Inspired by ShoeMoney’s Free Shirt Friday I would like to introduce the Ingoal.info Free Stuff Day. How I envision this thing to take off is:

1. You’ve got a site you want to promote?
2. You’ve got some swag* promoting your site?
3. Send it to us and we will post a pic of the swag and provide at least one link back to your site.
4. Both sides win ;-)

If you’re interested in sending us your swag, feel free to send it to:
Ingo Hildebrandt
ATTN: Ingoal.info Free Stuff Day
Neckargasse 7
71726 Benningen
Germany

If you’ve got questions and suggestions feel free to contact us at swag@ingoal.info! Oh, and if it’s a T-Shirt you’re sending, please make it XL and include a note with the address of the site/blog on it (only necessary if it’s not on the T-Shirt). Thank you.

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* Promotional merchandise for a band, record label, or other entity in the music business, usually distributed at concerts.

May include t-shirts, stickers, promo CDs, posters, etc. Often free, but not necessarily; a t-shirt or record purchased at a concert might still be considered swag, especially if it is a design or release that is not readily available in the mass market.

Many independent record labels throw in a handful of free swag when they ship out mail-order packages (stickers, sampler CDs, etc).

The chief difference between swag and regular merchandise is that its purpose is not to make a profit, but to promote the band/label, and reward its supporters by giving them something cool and unique.
Source: Urban Dictionary

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Well, maybe it isn’t…it just came across my mind to check my ad income though and I can tell you this much, their recent adaptation to “text-link-sellers” really works. Ever since they did the whole “You get less PR if not 0 right away, if you sell text-links”-thing not only are my blogs PR0, but they’re earning less from text-links (d’uh)…so I applaud Google…their strategy worked again…although not completely…because I don’t care. You heard me…if you think that I’m going to stop selling text-links because you stripped my PR you’re mistaken. Thanks…end rant.

…so I bought a new toy…I replaced my 22″ display with a 24″ one. Even more screen real-estate with the 1920×1200 resolution…and what a fast (2ms) and nice panel it is…sweeeeet!

…pictures from my vacation to Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt coming soonish….

…and I would like to say pics from my new display coming soonish, too….but I can’t as it still hasn’t been delivered…grrrr…..

…just ordered a new display….24 inches baby…1920×1200 resolution…hmmm….tasty….pics after I get back from vacation….I’ll be heading to egypt on tuesday….two weeks of soaking in the sun….I’ll post an update, hopefully with some pics of the new panel when I get back….

…just try to do a quick update of your server management software (Plesk) and watch how shit hits the fan…then try to fix it and make things even worse…curse…then try to get it back up and finally succeed (partially)…

So sick…so…if you’re seeing this, it means that part of the server is back up on it’s feet…happy new year…and please stand by while I try to fix the rest…

You might remember that I bought a new laptop back in april. I’m still really satisfied with my choice, although the battery runtime is not really up to par. The small, standard battery is just a little too weak to support the dual core cpu and ati video card for a long time. That being said, it still lasts for up to 2h, but that’s not really fly, so I decided to get myself the high capacity battery…

The original standard battery is 2600mAh…this baby is 6000mAh…so more than twice the up time…sweet…

Well, well…after waiting for a long time, Sony made my decision easier today. Dropping the price of the PS3, while introducing the “new” PS3 (40GB model without PS2-backward-compatibility)…

As I’m a fan of the first edition (60GB) and a fan of added value, I went with the 60GB-model including two games and two wireless gamepads…499 €…still a lot of money, but a good bang for the buck if you consider that it includes the console itself, two wireless controllers, two games and a blueray player…now all I need to “fully” enjoy it is a sick HDTV…hmm…maybe come christmas I’ll work on that one…

If you like the game of backgammon you might be familiar with Backgammonmasters.com and their all-in-one game software, which not only features the game of backgammon but also other games like perudo and poker.

The software is available in ten different languages, so it really doesn’t matter if you’re speaking english or german, french or greek, chances are that you’ll get a version which will suit your needs just fine and it’s not just that which has made this software one of the industry’s leading softwares. They’ve got a strong following of players and you should be able to find a game of your choice most of the time.

