Via ESV Blog, the English Standard Version Bible downloadable MP3 audio edition now costs USD$39.95 (AUD$53.35 as of 7 Dec 2005) — slashes from $49.95 previously.

It is narrated by Max McLean, and it is encoded in the format of 64kbps MP3 of one chapter per file (around 2Gb for the whole Bible). You can load them up to your favourite MP3 players and listen to them while you are on the move — which would be very useful. There are also samples on the GNP website which you can listen to. Max is quite clear in reading the text, although a little bit “American” to me (personally I prefer Marquis Laughlin‘s rendition).

Vivian did some large photo prints for the TAT mums last week. Print @ Harvey Norman Online has 8″ x 10″ (20.3cm x 25.4cm) digital photo prints on special at AUD$3.48 (normally $6.95). They normally costs $6+ in other printing shops so it is really a bargain. They use Fuji Color so the quality is not bad. You can either upload your digital picture using their web interface, or bring your media to the shop.

Delivery/postage does cost $3.95 per order though. However, you can also pick your photos up from their Harvey Norman store at Martin’s Place, if you happen to visit CBD regularly (like me).

We went to SupaCentre Moore Park this Saturday morning, enjoyed the $2.50 breaky at IKEA — and that was nice. Tastes much better than your Maccas breakfast meal deal (which is not that hard to beat), and quite a bit cheaper as well (which is rare)!! By the way, it is true that IKEA is moving out of SupaCentre Moore Park as it is just too small for it, but from the Q & A, you shall still be able to get $2.50 breaky at IKEA Homebush Bay.

After the breaky, we wondered into Toys “R” Us as Anna always enjoyed her walk there — home is just too small for her to roam around. Besides your usual Christmas toy sale (which we ain’t that interested in), there is also summer sale for baby items (1Mb PDF). Some of the items are actually quite cheap, which we did not expect to be from Toys “R” Us.

We ended up buying a cheap umbrella-fold stroller (as shown above) for $9.99, which normally costs $20+ in K-Mart and Big W (more in stores like Babies Galore). It is not a sophisticated stroller — just one position and very simply constructed, but we think it would be useful when Vivian and Anna travel to Hong Kong next year.

Good bargains are also a fully reclinable Safety 1st Euro Stroller for $99.98, and Safe ‘N’ Sound Sports Progress Booster Seat for $44.99. You can probably sell for more on the eBay, or give away to friends who are expecting babies (and I know a few next year).

Update: Jumba now no longer offers free hosting.

Free web hostings that are feature-packed, advertisement-free, stable and fast are hard to come by. Usually they either came strings-attached, or filled your sites with popup ads, or gone totally disappeared from the surface of this planet within a year (together with your sites).

Well, you can always gone paid hosting, especially when they are super-cheap these days. (Check my $88 off promotion code for DreamHost). However, if you insist not spend any money, I have also found Jumba Interactive Group (formally known as Alternative.net.au) provides free hosting plans on one of their US-based servers. Update 2006-04-11: Jumba now offers Australian server free hosting, after Net Logistics offered theirs earlier this month.

You get:

And it comes with PHP5 w/ Zend, MySQL 4.1, PostgreSQL 7, Perl 5, RoR, Tomcat that runs most open source web applications out there. There are some restrictions. For example, you cannot run commercial sites on their free hosting service, but you can set up advertisement to monetize your site. Perfect for personal blogsites.

If you do not want to pay for a domain — freedns.afraid.org has lots of good sub-domains to choose from — and free!

(Note: currently FOCUSer.net offers free WordPress hosting for current and ex-focus members. That gives you only 50Mb though, and runs on my dodgy 6 years old hardware and a relatively tiny 512kbps pipe. So Jumba is a much better offer.)

Thomas wrote again for the music heads amongst us:

Allans Music “Biggest Ever” Sale

This Saturday 26th & Sunday 27th November 2005

Allans Music Sydney
228 Pitt Street, Sydney (02) 9283 7711
108 Botany Road, Alexandria (02) 9318 2255

“Biggest ever” might be a gimmick, but Thomas can testify how much saving he got last time he visited Allans’ sale.

Thomas wrote:

For $2.50 you get sausages, bacon, egg, tomato, bread, butter and coffee or tea. The coffee is good, made by one of those $2,000+ machine which can give you capuccino, latte, etc.

Certainly the cheapest breakfast I’ve ever had in Australia.

I’m not sure how long it’ll last but IKEA Moore Park is supposed to close by middle of next year so certainly no longer than that.

Hmmm. Nice. Not sure how it stack up against IKEA Singapore’s breakfast menu :) Oh. Yum.

Elsie wrote:

I don’t know if this counts, but there’s free hot dogs!

HARTS PUB — FREE HOT DOGS

Friday 02 September to Friday 25 November 2005

On Friday nights Harts Pub offers authentic and free hot dogs. With condiments galore, there’s no better way to end the week.

Firday Nights

Harts Pub
Corner Essex and Gloucester Streets

Phone (02) 9250 6022

Sure we all love free hot dogs.

Tim wrote:

Picked up a stack of (100) photos from the local pharmacist on Anzac Parade. the photo processing company is called QFL (in red).

Good things:

1. 15c each
2. They are printed on Kodak paper.
3. Leave the digital media with them, and 3 days later the photos arrive — minimal fuss.

Things to note:

1. No manual control as to how the photos are printed (e.g. 2 photos were slightly off-centre, for one photo I would’ve liked to fiddle with the exposure)
2. Prints EVERYTHING on that media — no selection allowed.
3. Digital prints still lack certain clarity and sometimes not-so-natural skintones — but thats not their fault.

