Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Free Mother's Day Card

There is no longer any excuse for not showing your mom some love this Mother's Day.  Hallmark is offering a free customized card through their website.  The best part is they even mail it to your mom for free!  Check out all of the info from the SlickDeals post.  Also, to help you get in the Mother's Day mood, here's a message from Mr. T.  I pity the fool who doesn't send his mother a Mother's Day card!



Mr. T - Treat Your Mother Right

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

iTunes Ups Their Prices

From Slashdot "Steve Jobs vowed weeks ago that when iTunes shifted to a tiered
price structure in April, older tracks priced at $0.69 would outnumber
the contemporary hits that are rising to $1.29. Today, several weeks
later, iTunes made the transition. While the $1.29 tracks are
immediately visible, locating cheaper tracks is proving to be an
exercise in futility. With the exception of 48 songs that Apple has
placed on the iTunes main page, $0.69 downloads are a scarce commodity."

I stopped using iTunes a while back and have been very pleased with the decision.  The DRM is an unnecessary hassle that just makes life more difficult.  I used TuneClone to convert my iTunes songs from DRM'ed m4p files to mp3.  It creates a virtual CD burner and allows you to 'burn' playlists to the virtual drive.  It automatically converts any songs sent to the drive into mp3 and stores them in the folder you specify.  As far as purchasing new songs, I've chosen to use Amazon.com since they've already had songs less then $0.99 for a while and their music is already in mp3.  They are obviously aware of consumer wants and aren't just out to trap consumers into their products indefinitely.  I don't like how Apple has always been less open than other tech companies.