Control the action from the comfort of your couch. Connect your Android powered devices to an HDTV. When your phone or tablet is connected to an HDTV or monitor, the wireless Smart Controller lets you navigate through your phone's screens, select your apps, play movies, and share photos remotely. With the controller's integrated multi-touchpad, you have full gesture control over your content. Use two fingers to scroll through your screens or within web pages or apps. When looking at pictures or maps, you can pinch, zoom, and rotate your content just like a touchscreen.
No more running for the phone when your phone is docked across the room, the Smart Controller lets you make and take calls remotely from Android devices that support the Bluetooth HSP (headset profile) or HFP (handsfree profile). When a call comes in, just hit the call button on the back of the remote to answer it. To make calls, navigate to the dialer screen of your phone, or click on a number in your contacts, or on the web. With voice commands through the controller, you can use your voice to perform a variety of actions on your phone or tablet. Send texts and emails, search for destinations, show maps, or play music all with the sound of your voice. For the best voice recognition performance, download Vlingo, a free app in the Android Marketplace to your phone or tablet.
Dedicated Android keys make navigating through your phone or tablet's content a snap. Menu, Home, Back and Search buttons get you where you need to go right away. With this and a standard HD dock (one that has HDMI ports) you are ready to do everything that you do on your phone or pad directly from your TV screen.
Sometimes just knowing something that others are not aware of ... or having the time to do something that others do not have the time to do ... Can earn you a little cash !!! Case in point: The Hard Drive Deal. While posting auctions on eBay, browsing other listings, and just doing my normal eBay thing I ran across these hard drives. 21 external hard drives ranging between 320GB - 2TB. The breakdown is as follows: 1 - 2TB, 2 - 320MB's, and 18 - 1TB hard drives. This totals over 20TB of hard drives. The 320's and 1 - 1TB hard drive were laptop drives, all of the others were 3.5" (standard desktop) hard drives. The "Buy Now" price was $369.95 with free shipping. After further reading however, I discovered that the hard drives did not show up under Windows "Computer" nor Windows Hard Drive Management program. Here is where you should turn the attention nob up a bit because it really gets unbelievably good here on out !!! Most of these were the one-touch backup type enclosures. None of them had power cords. I knew that in situations like this, 90% of the time the issue was a "physical" one, and simply removing the drive from the enclosure, initialize & reformat, and it should be as good as new. The "physical" issues could be: Broken USB port, broken wire, bad firmware card connection, etc... A high definition wide screen movie of my experience with such drives and how I resolved the issues started to play in my mind. Then the strangest thing happened ... I decided to go on YouTube to see if there were any videos regarding the matter. I wanted to see if there were any dis-assembly precautions and maybe check to be sure my visions (LOL) were on point. Not only did I find a low quality, jittery, tilted, out of focus movie ... LOL ... The guy did exactly what I had planed on doing (my visions), and he was doing it with the same brand enclosure.
Here's the video below.
THIS WAS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE IT HAD TO BE AN OMEN !!!
Now a new movie started playing inside my head ... It was all numbers. I bounced back over to eBay to see what the average price for standard 3.5" 1TB Hard Drives were going for. I determined that the $70 - $75 range with shipping was a sweet spot. That is, it was a price that provided both me a good profit while at the same time providing the buyer with a bargain. I looked at the sellers other listings and saw that the seller had literally hundreds of these hard drives in their original enclosures and hundreds of good feed backs. I concluded that the seller was surely a "seasoned" seller that probably didn't have the time to do what I was going to do. "WOW!!! That's a lot of TB's", I said, as I pressed the "BUY NOW" button on eBay.
When the drives arrived I quickly unpacked them and began to disassemble them. The first thing to do was to thoroughly test them. I set the enclosures aside to be discarded because I didn't think they were sell-able. One of the 1TB hard drives was a laptop hard drive. I decided to keep that one for one of the Getac's (See Getac B300 post). There was also a 256GB SSD that was password protected that I had setting around collecting dust I planned to add to the pool of drives for sale. After testing, reinitializing, reformatting the drives (around 4 hours) there were three that had loud clicks and a fourth that made a grinding noise. These four were beyond help giving signs of needing a new PCB board at the very least. I couldn't put any more money into this project but I knew that there were others who would. Totally non-working hard drives will sell on eBay if they are large enough. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, the 2TB drive was one of the non-working hard drives, the other 3 were 1TB drives. Below and to the left are photos of the drives, enclosures, etc...
On quick assessment I thought that I could clear $1,000 on this deal. SO LET'S GET STARTED :)
The next thing I did was sell the four non-working hard drives. Including shipping fees that I charged, I made $64.74. Currently the solid state drive has a bid of $74.99 (smiles). This hard drive deal is looking pretty good so far. Looks like I'll be getting over a third of my investment back in a snap and I still have a ton of hard drives to sell thanks to the addition of the SSD I had sitting around. By the way, I purchased that SSD for around $100 "AS IS" thinking a friend would allow me to borrow his desktop computer to repair it however, I never got the desktop. The solid state drive was password protected and I needed the desktop to remove the password. There may have been another way to do it that I was unaware of or unprepared to do ... So letting it go was a good choice as it had been sitting around for months. I will be giving a full report when the dust settles including shipping expenses. My shipping expenses are a tad high because I always go Priority flat rate. Can't really estimate what the net figure might be at this time but the plan is to list all of the 1 TB hard drives at $64.99 +$10.00 shipping. I might have to play with those numbers a bit but my feelings are very positive about this project for now.
About the only thing that I can say is: GOOD DEAL !!! STAY TUNED !!!
