Bnpositive's Blog

For Christmas, both my kids got Nintendo DSi’s as gifts from their grandparents. Life being as it is, I just now got around to registering their portable game consoles on the Club Nintendo website.

I’d already been to the site before when we received our Nintendo Wii for Christmas a few years earlier. I subscribed to the email newsletter and visit the site every now and then, but I hadn’t really dug into the features of the site.

What I really liked is that I can setup a family account and then logins for each of the kids. Then they can login to the site and organize things they way they would prefer.

Club Nintendo allows you earn points for doing a variety of items, like linking your Nintendo DSi shop accounts to your Club Nintendo accounts. I can also earn points, or coins as they count them, for completing surveys and registering more hardware devices and games.

The email newsletter lets me keep up-to-date on what’s available for the different consoles we have, what new games are coming out for each and what’s available in the Nintendo Wii ware section.

If you own any kind of Nintendo product, check-out Club Nintendo and get your gaming life organized and current online.

Plastic has really changed our lives. We should use it responsibly and recycle it whenever possible, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about finding the right piece of plastic you need and the U.S. Plastic Corp. website should be your first stop.

You could be looking for a little plastic piece, some kind of tubing, containers, plastic bags, scientific labware and even DVD cases. If it’s plastic, this place has probably got what you’re looking for on their site and in their warehouse.

It’s like walking into a giant hardware store, but instead of having all the stuff you’d find in a big hardware store, it’s 1,000′s of items that are all plastic.

I was looking for things like trash bags, found them! Recycling containers… found them! Bins for art supplies for the kids… yep, found them. Nalgene bottles to replace all those plastic drinking water bottles we use… absolutely. I’m telling you, it’s all here. They even have brand name products like Rubbermaid items, loads of great stuff.

Let me repeat, if you’re looking for something and it’s plastic… it’s more than likely available for purchase from the U.S. Plastic Corp. website.

You’ve heard it before. A picture is worth 1,000 words right? That may be true, but unless you’re a photographer yourself where are you going to find some great images. You can use a stock photo website, but then you need to be rich to afford the images.

With the stock.xchng website you don’t need to be a photographer or independently wealthy to get great images for your website or other creative project.

The stock.xchng website has some photos that you will need to pay for, but they also have a library full of images that can be used for free as well. The site allows you to search for images by keyword, which is what I usually do for most of my image searches.

The images available or high resolution and size so you shouldn’t have any problems finding what you need while you’re on the site. The stock.xchng site is normally the first place I go when I’m looking for an image. Rarely do I have to go searching anywhere else.

The next time you’re in need of uncovering a great image, visit the stock.xchng website first.

Remember when the only way to really know what was going to be on TV in advance was to get the TV Guide and thumb through it while you’re sitting on the couch? It wasn’t THAT long ago, I can remember using it and I’ve been on this planet less than four decades.

A few years back TV Guide changed their magazine format a little bit and resized it as well. Now it’s a full-sized magazine production and has as much information about entertainment news as it does TV listings, if not more.

The same can be said of the TV Guide website. Sure you’ve got TV listings, but also interviews with actors, news information, photos and the ability to customize your TV Guide online experience to show and highlight what items you’d be most interested.

I’ve got to say the one thing I miss on their website that I used to absolutely love in their magazine was they’re crossword puzzle. I should also say that they’ve delivered one of the best mobile friendly versions of a TV listings website.

Catch-up on what’s on by uncovering the schedule of your favorite shows at TV Guide.com

How many times did you eat take-out, drive-thru or something other than a home-cooked meal last week. What was the biggest reason you didn’t eat a home-cooked  meal? What part of the process of cooking a meal at home gives you the most trouble?

Is it the shopping for groceries that’s the biggest annoyance? Is it knowing what you can fix with what’s available? Is it the actually process of cooking the meal in your kitchen?

All of these questions can be answered at the SavingDinner.com website.

When you subscribe to their Menu-Mailer, every Tuesday you’ll receive a list of menu items for dinners and daytime meals and snacks. The menus include the grocery list of the items you’ll need for all the meals for the week. The grocery items are even organized so that things are grouped together by the departments you’ll find them in the grocery store.

As you’re prepping meals, you’ll even be instructed to cook items that will be used for meals later in the week and be told that you can save them for later and not to eat them or your meals won’t be ready later.

Plenty of other options are available from SavingDinner.com too, freezer cooking (prepare a month’s worth of meals at once and always be ready to eat), gluten free menus, emergency menus and so much more.

Save yourself some time and your health by fixing great meals at home and stop eating out so much with SavingDinner.com

I had a bit of a challenging task recently serving as alpha-geek for my extended family. My mother-in-law had gotten the Security Tool virus on her machine and it was doing a great job of keeping her from doing anything productive to remove the offending malware.

The Security Tool malware virus presents itself as a very believable and helpful application. It uses quite a bit of social engineering to make the infected computer’s owner think they should be clicking on approval buttons and icons to let the software do more “help” on their computer.

What makes this even more challenging is that Security Tool actively denies just about any action you take to try and remove the offending application. You’ve really got to do a couple of different steps to make sure everything is removed and doesn’t come back to infect you later.

