Hackaday Lazy Afternoons

Lazy Afternoons

Here’s another poll. We like learning stuff. So vote.poll swag

So Live 8 is tomorrow. Woohoo. The lineup keeps getting better. You can check out live8insider.com for live blogging on Live 8. Anyways, I was looking at the new iControl for Garageband and I remembered a nice little secret that you guys might enjoy.

If you want a hardcore discount at the Apple store online, go and sign up for the Apple Developer Connection. I think it’s a once a year $79 or $99 fee. You’ll get all this free stuff and pre-release software etc. which is cool. But aside from that

20 thoughts on “Hackaday Lazy Afternoons

  1. Hey,

    Checked out the apple developer’s connection stuff – I’m only seeing like a $25 discount off the mac mini, $75 discount off a 12 inch iBook.

    And the $99 a year is only for verified student members.

    Not sure where you got the 50% off number, but I’d love it if I were wrong….

  2. I think the Apple Developer thing you mentioned is partially wrong. You can get those student version ADC’s with the low prices you mentioned and almost no real discount on anything, or you can get the “Select” and “premiere” with “significant” discounts starting at $500 and going to $3500 respectively.

  3. Well I see the kit for 75 bucks going the educational route. I didn’t see the one time hardware discount though…

    As for promos… Shirts. Personally I’d be willing to track down and pay Vince for a pair of XL shirts if they were available.

    -PsiVeteran

  4. Sean, john is absolutely right. Your local telco’s switch (Exchange or whatever..) knows you have picked up your handset ONLY because by doing so you put a loop (Short) on the line. When a phone is ‘on hook’ there is no loop and nothing is happening (other than line voltage shows about -50v dc). When the phone is ‘off hook, (You picked it up) the local exchange see’s this and passes you dial tone at approx 400hz (In UK) and roughly 10v. The voltages will vary with your line length i.e distance to exchange. Try putting a multimeter onto your phone line and put loops on and you’ll see what I mean. Watch out for when somebody rings your line though as this can be upto 75v AC (VERY VERY low current though!) as this can surpise you and make you jump like a girl, v v embarrassing – especially if you work in telecomms ;-)

  5. Whats up with these polls? They are a waste of time and should be seperated from the main hack content.

    We all come here for the cool links, not some crappy pointless polls!

    Maybe you can seperate the meet ups from the main website too? As the will only apply to a small ammount of visitors.

    Anyway, its a great site apart from these two things! :)

  6. I did a little research ont he apple discount… called around too… For the 99$ ADC membership you will need to fax them proof that you are a student. Also students are given a “once-in-a-lifetime-deal” like he said, however it doesn’t state the prices for anything… placed a few calls but no one is really giving quotes. i shot of an email to someone i know who works for apple and hoping they’ll give me some quotes… cross your fingers! i’m hoping i can get a good ibook for 500$

  7. The ADC discount for students pricing is available at http://developer.apple.com/membership/usa.html (just click the link). I bought my powerbook through this last year. Also they have sent me a mailing every month with software, as well as a new copy of Panther, and just recently the Tiger upgrade as well as the full install disc. All of this is available for download too once you are a member. Oh, and I got a shirt.

  8. i bought a G5 with the student discount last summer (sadly, not the 3GHz i’d been hoping for), here’s how it works:

    – sign up for it, prove you’re a student, and pay $99. if you’ve been thinking about taking some community college classes, maybe now is the time…

    – you’ll get your ADC membership and an “asset” on the web site. an asset could be an instance of support or an Apple-conducted software test; in this case, it’s the mythical “once-in-a-lifetime” Hardward Purchase Program discount.

    – shop the ADC store with your asset. the discount is 20% on (most) systems, and around 5-15% on peripherals, accessories, iPods, cheaper systems, etc. obviously, you’ll want to do this for a big purchase. to upgrade from my 7600+375MHz G3 card, i got a dual 2.5 G5 for $600 off (so really around $500 off, counting for the $99 ADC membership). i was able to get the G5 with AirPort, Bluetooth, the 250GB drive, and the extended warranty, plus tax, for under retail. not bad. slap an extra gig of ram and a 76GB Raptor in there and you just might have some real beef.

    – to keep the giddy excitement going, you’ll get a Student Membership Mailing every month for the next year. usually it’s a CD or DVD of ADC content – fresh documentation, tools, SDKs, yadda yadda. whatever, i’m not much of a programmer. however, as someone noted, you get a FREE TEE SHIRT (yes, it’s the computing industry) and hard copies of new system updates. I got 10.3, 10.3.8, and two copies of 10.4 (standard and “User Install”, whatever that is).

  9. Actually, you can do the busy box trick in a much simpler way. All you have to do is plug one end of a phone cord into line A and the other end into line B. Done. All the lines in the house will go dead. I did this in high school once to keep my teacher from calling my parents about a bad grade. Totally worked.

  10. i thought the same thing after i read that, if you can just short them in the box and it will work, why bother using the box anyway?

    So i took a phone cable, and shorted the wires in it. I plugged it in and called from my other line to see what would happen. And it worked!

    the result is the cutest busy box ever: http://tinyurl.com/78h93

  11. The trick with having the Apple Student Dev discount is to stack it with the Educational discount as well. Don’t buy anything you can get outside, like ram or harddrives. Glowing keyboards are, of course, fine. That’s the way I did it.

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