provided both the IP address and the hostname.

davar@nqh9k:[/home/davar] $nslookup 12.218.172.108

Server: localhost
Address: 127.0.0.1

Name: 12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com
Address: 12.218.172.108

Ok, whois shows that Mediacom Communications owns that netblock and nslookup confirms the address to hostname mapping of the remote server,12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com. If I preface a www in front of the domain name portion and plug that into my web browser, http://www.mchsi.com, I get Mediacom's web site.

There are few things more embarrassing to me than firing off an angry message to someone who is supposedly responsible for a problem, and being wrong. By double checking who owns the remote host's IP address using two different tools (whois and nslookup) I minimize the chance of making myself look like an idiot.

A quick glance at the web site and it appears they are an ISP. Now if I copy the entire message including the headers into a new email message and send it to abuse@mchsi.com with a short message explaining the situation, they may do something about it.

But what about Maricela Paulson? There really is no way to determine who sent a message, the best you can hope for is to find out what host sent it. Even in the case of a PGP signed messages there is no guarantee that one particular person actually pressed the send button. Obviously determining who the actual sender of an email message is much more involved than reading the From header.

Facebook infected with Koobface virus

Attention new viewers: those 5000 “friends” you have on Facebook? They might not actually be your friends. In fact, some of them might be scammers trying to infect your computer with a new virus dubbed “Koobface”. Koobface, which already made the rounds on MySpace, is now worming its way through Facebook. The Koobface virus uses Facebook’s private messaging system to infect computers via a shared video. Unsuspecting users will see a video link (shared by an infected friend) with the message, “You look just awesome in this new movie.” Click the link will lead you to an outside site where you’re told that you need to download a Flash update, which is actually a virus file. Once the virus is installed, it will try to grab sensitive data off your PC, like credit card numbers.

In a way this a very old virus; it operates much like mass-mailing worms that used to infest Usenet and e-mail lists. But it’s proving an effective tactic on social networks where private messages from friends seem more trustworthy than traditional e-mail, which even the most neophyte web users have come to distrust. With its some 120 million users, Facebook is not only a potentially lucrative target, but it’s well into the mainstream, which means more gullible, less internet-savvy users for virus creators to prey on. The virus watchdog blog for McAfee labs reports that Facebook is aware of the Koobface attack and is already working to remove the spammed links from its system. But with dozens of Koobface variants known to exist, McAfee warns that “the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.” Should your PC be infected the Koobface worm, the Facebook security blog suggests resetting your password and running updated anti-virus software to purge the worm from your system.

German Secret Intelligence Service

The secret IP addresses from the German Secret Intelligence Service are leaked, This organization is allowed to hack any computer, without any permission of others. So maybe interesting for your firewall

DNS INFORMATION (as responding):

Host www2-1.bvoe.de (195.243.248.226)
Host www2-2.bvoe.de (195.243.248.228)
Host www1-1.bvoe.de (62.156.187.234)
Host www1-2.bvoe.de (62.156.187.236)
Host mail.prosozial.de (62.159.60.150)

How To Zip And Encrypt Your Documents For Free

Do you remember how long ago you have heard about Zip for the first time? I think it was even before Windows was invented. Internet was an unknown word yet at that time. Computers were DOS operated and the instructions for compressing and decompressing documents seemed like magic words to me. What I didn’t know by then, but I’ve just found out tonight is that the .zip standard was invented by PKWARE. This explains why those commands were starting with pkzip and pkunzip. For those of you who are interested, PKWARE is giving away a non-commercial use license of a much more modern version of zip, the SecureZIP Express. Not only it is free of charge, but you have the chance to win cool prizes in the new “Decrypt and Drive” contest.
SecureZIP Express has several useful features. The basic ones are compressing/decompressing and encryption of files that you store or send. Compressing files is a great way to save storage space, especially on memory sticks and CDs; besides, there are situations in which we want our files to be secured, as they are not meant to be seen by anybody. The software also includes a digital certificate so you can exchange files securely with others without using passwords. Only the person the file was encrypted for can open it when you use a digital certificate. SecureZIP Express has no toolbars or spyware. For years, PKWARE has given free .zip software away. Now, together with the software, they are giving away a lot of prizes including a Honda scooter, bicycles, Wii games, gas cards, and more.

For entering the contest, you need to visit www.DecryptandDrive.com, download the free software, then come back to play the game. You need to have SecureZIP, and the digital certificate it installs, on the computer you play the game from. SecureZIP Express is also available for download at www.securezip.com. Good luck and let me know if you win something.

