Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him @jaltucher.

I’m in even worse trouble now. A few weeks ago I had to speak at Barry Ritholz’s conference but that turned out to be “only” a panel. It was a great panel but I knew I would only have ten minutes of time so wouldn’t need to prepare much although even then I was worried.

Now I’m speaking for one hour at Defrag in Boulder, Colorado next week on November 9 and I’m terrified. For one thing, all of the other speakers are smarter than me. Right before me is Roger Ehrenberg speaking about “big data”. I’m not even sure what “big data” is so right off he’s smarter than me. Then Paul Kedrosky is speaking later in the afternoon about god knows what. Paul has an excellent blog obsessed with everything from economics to weather data. So despite my expertise in speaking I’m finding I’m a bit nervous.

I could open up with the same line I used on Barry’s panel, “When I was walking over here I had an erection. Not so easy for a 43 year old without any stimulation whatsoever.” But this might not be the exact crowd for it.

Technically, the title of my talk is “Success is a Sexually Contagious Disease” but I only gave them that title because it sounded neat and it was the title of a blog post I then published. But I have no idea if that’s what I’m going to talk about or if that’s something people will be interested in.

The conference itself is about entrepreneurship. But I always am plagued by the fact that I’ve gotten somewhat lucky on this issue. My first company happened during the internet boom and I happened to be one of the few people around (at the time) who knew how to make a website. The second company I had, where Yasser Arafat was an investor, went down in flames in the Bust. The third company I sold was a venture firm. We were only sold because our top investor was so disgusted with us he wanted to buy out our ten year contract. And the third company I sold was Stockpickr.com, which I sold to thestreet.com that I already had a great relationship with. Another company that I made a decent living off was trading for hedge funds and then starting a fund of hedge funds. Everything else I did (about 16 other attempts at businesses) failed.

So I guess right now I can see if it was luck or if I learned some lessons.

1) Luck is similar to “being at the right place at the right time”. So you can easily position yourself there. We know that the right place for right now is somewhere in social media. There are still many niches (plumbers, diamond wholesalers) that aren’t using social media correctly. The big agencies are ignoring them and they are too small and focused to understand how to use direct marketing via social media. If I were starting a business right now I’d either do lead generation via social media for a small but focused niche (diamond wholesalers, small restaurants) or I’d provide financing/lending for companies that are doing this and have established records of turning profits on money spent. I know several companies doing the above but it’s an incredibly wide, open, gaping hole in the industry.

If I were a banker I’d look to buy companies all over the country in this space and then bring the combined entity public in the IPO boom that’s about to start happening.

2) My venture firm being sold I learned one thing: have at least one partner who is a great negotiatior. “Be bad” and someone will be willing to buy you usually doesn’t work. I was lucky there. Although, I will say, I had good, professional partners that knew how to negotiate very well. The one guy’s main technique was to act like we always had alternatives when we never did. And he would ignore the other party for a day or so while they got desperate. It’s a gutsy way to negotiate but it worked. Here’s part of the reason it didn’t work out for me as a big VC.

3) The mental health facility I sold I learned some very important things. Quantity, persistence, and story-telling. You need to hit everyone and then call everyone back twice. We must’ve made 30 calls and then 30 follow-ups to make sure we spoke with the right person. And then with each person we pushed to have a phone call with the company. Then once we had a potential buyer on the phone we had to make sure we told at least three different stories: how the was company doing (and was going to do ), the reasons why growth was a lock, and the reasons why management was incredible. Then we got the deal done. Which was a story unto itself. (Here’s my prior post on TechCrunch on how to best sell a company).

4) Stockpickr, as I mentioned before was a matter of being both proactive, and having friends in the right places. But it also was a matter of vigilance. I had a particular passion about how a financial community could develop with no news. I hate the news. It also was a matter of nourishing relationships built up over a five year period of non-stop work in the financial media space.

So here’s how you “Create your luck”:

A) As Wayne Gretzky says, “skate to where the puck is”. Don’t start a soft drink company competing against Coca-Cola. Start a company in a fast growing industry that has a wide, gaping hole in it. It’s not hard to identify those industries and holes.

B) If you can’t create the company in that space, can you arrange financing for companies in that space through some of the techniques roughly described above. This still allows you to profit from the growth of the sector.

C) Learn how to negotiate.