The best instructions I’ve found in quite some time to remove a virus, are the ones I found on the Bleeping Computer website (great site name by the way!). Step-by-step instructions, and even the suggestion of printing them out so you have them available through the different restarts that may be required. My only suggestion to you would be to read all the way through things first, download everything you need before you start so it’s available just like the printed instructions. Then get to it.

If you’re infected with the Security Tool virus malware and looking for ways to remove it, visit Bleeping Computer and follow their instructions. It worked perfectly for me.

Image: Bleeping Computer website

My wife and I are really working on getting our kids to read more and more. That’s not to say they don’t already read, both of them have been reading on average 30+ minutes per day since they’ve learned how to read.

The challenge we’ve found recently is finding good books that both challenge them at their reading level, as well as continue to be appropriate for them at their age. Sometimes that can be a difficult task to accomplish. I want to get my kids to read more than Diary of A Wimpy Kid or Captain Underpants for my son, and something besides Disney books for my daughter.

Thankfully I recently found the Rated Reads website which has the goal of finding these types of books and providing reviews of exactly what I’d expect to find in each title that’s recommended.

The Rated Reads website has a simple rating structure of "None", "Mild" or "Moderate" which identifies main topics of language, sexual references or violence. Cleanly organized and concisely written. This website allows you to spend more time reading more great books instead of spending it on websites looking for those books.

Visit Rated Reads for yourself and find the next great book to put on your nightstand.

If you haven’t figured it out just yet, there’s quite a bit of information that can be gained by paying attention to your activity using the network’s micro-blogging  functionality. Finding out more information about your activity on Twitter can help you adjust your activity if necessary, or just identify other areas to work on improving your Twitter citizenship.

Twitter Analyzer provides details about your activity on Twitter. Including who you follow, who re-tweets your messages, what you’re talking about and just how quickly is your Twitter network growing since you’ve been involved?

The Twitter Analyzer tool provides a quick resource to find all of this information and once you find it, you can share it with your friends and the world just as easily as you might expect.

One of the interesting bits of information that I haven’t seen available from other similar applications is an identification of what tool you were using to use twitter. The web? another application like BrightKite or Foursquare or do most of my tweets come from my mobile phone?

Get a clue to your Twitter experiences and visit Twitter Analyzer to grab those details quickly and easily.

There was some significant spammy Twitter activity today on the network. I’ve received a number of tweets throughout the day that were less than what I’d expect from the people I received them from in my followers lists.

As you can read in the screen captures above, it’s the obvious sex and performance subjects of topic that we’re used to receiving in our email Inboxes. The problem now is the increase in activity on the twitter micro-blogging platform.

The two messages I’ve received multiple times today are the following:

hi, i’m 24/female/horny… i have to get off here but message me on my windows live messenger name Paris455love@hotmail.com

and

hhey, i’ve been having better sex and longer with this here [link removed]

The massive onslaught makes me wonder if these accounts were really hacked, or if someone they’re just being spoofed. Regardless, we don’t need this junk on twitter. I think this sort of thing can start to significantly damage the increasing usage of the service.

If these accounts are being spoofed, if I had to start weeding through messages where 10%+ started being spam, it would impact my ongoing willingness to fire up the service. With the recent release of Google Buzz, timing on can’t be good.

You’re on twitter all day, so why don’t you make it work for you. In fact you can even make it serve you as your own little personal assistant for all those little, but very important things you always seem to forget anyway.

If you follow @timer on twitter, you can send yourself little reminders that are set on a schedule and be notified of that item as you need, when you need it.

With the requirements being straight-forward and simple, you’ve got the flexibility to be pretty creative with the reminders. Don’t count on the service to be absolutely precise though. Remember we’re dealing with the intarwebs here, things could get delayed unexpectedly. I guess that should also serve as a bit of a reminder not to use the service for those absolutely crucial reminders, or at least not solely rely on them. You know, the really serious stuff.

I just used it to remind myself to call a restaurant tomorrow to make dinner reservations for the weekend.

So, go follow @timer, and send them a direct message with the number of minutes from now you want to be reminded and what you want to be reminded of at that time. Can’t be much simpler.

The big news this week is the CEO of Toyota coming before Congress to justify and explain their position on the recent re-call of millions of their vehicles. Did they wait too late? Did they save too much money avoiding the re-call? Did they wrongly blame the drivers?

Honestly, I don’t have too much of a problem with a large company with a large impact on the general public of the United States to be questioned about their responsibility to the safety of that same public.

My biggest hang-up with the whole issue now is that the organization doing the questioning is the United States government, when they have their own little car company (Government Motor Company) in their back pocket. You think there’s any benefit with the US Government knocking out a major competitor to increase the likelihood of getting a better return on their bailout investment of an automobile company?

But at this point I’m a little tainted with the government’s recent involvement in major league baseball, NCAA national football championship and other useless endeavors far below what they should really be focusing on. Which, in my opinion is to get as much out of the way as possible and let the American people fix the country with their own hard work and determination.

Reeling from a series of public relations guffaws, John Mayer has been in search of some way to bolster his public image. He had just that opportunity at a recent concert in Philadelphia. Standing in line before concert, 11-year old Austin Christy had a sign asking if he could play John’s song "Belief" with him on-stage. Mayer agreed and has potentially set the next guitar hero on his way for future shows of his own.

Catch the YouTube video below of the event.