UPDATE 12/09/13 - SSD sold for 76.99 (Less $5.60 shipping expense). Funny that all of the busted drives sold and none of the working drives sold. I only had five of the working drives listed to test the waters. Now I know that I have to change something. Could be ad/text. It states that the drives were removed from damaged enclosures. Or it could be price structure, or it could be something else. Resolution: Going to re-list for $5 more and FREE shipping ($70 total instead of $75) and remove the information stating that the drives were taken from busted enclosures. I'll also mention the fact that "ALL" of the drives have been re-initialized, re-formatted, and function as if they were new ... BACK TO THE TRENCHES !!! STAY TUNED !!!
UPDATE 01/03/14 - Still no sales and I've reduced them an additional $5 and listed them all in one auction for independent fixed price sales... sighs. Might have to start one or two super low to see where the bidding caps out at. Others are at my asking price and higher. Personally, I think it is the Christmas season that causes buyers to behave strangely. Most buyers around this time are either looking for new items, or returning/exchanging unwanted ones for example. I took a look at item sales for this item. Seems most have sold for around $50 - $55 dollars. So my asking price/opening bid is a little high. I can still meet my financial expectation if I lower the price an additional $10. I didn't want to start out too low and lose my shirt. This is taking longer than I expected and it may possibly be time to bail out soon, take what I can get, as long as it is profitable.
UPDATE 01/31/14 - Looks like I found the sweet spot. The drives are starting to move around $47.49 + $7.50 or around 54.99 including shipping. Should have them all sold February.
UPDATE 05/27/14 - Well the dust has finally settled. Seems like it took forever but luckily I have several projects going at the same time. I found that 2 more drives had problems or were dead. That took about another $100 off of the potential profit that I could make. The results are calculated in the spreadsheet below. I am considering continuing this project as an on going venture as a supplemental stream of income, but it's an area you have to keep on top of. The hard drive industry technology shifts at an amazingly fast pace. There are 6TB drives available as I write. Bigger, faster hard drives push down the prices of older, smaller hard drives.
As you can see I did not make quite as much as I thought I could, but close enough. I doubled my investment and I stll have a couple more drives to sell. Had I done things a little differently I probably could have come out with the same result in a more timely fashion. However it would have been at the risk of lesser profits.
If you are anything like me ... When sitting at my computer for prolonged periods of time, I absolutely MUST have a cup of Joe there with me. I have a color coordinated (black & grey) cup warmer sitting to the right of my monitor. However, I have a couple of nagging complaints in regards to this old school warmer. It is not USB so I have to use yet another plug on one of my power strips. Since the cup is not covered, the heat dissipates quickly and it does not stay as warm as when poured from the coffee machine. The cooling off of the beverage causes a film to accumulate on top because it is never stirred ... sighs. During a normal day of posting auctions and such, I ran across this item. As soon as I seen it, I said to myself, "I gotta get one of these!" It is a beverage warmer that works via USB and actually stirs the beverage for you. Google images will direct you to many places where you can purchase this FANTASTIC item. Fairly inexpensive, they run around $20 and come in various colors including basic black (so I won't have to abandon my geeky toy color scheme ... lol). A great gift for the computer geek in your life. Simply Google the post title and you should have no problem finding it. You can also take the shortcut and go directly to eBay ... Where else ... HA!
As somewhat of an advocate for "FREE TV" I've never been very fond of cable. I never saw the purpose of getting cable boxes, satellite dishes ... And so forth (all having tuners) while there resides a tuner in your television set. Furthermore, being financially responsible for equipment that you do not own sucks raw eggs. You could wind up buying 3 or 4 tuners for the same A/V setup. I prefer monitors as opposed to full fledged television sets to circumvent this dilemma. Problem is ... Just a monitor alone doesn't capture broadcast or cable television programming. With the introduction of this product ... Problem solved. It has 3 built-in digital television tuners. This device connects via your ISP (Internet Service Provider) router and makes all stream-able content available to the 3 tuners. You can tune into 3 different channels on 3 different devices at the same time for example. Though you don't need one, it has been the perfect compliment to my home server which I control remotely via my wireless router. The included software works in conjunction with Windows Media Center also making it easy to setup custom viewing preferences. My router is wireless so a network wiring nightmare has been eliminated for me. Additionally my Samsung Blu-Ray DVD player with Wi-Fi sees this device. The device has true 1080p high definition. Streaming is smooth and stable. Yet another impressive addition to my home network and A/V entertainment system.
These are the companion 3D glasses (sold separately) for the Samsung BD-C6900 Blu-Ray 3D DVD player published a couple of posts prior to this one. I got a chance to try a pair of these at a local mall. The first thing that I noticed right off the bat is the contemporary style and smooth lines of the glasses ... pure hotness. I have 2 pair, one for myself and a guest/company (even though I "rarely if ever" have company). They run around $50 retail. I got mine less than half price on eBay, where else ... lol. They are battery operated and are turned on by pressing a button located on the upper right edge of the frame. Though the lens appear to be heavily tented, imagery is crystal clear (not like sunglasses at all). In doing my research I found that there are 2 types of 3D glasses, active and passive. The active glasses cost much more, in some cases 10 times as much or more. These work just as I anticipated when viewing a compatible monitor/TV. Picture is very clear. They are light weight and comfortable. Battery life is long. I stuck my hand out in front of me to make sure what I was seeing was actually a TV screen and I wasn't looking out of a window. Below is a list of the compatible 3D televisions.
This was a small price to pay to once again up the ante of the future entertainment service and value of my audio video system. Now I gotta get a new TV. For now, I guess I'll just take them to the theater with me (grumbles) ... lol.
