Get rid of Coinstar's Commission

If youve ever walked into a supermarket within the past 10 years or so, youve probably seen a Coinstar change counter.

They are the devices that let you take a jar full of change, dump it all in there, get a receipt, then take that receipt up to a register and trade it in for some cold cash. So far so good, right? Well, now step in evil corporations.

According to Coinstar, they need to charge you a percentage of your cash just to be able to dump it into a machine. Last time I checked, it was free to do this in any casino in Las Vegas.

In my area, Coinstar charges you 8.5% of however much change you have. Thats not cool with me.

And apparently, it wasnt cool with other people either. It seems that Coinstar heard about the fact that they are evil, so they tried changing some things around. They now give the coin holder the option to either get cash with the percentage taken out the same way they have been, or they can choose to completely bypass that percentage commission and elect to instead receive a gift card. If you select a gift card, the machine will ask you where you want the gift card to be used at. You actually get some good choices here too. Places like iTunes online store, Amazon.com, Target, and many others.

The whole gift card idea made me have an entirely different opinion on the evil Coinstar company (Yes, I still think they are evil).

Recently I read about a way to totally confuse the Coinstar machine and pretty much combine the two methods of monetary trade. Basically what it lets you do, is get cash with no commission taken out!

YES! Best of both worlds right there.

Its a very simple way of doing it, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Heres the steps of getting your cash without paying the percentage for it.

1. Start the Coinstar machine.
2. Tell it you want to trade coins for a gift card.
3. Select a gift card. It doesnt matter what one, you wont be getting it anyways.
4. Give it your hard earned couch coins.
5. Discretely go around back and unplug the telephone wire :D
6. Wait a few minutes while it keeps trying to dial, then finally gives up.
7. Watch it give you a receipt to bring to the register and get cash.

What we effectively did here was disable all communication the machine has with its central servers. This makes it unable to put funds into a new gift card for you.

After it decides that the connection just wont work, it gives you the cash receipt. Since you never selected that you wanted cash, it never had a chance to ask you if you agreed to the condition that it charges you a percentage!

Without your consent, the machine cant take anything out of your money.

Now go cash in that receipt and buy some baseball cards..... or whatever it is you kids are spending your money on these days.

[Via Zedomax]

Restart? NEVER!

Dont you hate this little guy?


No matter what you tell it, it just wont leave you alone, will it? You can click 'Restart Later', but if your a regular windows user, you know damn well that that wont do much good. The dialog just comes back after 3 minutes.

What Ive been doing is dragging it to the bottom right of the screen all the way off the desktop, so that just a little bit of the top left of the dialog is showing.

That seems to work pretty good, but it still bugs me. In the back of my mind, I still know its right there waiting for me. GUH.

Well, thankfully, I just found a nice little command that will get rid of it. If you ever want to totally get rid of the dialog without having to worry about it popping back up and taunt you later, simply open your Run box, or get to a command line and just enter this command:

sc stop wuauserv

That should get rid of the current dialog, the system tray icon, and also make it so it wont come back up again.

Just one more tip.... dont forget to restart the system! Ha.

[Via Digital Inspiration]

The Prioritizer

So I came across this awesome online calculator that lets you 'get your priorities straight', as my ex girlfriend would often tell me to do.

Its marketed off as a financial calculator, but whats great is that you can use it for anything that you need to plot.

Lets take the example I used to check it out. When people ask me something like 'What's your favorite soda?', I just usually say I dont have a favorite. Lets say i actually want to see what soda i really do prefer over all the others. Thats where this calculator comes into play.

All I have to do it give it a list of all the items I want prioritized. In this case, Root beer, Doctor Peeper, Splite, Sierra Myst, Cherry Cook, and Pipse.

After i enter all my choices, up to 15, it then proceeds to ask me which I prefer over another. In other words, a complete boolean approach to the entire situation.



Depending on how many items are put in, The Prioritizer will keep asking questions until every item has been compared to every other item. In my case above, it had 2 of the above screens i had to fill out (on 2 pages).

Once you have completed the comparisons, you get a result page with a ranking of all your comparisons on it, showing you what is most important to you.




For my example above, It shows me that Root beer is the number one position on my favorites, while Doctor Peeper is the least favorite.

Like I said above, this was intentionally intended as a financial calculator, so you could of course use it to prioritize financial situations like home mortgage payments, car payments, and the what not..... but wheres the fun in not being able to decide what color to dye your cat?

The Prioritizer [ Via Lifehacker]

Learn to speed read

Ive always been interested in speed reading.... i just never knew exactly how. I knew there were a few tricks to use, like you just simply cant say the words in your head if you wanna go fast. It just wont work.

Ive never really tried to look up techniques for speed reading, but i did just happen to come across this guy's site. He seems to know his stuff and has some tips about it. Its worth a nice slow read anyways ;)

Double Your Reading Rate [Via Lifehacker]