…and now, the software and platform have become even stronger. Why? Because they added one of my favourite games (apart from poker): BlackJack or 21 as it’s sometimes called over here. So, whether you’re interested in just Backgammon, just poker, just perudo, just BlackJack or any combination of the above…check out Backgammonmasters.com…btw if you aren’t familiar with the rules of BlackJack, why don’t you head over to the BlackJack-Article-section and get up to speed?

The new season in good ol’ Engerlund has kicked off and for the first time in a few years I didn’t signup for the manger game as someone (you know who you are) either didn’t start a league this year or forgot to invite me. Oh well…I’m mostly busy with my diploma thesis anyway…so maybe it’s best that way.

Speaking of footie…I just came across this site and I gotta say I love the idea of buying a footie team with the help of some thousand ppl…although I’m a little bit sceptical about the whole thing. Is it really a good idea to have that many “voting members”? Maybe, maybe not…I’m going to keep an eye on the site and see how it’ll go…

It’s been a while since I’ve been looking for new ways to monetize my blogs. To my surprise there is a new, in my humble opinion, cool way to earn some money blogging. The site is called payperpost
and the concept of it is quite simple.

If you’re a blogger, you signup and register your blog with the site. As soon as your blog has been accepted into the program (which didn’t take longer than a few minutes with Ingoal.info), you can wander around the “open opportunities” section and see who’s willing to spend money on blog posts.

The listings include all the information you need: the requirements you need to fulfill (e.g. minimum PageRank, Alexa Score), the blog categories that the advertiser is willing to accept (e.g. General Entertainment, General Technology, Sports/Outdoor Recreation, etc) and if the advertiser requires disclosure (that your post is payed advertisement). Once you found an offer which is appealing to you (either topic- and/or money-wise), you can take the opportunity and get right to it. Once you’re done writing the post (and pasting the required tracking codes into the post), you submit the title and url of the blog post and wait for approval and you’re done. Easy as 1-2-3.

A beautiful feature is that you can either keep the money or you can donate it to a good cause (e.g. Red Cross) right away, how cool is that. Now, you might ask yourself why I would consider PayPerPost as I experimented with other pay per (blog) post sites. The answer is easy, because they won’t take a huge cut out of your earnings which means more net income for you. So, if you’re looking for another revenue stream for your blog, check out payperpost.com!

I decided to give repair of my good old Laserjet 5 a shot and it worked out pretty nicely. After getting the new toner cartridge and printing some dozen test prints everything is back to normal. Groovy. To celebrate the “success”, I decided to upgrade the printer…so I fired up ebay and started looking for a duplex-unit, the last available upgrade for my printer. I found one pretty quickly and I’m happy to say: not only is my printer up and running again, no, it’s more than that. It’s a fully equipped printing beast now ;-)

Speaking of updates: As you might have noticed I decided to get a new theme…Ingoal’s Insight is about to hit the three year anniversary…so I thought a new look would be a nice touch…hope you all like it…

Yesterday something ugly happened. My trusty old network printer, a HP Laserjet 5n, bugged out on me. I printed some documents and there was a paperjam. Usually that would be no big deal, but this time it was. The toner cartridge thought it was a good idea to spill loads of toner onto the paper in print. Combine that with the paperjam (in the fuser) and you have the ultimate ugly ugly ugly result. The toner pile on top of the jammed paper melted into the fuser. Did you ever see how some grams of toner look like after they’ve been cooked? Me neither…until yesterday that is :-(

So now the big question for is: should I try to repair the damage or should I buy a new (used) printer to replace the whole thing?

I think there’s a chance that I can clean out the fuser…if that was the case I would just need a new toner cartridge and it would be as good as new. But if not…it’s really not worth the effort as the fuser unit is the most expensive part of the whole printer and what’s even worse, you can get one of it’s successors (e.g. the 4050n, sometimes even the 4050dn including the duplex unit) for less than 100 Euros these days…

So, today the UPS man dropped off my new laptop and I started to play around with it. This is really one fine machine:

1. It looks terrific with the black piano finish on top (I hope that I can keep it from getting majorly scratched by using a tucano second skin, which is like a diver suit, neopren, fitting the laptop like a glove)

2. The display is nice…1280×800…more than enough screen real-estate for my needs

3. It’s light (2.39kg)…

4. It’s fast (I didn’t grab a screenshot of the windows performance ranking, but the lowest score is 3.8 on 3D, everything else is well above 4 (4.6, 4.8, etc)), I like! High-five!

