Charmaine posted in the forum,

Hi,

The team at oo.com.au are giving things away. We are running a competition which allows you unlimited chances to win one of 10 major prizes.

And even if you don’t win one of the major prizes, you will win a $5 discount that you will have 3 months to use on any order at oo.com.au. (discounts issued as coupons at end of promotion) Everyone’s a Winner. The exciting part is for every friend, family member or colleague that you forward this mail on to, you will receive an extra entry into the draw for the major prizes as well as another $5 discount (limit one per order). As an example, if you send it to 5 friends, you will receive 6 entries into the draw plus 6 discounts of $5 each. So forward this to everyone you know and you might end up with a FREE 94cm LCD TV.

Yup. Everyone’s a winner! Enter to win a 94cm LCD TV. Even if you don’t win, you’ll get a $5 discount coupon. Moreover, refer a friend and you’ll get up to 6 $5 discount coupons.

Major prize draw will take place on 1^st August 2006, which means you still have less than a week to enter the draw. Oops. Maybe I should not be blogging here to have too many people competiting.

Enter the OO.com.au competition here.

Kmart again has their regular almost-monthly store-wide “percentage sale” this week! From Thursday 27 to Saturday 29 July, Kmart is having 15% off store-wide sale, and here’s the catelogue.

Rooaaarrrrr into Kmart for a monster 15% off storewide this week! Some exclusions apply, see in store for details. Hurry in — it’s only for three days, Thursday 27 July to Saturday 29 July.

There’s also “Dollar Deal” afterwards with discounts on great range of items. Great timing, as we jut came back from holidays and need to restock some house hold items.

Besides collecting shopping dockets to combat petrol price hikes, I guess another way is to join free-to-enter competitions that can actually win petrol. Two sites that I have found:

• Drive.com.au — win $100 worth of petrol 3 times a day. I have been entering my details a few times a week ever since it has started, but have not won anything :( But at least if you click through via OzRewardS, you get 5 cents rebated into your account, and they do add up…
• CARguide.news.com.au — win $300 worth of petrol on 5^th of August, and there will be 10 winners.

Alternatively, you can always take public transport, buy a more fuel efficient car, or get a job that allows you to do telecommuting…

What if you combine a bargain blog like this and social bookmarking service like del.icio.us? You get DealPlumber! From its about page:

dealplumber aims to address this problem (unable to find best deals across the web) by delivering a community-driven deals and coupons engine where you can simple search or browse for deals on product and services you might want, compare the different deals posted by different users and choose the best one.

It allows individuals to submit deals and/or coupon codes via its web interface (web service API coming soon they claimed). Deals can have optional URL and expiration date, and can be categorised with tagging/folksonomy. Other users can then search all these contributed deals, or list them by tags. You can also subscribe to RSS feed of all latest deals, or deals with a specific tag.

There’s also interactivity. You can rate a deal or give a comment. You can also subscribe to their weekly newsletter detailing the best deals.

It’s such a good idea!

However it seems to be pretty much US-specific. I tried to search “australia” and it returned nothing. Tagging is not really working as well. When you click on a tag, it does a search on that term instead, which returns undesirable result. Its database is still pretty empty, or at least I have not been able to find the deals I was looking for.

Maybe I’ll start tagging items with “australia” when it fixes all its bugs.

How cheap do you want your phone cost be? How about free? Gizmo Project, a VoIP (voice over IP) company that is committed to open standards, has recently announced their all calls free plan, that let you call landlines and mobile phones free from your computer, with some conditions.

The little fine print after bold typed FREE says:

The All Calls Free plan applies when both call participants are registered and active Gizmo Project users. A person is considered active when they are making phone calls with Gizmo Project on a regular basis. We reserve the right to limit call length. In countries where free phone calls are not available, when calling a non-free number in an All Calls Free-listed country, or when calling a non-Gizmo Project user, calls are subject to our regular low rates.

