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Father’s Day Round Up! Great Gift Ideas For Dad

Father’s Day is approaching again and if you’re like me I always wonder what would be a good gift for Dad. There have been years where a bottle of wine was the gift of choice, or maybe a couple of dress shirts. How boring! Hopefully your Dad is as great as mine and not only deserves a fun cool gift, but would also appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Father’s Day Gift Ideas!

Is your Dad into computers? Maybe a fun USB drive would be the perfect gift? Low cost, yet thoughtful!

16GB Mercedes-Benz USB Flash Drive in the style of a Car Key!
$12.99 GeekGearStore.com

This is a very cool gift for Dad, especially if he drives a Benz and enjoys electronic gadgets. On sale at GeekGearStore.com $12.99 Continue reading “Father’s Day Round Up! Great Gift Ideas For Dad”

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Protect Your Internal Network With A LOW COST Honey Pot

It would appear that more and more companies and home users are becoming victim to bad actors intruding on their network. Weather it be a targeted attack or drive by malware, network security is a hot topic in today’s IT landscape. In this article I will describe how you can build a low cost Honey Pot that can help alert you to an intrusion before its too late.

What is a Honey Pot?

In simple terms a Honey Pot is a device  on your network that looks appetizing to a hacker.  Like drawing a bear to a pot of honey. This device will advertise services that appear vulnerable and maybe draw an attacker in for further investigation. At a minimum it can simply be used as an internal “trip wire” to alert you someone poking around.

Why does a honey pot work?

Stop Hackers WIth A Honey PotI’m Joe hacker and I have just installed malware on one of your employees workstations. I have quickly gained access and I am now able to execute code and commands. What is the first thing I’m going to do? If you said start poking around you would be correct. After I look for anything of value on my host computer I will quickly begin scanning the subnet looking for hosts that are alive. I will also begin mapping the network for services that are possibly vulnerable to attack. This is where the Honey Pot fits in. It has been patiently siting on your network waiting for someone to direct a packet of data in its direction and alert you to possible trouble.

I’m in! How much does a honey pot cost?

Continue reading “Protect Your Internal Network With A LOW COST Honey Pot”

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Help My Laptop Has Really Poor WiFi Performance!

I am the proud owner of a new Dell 5290 2-in-1 laptop and its actually pretty cool. Touch screen, detachable keyboard and pen put together in a nice package for me to take my work on the go. Shortly after configuring the laptop and applying the latest Windows updates I notice the WiFi performance to be really poor. The laptop was almost unusable. My first thought was maybe the laptop chip-set was having an issue with my Ubiquity Access points, but this was NOT the case.

Why do I have poor WiFi performance?

I ran a speed test to see how bad the throughput was.

As you can see from the image above the download speed is less than 1Mbps while the upload speed is close to 100Mbs. What is going on here and how do I fix this? Continue reading “Help My Laptop Has Really Poor WiFi Performance!”

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Extracting Etsy Product Reviews To CSV File

Etsy is a great platform to sell your handmade wares, however since Etsy has become a publicly traded company they have made some changed that angered some sellers and may have caused them into looking at other venues. Moving to a new online store is like moving into a new home office. You want to take your belongings with you and setup shop in your new place. In Etsy’s case this could include your product listings, order history and even your product reviews.

Easy to move except product reviews!

Etsy is kind enough to provide tools to capture your sales data into a neat CSV file ready to import at your new shop, however the product review section is much more difficult to work with. There is no simple interface to export your reviews to a CSV file.

To capture your product reviews. you could cut and paste each one individually, and if your shop is like mine with over 3,000 reviews it could take days or months to complete this task

I want to help get you your data!

In my opinion you earned the reviews and therefore they belong to you and your shop. Now is it ethical to re-post the reviews at other venues? Can you legally use a customers name? I’m not sure, so what you do with the CSV file I provide to you is, well up to you. My official stance is Etsy product review extraction is purely for archive purposes.

How much does it cost? What do I get?

Each page of product reviews contains about 15 reviews on it. To make payment options simple and affordable to all, see rate chart below. Even at the $25 range it comes out to about .03cents per extracted review

  • 1 – 50 pages $25    (up to 750 reviews)
  • 51 – 100 pages $45 (up to 1500 reviews)
  • 101-200 pages $75 (up to 3000 reviews)
  • 201-500 pages $150 (up to 7500 reviews)
  • 500-1000 pages $200 (up to 15000 reviews)
    Over 1000 pages of reviews (email me!)

    PURCHASE AT THE GEEK GEAR ONLINE STORE

What will the data look like?

The data will be in a CSV file and contain the following

  • Reviewers Name
    (Some older reviews have been set to Anonymous by Etsy)
  • Date of the review
  • Content of the review
  • Item name

Unfortunately the process that I use is unable to capture the star rating. Hopefully all your product reviews are 5 star so it will be simple to add it on!

DOWNLOAD THE SAMPLE DATA HERE

Click the link to download the sample data it will show you the exact format of the data and you can easily manipulate it in Microsoft Excel.

 

 

You’re interested and would like to proceed

Click this link to my online store -> www.geekgearstore.com
Purchase the number of reviews you would like extracted
During check out, include your review page URL from Etsy and shop name.
(https://www.etsy.com/shop/<SHOP NAME>/reviews)

The system takes some time to crawl the pages and extract the reviews, usually I can have the work done in about 24 hours.