Simonne

How to remove file protection from iTunes songs

How to remove file protection from iTunes songs
by Dman
Okay there are lots of ways to remove file protection using programs and what not, but what if you do not feel like downloading anything, or just don't have the priveldges on the computer to do so? What are you to do with all of those files that you can't play on any other computer that you paid for. What in the world are you supposed to do?

Basically it is the same meathodas using your iPod as a storage device, here is a quick tutorial on that.
1. Have your iPod disconnected.
2. Make a file with whatever program file you want to put on your iPod.
3. Now it is time for speed because approximately 10 seconds after you conenct your iPod it dissapears from the "my computer" section if it is innactive (if you are placing songs onto it, you can see it once again). So have my computer opened and the directory of whatever file you want to place on it. Connect your iPod and instantly place whatever file you want to be placed on it straight onto it (it will be a drive f:\).
4. And voila, you have now placed a file onto you iPod, now go to your other computer, and use the same technique, open up My computer, connect your iPod, and now drag the file outa there onto your new computer.

Ok, now that we understand how to use the iPod as a storage device we will get into how to use this feature to our andvantage to get rid of the file protection. I still do not understand how or why the shit works, but it does. Basically the main reason I even found out about this was because those sons-of-a-bitches at Macantosh made it so that if you place songs on your iPod through the iTunes software that you cannot transferr them to your other computers, this feature is useful for protecting songs from bieng brought to another computer illegally but as a saying goes "locks are for honest people because they will try the door and leave. But for unhonest people who we made the locks to keep them out, they can get past them". But the occasion comes where this is not the case and that is the reason for which I wrote this tutorial. Also because of what was written above, it is basically about 3 steps to take the file protection off.
1. Make a new folder on your desktop with whatever songs you want to take the file protection off of.
2. Open up my computer.
3. Connect your iPod and place the folder with all of your songs onto your iPod (make sure you will have enough space on your iPod to do so).
4. Disconnect your iPod and bring it to your other computer.
5. Open up My computer on your other computer.
6. Connect your iPod to the other computer and place the file onto the computer.
7. Voila for some odd fucking reason the file is unprotected!

Now, I have only done this once, and only with a computer that did not have iTunes installed on it. I have not tried this to place the files on and then back onto your computer to take the protection off because it might not work, but I do now that you can just place the files onto another computer, delete the file off of your iPod, and then place the unprotected one back onto your desktop and vuala. I do not guarantee any results if the other computer has iTunes. And I would also appreciate if people could post their success and unsuccessful attempts at this and to post what version of the iPod they used, what version of iTunes, and if the other computer had iTunes installed or did not or had it installed in the past but then deleted.

Investigating IP's

http://centralops.net/co/
http://www.all-nettools.com/toolbox
http://www.completewhois.com/
http://www.samspade.org/
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
http://www.demon.net/external/

Domain name investigation:

Whois.sc is now:

www.domaintools.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/
http://whois.webhosting.info/

RWHOIS:

http://www.rwhois.net/rwhois/prwhois.html

Spam database / cross reference lookup :

http://openrbl.org/
http://ipindex.homelinux.net/index.p...check_on_dnsbl

IP/AS/ASN search:

http://www.fixedorbit.com/search.htm

AS trace:

http://www.fixedorbit.com/trace.htm

The general RIR lookups :

http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl
http://www.ripe.net/whois
http://www.ripe.net/db/whois-free.html
http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl
http://whois.samoanic.ws/whois.dhtml

Traceroute site listings:

http://www.traceroute.org/
http://www.geektools.com/traceroute.php

IP Index sites:

http://ipindex.homelinux.net/
http://www.flumps.org/ip/index.html

Site Host monitoring:

http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph
http://www.hostcount.com/

IP/netstat monitor:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/TcpView.html

Freeware Packet Sniffers to help identify the source of any suspect packets/connections leaving your computer:

Smartsniff [ no install required ] :

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/smsniff.html

What is transferring:

http://www.wfshome.com/wit.htm

Packetmon:

http://www.analogx.com/contents/down...twork/pmon.htm

Enabling Right click .

Lots of web sites have disabled the right click function of the mouse button... it's really, really annoying. This is done so that you don't steal (via right-click->save picture) their photos or images or any other goodies. Unfortunately, it disables ALL right-click functionality: copy, paste, open in new window.

It's easy to change, assuming your using IE 6:
Click "Tools"->"Internet Options"
Click the "Security" tab
Click "Custom Level"
Scroll down to the "Scripting" section
Set "Active Scripting" to "disable"
Click "Ok" a couple of times.