D) Quantity. You’re never going to win if you depend on one potential buyer or one potential customer. The first time I tried to sell my company, Reset, I tried to sell it to HBO. I had only one potential buyer. No good and it didn’t work out. But the next time I tried I made sure I had ten potential buyers. Ever since then I almost get a reflux reaction in my stomach when I realize I’m back down to the one buyer-one customer model, which is never good.  Create a market for what you are selling.  The price will go up.

E) Persistence. When we were selling the mental health facility there was one time we got a wrong number when we called a public company. We got switched to the wrong person in the company repeatedly. My business partner, Dan, kept calling until he finally convinced the operator she was connecting him to the wrong person. This was one of only 30 companies he was calling so he could’ve just left a message and given up. Instead he got someone on the phone eventually and she was the one who coughed up $41.5 million in cash, three times the closest other offer.

F) Story-telling. Everyone is a little boy or girl at heart. We all want to sit on the floor and bounce a ball and watch Saturday morning cartoons. A story has a beginning, middle, and end. Make sure your story is down pat when you are talking with anyone about your idea, your company, your self (on a date, for instance). It doesn’t have to be so “planned”. But make sure you are constantly improving your storytelling abilities. For instance, before I gave a talk last week in Arizona I watched 30 minutes of Ellen Degeneres and Jon Stewart. Comedians are excellent story-tellers with perfect timing.

G) Nourish relationships. The size of your network increases your luck exponentially. But relationships take Time to nourish. When I wrote here two weeks ago about “the 9 Skills for Becoming a Super Connector” I mentioned that I forgot why “Time” was on my list. Now I know: over time relationships get nourished. A simple connection becomes a friend, becomes family, becomes someone who actively wants you to succeed. That takes weeks/months/years to happen. Important to note: expressing gratitude across your network is the surest way to strengthen it.

H) Passion. Luck will always follow your passion. Warren Buffett was, of course, extremely lucky that his passion was investing in 1950. But almost every passion can be used to make money if you have all of the above. Even if your passion is just “how do I meet the love of my life” and you apply all of the above you will “get lucky”, so to speak, and find success at your endeavor.

I’ve had a lot of bad things happen to me in the course of being an entrepreneur. And sometimes I get down about it and it’s hard to pull myself away from the nightmare alley where the light at the end just becomes a fire that pushes me back. But when I do get to the end of the nightmare, and I apply these lessons, luck comes shining through and I can see again.

Photo credit: Flickr/egazelle

Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by David Barrett, CEO and founder of Expensify, whose tagline is “Expense reports that don’t suck.”

Now, you might think that making a product that isn’t terrible should be so obvious to every company on the planet as to almost be nonsensical. Indeed, who would ever advocate building a product that sucks? But the fact is: many products do suck. How can something so obviously important and universally recognized by so infrequently accomplished?

It’s a surprisingly complex question. But I think it all boils down to variations on a single, simple answer: it is much, much easier to build a product that sucks than one that doesn’t. Here are some reasons why that is true (and what you can do about it):

1. It only takes one person to make your product suck.

I love the movie Twelve Angry Men. (The Henry Fonda version, not the Tony Danza version.) It’s about this jury of 12 people, 11 of whom walk into the jury chamber convinced the accused is guilty. But as you know, juries can only render verdicts with unanimous consent, so that one lone individual is able to prevent a quick conviction and force the jury to review the evidence and deliberate on the case—one by one convincing everybody that the accused is in fact innocent. It’s a great movie about the power of the individual to uphold justice in the face of prejudice, expediency, and general carelessness.

Unfortunately, your team isn’t a jury. Quite the opposite: anybody can make your product suck, often without anybody else noticing until it’s too late to change, and very expensive to undo. The fastest racecar can’t move if the gas-cap gets stuck; your product is only as good as its worst component. Not sucking requires continuous, unanimous consent—not on the details, but consent that not sucking is worth the effort. And you need to do it without security guards lurking outside the door.

Suggestion: Convey to your team and the world that not sucking is your primary goal. More important than new features, more important than new customers—even more important than being awesome—is the simple act of not sucking, consistently, across the board. Each awesome feature might attract a new user, but each sucky feature will lose you two.