Basically it is their strategy to encourage sign ups. In order to call landline number free, that number must belong to an existing contact in your roster. How to get contacts into your roster? Ask your families and friends to sign up so you can them for free. How can they stop someone by themselves signing up accounts for all their friends, family members and house pets? Account must be active, i.e. using Gizmo client for voice calls on unspecified “regular basis”.

Well, not that bad actually. I was at my parents’ place on the Gold Coast so I quickly install them on my mum’s notebook and gave her instructions on how to use it to make free calls. We add each other on our installations — and now I can call my Gold Coast landline number for free, whenever my computer is on.

Installation is easy, and the application is available in either Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Interface is not as “snappy” as Skype and other VoIP software I use, however it is more “open” than Skype, which uses its own proprietary P2P VoIP protocol. It uses SIP which is the industrial standard for VoIP. It not only lets you call other Gizmo users and landline/mobile phone numbers, it also lets you dial other SIP phones.

One thing Skype excels is its firewall penetration — it almost-always works even in heavily armoured corporate firewall. Gizmo Project claims to have the same level of penetration, but I have yet to test it. Might give it a try after getting back to work tomorrow.

Quality-wise, it is a bit disappoiting when calling Australian landline numbers. Quality and latency not as bad as VoIP Stunt (BetaMax company also provides free landline calls), but you can still feel significant delay and echo (tested on my 1500k/256k Exetel ADSL line). However Skype Out is no better last time I tried, and the call rates is slightly more expensive. I have not had an opportunity to test out PC to PC calls, but Skype is “good enough” for me in that domain.

Gizmo Project does reserve a right to limit the length of those free calls though. Unlike VoipStunt who said explicitly 300 minutes per week, there is no clear indication of how long you can make those free calls.

Still, it’s nice to call family and friends for free, even when they are not in front of computers. You just need to get them have an active Gizmo Project account.

I haven’t been blogging for a while as I + family have been having holidays here on the Gold Coast. I do have good Internet connection here, but it is just that whenever I picked up the computer I felt too lazy to put anything down. I’ll be back to Sydney tomorrow evening, and back to work on Monday. <sigh>

A few random things:

• Buy air ticket earlier might not always give you the best price. We have always booked our tickets early. We actually bought the Sydney to Gold Coast return ticket from JetStar 3 months prior to our holidays at $79 per flight per person, thinking that we can grab cheap tickets. Then we checked JetStar again 3 weeks ago and the return fare has dropped to $49 per person! So we booked early, and paid $90 more for this holiday (me + Vivian + Anna)

  I guess it makes sense to JetStar to try to lower the fare to encourage travellers to fill up vacancies. Just that it didn’t feel good when you are loosing money while trying to be prudent.

• Habour Town on the Gold Coast has great bargains. In fact we went there on Wednesday and Thursday just to visit all the shops. It’s like a big shopping centre, but almost all the shops are factory outlets for clothing and footwear. We have picked up quite a few bargains.

  Vivian’s favourite shops there — Just Jeans, Table Eight, David Jones Warehouse and Pumpkin Patch. The Pumpkin Patch there is actually affordable (we are cheap parents), and has much cheaper price than the ones here in Sydney.

  It’s a must visit if bargain hunting is your thing.

• Bought a digital video camera from Zazz and have it posted to my office in Sydney, while having holiday here on the Gold Coast. It’s my first Zazz item. Besides good price (using eBay as reference), my order was processed and delivered quickly.

  I’ve also bought a 1Gb SD card from HK for around $30, also posted to my office. Nice to be able to shop right in front of your computer — actually walking around the shopping centre wasn’t really my thing. Hopefully everything has arrived, and will see them on my table on Monday morning.

Sometimes you gotta wonder, why would you pay $250 for something like this, when you can buy something like this from Deals Direct that looks almost alike would only set you back for $39.95 + $9 shipping.

