Chaos Laboratory

Does that risk-taker in you makes its presence felt every so often? Does that involve gambling? Lets face it – all of us would squirm inwardly with pleasure at the prospect of making a quick bundle online. And many of us have tried out their luck sometime or the other. To cut our work short for us, there are millions of online casinos sprouting up at every nook and corner of the net. But do you even know for sure that the casino you’ve blown up a fortune at is for real and not just some scam site designed to make you part with your savings in the shortest possible time? If you’ve had panic attacks on such issues – fear not, cause Online Casino Bluebook is here for your rescue.

The site maintains a nice list of the top ten (and legitimate) online casinos along with a couple of pertinent factors that can help you choose the casino that is right for you. These include the world rankings, welcome bonuses offered, payout percentages as well as solid reviews. The listed casinos are the ones where players will be able to play number one Vegas style casino games like craps, baccarat, blackjack, slots, poker, keno and bingo. The site maintains separate listings of casinos that offer a single type of game only (Poker, Bingo, Roulette etc.). They’ve even dedicated a section to No Deposit Casinos where you don’t have to pay up a bundle beforehand to start playing.

If you’re in a dilemma even after studying the list, you can always get in touch with their support team – who’ll guide you through the process of picking the best casino tailored to meet your needs.

Been cheated/scammed by an online casino ? They can advise you in this regard too, or just point you to sites which act as the casino watchdogs on the net.

The site has a very simple yet easily navigable layout – with easy access to all the important links that you may ever want. However, it could definitely do with a face-lift (a better template, that is). End of the day a bulk of the netizens tend to trust more of eye-candy sites.

Oct 20th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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An average internet user comes across plenty of Get Rich Quick schemes floating around on the net. Almost all of these lure members in with promises of delivering an insane amount of riches in just 3-4 days while you just sit at your computer building up your referral list. You’ll notice something strangely similar about their advertising methods – all of them put substantial emphasis on words & phrases like FREE, FASTEST MONEY MAKING MACHINE EVER, LIVE A DREAM LIFE EVER AFTER etc. and denounce all others in this business. Reading their income outline compels many of us to rush head on and sign-up immediately. Unfortunately it doesn’t take long to realise that this “dream opportunity” isn’t really all that free as it claims to be. to get any real advantages out of it you’ve to build a massive list of referrals / affiliates and pay a monthly membership fee in order to gain any real benefits out of your down-line. The monthly payment part is what most of these services very conveniently forget to mention in their advertisements. Ah well !

I had played around with a lot of these online money makers before I launched this blog (and started earning advertisement revenue). These schemes operate on the principles of MLM (Multi Level Marketing) or Network Marketing – which means that in order to make some serious money you need to have a large networked down-line. Initially you can always lure others into signing up through similar advertisements. But when it comes to fishing out cash from their own pockets you’ll find a lot of your down-line vanishing into thin air overnight – coz it’s evident to everyone that there’s no guarantee that the scheme would work as advertised. Why waste hard-earned money of such a thing? While I am still interested in making those few extra bucks online – I’ve lost faith in all such schemes long since.

In comes Hits4Pay. I found this site through an AdBrite advertisement that popped up on my site. The catch-phrase sounded interesting but I was quite apprehensive about it. Anyway, there was no harm in spending a couple of second signing-up for it – so I went ahead with it. To my surprise this turned out to be the first ever scheme that doesn’t ask you to shell out anything from your pockets. You pay absolutely nothing for a membership with them – and never need to pay anything for upgrades either.

Hits4Pay operates on a much simpler principle. While signing-up you choose a bunch of topics that you’re interested in. They’ll keep sending you emails from advertisers about 2-3 times a week. To read the emails, you’ll need to log in to your Hits4Pay account and check your inbox. Once you’ve read the mails, your account gets credited with $0.02 – that is you receive 2 cents for every email you read. Admittedly this isn’t a big amount – but then again, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme either. There’s a scope to earn more by building a down-line. For every email read by your affiliates (1st and 2nd level), you receive $0.01. Having a large down-line can really boost your income – so that’s the only area you need to concentrate on.

What more – as of now they’re offering a $10 sign-up bonus. Your account gets padded with $10 the moment you sign-up and all emails you read after that goes towards topping up that amount. Payouts happen for as low as $25 and get sent directly to your PayPal account.

Here are the key features:

• Free Sign-up
• $10 bonus for just signing up
• No membership / upgradation fees ever
• Receive paid emails on topics that you choose
• No spamming
• A flat income of $0.02 per email you read
• Earn $0.01 from every email read by your 1st and 2nd level down-lines
• Minimum Payout $25
• Payouts occur instantly through PayPal
• Only limitation – 1 account per household

That more or less summarises the idea. If you’re interested in making some extra cash online, this could definitely be the scheme you’re looking for.

