This gets a "stuffwelike" tag on LH, and an "overkill" tag on Gizmodo? Which is it guys?

@G Friday: YES! My old boss (an engineer) taught me that, and it's DA BOMB. It holds better than a normal double knot, and as you say, it comes undone by just pulling on the ends. (here's a link to it, where the egomaniac of the site has named it after himself - i'll just call it the "secure knot": [www.fieggen.com]

@everyone: gotcha. I'll go for the ebay cheapie and no contract, thank you.

my big question: why are the t-mobile no-contract plans *less* expensive than those with a 2-year contract? Hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but...

@H0M3: [chegg.com] (iirc). also, barnes & noble is starting up in a few places (another lifehacker article)

I use both [addall.com] and [bookfinder.com] to find the cheapest books (after making sure it's not a full view version on google books). Note that some campuses have student exchange sites - that's probably THE best way to go, if it's an option.

This calculator sees things from the supply(of labor)-side only. We would be silly, of course, to pretend like we know nothing, or care nothing, about the demand-side (i.e. what companies _would_ pay).

I use Gizmo5 to forward GV calls internationally. I'm lucky. But everyone else who doesn't already have it is SOL. It's been closed to new subscribers since Google bought it a few weeks ago. You're not totally lost though - you can use [localphone.com] in the meantime (though you have to pay a small fee for the…

@Badongadoodle: yeah - i have a thinkpad t400, and the screen is all wonky on it, for stupid reasons. My guess: lenovo will tell you the space is for antennas (and they won't mention the hundreds of other laptops *with* antennas and *no* horribly funky and wasteful spacing issues like that).

@everyone: ok, i guess it happens! my stuff has been misplaced a bunch of times, but always got it back (i'm continually impressed by baggage delivery services).

has anyone here ever lost *anything* while flying? I've been to some crazy-ass places, travel all the time, and never lost a thing. (although i'm still looking for my yo-yo after coming back from christmas - seriously).

@tmlfan81: Isn't it funny how companies have to manage their hardware releases so as not to piss off owners of previous versions? iphone/ipod touch being the best example here. To me, this highlights the fact that technology is now more a status symbol than useful tool. Why else would someone be pissed about better…

dooh - just saw that chris is one of the gvxmpp dudes. No need for twitter confirmations!

@Chris Soyars: right, thanks chris. confirmed on their twitter feed:

hmm - quick testing shows that not just any prefix works. bummer. are all prefixes "401_"?

This is cool. I have it set up with trillian. I'm wondering about a work-around for outgoing SMS's. Testing it myself, the incoming contact has a "401_" prepended to the phone number, then @gvxmpp.com. Is it always "401_", or are we unlucky enough for that prefix to change? If it's constant, then we can set up…

My guess: China will out-negotiate Google. China's been in this business for, hmm, a few thousand years. Google - a few units of years. My guess is that this is big talk from Google, and that it won't phase China. We'll see - hope I'm wrong.

If the only charges levied on businesses are based on %, then there's no good reason to not accept small credit card purchases (except that they want to force you the consumer to buy sh*t you don't want). If there are flat charges, however (such as 5 cents a purchase), then it makes sense. Anyone know the answer to…

Many retailers don't require the actual card to use it - the number often suffices. My advice is to plug those numbers into your password manager. Then you have them wherever you go, and it just weighs a few extra electrons.

@FoxFireX: from the sounds of it, i trust the kumanki wines trial more than mythbusters. sounded to me like kumanki had more than one replicate, and actually had an objective measure. their methods could be explained a bit better of course, but hard to be worse than the mythbusters design.