David's Tidbits

Here's a Yahoo group that lists a ton of information on getting the best deal for various items. In one of David's recent Tidbits he mentions that he wrote his own software to track items.

I now have the internet monitoring software working on office depot, I am using a testing software that allows me to record my shopping online, I filter out the SKU and make it a variable and I can get all the price changes at a store that I load the sku's for. I have these run via scheduled task then dump the data to a excel spreadsheet. I now know when all of the St. Louis market is dropping their prices and what stores have it available.

While most of what is listed relates to getting deals on computers, monitor, printers, cameras, etc. there are also items that are related to the more technical crowd such as his Tidbit on Microsoft firewalls.

Hey, ever wanted to know what the MS firewall is doing, can you make direct changes? well amazingly there is a way
To enable logging of dropped packets:
netsh firewall set logging droppedpackets=enable
To enable logging of connections:
netsh firewall set logging connections=enable
If you want to see the firewall configuration for logging:
netsh firewall show logging
Turn it on and you will now be able to look at the log (default %windir%\pfirewall.log) and you have it.

On the downside - sorry David - there is no structure for the messages that are posted. I think this is more of an issue with Yahoo Groups (that's a negative in itself) more than anything else. Trying to search for past items is near impossible with the search tool provided by Yahoo.

However, with his new software program and his uncanny sense of penny pinching (honestly, I think he separates 2-ply toilet paper and re-rolls it into 1-ply), I think Tidbits is still something to keep an eye on - or at least aggregated.