Five Best Sites for Finding Deals Online [Hive Five]
Did your holiday gift budget shrink considerably this year? Your friends and family need never be the wiser: You just need to know where to find the best deals. Photo by ginnerobot.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite sites for finding great deals online, and now we're back with the five most popular answers. Let's take a closer look at the best sites on the internet designed to help you stretch your dollar further this holiday season and beyond.
Slickdeals
Slickdeals.net is a comprehensive deal-finding web site with an active user community dedicated to scouring the web for great deals. Slickdeals posts deals in a blog-like format, providing a uncategorized and steady stream of deals on their home page covering the gamut from tech to toys and clothing to appliances. Avid users emphasize that while you should certainly come to Slickdeals for the front page deals, you should stick around for the thriving and thrift-conscious forums.
DealsPlus
Relative newcomer DealsPlus is much like the other popular deal finders listed but with a twist: It integrates social bookmarking features à la Digg or Delicious to help the most popular deals rise to the top. DealsPlus users submit deals and vote on the submitted deals they like; popular deals make the DealsPlus home page. If you're nuts about deals and user-driven content, DealsPlus may be right up your alley.
Dealnews
Dealnews is a popular deal finder "where every day is Black Friday." In contrast to the blog-like style of Slickdeals, the Dealnews front page organizes deals by category. While Dealnews has a clear emphasis on tech, it's no slouch when it comes to covering other categories, like clothing, home, and toys. It's friendly interface—complete with large pictures of featured product deals—makes it a fun and easy scan for the casual deal-searcher.
FatWallet
FatWallet is a popular deal-finding web site that aims to help you maintain a healthily plump wallet. Probably best known for it's active community of prudent spenders, FatWallet is an excellent resource for saving money online and off. As deal finders go, FatWallet doesn't do the same front page style as sites like Dealnews or Slickdeals, but if you do a little digging, you can find plenty of great deal streams—like in their Hot Deals forum.
PriceGrabber
Unlike the rest of the competition in this Hive Five, PriceGrabber is a comparison shopping web site that searches and compares prices from popular online retailers to bring you the lowest price available price. Apart from the simple search, PriceGrabber supports Price Alerts and rates products based on expert and user reviews.
Now that you've seen the best, it's time to vote for your favorite.
This week's honorable mentions go out to the always-popular Amazon (not strictly a deal-finder, but it certainly has consistently competitive prices), Ben's Bargains, and Craigslist. Whether or not your favorite made the short list, tell us more about what makes it so great in the comments.
KickYouTubes Lets You Download Videos Without Extra Software or Hassle [Video]
KickYouTube is one of the simplest solutions for downloading YouTube videos we've reviewed at Lifehacker. So simple that if you can find YouTube videos you like and type the word "kick" you're in business.
The mechanism is web based and very straight forward. When you're watching a YouTube video that you would like to download for archiving or later perusal, simply add the word "kick" to the URL immediately in front of the word youtube. For example if you wanted to download the Merlin Mann video we suggested as weekend viewing to throw on your iPod for a subway commute, you would do the following:
Load the URL for the video in your browser:
http ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOgHE5nEq04Insert the word "kick" between the www. and the youtube.com section of the URL:
http://www.kickyoutube.com/watch?v=uOgHE5nEq04
That's it! After you send that URL, the page will reload with the KickYouTube toolbar at the top of the screen, as seen in the screenshot above. From there you can download the file from YouTube as an FLV, MPG, MP3, and even HD MP4. Note: going to the KickYouTube website directly will just give you a video demonstration on how to use the service, to actually engage the toolbar and begin grabbing files you have to find a YouTube video you want and insert the "kick" into the URL of the video. For another simple and cross platform method of downloading files from video sharing sites, check out All-In-One-Video Bookmarklet.
This Week's Top Downloads [Download Roundup]
- First Look at Opera 10 (All platforms)
"Opera released an alpha version of Opera 10 today, a first step toward the next major release of the popular cross-platform web browser." - KLS Mail Backs Up Your Browser, Email, and Contacts (Windows)
"Despite what its name would imply, free application KLS Mail Backup backs up popular Windows web browsers and address book apps in addition to email applications—including Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey; Windows Live Mail, Contacts, and Messenger; along with Windows Mail, Windows Contacts, and Internet Explorer." - Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 Now Available for Your Testing Pleasure (All platforms)
"Hot off the press, the second beta of Firefox 3.1 is now available for download." - Better GReader Extension Gets New Features Plus Fixes (Firefox)
"Just uploaded new version 0.5 of the Better GReader Firefox extension, which includes new features and fixes to all the stuff that Google's recent Reader redesign broke." - TinyResMeter Monitors Your System Stats (Windows)
"TinyResMeter is an ultra-lightweight and spartan resource meter." - VLC Remote Adds iPhone Control to Our Favorite Media App (iPhone/iPod touch)
"VLC Remote Free lets you play, pause, and skip tracks on the mighty VLC Media Player on any computer from your iPhone or iPod touch." - Google Chrome Officially Leaves Beta (Windows)
"Google's new web browser, Google Chrome, has officially left its beta tag in the dust, graduating to a full-fledged 1.0 release today (just 100 days after the initial release)."