2. Nobody ever got fired for sucking.

There’s that old saying “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. It dates back to when IBM was in decline after a long period of dominance, when there were clearly superior products available but the risk of choosing them was higher than the safety of going with the tried-and-true. You can always be fired for something going horribly wrong, or for trying something crazy that doesn’t pan out, or for doing something that upsets a key customer or loses a major deal. But nobody gets fired for merely doing something sub-optimal, especially when that’s what everybody else does. Too often product teams take the the quick and dirty way to get the feature out, or concede to that “one line change” to satisfy some new client. Nobody gets fired for making something merely meet the hard requirements, even if it fails the “soft” requirement of “not sucking”.

Suggestion – Be slow to hire, and quick to fire. I know everyone always talks about the importance of exceptional people. But like the importance of not sucking, that standard is very rarely maintained in reality. Maintain it. There’s that saying “A people hire A people, B people hire C people.” Be an A person, even if it means doing without for far longer than you’d like.

3. It’s easier to suck more than suck less.

Sucking is like a tar pit: once you step in, your struggles only pull you in deeper. After you make that one product compromise to satisfy some crazy customer, then you’ve got to support that setting forever lest you lose the customer who depends on it. Then other customers find it (because if you’re going to build it, why not give it to everyone?), and those customers have their own unique requirements that pull you further into the sludge. That one random checkbox for a single customer becomes a full settings page for a niche demographic with esoteric needs. Supporting those customers places constraints on how you support other customers, affects how you upgrade your data structures over time, prevents sharing of certain types of code, etc. The tar pit sucks you down, and sometimes the only way out is to go back the way you came, discarding the customer you fought to get in the first place, and upsetting all your other users along the way. Avoiding the tar pit takes an incredible level of discipline and fortitude. It should be no surprise that it so rarely happens.

Suggestion: Avoid the tar pit at all costs And when trapped—which will happen, often, despite your best attempts—cut off your own limb if necessary to get back on track. Even if it means upsetting 100% of your users: if they’re the wrong users, it’s what needs to happen to get the right ones.

4. There are more ways to suck than to not suck.

Anybody charged with building some feature is immediately overwhelmed with choices. Even ignoring the countless technical options for rendering feature X on platform Y, there are limitless sub-variations to every possible choice. Something as simple as, “Should this link be a button?” “Should the button be on the left or right of this other button?” “Should clicking it open up a dialog or a new page?” “Should you click Save after clicking the button, or does the button auto-save the result?” And on and on. If sucking is like a tar pit, then building a product that doesn’t suck is like walking a tightrope over La Brea. In the fog. There are countless places to step, but very few of them are on the right path—and often you don’t know you’ve slipped until you’re waist-deep in tar.

Suggestion: Define what not sucking means to you, and make sure everybody knows it. Even if the lines are ambiguous, draw them anyway, and work to constantly refine them. How you circle your wagons is far more important than how fast you can fire your guns.

5. Customers demand sucky products.

Not intentionally. But they request features that make your product suck, with depressing regularity. This is doubly true if your product allows some users to manage other users. There are features that they think they need but don’t, and features they actually do need but nobody else does. There are billions of people out there and you will never, ever satisfy even a tiny fraction of them. So be very selective as to which ones you let dictate your roadmap, and make sure they’re taking it to the promised land and not into a tar pit. They’ll threaten to never use you, or to quit, or to say bad things about you. Some will actually follow through. But most will eventually realize you were right all along. That is, if you actually were right in the first place.

Suggestion: Trust your instincts and the tiny set of users who use you, and resist advice from the billions of people who don’t. Either you’re right or you’re wrong. If you’re right, sticking to your guns will lead to success. And if you’re wrong, better to fail fast on your own merits and learn something along the way than to take bad advice from people who never intended to use you in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong: people complaining about your product isn’t all bad. People only complain about things that matter to them; better to have complaints than disinterest. And not all complaints are equal: complaints that you don’t support feature X are far better than complaints about how feature Y sucks.

But ultimately, if your users hate your product, eventually an alternative will come along that sucks less. At Expensify, we try to live by these rules and create products that don’t suck. Like any ideals, I don’t claim Expensify lives up to them perfectly. If you’d like a glimpse at what we are working on next and want to help us suck less, please sign up for our Expensify 2.0 Beta.

Most products suck. But yours doesn’t need to, and we’re trying as hard as we can to ensure ours doesn’t either. I’d love your advice on how we’re doing, or any suggestions on how to do better.