To me, 15c is still a worthwhile bargain despite some of these shorcomings…

Nice. I am not really a “printing person” and I am happy to look at digital photos on computers, but I know many would prefer holding an actual album. 15 cents is probably the absolute lowest these days, but this one is much closer to home.

Which pharmacist is this?

Thomas wrote:

If you’re a university student, you can subscribe to The Australian and Sydney Morning Herald at a very low cost.

You can subscribe to The Australian for 40 weeks in 2006 for $15 only. Log on to www.theaustralian.com.au/unioffer to subscribe.

Alternatively you can subscribe to Sydney Morning Herald for $20 on www.tertiary.smh.com.au.

Both offers will require you to pickup weekdays paper on campus but weekend paper will be deliver to your home address.

Thanks for the tips!! Not to mention that if you subscribe The Australians before 5 Dec, you get a chance to win a Dell notebook that looks remarkable similar to the one in the previous entry.

Dell Australia is promoting their budget notebook computer — the AUD$898.70 Dell Inspiron 2200, and that includes free delivery and an hard disk upgrade.

There has been quite a few notebook computers selling for under $1,000 these days, which was unthinkable even 3 years ago. The Dell package has to be one of the better offers —

• Processor: Intel Celeron M 1.40Ghz, 1Mb L2 cache
• Memory: 256Mb
• Monitor: 14 inch at 1024×768
• Hard drive: 60Gb
• Optical drive: CD-RW/DVD combo drive
• Graphics: Integrated (Graphics Media Accelerator)
• Network: 10/100Mbps ethernet, 56kbps modem
• Service: 1-year collect & return service

Notably missing is wireless networking, which comes as an AUD$26.40 extra option. Why get a notebook if you can’t go wireless?

To bring up the spec to make this budget notebook a workhorse, I’ll upgrade to 512Mb of RAM (AUD$48.40), add wireless mini PCI and upgrade to DVD+/-RW drive (AUD$51.70), which sums up to be $1,025.20 delivered. That would be quite a nice machine to get work going.

Here is just going to be the sale that everyone is waiting for. Kmart is having its The Monster Sale — 15% off store-wide.

Yes. That’s everything in your local Kmart store, and it starts off from 8AM tomorrow morning. Expect it to be very busy. Since no rain check is available, you’ll be hurry before your favourite item runs out.

Unfortunately we won’t have the car back until late Friday (it’s in repair) so we’ll see whether there’s any bargain left on Saturday.

This is for the programmers out there. Want to get started programming on Windows? Cannot afford buying Microsoft’s expensive development suite? Don’t think open source as alternatives?

Microsoft might have heard your cry! Yes, it wasn’t an illusion. Microsoft is now offering the express editions of its line of Visual Studio products absolutely free through MSDN, which had an initial price tag of USD$49.

You get to choose from its Web Developer edition, or languages like Visual Basic, C#, C++ or J#, download directly from MSDN website.

There’s also SQL Server 2005 Express Edition for free as well, and they are not limited to personal use — use them in a production site or your commercial software if you wish.

Free offer expires in November 2006. Meanwhile — happy coding :)

I have recently signed up to DreamHost to host some of my sites. It has a nice affliates program that allows its users to share referral rewards as discount for the new sign ups.

Here is my promotion code:

BARGAINBLOG

It saves you USD$82 when you sign up yearly plans with DreamHost. For example, if you are interested in its “Crazy Domain Insane!” plan (Level 1), which normally costs $119.40 if you pay annaul. and now it would cost only USD$37.40 for the first year — which equals to around $3.12 per month. And you get:

• 200Gb space (+1Gb more per week)
• 2Tb bandwdith per month (+16Gb per week)
• Unlimited domains
• Unlimited MySQL database
• 3,000 email boxes with IMAP and POP3 access.
• Up to 75 shell/FTP accounts, PHP4/5, Ruby on Rails.

Price also includes one domain registration. It also gives you full refund if you are not satisfied within 97 days (provided you pay by credit card). There is also a plan comparison for all the existing plans.

DreamHost uses Debian Linux boxes, and at least for the boxes I have access to, they seem to be running descent dual+hyperthread Xeon’s. I am mainly hosting some CPU/database intensive applications that have been killing my humble Pentium III 450Mhz at home, and the performance seems to be quite good. Many webmasters swear by DreamHost’s services, and that was the reason I signed up to it.

Note — I do receive a few bucks for referring you, if you do decide to take up the promotion code. Just to make it clear.

Got Strathfield‘s latest catelogue yesterday, and what caught my eyes were the cheap DVD-R and CD-R in their recent sale.

Printable DVD 4X

• +R & -R
• 4.7GB
• 50 Pack
• 120 Min

$16.95

That’s very cheap — cheaper than searching through staticICE or eBay. Not the latest 16x discs, but who cares as long as it fits the full 4.7Gb. I actually spotted the same product on their website which still retails at $34.

There’s no hint on the catelogue on how long this deal is going to last. Neither is there any indication on how good those discs are (I bought a pack of lemon from eBay before so I know not all blanks are the same).

Other cheapies from Strathfield:

• Strathfield branded 8x DVD R 50 pack for $19.95 (for those who are in hurry).
• Laser branded CD-R 100 pack for $24 (for those stuck on 700Mb).

That’s it for today.

I bought a set of Doro cordless phone (830R with 3 hand sets) last year for $199 at a sale, and I was pretty happy. The phones were small, fully digital, have lots of useful functions and (most importantly) it is cheap.

But that was last year. DECT phones are now much more popular and are dropping in price everyday. I just saw this deal on Deals Direct Australia — Binatone AT2000 Quad Pack Cordless Phone for $119.95 + $9.95 delivery.

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