Instead of reading commercial emails for free receive emails on topics that interests you and Get Paid For It! Hits4Pay is one of very few highest paying advertising program in the industry.

Signup for free and receive $10 as a Free Reward.

Sep 26th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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Taking a loan used to be a big issue once upon a time. It meant going through a lot of hassles and making rounds of the bank till the shoe-soles threatened to surrender. I remember, taking a loan was always a last ditch option for people, when we were kids. Once a loan was taken, it would be a cross to bear till it was paid up. That’s what we learnt while growing up.

Once I started working and was pretty much settled in, I started to see a very different picture. Every other bank started offering me a loan. Be it Personal Loans, Home Loans or Debt Consolidation Loans. In the beginning the banks would just call and tempt me to take a personal loan. Then they started sending people to my office. They would literally go down on their knees to convince me.

I was very surprised to learn that taking a loan is not all that difficult any more. In fact, its something that’s become a regular affair these days. People take loans to buy houses and lands. They again take loans keeping their properties as securities at the financial institutions to buy something else. These are called Secured Loans. There are loans available to furnish the new home, to buy a car, to spend on ones marriage and also to go on a vacation to Europe and USA with the family. Sometimes when there are too many loans and the interest rates are high and becomes difficult to maintain an easier option is a debt consolidation loan. Debt Consolidation offers an amount of money to pay off a part or the whole of all the loans and pay a much lower interest rate. The best part is that it becomes one EMI to pay instead of the headache of paying all the loans and credit cards.

The loan that we take can be paid off at leisure. It can be arranged with the institution as to when and how much will be paid off each month. The term can be anything between 6 months to 5 years. The EMI is fixed so as to make payments easy and hassle free. The banks even offer various services to pay off the EMI each month without having to make it a headache for the customer every month. It is either collected as a check from a given account or it can be an electronic payment. Payments can even be set up between an account and the loan so as to pay up a certain amount each month without further instructions.

Paperwork is fairly simple too. The documents required are usually the regular proofs of identity or residence. Most of the other documents are provided by the company that one works in or easy alternatives are available. A couple of photographs and a couple of signatures and the loan documentation is complete. Sometimes loans are also available for existing customers without any paperwork as long as one has a credit card.

Borrowing money has become a lot easier these days and so has the temptation to take a loan for no particular purpose. Most people take paying off loans very seriously. But unfortunately there is a group of people who have made ‘taking a loan’ a sport. They tend to avoid payments by closing accounts and leaving their jobs or cities altogether. They give customers a bad name. The financial institutions too are aware of these kinds of people. They can identify a genuine defaulter who might have missed a payment due to some problem and troublemakers who miss payments cause they do not intend to pay.

As a plea to all who take loans or plan to take a loan sometime in the future, make sure you pay back the money that you borrow. Just because a loan is so much easier these days doesn’t mean that you would borrow peoples money and not pay it back. Moreover, an unpaid loan is bad credit for the customer. In future you might be refused further loans, phone connections and petty loans to buy household items because you failed to pay back some money a long time ago. Be responsible.

Sep 02nd by mOon

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A brief intro…

Past few weeks I’ve been extremely busy designing a Property Investment site for a client. The primary requirement was a custom CMS (Content Management System) – which I had to build from scratch. While it drove me over the edge at times overall it was a thoroughly enjoyable as well as an educational journey for me. Since this is a site that caters to foreign investors, one of the requirements was a Currency Conversion Calculator which could be embedded in any of the articles thus providing the visitors an opportunity to get an idea of the property prices in their native currencies, without having to leave the page. At first I sought the easy way out – i.e. I searched far & wide for a currency calculator service that’d allow me to convert between almost any of the world currencies. Unfortunately the free ones out there are really pathetic and the my client wasn’t willing to shell out any $$ for a paid service. That got me down to designing one on my own. I’ve been dabbling in AJAX for a while now and find the whole idea of RIA (Rich Internet Application) really attractive. So I decided to walk the AJAX way and came up with this cool-tool. Once done with the main project, I was so satisfied with the result that I thought it’d be a really good idea to convert it into a sidebar widget for WordPress. So here I am, with curreX – the Ajax based Currency Converter for WordPress.

Current Version

• 0.9

Features

• The widget is very simple and does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It accepts a currency value (integer or decimal) and a source & destination currency and gives you the converted rate once you hit the Convert button.
• It employs an AJAX back-end, i.e. the conversions are performed without having to refresh the whole page, making the tool really lightweight & fast. Looks cool too.
• Performs client-side validation of the amount entered – thus cutting out chances of entering an erroneous value and crashing the calc. midway while performing a conversion.

