How to get a free iPhone (or Blackberry Curve)

AT&T is really pushing their Blackberry line, and why not? The Blackberry Curve 8310 with GPS is the best phone I’ve ever used. It was more functional, flexible, and felt better in my hands then any phone I’ve owned…and I’ve owned a lot, including the iPhone. The iPhone is a very close second to the BB Curve. Well let me show you how to get either one for free.

If you want the Blackberry Curve, and you are a new customer to AT&T, you can simply go on Amazon and buy the BB Curve 8310 with GPS, and after rebates, you make out with $50.01 in cash and a free phone. That’s it…simple as that. Cold hard cash and the best cell phone ever made.

If you are wanting to get a free iPhone, the steps are a bit more involved, but not by much. Buy the BBCurve like mentioned above. Then go online to GSM PhoneSource and get an unlock code for $19. Finally, put your newly unlocked BBCurve (make sure to keep it pristine and sell as new), on eBay where they are selling for upwards of $400.

That on top of the $50.01 you made just from buying the Curve from Amazon will net you enough cash to buy an iPhone including tax.

There you go, a free iPhone, and heck you might even have some extra money left over for a nice case for that newly purchased Jesus phone iPhone.

Buy via Amazon

P.S. This is the method I went about buying my iPhone, but Amazon wasn’t offering such incredible rebates, so I was able to get the AT&T store to match the Amazon price at the time of paying $50, this this method, you can pocket $50 on the purchase of a Curve.

Firefox 3.0 (Beta 1)

Today Mozilla released their latest browser Firefox 3.0 beta 1. After running it for a while, the browser is MUCH faster. No bugs yet, other then the memory leak which has plagued users of FF since the browser first launched. The entire experience is improved. They’ve redesigned it to be cleaner, easier to access, and made things like bookmarks and saving passwords easier. Page zooming is really cool, and they finally have the ability to resume downloads perfected.

To the geeky crowd, the reason for the speed bump in rendering pages is that Firefox now is built from Gecko 1.9, a brand new version of engine for rendering HTML. Gecko 1.9 is primarily coded from Cairo, an open source vector graphics software library that can leverage hardware accelerated rendering.

It isn’t recommended that you download this if you are just a casual user, but from what I’ve seen it is stable enough to use as your main browser…and they are sure to release a few more updates in the coming weeks before it’s final public release.

Read

P.S. It is most likely that your extensions won’t work yet with the new beta. It takes time for the creators of these extensions to update the software….a large reason why there is a beta period. And yes, this beta is available for  OS X, or any other platform that Firefox runs on.

You Can't Stop the Beat

As many of you know I had nearly everything I own stolen a few weeks ago. My job has allowed me to borrow an old PC (yeah I know a PC not a Mac) that was lying around and use at home until I am able to get one for myself. Up until now I was downloading tv shows via torrent and downloading them to my iPhone and watching that way, thus filling it up very quickly. Now with the computer I have tons of free space on my iPhone. I want to fill it up with some music, but I really don’t have any.

Here’s where you come in…since I am starting from scratch, send me your favorite song, band, album, etc. The easiest way would just be to send 1 mp3 to me of your favorite song via email to me(at)NickStarr(dot)com. It is a Google hosted email account so attachments can be up to 20 megs.

If you wanted to send a copy of an album or a cd or dvd of some of your favorite songs, you could also mail them via media mail (very cheap way of sending) to my PO Box in San Francisco: PO Box 426084, San Francisco, CA 94142.

You could also gift a song via iTunes, but I am trying to keep this as cost effective as possible.

Disclaimer: Sure here’s the part where I say you probably shouldn’t send music b/c of the RIAA blah blah blah, but just think of it as sending me a digital backup copy just in case you ever lose your music. I will be sure to send it back if that ever were to happen.

I want to thank everyone who sends a song. I really appreciate it and will make sure to listen to every one. I am sure it will open me up to a lot of different band/songs that I may of never discovered on my own.

NY Times – The Global Sympathetic Audience

My NY Times article about Twitter and the entire suicide issue is finally published. It is online, and looks to be in print tomorrow, November 4th. Below is the article, but it can also be found on the NY Times site here. There are a few inaccuracies. The police didn’t find me in my car the next morning, and I’ve had no contact with any law enforcement about this incident (others did by calling them and reporting the incident though). On the site, it doesn’t look like they used any of the photos we took the day of my second break-in.

Currently, I am still without a computer as well, but I hope to have enough money by the middle of the month to get one. The donation link is still available as well.

Before I publish the article, I want to take this time to give an update on what has been going on. My job in the north bay found out about my recent break-ins. My boss donated towards my fund, and other various donations have been coming in.

I decided that the best way to start over, since I was down to 2 outfits and the clothes on my back, was to move outside of the city and find a place to live. I found a beautiful house that was renting out rooms. Check out my Flickr page for some pics.

The rent is VERY reasonable, but coming up with the first/last/deposit/etc was a HUGE drain on my finances. In the end I believe it is worth it, and putting off my goal of buying a new computer has suffered, but I am now safe and sleeping on a real bed (it’s a queen sized double high air mattress).

It feels good to be out of my car and sleeping in a real house. I’m using my only piece of technology left to watch lots of YouTube and other videos on my iPhone.

Other then that, I’ve been better. Things are looking up and moving forward. With all of that being said, here is the article after the jump: