Auction sniping is the process of watching a timed online auction (such as on eBay), and placing a winning bid at the last possible moment (often seconds before the end of the auction), giving the other bidders no time to outbid the sniper. Some bidders do this manually, and others use software designed for the purpose. A bid sniper is a person or software agent who performs auction sniping.

When it comes to eBay I sell far more often than I buy. Recently I was bidding on an electric automatic antenna for my car, and I was outbid with mear seconds to go before the end of the auction. I was sniped! This prompted me to look into applications to help do this myself from my Mac. There are several pay software packages out there but fortunately their is also a nice donation application to do this, JBidwatcher. In fact it is a multi-platform application, but I only tried out the Mac version.

Just tonight I had an auction to try it out on, and it performed flawlessly, outbiding my nearest competitor with seconds to go before the end of the auction.

The software is so simple and easy to setup that it doesn’t require my assistance in retelling how I set it up. I will say that while the GUI is not hideous, it certainly isn’t a pretty Mac application that we’ve become so spoiled with as of late. It has a look and feel of an old web browser with newer icons to me.

If you purchase goods from eBay this is most definitely worth your time.

Recently my computer has been taking a LONG time to reboot.

I installed this networking program, DAVE 7.1, the other day and thought maybe it was the culprit. Nope.

So I started digging into the Console system log and son of a bitch I found out that my external modem was the last entry in the log, then 4 minutes of NADA then the next entry. Oh, let me say that from the time I hit the power button to the time I started booting into my personal account's GUI was taking 5 minutes! Well anyway, I had moved the modem a while back from the back of my iMac to my powered USB hub. I moved it directly to the iMac and voila, I now go from shutdown and hit the power button and in 30 seconds I'm booting into my account GUI.

Phew!

I was starting to think that I was going to have to do a Windows'esque reinstall of my system to fix things up.

Note to self, the next time I have issues remember to disconnect ALL peripherals and see if that resolves the issue.

Camino hasn’t had a working plugin that supported inline viewing of PDF’s for Intel, only PPC. Well Uncle Asad, big Camino guy over on the Mozilla boards, has outlined how you can use a new Google Code plugin that allows very functional Inline PDF viewing if you are using the 2.0a1pre versions of Camino which are readily available from Joel Craig here.

We have all been bombarded from our favorite Apple and Technology sites about the Jesus Phone 2.0, aka iPhone 2.0.

Just couple things to note from the first day of WWDC 2008.

First is the lower initial price of the 3G iPhone. It is great that the new iPhone cost less money upfront, however, it is a bummer that the monthly service fee will be more expensive than the current Edge Network based iPhone. I don’t know if the 3G service plans being offered for the 3G iPhone are more or less expensie than what other carriers are offering for the 3G phones they sell - nonetheless it’s sort of a drag that the monthly fee is increasing - even if the speeds are better. I’m sure that you’ll likely be better off paying a few more bucks a month and hundreds less for the 3G iPhone anyway.

MobileMe, I’m actually very excited about the upgrades to MobileMe as it replaces .Mac. I recently became a paying user of .Mac, I came around to seeing the value of it but admittedly I was banking on the fact that it would be revamped and upgraded at some point. I didn’t expect the overhaul to come so soon, and neither did I expect it to go away from .Mac and to MobileMe. Time to change my email address with everybody yet one more time...

I have a feeling that the move from .Mac to MobileMe is a very deliberate one. While I know that Apple is extremely proud of their Mac computers, it seems that they are trying to sanitize .Mac from being a Mac only offering. By calling it MobileMe and working with Microsoft’s Outlook they appear to be trying to make MobileMe appeal not only to Mac users but also Windows users who use an iPhone. Given the success of the iPod on the Windows platform it is hard to argue this strategy if it is in fact something that Apple is trying to do.

It does seem to me that Apple should give away a year free subscription to .Mac/MobileMe with every Mac computer purchase, and slash the annual fee from $99 to $49. I’ll bet it would grow exponentially in the number of users, and the profits they make from it.

Net Applications tracks the market share of computers in use by a proprietary method of monitoring web activity. So these numbers are only as good as their logic behind the data - however, it should give relatively decent numbers in so far as trends go. And the Mac has been and is continuing to trend upward.

I saw the other day that Apple has a 66% market share in computers over $1000, wow - that’s pretty impressive.

All around me I see Apple making inroads, both in notebooks and iMac’s. It’s great to see more and more people realizing how nice an the Mac ecosystem is for us users.

Check out Previous posts on MacSeven.com

MacSeven Posts from March 2008

MacSeven Posts from February 2008

MacSeven Posts from January 2008