I am planning to use a new theme for the blog. As usual, here is a screenshot of the old kombitz version 2. The new theme is working quite well. It should be done in a day or two.

I was working on a PHP page to dynamically generate the links to coupons offered by my advertisers from LinkShare network. Suddenly, LinkShare has terminated my account without a reason. The page is useless now that I am no longer an affiliate.

I am listing my code here so that at least someone can benefit from my work. Note that you need to replace your_token and your_mid with the actual ones. If you omit the mid field, the request includes all your advertisers. Also, do not forget to add error handling to the code to prevent any unsightly errors.

<?php
$url = "http://feed.linksynergy.com/coupon?token=your_token&network=1&mid=your_mid";
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
#
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($xml->link as $link)
  {
    echo '<li>';
    echo '<a href="', $link->clickurl, '">';
    echo $link->offerdescription, '</a> ';
    echo ($link->offerenddate=="ongoing"?'':'exp: '.$link->offerenddate);
    echo '<br />';
    echo '</li>';
  }
echo '</ul>';

?>

Here is the sample output.

I am in the market for an entry level DSLR. One model that interests me is the Canon Rebel XS. I also found a rebate of $50 for it. To qualify for the rebate, you need to have a previously registered Canon camera and you also need to purchase your new camera through authorized Canon dealers.

If you go online and search information about authorized Canon dealers, you can find some lists from some online communities. Those lists are dated. Some companies are even out of business already.

Finally, I found an official list from Canon USA. Here is the direct link to the file.

http://www.usa.canon.com/app/pdf/dealer/CanonAuthorizedDealers.pdf

It started out when I saw a post about a free album download from Amazon. The album is called Sarah Chang Selections and here is the link to the album. After I installed the MP3 downloader and download the album, I found more free albums. These free albums can be found by visiting the Amazon.com home page under More Items to Consider after you download the album. BTW, you need to have an account with Amazon to get the download. A valid credit card is required to create an account.

There is also a page listing all the free songs scattered throughout the site. Here is the link of over 1400 free songs. Enjoy!

http://tinyurl.com/yen6vx5

Kombitz is  moving to a new hosting company. Please bear with us if you experience some difficulties with our site. If you have made a comment recently, it might not be moved to the new site. Please note that the forum will NOT be moved to the new site, therefore if you want to keep some postings of yours. Now is time to back them up. Thank you for all your supports.

The forums are now officially closed. They were open because there were a lot of discussions when I was actively involved with unlocking Mio C230. Now that there are not a lot of activities in the forums, it’s time to close them. I am keeping the old threads and posts for now.

[Update: 10/5/2009] kombitz has been moved to a new hosting company. The old closed forum is not migrated to the new server.

Amazon has opened up the platform to publish your blog on Kindle. The sign up process is really easy. It takes about 5 minutes to get it up and running. It provides a nice preview tool to let you see how does you blog look like on a Kindle device.

Originally, I just want to make my blog free through Kindle. However, they do not let you set your own price. They want to charge $1.99 monthly.  It’s not a bad price, but I’d appreciate they can let me publish for free. Here is the link to my blog’s page on Amazon.

Interested? The link to sign up an account is here.

Amazon has thousands of free Kindle books. How do you know what are the popular ones among those free books? To save your work, I compiled a list of the free books in the bestseller section.

• Tales of the Jazz Age

• Divine Comedy, Cary’s Translation, Hell

• The First Men in the Moon

• Anna Karenina

• Heart of Darkness

• Gulliver’s Travels

• The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights

• The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Short Stories Old and New

• The Island of Doctor Moreau

• Divine Comedy, Cary’s Translation, Paradise

• The Mysterious Island

• Divine Comedy, Cary’s Translation, Purgatory

• Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know

• The Velveteen Rabbit

• The Jungle Book

• 365 Foreign Dishes

• The Prince

• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

• The Art of War

• Crime and Punishment

These are mostly classics and they are always free. The following are the books for free for a limited time. They might not be free by the time you read this post.

• Red Mars

• Blood Engines

• Assassin’s Apprentice

• His Lady Mistress

• Irresistible Forces

• Crime Scene at Cardwell Ranch

• Hide in Plain Sight

• His Majesty’s Dragon

• Summer’s Path

• Kiss Me Deadly

• Price of Passion

• Snowbound

• Stranded with a Spy

• The Bride’s Baby

• A Very Special Delivery

• Speed Dating

I managed to capture a screenshot of coolepochcountdown.com when the epoch time reached 1234567890.

Just in case you don’t know about epoch(Unix) time, here is the wikipedia entry.

My forum started to get a lot of spams since the beginning of this month. The spams were from some kind of spam bots. My first reaction was to find SMF mods that can deter the spams from coming. There are a few mods available for fighting spams. However, I could not get these mods to install for some reasons.

Finally, I came up with a way to stop the spams without additional mods. Here is what I did.

1. Click on ADMIN menu and click on Registration on the left.
2. Click on SETTINGS.
3. Change Complexity of visual verification image: to High: Angled letters, considerable noise.

After the changes, there are no more fake users created by spam bots.