Obviously an “Eurolab” is different from Altec Lansing. I actually have a set of Altec Lansing at home which I bought more than 7 years ago, and it still sounds great. But… it does look like an Altec Lansing! And works like one as well, apparently.

It has got an iPod/iPod mini dock, and runs on either 4x AA battery or DC adapter. Very portable design. All controls are on board. Did I say that it look just like an Altec Lansing?!

Good price to me at less than $50 delivered. Now I just need to shop for an iPod…

I subscribed to Toys “R” Us‘ email newsletter because, hmm, I have a 2 year old daughter. Not entirely true… Because of their occasional exclusive email offers!

Surprisingly surprisingly, Toys “R” Us actually have pretty good price on nursery/baby related items. However their latest email offer excites me more! $10 off for all games over $30! That applies to all modern consoles, handhelds and PC games. Maximum 2 coupons per customer, but it did not say whether there is a limit on the number of customers :)

You can download the coupons here (PDF file) where you need to print them and bring alone. Oops I think they are not exclusive anymore. Offer valid until 21^st of July, so there’s plenty of time to make your pick (and waste your school holidays).

They also have a special deal on MP3 players (yes, they are “toys”, aren’t they?). If you spend $80 or more on a MP3 player, they’ll throw in a Philip headphone valued at $39.99 for free.

Looks like one of those noise cancelling one. Only while stocks last

Dan Warne of APC Magazine wrote that 300Gb is the sweet spot for hard disks, where it has lowest $/Gb at 47 cents.

Are you looking to upgrade your desktop PC’s hard drive? Of course you are! There’s no such thing as too much disk space on a desktop PC.

The current sweet spot is 300GB for 47c per GB: a Western Digital 7200RPM drive for $142.00.

$142.00 for a 300Gb WD hard disk is certainly very cheap, and he has researched the price with PC parts search engine staticICE, which I have previously reported here. I have just paid $80 for an 80Gb drive 3 months ago, and I bought two at $1/Gb to set up a RAID1 mirror. I could have spend a bit more to get more space…

However the assumption is that there’s no such thing as too much disk space on a desktop PC, but there certainly exists something as enough space on a desktop PC. I now have a 80Gb RAID1 file server, and I have only filled up 30% — that’s including the operating system, our family photos of last 5 years, all my files + emails I kept since 1997… I do not download or keep MP3, video, etc, and have just felt difficult to fill the space up. So I figured, instead of spending more to get the best bang for the buck, I can actually save myself a few $$$ by getting just enough storage for the next 3 years (of drives’ warranty).

Of course, your mileage might vary. If you have a habit of downloading and keeping lots of warez Linux distribution ISOs, then take Dan’s advice and get that 300Gb monster (or two of them to form a RAID1 if you value your data). Otherwise, think about how much space you really need.

It appears that both Kmart and Big W are having Toy Sale, starting from today (Thursday 6 July) for 2 weeks (Wednesday 19 July).

From Kmart’s Toy Sale Catelogue:

The wait is over! The Toy Sale is on now at Kmart. There’s 330 cool, new toys – 130 are exclusive to Kmart, like Dora’s Talking Kitchen, only $139, and Tekno, the Robotic Puppy Dalmatian only $99…

From Big W’s Toy Spectacular:

This week we have our BIG W Toy Spectacular, 48 pages packed with toys for the whole family from the brands you know and trust. BIG brands like Fisher Price, Disney, Bratz and many more.

These items are onsale for for two weeks only, so come in and see our great range of toys at even greater BIG W prices.

There seems to be quite a few good deals around. Vivian and I flipped through the catelogues yesterday and found somethings that we should have waited a few weeks for the sale price, but we bought them at higher price — and we haven’t even used! :(

Just discovered an Australian bargain website Zazz! with an interesting tagline — “One Day, One Thing, One Chance”. Basically it sells one and only one product each day at an extremely low price, and it is usually sold out within a few hours after the product is available on their website. It is like Woot, except that it is Australian.

