Eddie On Everything

How to find bank foreclosed homes to buy as investment properties

It doesn’t look like this site is officially affiliated with Countrywide. In fact, the author of the blog, Dimitris, offers this explanation of the site:

I started this blog to show a couple of friends the total count of foreclosures by Countrywide. I kept going to Countrywide’s website (along with other places) looking for an REO (hoping to find something affordable)and was frustrated by the way the listings were presented. After noticing a rapid rate of acceleration in foreclosure inventory, I decided to organize the listings.

The blog that Dimitris runs offers links to lists of foreclosed homes, broken down by state. Some example links from the first week of September:

Florida
California
Washington

Of course, check the blog to get links to the most current listings.

Get Free Movie Downloads from Amazon

Adobe’s penchant for poor application design strikes again! See this news story, recorded earlier today:

Hole in Adobe software allows free movie downloads

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A security hole in Adobe Systems Inc software, used to distribute movies and TV shows over the Internet, is giving users free access to record and copy from Amazon.com Inc’s video streaming service.

The problem exposes online video content to the rampant piracy that plagued the music industry during the Napster era and is undermining efforts by retailers, movie studios and television networks to cash in on a huge Web audience.

“It’s a fundamental flaw in the Adobe design. This was designed stupidly,” said Bruce Schneier, a security expert who is also the chief security technology officer at British Telecom.

That’s right, it looks like you can easily download many for-pay movies for free, and then save those movies on your hard drive. You are then able to make as many copies as you’d like, give the movies away for free, etc.

It’s funny that an Amazon spokesman tries to minimize the issue, saying that the movies “cannot be pirated using video stream catching software,” yet Reuters reports that they were able to do exactly that using relatively inexpensive software.

Another Green Tea benefit: Inhibits Breast Cancer Growth In Female Mice

There are many well-documented health benefits to drinking Green Tea.

Green Tea reportedly helps to soothe rheumatoid arthritis, lowers high cholesterol levels, helps to prevent cariovascular disease, staves off some infections, and now, according to at least one study, it significantly inhibits breast cancer growth in female mice.

The benefits of Green Tea are largely due to a chemical called EGCG, or epigallocatechin gallate. According to this page at About.com, “EGCG is a powerful anti-oxidant: besides inhibiting the growth of cancer cells, it kills cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. It has also been effective in lowering LDL cholesterol levels, and inhibiting the abnormal formation of blood clots. The latter takes on added importance when you consider that thrombosis (the formation of abnormal blood clots) is the leading cause of heart attacks and stroke.”

A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Mississippi researchers now finds that consuming EGCG significantly inhibits breast tumor growth in female mice.

Green tea is high in the antioxidant EGCG (epigallocatechin-3- gallate) which helps prevent the body’s cells from becoming damaged and prematurely aged. Studies have suggested that the combination of green tea and EGCG may also be beneficial by providing protection against certain types of cancers, including breast cancer.

With each passing day, it seems that the good news about green tea continues to pile up. Of course, green tea and other holistic or natural elixirs should not be thought of as a replacement for traditional medicine. However, it seems clear that working green tea into your regular routine not only can’t hurt, but it may help quite a bit, serving as a valuable preventative measure against an array of ailments.

How to remove yourself as a “Fan” on your Facebook profile

I’m posting this tip because it took me forever to figure out how to remove myself from being a “Fan” of something or other on Facebook.

Seems that it is really easy to become a fan of something, but when you decide that you no longer want to be a fan, it’s not easy to find out how to become an “un-fan,” or an “ex-fan.”

This is because the link is hidden away at the bottom of the page that you have previously fanned. That is, the link to “remove me” is not grouped with the other links on the page. Instead, it is hidden away at the bottom of the page that you previously became a fan of.

I couldn’t find out how to do it on Facebook, even after looking for over 10 minutes. Fortunately, I found this page from Yahoo Answers where someone reveals the technique.