The value of computer labs should not be underestimated, even for liberal arts students. In addition to hopefully beefy hardware with properly installed and maintained software, there’s a very important social component to using computer labs. This is not to say that’s just an opportunity to watch lulz videos on YouTube with your pals, of course. The people you meet in your classes and your degree program are kindred souls, and you should get to know some of them. Whether it’s a team project, or help with a tough assignment, or simply making smalltalk, the interactions you can have in the computer lab are an important component of the social college experience, and you should not avoid them by locking yourself in your dorm room to plug away on your fancy new workstation.

That janky old laptop you buy from Craigslist will not be as attractive a target for theft as a brand new computer. If it does get stolen, you won’t be out as much cash. No, it won’t be a speed demon, but what do you seriously plan to do with it? Type some papers, read some emails, Facebook, maybe watch some Internet pornography? It’ll sit unobtrusively on your desk, under a pile of papers, until you need it. Even if the battery doesn’t work, you can still lug it with you to plug in at the library or the coffee shop when you need a change of scenery.

You’re not going to play games on your college laptop. Your roommate, or someone in your hall, will have an Xbox 360. Someone else will have a PS3, and there’s a strong chance that there’ll be a Wii somewhere, too. Make friends with these people and play their games. Save yourself the grief of soda spilled into your own precious gaming console. Save yourself the trouble of kicking people out of your room when they want to play RockBand every night during Finals Week. Take the time to learn a couple new card games, too: Euchre, Golf, whatever. Going old school — you know, without electricity — can be a fun and super portable way to enjoy games and meet new people, too.

You’re also not going to use your used laptop as a media PC to stream movies in your room. Oh sure, you can, but you’ll be watching those things alone: none of your friends are going to want to crowd around your 14″ laptop screen to watch anything. For more social viewing opportunities, rely on those friends with XBox 360s and PS3s and big TVs. You can, however, load up your laptop with MP3s so that you can rock out (with headphones on if you have a roommate) while cranking out that paper on Plato’s Republic.

The used laptop you buy from Craigslist should be used to help you get some schoolwork done, and little else. Ubuntu provides everything you need. OpenOffice can open and save files in Microsoft Word format, so you’ll have no real trouble integrating with most of the campus systems. In the event that your school uses a classroom management system like Blackboard or Desire2Learn, you may have the occasional situation that requires some goofy ActiveX control, or proprietary shim component. See the paragraph above about the computer lab.

Ubuntu will keep you safe from the Wild West that is a dorm network. You can be absolutely sure that a good many of the computers on the dorm network are compromised by malware. There’s also a slim chance that some miscreant in your building fancies himself a hax0r, and will probe and poke at every device he or she can find. Your Ubuntu laptop will not easily become a victim, and it might even become a conversation starter.

1. Download the latest version of Ubuntu and burn it to a CD.
2. Search Craigslist for a decent, moderately priced used laptop.
3. Buy that laptop.
4. Boot that laptop from your Ubuntu CD and follow the instructions.
5. Enjoy your college experience.

What burns more calories? Playing World of Warcraft or Farmville?
Bart, NYC

In the real world, soldiers and farmers burn around 450 calories per hour doing what they do (size, gender and age can also impact this number as well as what type of task is being performed). When it comes to gaming, obviously the calories burned will be much lower. For example, according to calorie estimates from the Mayo Clinic, you burn about twice the calories playing tennis, boxing and golf when you do it in the real world as compared to playing them virtually on the Wii. To answer your question, doing something awesome like playing WoW always burns more calories than doing something lame like playing Farmville.

There are no healthy snacks in the vending machine at my work? What should I do?
Sandra, Bridgeport, CT

Control your own destiny – bring your own snacks to work. Don’t rely on the man. Find a place to store your snacks like a common area refrigerator/freezer. Or, if you have to, bring your snacks in a small cooler. Frozen fruits like raspberries and peaches are great because they are loaded with antioxidants and have the texture of a sucking hard candy. Walnuts and almonds are loaded with protein which makes you feel full fast – but don’t go nuts and eat a lot because they have a lot of calories. Some other easy mid morning or mid day snacks are: peanut butter and jelly or apple butter on whole wheat; roasted veggies like carrots, red peppers and sweet potatoes and hummus on pita chips.