Here’s an sample of its bargain pricing of past products:

• 1Gb Sandisk SD card — $37 & free shipping
• USB Skype Webphone — $17 + $4.70 shipping
• 120Gb portable hard disk — $189 + $8.70 shipping

They are indeed quite an insane price. Moreover, they have a blog and a forum to keep you updated with their latest great buys. Unfortunately I cannot find RSS feed for their daily items. However they do provide email notification when you sign up.

I guess it is going to be one of the first thing to check in the morning.

Another bargain gadget from Deals Direct spotted today, and it is a PDA this time. Might not be as crazy a bargain as last time, but this Palm TX Handheld PC at $399 is still a good buy, much cheaper than you can find on staticICE and ShopBot.

Palm TX is one of the latest release from Palm. Highlights include a big screen at 320×480 (twice of a typical PocketPC), 128Mb of non-volatile RAM (won’t lost your calendar/contact even without power), Wi-Fi + Bluetooth (surfs the web wherever there’s wireless network), and lots of bundled software. Pretty good review from CNet and PC Magazine.

Almost want to trade in my year-old Dell Axim for a Palm, since my first “proper” PDA is a Palm III, and I actually loved graffiti and the simplistic design of Palm OS.

Update: There’s also a $50 rebate from Palm, which makes the whole thing only $349! Deal ends 31^st August.

Kmart is having its end of financial year stock take sale from this coming Thursday. Some of highlights:

• 20% off cordless phones, Hi-Fi systems, CD players, MP3 players (except iPods).
• 15% off TVs including LCD and plasma, printers, DVD players, camcorders, digital cameras and home theatre systems.
• Music CDs from $3.50 each.

There are also of course 30-40% saving for winter clothing, footwear, etc, but it’s just the gadgets that I am interested in :) The stock take sale starts on Thursday 29^th June, goes for a week and ends on Wednesday 5^th of July.

In Dell’s latest catelogue, they are now selling their latest budget notebook — Inspiron 1300 — for $799 delivered. Absolute bargain for a quality notebook that can perform everyday home/office tasks.

Here’s what you’ll get for $799:

Bumping the memory to 1Gb is $144.10 extra, upgrading to 60Gb hard disk $28.60 extra, adding 802.11b/g wireless network $22 extra and DVD burner for $48.40 extra — that brings the total to $1,041.70 for a good work horse. Probably not fit for gaming due to integrated video card, but good enough for software development, business activities, etc.

Usually you will not link Australia and World Cup final 16 together — until Socceroos secured their position in this morning’s game against Croatia. And usually you will not link Socceroos and “free delivery” together — until both OO.com.au and Deals Direct‘s marketing department made this happen.

Go Socceroos — No Delivery Charges from OO.com.au

First this morning at 10am, OO.com.au sent out their news letter titled “Go Socceroos — No Delivery Charges This Weekend Only“. From Now until Sunday 25 June 6pm, you can make purchases on OO and they won’t charge you delivery, some bulky item excepted. That usually save you $8-$10 dollars if you are living in Sydney.

We are in fact getting a cheap classical guitar ($39.95) because Vivian wants to pick up some “hobby”. We’ll see how it goes.

Stock Take Sale — Sitewide Free Shipping from Deals Direct

Later in the afternoon Deals Direct sent out their news letter advertising almost the same thing! Moreover, their free shipping ends one day later, until Monday 26 June at 5pm. Deals Direct usually have $9 flat delivery cost for their items, so it’s great saving for low price items which you would not usually buy because of the weight on delivery cost.

In the email it does say “Go the Socceroos!” so I guess it might be another reason beside the “stock take”.

Also remember their $10 cashback partnered with PayPal if you want to have “double savings”. Too bad that they don’t have a cheap classical guitar at the moment, but I guess I have until 12am to figure out whether I want to claim the PayPal cashback deal.