Uni-ball Kuru Toga [Stuff We Like]
If you work with mechanical pencils but are constantly rotating the pencil in your hand to deal with uneven wear on the lead, the Uni-ball Kuru Toga is the pen for you.
Designed in response to the problem of uneven lead wear, the Kuro Toga has an ingenuis mechanism in the barrel. As you write the mechanical part that holds the lead slowly rotates. Instead of wearing the lead down to a flat chisel point— you're witnessing this phenomenon when you see your pencil strokes change from super fine narrow lines to more broad calligraphic style strokes— each stroke of the pencil turns the lead a tiny amount allowing the lead to evenly "sharpen" itself on the paper instead of wearing way one side. It's an astoundingly simple concept, but one that seems entirely lacking from any other mechanical pencil we've run into. For other writing utensils we like check out the Grip Slippa Super Flat Pen and the light up pilot's pen.
Optimal Home Location Helps You Find a Commute-Friendly Residence [Real Estate]
Optimal Home Location is a Google Maps/Zillow mashup tool that helps you calculate the central location between all your commuting destinations.
After plugging in the six most frequent places you and your family commute to: work, school, other family members, etc., Optimal Home Location will crunch the numbers. The map it returns will show you the best place for you to live in order to minimize your commute times. The service is really handy, although not without its quirks. It cannot take into account anything beyond physical distances for instance, leaving you decide if the area is a safe neighborhood and whether or not it's cost effective to live there. Perhaps it was just luck— on the part of the search engine or on my part for picking the house I did— but in my testing Optimal Home Location picked a handful of homes right in the neighborhood I currently live in. One of the things my wife and I both love about where we live is that we spend little time commuting thanks to a very strategically located home. Score one for the Optimal Home Location engine! On top of showing you the optimal location, it also allows you to compare commute times from various addresses you are already have in mind and show the location of local features like schools and libraries to help you pick an ideal locale. For more help with home hunting and moving, check out our top ten real estate tools.
DIY Greeting Card Holder [Holidays]
If you're flush with holiday cards but lack an enormous mantle to spread them out on, check out this DIY greeting card holder.
Instructables user Very Keri had a ton of Christmas cards and no where to put them. By recycling an unused art canvas with a fresh wrap of festive fabric and attaching bands of ribbon around it, she created a unique greeting card holder. It can be hung on the wall or propped up, and the entire project is easily customized to blend in with any decor just by the color of ribbons and fabric you use. For more holiday card related ideas check out how to score free images for your holiday cards off of Flickr and our roundup of DIY Christmas card ideas.
WPClipart Archives Free Clipart [Free]
Don't embarrass yourself by busting out the same tired stock clip art for your next Power Point tour de force. WPClipart has a pile of royalty free images to share.
The archive currently has 23,872 images, covering thousands of subjects. A significant portion of them are in lossless formats. The site is organized into categories, but if casual browsing fails to find you the perfect gem you've been searching for there is always keyword based searches. You can even download the entire collection as a single archive, making it easier to use offline. For more free clipart, check out the Open Clip Art Library.
What Holiday Tricks Have Saved You The Most Time? [Ask The Readers]
What tips and tricks for the Holiday season will help your fellow life hackers keep stress levels low? Share the wealth and help keep your friends from drowning their sorrows in bottom shelf eggnog.
One of the best tips I adopted—although you could well argue it was the simplest and most obvious tip in the world—was to use a giftlist to track holiday gifts. I started with the careful list keeping after I gave a friend the same book two years in a row. It was no less of a good pick for him the second time around, but it was a tad embarrassing to have completely forgotten what I'd picked out for him the year before! So let's hear it hear it, you talented time savers, what tips and tricks will help your fellow life hackers this year? Photo by Zach Klein.
BookCrossing Tracks Your Books In The Wild [Recycling]
If you're looking for a novel way to keep your books out of landfills, release them into the wild with a tracking number from BookCrossing.com to see how far and wide they roam.
After signing up for an account you can begin tagging your books and releasing them. Give them to friends, leave them on airplanes or coffee shop tables, anything to put them out where they can be found and enjoyed. Each book you release will have a unique ID number that allows future readers to visit BookCrossing and track where the book has been and what other people have to say about it. Some of the more well traveled books have hundreds of entries showing where they were found and what the readers has to say about the book. You can order labels or simply download the templates from their website and print them on label paper. If you'd like to jump right in and start sending lots of books on new adventures, you can order packets of pre-numbered labels. All the pre-numbered labels are registered to your account so all that's left to do is slap them in the covers of the books and leave them in interesting places to be found and passed on. If you're in a tracking mood, check out Where's George and track the meandering paths your dollar bills take.
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