My boss insists we have meetings while walking around the block. Is it okay for me to smoke during these meetings?
NC17, North Carolina

Well that depends. I wouldn’t recommend smoking crack – because that’s hard to do while walking. Cigarettes are also a bad idea. Inhaling smoke into your lungs prevents oxygen from getting to your muscles which will cause you to will poop out pretty quick. Your co-workers will constantly have to slow down and wait for you and that gets embarrassing.

In order to lose weight, I have a 5 hour energy drink for breakfast and lunch and eat a normal healthy dinner. Is this okay?
COD, San Diego

Yeah – great idea – how about this – during the day only drink energy drinks and then right before you go to bed take a multi-vitamin. Don’t eat any real foods. There shouldn’t be any negative health consequences to that.
No, it is not okay to substitute energy drinks for food. The human body needs nutrition like protein and carbohydrates to fuel itself to do what it needs to do. Ideally, you should be eating the bulk of your calories during the times you are most active. A guest on our show told our listeners that you should eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.

If you were going to buy one fitness gadget, what would it be?
Carl, Toledo

If you are just starting to exercise then I’d get a heart rate monitor, which gives you immediate feedback as to how hard your body is working. But if you are a fitness freak like Dr Fitness, who is acutely aware of his heart rate at any given moment then that gadget would be an mp3 player with good sweat resistant headphones. If you are more like the Fat Guy who is not that quick on his feet and has an immense fear of dogs and mailmen that that gadget would be pepper spray.

Every few months we get a press release about some great device from a no-name manufacturer who promises to change the world. One example was the TXTR reader from Germany last January. Another is zzzPhone, a company selling dual-SIM Android powered smartphones from China. Neither company produced much of anything.

Era of the Silicon Valley success story – two guys making something cool in a garage and selling it – is over, at least in hardware. The costs of making consumer electronics, including cellphones and computers, on a small scale have risen so much as to be prohibitive and then the marketing costs of that same hardware is even more prohibitive. Whereas, once, two nerds in a basement could build a computer company I worry that it takes more resources than any one man or woman can muster these days to even approach something like success.

DOA

The first sad truth is that most consumer electronics cannot be made in “expensive” countries like the US or the Euro zone. During a visit to the Suunto watch factory in Finland, for example, I learned that while many of the watches are made near Helsinki a large percentage of them are made overseas and drop shipped from Asia. The company just couldn’t make anything in bulk without resorting to off-shoring. This means you either invest in an expensive small run of hardware overseas, something the Asian manufacturers do not do particularly well, or invest in a massive run of inexpensive hardware in Asia that you risk having to recycle if your company goes belly-up.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make it big anymore. Take TiVo, for example. It sprung out of obscurity a decade ago and filled a niche in the living room that has yet to be challenged by any manufacturer. Unfortunately, when someone – probably Samsung, LG, or Apple – figures out how to take over the DVR market, TiVo is toast. The same is true of Palm who, to all intents and purposes, is now a small company. The big guys are eating their lunch thanks to Android and it will take some fancy footwork to survive. The small guys are, sadly, always at the precipice of failure.

Other companies like Neuros and Slingbox simply sell a wrapper for their software. Sometimes this works but sadly it also leads to retrenchment when companies like Slacker pull out of the hardware business due to lack of interest and cost. Then there are success stories like like FyreTV [NSFW] which will do well because they focus on porn. Not everyone can focus on porn.

When in doubt, do this.

The second problem facing small CE companies is marketing. Micro-companies like Zeo and FitBit get a huge initial boost thanks to online media but then disappear once the news cycle has moved on, leaving the companies with amazing technology in the dark. This is an era of constant marketing, a situation that forces companies like Apple and Sony to put their message in front of consomers almost constantly in multiple media.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen companies receiving 8,000-10,000 pageviews with one good launch, more if its an interesting product. That initial boost translates into a percentage of good sales – those are good eyeballs, not just random traffic – but it rarely turns into repeat or continuing business.

That said, here are some of the best practices I’ve seen from small to medium CE companies who know how to do it right. This may not apply to you and yours, but it’s something to think about when you get excited about a product (Gizmondo anyone?) only to find it has crashed and burned.