PURCHASE AT THE GEEK GEAR ONLINE STORE

Ready to go, just click the link above and you’re on the way. If for some reason I am unable to complete the task, you will be issued a 100% refund!

Questions? email me joe@joeoliveri.com

Thanks again for reading my blog,
Joe

visit the GeekGearStore

RELATED
Is Etsy just another Ebay?
Forced Etsy Payments; Is this a good thing or bad?

 

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Best stickers / labels for youth hockey score sheets!

I have been working with youth hockey teams for about 15 years now. Both my boys play ice hockey on multiple teams, and I have been volunteering as team manager for all of them. Part of the managers job is to keep score and supply rosters to the home and away score keeper. Its a huge pain to write in each players name on game day so I generally like to make a score sheet sticker.  It simplifies the process and makes the sheet nice and neat.

Which stickers labels work best?

We have a great example of a youth hockey score sheet above showing both teams using 2×4 stickers. From what I have seen there are many organizations using this format for paper score keeping. Continue reading “Best stickers / labels for youth hockey score sheets!”

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Weekend Project – 2011-2014 Dodge Charger Backup Camera Replacement

Over the last few months the backup camera on my wife’s 2014 Dodge Charger has been intermittently failing to send picture to the console display. The radio / head unit is functioning normally for climate control functions and AM/FM/ and Satellite is working OK too, so I began to troubleshoot the wiring.

During the troubleshooting process, with the backup camera active I disconnected the unit from the cars wiring harness and then reconnected it. At that point the camera begins transmitting again. (think reboot) The next time the camera is activated it fails once again.

This leads me to believe the unit is bad and needs to be replaced. A call to the Dodge dealership quoted me a price of over $350 for parts and labor. I quickly sourced the part on Amazon for around $197

OEM – Mopar  2011-2014 Dodge Charger / Chrysler 300 Backup Camera – $197 at Amazon

 

Tools you can use:

Continue reading “Weekend Project – 2011-2014 Dodge Charger Backup Camera Replacement”

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A Blast From The Past – Panasonic Panapet Radio

I love when I find vintage electronics in the basement or back of my closet. During some recent spring cleaning I came across this 1970’s something Panasonic Panapet radio. In itself its not very remarkable, but when you think about how much technology has changed in the last 45 years its quite amazing. Also kind of funny that they named it “PANA”sonic “PET”

History Of The Panapet

Continue reading “A Blast From The Past – Panasonic Panapet Radio”

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Incredible Shrinking Product – Barbasol Shaving Cream

I’m not sure if anyone cares about this, I’m not sure if I even care about this however I guess I find it worth mentioning. I have been using Barbasol shaving cream since I hit puberty and it does the job its supposed to do. In fact my father used Barbasol shaving cream too. I would say he passed it on to me when I was learning how to shave so many years ago.

Welcome to corporate America, where profits are important and the incredible shrinking product is a reality of life.  I have seen this before where the toilet paper roll becomes thinner, or the NET Weight of a product is shaved down by 1/2 and ounce or so and the price stays the same. I understand its all economics. Reduce the amount of product in the box and increase your profits.

Barbasol  – 10oz vs 7oz

Continue reading “Incredible Shrinking Product – Barbasol Shaving Cream”

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WTF – Is Amazon Selling Nazi Magnets?

Like most of the world I use Amazon to buy everything from electronics to dog food. I needed some magnets to complete a project and stumbled across this image. The $10 – 200pcs magnet set. Which normally would be innocent enough, except when the magnets are placed to reference a swastika.

What is going on here? Amazon Nazi Magnet Set?

Seems inappropriate if you ask me. Click here to see for yourself

Unless they took it down already, then click here to see a local copy

Nazi Magnets?

I wonder how much more inappropriate stuff is floating around on Amazon. If you find something let me know.

Thanks for reading my blog,
Joe

 

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Fun Desk Clock From Recycled iPhone 5

Technology changes so fast, and we all want the latest gadget, but what is the cost of consuming so much? Big business wants us to keep buying devices, even if the old ones are still good. We wind up with millions of abandoned iPhones, Androids and tablets. Some are recycled responsibly while tens of thousands are just tossed in the trash or the back of your desk draw never to be seen again.   Here is a super simple way to recycle your old iPhone into a great retro looking desk clock.

Recycle Your iPhone into a clock – WHAT YOU NEED

 

I needed a stand for my clock and since my objective was to keep this project as simple and low cost as possible. I started with two 3×5 acrylic photo frames.

 

3×5 acrylic frame. Very low cost, about $5.00 at Amazon

 

You will also need 8 flat rare earth magnets (Neodymium) The stronger the magnets the better. Keep them small and flat, the actual shape round or square does not matter. $14.00 at Amazon

 

A little glue to hold it all together. I tend to like GOOP, but any strong adhesive should do. Goop at Amazon $ 11.00

 

 

The last two items you probably have around the house.

  • A colored spay paint for tinting the acrylic frames, I used black.
  • Some type of counter weight for the back of the stand to give it stability, I used a pair of hard drive spindle motors.
Putting it together

Continue reading “Fun Desk Clock From Recycled iPhone 5”

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