Category: Shopping

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Online Travel Sites

Reagan National Airport

Online travel booking is easier than ever. And for us lucky folk in Washington DC with three airports (Dulles, Reagan, and BWI) there are flights everywhere and lots of deals. Below are some useful travel sites.

Travel Reservations

Travelocity – early leader in online reservations with roots back to CompuServe and AOL. Now known for the gnome commercials.

Orbitz – developed by airlines in response to Expedia and Travelocity.

ITA – uses the search system that powers Orbitz, but allows far more complex trips.

Priceline – offers standard purchases or allows you to name your own price for flights, hotels, and car rentals. Pitchman is now William Shatner.

Expedia – started by Microsoft, bought by Ticketmaster, now independent.

Hotwire – owned by Expedia. Unique in that you purchase hotels based on location and star rating. You only find out the name of your hotel after the purchase.

Kayak – travel search aggregator. Kayak does not directly sell tickets, but links to all the sites that do and makes a small amount of money on click throughs.

Bing Travel– recently renamed from Forecast.com, now owned by Microsoft. This site has flight price trends and predictions to help you decide if you should buy or wait for a better fare. It’s not perfect has helped me on a couple of occasions with suggestions to wait for a better price.

Special Airlines

JetBlue and Southwest airlines are not part of the above travel reservation sites. You can only book with them directly.

Other Resources

The Savvy Traveler Blog – deals and news by Rudy Maxa who often discusses travel on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show on NPR in DC.

Flyertalk – forum for frequent flyers to discuss deals and reward programs. This is where serious deal seekers go to discuss optimizing their points and airline status.

Liftopia – discount ski lift tickets and ski hotel deals.

TripBuzz – find local activities.

Have other travel resource recommendations? Email me to let me know.

6/12/16 UPDATES: Updated ITA Link and added TripBuzz, thanks to Phoebe.

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Dropbox Tips and Tricks

Dropbox is one of my favorite tools to help small businesses in the D.C. area share files on the cheap.

Dropbox Wiki Info

Besides simply sharing files with your friends, office co-workers, or just your other computers, there are lots of other uses.

See the Tips and Tricks page and Dropbox Add-on page on the Dropbox Wiki explaining things such as:

Other Dropbox Tips and Tricks

  • See any updates that occur to your Dropbox files with the free Growl (Mac) program. Dropbox for Windows does this through the Dropbox System Tray Icon. This is especially useful if you are sharing folders and need to be notified when there are new files.Dropbox Growl Notification
  • Automatically make web photo galleries by moving pictures to the Dropbox Photos directory either from a computer or using the free iPhone Dropbox App.

iPhone Dropbox

  • Use a Dropbox Add-on that allows you to quickly move a file to a public folder and place the URL the clipboard. This makes sending people a file super easy.
  • Change shared folder names. For example, I share a folder with Joe that I name “Joe”. Joe can accept to join that folder and then rename the folder “Rick” so that it makes more sense for him. The great thing here is that the folder is still named “Joe” for me. Alternatively, I can share a folder with Joe that I have named “Rick” and then rename it to “Joe” once he has joined that folder. On Windows machines, renaming a shared folder has sometimes caused me to leave a shared folder. To get around that quirk, rename a shared folder from the Dropbox website.
  • Move shared folders. You can move shared folders, for example, to a directory named “Shared” or “Work”. This does not affect any of the shared users.

Sign Up Referrals

Dropbox ReferralDropbox is free for 2GB of space. See their pricing for more space. One of the reasons that Dropbox has quickly grown in popularity is their referral program. Once you sign up, you can invite others and get 250MB of extra space for everyone you sign up. On that note, please use my Dropbox referral when signing up for Dropbox to give both of us an extra 250MB of space.

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Monoprice for Cables

At Tech DC, we regularly set up home theater systems for people. We rely on Monoprice for all our cables. They are great quality and only a fraction the cost of cables from big box and other retail stores.

Local retail stores try to sell a HDMI video cable for $50 with every TV. See the HDMI cable selection at Monoprice showing equivalent cables for $10-20.

