Matt Silverman

Amazon Prime, otherwise known as free 2-day shipping on most Amazon items, is offering a rare 30-day FREE trial of their service. It costs nothing to sign up for the trial, and you and up to 3 family members can take advantage of the offer.

Amazon Prime includes:

• FREE 2-day shipping on any eligible item from Amazon (No minimum $ order)
• $3.99 overnight shipping on any eligible item (usually $20+)

I normally would not post a free trial offer here, but last time they ran a free trial of Prime I got a ton of use out of it when ordering books.

Get 30 days of Amazon Prime Free

BoltBus at its stop outside Sbarro’s in NYC (33rd and 7th ave)

Need to take a bus from DC to New York City (NYC), or from NYC to DC? After taking four different bus lines I am now confident that I have found the best one: BoltBus. I rode on Greyhound, Chinatown’s Apex Bus, and Tony Coach in the past, and they all pale in comparison to Bolt.

Here is quick summary of why you should use BoltBus:

• Express service from DC to NYC and back (no shady stops in Baltimore)
• Onboard Wifi for Laptops
• Power Outlets on first ~12 rows of seats
• Pseudo-Leather Seats
• Rewards program (After 8 rides you earn 1 free ride)
• Amazingly responsive customer service (via e-mail at customerservice[at]boltbus[d0t]com)

Price
BoltBus is comparable in price to most of the other bus lines. If you are the first person to book a ticket on a ride, your ticket only costs $1. After that, the tickets go up incrementally. Do not expect to pay under $15 for a one-way ticket. In general, expect to pay around $20 each way to get to NYC. Bolt also offers service to other cities including Boston and Philadelphia. BoltBus does sell available seats for $25 each way on a walk-up basis, but these seats are never guaranteed. Your best bet is to always book online in advance.

Reliability
BoltBus is about as reliable as a bus can be, which is at best only slightly reliable. My experience with DC to NYC buses in general has been riddled with delays on all bus lines, BoltBus included. This usually cannot be held against any company, as they do not control traffic. BoltBus is by far the most reliable of any buses I have taken.

Service
BoltBus drivers generally have a great personality, and make a legitimate effort to make sure everyone feels accomdated. BoltBus uses Southwest Airlines-style boarding, in which every person belongs to a boarding group (A,B, or C) and board the bus starting with group A. This is an ingenious idea, so people do not have to worry about showing up early to get a good seat on the bus. If you have an “A” boarding pass, you can feel safe arriving there 20 minutes before scheduled departure. Any later than that and you will be stuck boarding behind everyone else.

Wifi + Power
The one thing that really made BoltBus stand out for me is as simple as power. There are few things that can make a 4-6 hour bus ride enjoyable, but having unlimited use of power for a laptop is about as close as you can get to making it tolerable. To make matters better, they have wifi on board all buses. The wifi is VERY temperamental, so by no means should you ever depend on having internet access via BoltBus wifi. That being said, the wifi has worked much better as of late than it did when the bus line was first starting out.

DC Location
Boltbus picks up and drops off at 11th and G St NW, right at one of the entrances to Metro Center.

NYC Location
Boltbus picks up in multiple locations in NYC, the one I always prefer is the Penn Station stop, which picks up at 33rd st and 7th Ave, right outside of Sbarro’s.

In closing, if you find yourself needing to travel between NYC and DC for cheap, Boltbus is definitely the best and most cost-effective method. Riding on buses for more than an hour is never fun, but BoltBus really does make the trip as enjoyable as it could possibly be. Feel free to also check out MegaBus which picks up in the same DC location as Boltbus. I have not tried it yet, but it is definitely a good second option should BoltBus ever be unavailable.

If speed is the most important factor, forget the bus, and even forget flying. Take the Acela, which generally costs around $130-$190, EACH WAY. It will get you from Union Station in DC to Penn Station in NYC in a blazingly fast 2 hours and 45 minutes (I clocked the speed of the Acela in excess of 140mph at some points of the trip via my Blackberry GPS), but you pay dearly for it.

Purchased my AT&T Wireless 3G card about 2 months ago. Has worked flawlessly since then, up until today. Out of no where, when trying to connect with a full 3G signal available, an error message stating Error 668 caused the connection to terminate. I tried the usual problem solving of removing the aircard and reinserting it, restarting the ATT connection manager, and restarting my laptop. Nothing worked, and it continued to produce the Error 668 message.

As I would rather squeeze turnip juice than call AT&T Wireless for any technical support issues, I tried A few Google searches which netted some promising results. While I am not sure exactly what fixed my problem, it is now working again without any hardware replacement. Feel free to try the methods below.

Reinstall the Firmware

• If you have a different model or Mac OS, you can start at the Sierra Support website
• Otherwise, visit the 881 AirCard Support Downloads page for Windows
• Download and run the firmware application, while keeping your aircard plugged into the PCMCIA slot.
• Some people mentioned that installing the Connection watcher utility from the support downloads page may also help with this issue, but I did not need to use it.

After reinstalling the firmware, I attempted to connect again but still received the same error 668 code. I then moved to this next little workaround.

Install New ATT Connection Profile Using wap.cingular

This is what I think finally fixed my problem, but it did not work without first reinstalling the firmware.

1. Edit connection profiles in ATT Wireless Connection Utility

2. Click the “Add” button on the profile manager window, then select “AT&T” and hit next.
3. Change isp.cingular to wap.cingular, and leave all the other input boxes as is. My result looked like this:

4. Hit next, make sure both radio buttons are select to “Obtain IP Address Automatically” and hit next again.
5. Give your new profile a name, I used AT&T (2). I changed the connection options window to “Automatic” from the default manual, and that seemed to work for me.

6. Hit Finish, close out of the profile manager, select the connections drop down window in the AT&T connection utility, and then select the new AT&T (2) connection profile that we just created.

Hope this was some help to you. Please post in the comments if this did or did not work for you.

One of the biggest headaches with printers, especially USB printers, is getting a print job to stop once it has already started. Sometimes you can click cancel on the print job, but other times the job will go until completion. Even turning off the printer does not always solve the problem. I finally came across a solution that fixes all printing problems for me.

Step 1. If you need to immediately stop the printer from wasting paper/ink, turn off your printer. This may involve unplugging the power cord from the surge protector if the regular power buttons fail.

Step 2. Go to Start button > Run > net stop spooler

Step 3. Click OK

Step 4. Start > Run > C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers


Step 5. Hit OK, and delete all files within the “Printers” folder you just opened. This will delete any print jobs you had remaining.

Step 6. Start > Run > net start spooler


Step 7. Hit OK, and turn your printer back on.

All of your printing problems should now be solved. Please post comments if this did or did not work for you.

I recently realized that Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Premiere CS3 were updating themselves without permission to do so. I looked for an option within each respective application to disallow automatic updates, but could not find one. After doing some searching, I found this workaround.

To disable automatic updates in Adobe CS3 for Windows Vista (Should work for Windows XP too):

1. Start > Run > C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Updater5\AdobeUpdater.exe (if this does not work, navigate to to the common files folder and follow the same directory structure to get to AdobeUpdater.exe.
2. Adobe Updater will open, and select continue as it searches for updates.
3. On the screen where you tell it to download the updates, it will have a preferences link. Click the preferences link.
4. Un-check the box that says “Automatically check for updates.” and hit okay, then close out of the updater.
5. Enjoy.