The solution: Go to the page that you are a fan of then go to the bottom and press ‘Remove me from fans’ and that should do it! Good Luck!

Easy once you know how to do it, eh?

Suppress your appetite without adding calories with these appetite control foods

This article at Natural News.com lists 5 appetite control foods that will help you suppress your appetite without adding additional calories. Below are a couple of important tips from the article, along with a few of my own.

Fresh drinking water. Drink an 8-ounce glass of water when you first start feeling hungry, you will find that it suppresses your appetite in nearly every case.

Green vegetables such as lettuce, cabbage, bokchoy, and other leafy vegetables. They have so few calories that they need not even be kept track of in most diets.

Pickles. Be sure to check the label, though - some pickles contain sugars that add calories. If you have trouble finding low-calorie pickles, check your natural food store or you local Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods.

Olives: Olives contain very few calories, and are quite heart-healthy to boot.

How do you boot from a CD or DVD in Mac OSX or OS X? How can I ignore the startup disk/volume?

I recently had to upgrade my Mac Mini from OSX 10.4.x (Tiger) to OS X 10.5 (Leopard.)

In order to do so, I had to figure out how to make my Mac boot up from the CD/DVD drive, not from the hard disk.

Here are few different methods for booting from CD on a Mac:

• Restart your computer and immediately press the c key. The computer will look for a bootable CD or DVD and, if it finds one, will use it as its startup device.
• Restart your computer and immediately press Cmd-Option-Shift-Delete.
• Restart your computer and immediately press the Option key. Icons for all available startup volumes will appear. Click the one you want to boot from.

Free up Disk Space on your Mac by Removing unnecessary OSX language files

Mac OSX.

It looks pretty.

It’s based on BSD.

But it’s a disk space HOG, with a full install consuming nearly 20GB of disk space.

Fortunately, there is an easy way that you can reclaim 1-2 GB of disk space on your Mac. By default, Apple’s OSX installs hundreds of language (localization) files that you will probably never need. Honestly, how many people out there speak 200+ languages?

I am so happy that I found Monolingual, a handy little utility that will free up over 1GB of space on any version of OSX (Leopard, Tiger, etc.) by removing unnecessary language files.

To free up disk space on your Mac, simply download the file from here and follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that it will take some time to run - it can take up to a couple of hours on some systems to the remove the many, many unneeded files. Still, the precious space that you will reclaim makes it well worth the wait.

Who won the first 2008 Presidential Debate? Do polls show Barack Obama or John McCain?

One day after the first presidential debate in 2008, opinion polls as to who won are mixed. Many polls show Barack Obama coming out on top, while others indicate the John McCain stole the show.

Below is a collection of various polls that I’ve tracked down. If you find any others, post them in the comment section.

The Drudge Report is running a poll that indicates, after over 300,000 votes, that a whopping 68% of respondents believe that John McCain won the debate.

A poll at CNN.com, on the other hand, shows that 51% of people thought that Obama won, while only 38% considered McCain the winner. However, CNN does admit that their sample was probably biased.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey is not a measurement of the views of all Americans, since only people who watched the debate were questioned and the audience included more Democrats than Republicans.

Fifty-one percent of those polled thought Obama did the better job in Friday night’s debate, while 38 percent said John McCain did better.

An MSNBC poll with over 800,000 responses shows that 52 considered Obama the winner of the first debate:

The this article entitled “The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won”.

The presidential campaigns roared out of here Saturday morning in a pitched fight to make the case that the other candidate had lost the first presidential debate of the general election.

At the crack of dawn, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign released a new advertisement criticizing Senator John McCain for failing to utter the words “middle class” in the 90-minute debate, held Friday at the University of Mississippi here. By then, Mr. McCain had already produced and released an Internet video citing several instances in which Mr. Obama had said he agreed with his rival’s positions.

Got any other interesting polls results? Put them in the comments.