Requirements

• WordPress 2.x
• WordPress Sidebar Widgets Plugin in case you’re using WordPress 2.1.x or below. This is not required, if you’ve WordPress 2.2.x installed.

Download

curreX  (99.5 KiB, 5,951 downloads)

Installation

Installation couldn’t get any easier. Once downloaded, simply…

1. Unzip the archive.
2. Copy the extracted folder named curreX into your WordPress plug-ins folder.
3. Activate the plug-in from the Plug-in Manager in WordPress.
4. Visit the Sidebar Widgets page under Presentation menu to drag & drop the widget onto any sidebar you desire.

That’s it…

For those who’re using curreX with non-widget-enabled themes, you should insert the function
< ? show_currex( default_from, default_to, decimal_places, type, title ); ?>
in an appropriate place. For further details on this function & it’s parameters, refer to the FAQs section of the readme.txt bundled in the distribution.

Demonstration

A live demonstration of this can be found under the Coding section of my blog. Though the implementation of the demo is slightly different (it’s hard-coded into in a page), it should give you an idea on what the widget can do.

Showcase (the widget in action)

• GoBackpacking
• Hua-Hin Live – A customised version of the plug-in can be seen in action in the property list pages, once you’ve searched for properties

Subversion Repository

• curreX: SVN Check-out Link (Anonymous check-outs permitted)

Change Log

• Version 0.9 (2008-06-22)
  • Added Flash based Widget support. Now one has the option of choosing between the HTML/JavaScript version or the Flash version from the widget configuration panel of WordPress.
  • The structure of the show_currex() function (for non widget-enabled themes) has changed slightly too – to support embedding of the flash widget.
• Version 0.8 (2008-06-19)
  • While releasing version 0.7 I had made some changes in the path structure (reference to any additional files that were loaded in the background) – and I messed up a bit there. As a result, the core javascript module that fetched the conversion rates and performed the calculations wasn’t loading properly.
  • Fixed some minor CSS issues. Now the look & feel of the widget can be modified in its entirety through the accompanying CSS file.
• Version 0.7 (2008-05-16)
  • Added the functionality to display curreX in non-widget-enabled themes too (by popular demand). Till version 0.6, this plug-in could only be used in the form of a widget with widget-enabled themes.
• Version 0.6 (2008-05-11)
  • This is a complete port to jQuery. Decided to finalise on one ajax library and jQuery emerged the winner. No more Protoculous for me.
  • Split out the styling into a separate CSS file. Anyone with even a bit of CSS knowledge, can now easily alter the looks of the widget without having to touch the core code file(s).
  • Implemented BlockUI – a jQuery plugin that blocks the widget interface while performing a currency conversion routine (ajax based).
  • Included a HELP option, that leads directly to the Chaos-Lab Forums (curreX Subforum)
• Version 0.5 (2007-09-21)
  • Minor fix – but at the same time a major one from the perspective of functionality. The back-end URL for fetching conversion data from Yahoo! Finance had changed from finance.yahoo.com to download.finance.yahoo.com. This caused the plug-in to generate a message saying “Error contacting Yahoo! Finance” and not work at all. Thanks to Lia Johnston for pointing me to the correct URL.
• Version 0.4 (2007-03-15)
  • Fixed a minor bug that caused incorrect version reporting in WordPress plug-ins management panel.
• Version 0.3 (2007-03-15)
  • Bundled prototype.js library along with the distribution instead of relying on a theme to have it. This way the latest version of prototype can always be bundled along with.
  • Made some minor changes in the layout for smoother functionality & improvement of looks.
  • Renamed a bunch of plug-in related variables to avoid name collision with other plug-ins.
• Version 0.2 (2007-03-05)
  • Fine tuned the widget. Now the currency unit values are written off an array instead of the ungainly manual approach that was being used earlier on. This reduced the file-size of the main plug-in considerably despite adding new code.
  • Added the configuration section. One can now set the default currency units to be displayed when the widget loads (from & to).
  • Added a Decimal Place option, which defines the number of decimal places to show in the converted result.

Please Note

I offer support for my plug-ins via the Chaos Laboratory Support Forum only. I will NOT respond to support queries left in the comment section below and, in most cases, will also not publish them. Of course, if you’d like to say something nice or helpful, then feel free to leave a comment!

If you find this plug-in useful, please consider making a donation towards further development of this useful little utility.

Alternatively, you can help me by reviewing this post by clicking on the following link. Believe it or not, this will help us both earn some cash from PayPerPost.

Mar 01st by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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