From a Virginia Target store:

HDMI cable from Target

From a Best Buy advertisement in the Washington Post:

HDMI Cable from Best Buy

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Replace UPS Batteries

If you have computers or electronics that you don’t want to be killed by power fluctuations, it’s a good idea to have a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). The battery in the UPS keeps your equipment running through blackouts our brownouts (reduced power).

Dead Battery

The main problem with a UPS is that its battery might only last a couple of years. A dead battery is often announced by a UPS through regular beeping. Because a UPS is expensive, consider just replacing the battery instead of the whole UPS when the battery dies.

You can buy a replacement from the UPS company or for significantly less money from a third party such as Battery Mart. Just be sure to get a battery that is designed for your specific UPS. I have had good luck with with Battery Mart, but there are some third party batteries which are of poor quality, possibly having a short life, acid leakage, or even causing a fire.

I replaced the battery for the APC Back-UPS 500 ES for $26.39 from Battery Mart instead of $48.99 from APC (prices include shipping).

Battery Mart Replacement Battery

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Network Attached Storage for Automated Backups

Prevent Lost Data

Many DC area residents have been contacting me lately with hard drive failures and lost data. Data can sometimes be recovered using software such as SpinRite. But it’s easy and relatively inexpensive to be proactive and backup your data. The best backups are automated, using free software such as SyncBack for Windows or the built-in Time Machine for Macs.

Backup Locally

Backups can be sent to a local USB flash drive or local USB hard drive. The Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB costs about $107. These use laptop hard drives which have the advantage of being able to run only on USB power. Larger 3.5 inch external drives can hold more data but require an additional power supply.

Network Backups

If you have more than one computer, a better solution can be to backup to a network attached storage (NAS) drive. This connects by ethernet to your router allowing you to connect to it through your home network.

Here are a few solutions:

Apple Time Capsule

If you are a Mac user and you want the simplest solution, you’ll have to pay a lot more for the Apple Time Capsule. Apple just upgraded their large capacity Time Capsule to 2GB for $499. The Time Capsule is both a NAS and a wireless router, so it simplifies your setup. However it is only a solution for automated Mac backups that use Apple’s included Time Machine software.

Apple Time Capsule

Buffalo Linkstation

Buffalo Technology Linkstation Pro LS-XH1.0TL 1 TB is a great NAS that costs about $215 currently. It is fast and works as a Time Machine drive for Macs just like Apple’s Time Capsule above, though you’ll have to login to the Buffalo to set up that capability. You pay a bit more for the Buffalo’s speed than the below Iomega. If you are only using the NAS for automated backups, speed is not particularly important. Speed is helpful if you are also using the NAS as a network shared drive. The other advantage of the Buffalo and the Apple Time Capsule is that they are near silent. You have to put your ear right up to them to hear the small fan.
Buffalo Linkstation

Iomega Home Media Server

Iomega Home Media Server 34337 1TB is a good media server, which is cheaper ($148) but a bit slower than the Buffalo. It is not loud at all, but the fan is noticeable. It includes software for automatically backing up 5 PCs. You can also backup to it with a Mac by using free software such as SuperDuper.

Iomega Home Media Server

NAS Reviews

SmallNetBuilder.com is a great site for NAS reviews. They also have charts such as this one which show you the speed versus price. I circled the Buffalo and Iomaga drives mentioned above illustrating the Buffalo’s excellent performance.

SmallNetBuilder Single Drive NAS Chart

Multi-drive NAS

For larger businesses or those who want an extra backup of their backup drive, consider a NAS that consists of multiple drives. This could be a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) box such as a Netgear ReadyNAS. Or it could be a Drobo and Droboshare. These solutions are more expensive and often slower than single drive solutions. But they ensure that your data will safe if one of their hard drives crashes.

Backup Your Data

In the world of computer support, nothing is worse than seeing someone lose family pictures or days of important accounting data. Given the low cost of storage, there is no excuse for avoiding backups. Automated solutions are a simple way to keep your digital data safe.