5. Battery life could be better…it ships with a 4 cell battery so the actual runtime is somewhat limited (roughly 3h)…maybe I’ll get the highcapacity battery (double capacity, 8 cells) in the future…for now, I’m fine though as it’s not going to be “on the road” (without a power outlet in reach) for an extended period of time…

So…I’m exited and looking forward to using this bad boy to do some (semi)mobile writing and playing in the months (and/or years) to come :-)

I finally ordered my new laptop today. I was looking around for months now and it seemed that I just couldn’t find “the” perfect model. My requirements were:

1. max 14.1″ screen…15.4″ screens are fine, but having a 15.4″ screen means that the things is at least 16.x” wide (15.4″ + frame)…usually models sporting a 15.4″ screen are heavy (around 3+ kg)…and due to the big screen the battery runtime is usually low(er) too…

2. decent vga…integrated intel and stuff is cool, but not really…especially as I tend to hold on to laptops for quite some time (I bought my current laptop, an IBM Thinkpad, 6 years ago), so it should be at least up to par now so that’ll still be “okay” in a few years…

3. at least 1GB of ram…better 2GB…dual channel…yadda-yadda…

4. don’t care much about hdd size but 80GB would be fine and a DVD burner would be nice too…

5. shipped with Vista

6. not the most expensive one out there

7. service…at least two-year warranty with at pickup service or better…

8. screen resolution of at least 1024×768…but preferred would be some widescreen format (e.g. 1280×800)…

Given those requirements, it was a real hard task to find a compromise between some of them - 14.1″ models are usually far more expensive than 15.4″ models as 15.4″ is the biggest seller these days, so I guess the panel prices are way cheaper. Some models are still only available with Windows XP. Other models have 14″ screens, but only a 1024×768 resolution. Some models are looking good in pictures, but when you touch them in real life, they feel cheap and not really fit for everyday operation. etc etc

To make a long story short, I finally decided to go with the new Samsung R20-Aura line. There are only two models available in that line, so not much to chose from, but they are exactly what I was looking for. The difference between the models (Deva / Declan)? They’re exactly the same…except for the CPU…so chipset, ram, video card, hdd, dvd burner, software, everything is the same…

Deva - Core 2 Duo T7200 (2×2GHz, 4MB Cache)

Declan - Core Duo T2350 (2×1.86GHz, 2MB Cache)

Now, I always want to go with the newest stuff and all and a Core 2 Duo system would be nice, but I decided to go with the Core Duo model. Why? Let me explain…

Yeah, Core Duo isn’t the current line of Intel mobile processors, but it’s a kickass CPU and probably more CPU power than I’ll ever use (as this notebook will be used as a mobile computer, not as a desktop replacement) and you just can’t beat the price difference. I ordered it with 2GB of ram, 120GB HDD, DVD burner, Vista Home Premium, the whole shebang…and what’s the price difference between the two models (which are exactly the same minus the CPU)? 400 Euro (that’s roughly 545$)…you can keep your 2 between the Core and Duo for that fellows

…the best thing is that I ordered it this afternoon and they called me up five minutes after I had placed my order to confirm everything. The said it would be shipped tonight and earlier on I received a mail with the UPS tracking code…wheee…it really left their shop tonight and now, in the middle of the night, I just rolled into the UPS depot for my area…so…I expect to be playing on and with it tomorrow…the excitement

Specs:

T2350 - 1.86GHz Core Duo

2GB Ram

Ati x1250 video card (max 256MB, which will leave me with 1.79GB of ram)

120GB HDD

DVD-Burner

Vista HomePremium

14.1″ Widescreen WXGA screen (1280×800)

Piano-style finish (shiny black)