Zoodoka Paused

A few months ago I was asked to write about Zoodoka, a blog RSS-to-email program. It’s a little pretentious to quote myself, but I said:

With any email marketing program, spamming is going to be a major issue. Any free, mass-mailing program has a huge potential to be abused.

Today, I heard on ProBlogger that Zoodoka is suspending all blog emails because of spammers. From the Zoodoka blog:

We offered the service completely for free and so, as is the way with all things Internet, a annoying minority decided to abuse the system. We found ourselves a few weeks ago facing a massive backlog of broadcasts many of which were spam related. …

…. We’re not spammers, we don’t support spammers and we do support everybody’s freedom of choice when it comes to opting in and out email lists.

Today we’re stopping Zookoda broadcasts. The system will remain live, but broadcasts will not be sent. We are going to be making some more changes to the infrastructure and will allow for broadcasts again in early January. In the meantime though this is a pain for our legitimate users and I can only offer my most sincere apologies to you guys for the disruption this is undoubtedly going to cause.

Wi-Fi Detector Shirt

ThinkGeek has a new way to find a good wireless spot. Instead of turning on your laptop, and wandering around the coffeeshop / library / friend’s house, you can wear this shirt. Or convince your sidekick to wear one and run around for you.

Product Features

Glowing animated shirt dynamically displays the current wi-fi signal strength.
Shows signal strength for 802.11b or 802.11g
Black 100% Cotton T-Shirt
Animated Decal is Removable (with hook and loop fasteners) for Easy Washing
Battery Pack is Concealed in a Small Pocket Sewn Inside the Shirt
Runs for hours off three AAA Batteries (not included)

As seen on ThinkGeek

CDs-turned-3 1/4 Disks

Do you remember 3 1/4 disks? We all thought they were so cool because they were smaller than the five inch floppies AND they held more. This was back in the day when installing a new computer game meant swapping 5 1/2 floppies for a few hours until your game was done! The smaller disks were like magic.

The guys at DesignBoom miss those days, and they’ve come up with a CD that thinks it’s a floppy disk. It’s a square CD that looks
exactly like the old disks, down to the little label stickers, but will actually store 200mb and play in CD drives (it has a disclaimer that you can’t insert it into a pop-up CD drive, but you probably figured that one out).

A fun novelty for your desk at work, or a joke for the computer geek in your life.

World Of WarCraft PC

Dell’s new laptop is just for WarCraft players. ExtremeTech offers the basic stats:

Intel Core 2 Extreme X7900 CPU at 2.8GHz
2GB dual channel DDR-667 memory
2 x 200GB hard drives, set up as a 400GB RAID 0 array
2 x Nvidia 8700M GT GPUs in SLI configuration (each with 512MB of video memory)
AGEIA PhysX 100M physics processor
Integrated HD audio with Creative Labs Audigy software stack
Intel 802.11 a/g/n wireless networking plus integrated gigabit Ethernet for wired connections
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition preinstalled

More importantly for WoW fans, the laptop comes with World Of WarCraft, and the expansion Burning Crusade, along with other WoW spinoffs like a DVD, Azeroth novels and a soundtrack. The laptop itself is customizable for Alliance or Horde. The kayboard is WoW-friendly, and it offers some pretty WarCraft backgrounds (in case you can’t download one or use your own screenshot).

And it includes (from ExtremeTech again):

You also get something called a “Quest Envelope.” This includes a Blizzard beta key card with five keys that can be used in upcoming WoW betas, plus an upgrade certificate that upgrades accounts to the “Collector’s Edition” level, and gives the player a special in-game pet.

Unfortunately, this great toy starts at $4,499, which puts it a little out of my price range.