1. Tell multiple stories. When you start out you have one story: Why your product is good. Prepare multiple stories for the next few years including ideas tagged to pressing issues of the month or year. Do you have a fitness gadget? Work on a story about post-holiday stress and weight gain. Have a DVR? Put yourself in the Super Bowl frenzy with blogger outreach and giveaways. That first boost is nice but if you’re a small company it’s the next four boosts that will push you through the rest of the year.

2. Price yourself competitively if not suicidally. Even if it’s suicidal, price yourself at just above the average price in your market. Aiming at rich, cosseted professionals is nice but the sharper Image model of doing business is over. Consumers want more for their money (even if they often get considerably less) so while $999 might seem like a nice number for a NAS or a piece of audio gear the consumer is more accustomed to $499.

3. Be quiet. Hide your light under a bushel. Patent your idea and don’t launch until the product is completely ready. I’ve seen too many companies splattered with the vaporware monicker because they failed to deliver on time or at all. Once you’re done, support your product forcefully and quietly. If someone has a problem, address it quickly. Send out new hardware before putting someone through tech support hell.

4. Change your trade dress regularly. This fickle market thinks anything that looks the same as it did last year is old. Why do iPods change every few months? People want to think they’re buying the new hotness, not the old and busted. If you can’t change your trade dress, change your website.

5. Slow and steady wins the race. None of the greats made it overnight and it’s harder than ever to truly make it. If you’re a small CE manufacturer, Godspeed. It’s a tough race so don’t sprint it.

For a great look at this topic, read The Song of the Powersquid, our 6-part story on the creation of a CE product.

Tired of your boring home town? Want to “see the world” like you’re the star of a Disney Channel movie? Do what I and countless others have done—go abroad for a few months, experience a new culture, then come home all like, “Um, now what?” Very exciting, yes!

To that end, I’ve compiled a few odds and ends that might make your trip abroad less annoying. You know, gear, junk, wisdom, etc.

Bags

You’ll want a proper bag is you plan to spend any amount of time traipsing about the foreign locale of your choosing. Yes, nothing screams “tourist” like a giant bag, but where else are you gonna keep your laptop, dSLR and extra bottles of water? Exactly.

I recommend two bags, actually, both from Crumpler. Crumpler is one of those fancy bag places you find in “cool” parts of town, like New York’s SoHo. If all you’re looking is to carry your laptop to a café for some pointless Web surfing and half-hearted “Wish you were here!” e-mails, you’d do well to check out something like the Golden Dig. (All their bags have cutesy names, I’m afraid.) It fits my MacBook just fine, with enough extra room to fit a can of Red Bull and, gasp, my always-on-me point-and-shoot. (When I go out with the express purpose of taking photos, however, I bring a dSLR.) The strap is wide on your shoulder, so at the end of the day it’s not digging into your tendons like Grim Death. Plus, the Crumpler logo is pretty well known out here—the countless number of people I’ve passed on the streets in Barcelona, I’ve had one recognize it. Just call me Mr. Popular.

If you need a bigger bag, I suggest the 15 Hour Delay. This has enough room for not only your laptop, but also, say, your iPod and DS (or whatever music player or your portable gaming platform of choice), dSLR (you might want to detach the lens for added comfort), etc. It’s your “my whole life is in this bag” bag.

Travel Gear

Great, so now you have a bag or two, what else so you bring with you while you wander European city streets with that “please mug me” look on your face?

A laptop/netbook

You probably have one already, but be sure to bring your laptop or netbook with you while you travel. At some point, someone, be it your employer, loved ones, dumb friends, etc. will want to know whether you’re alive or not, and what you’ve been up to. Make that easy by using your laptop to constantly let people know that, yes, you yet live! Create a Tumblr account, Twitter, Flickr, or whatever Web 2.0 service is hot this afternoon and tell your mates to check those. That way you can broadcast what’s up without having to have 20 simultaneous IM conversations. Skype is handy, too, by the way, in case Mom and Dad insist on hearing your voice.

Phone

You’re gonna want a phone, if for no other reason than emergencies. (Guess who had to call Citibank a few days ago because every ATM in town said he was overdrawn!) I was able to go to Telefonica here in Barcelona and buy one of those pre-paid deals for not a lot of money, something like €20 for a phone with removable SIM card and a few minutes of voice. Minutes can they be added on at any Telefonica store. I bought the phone, then stuck the SIM into a Nokia N76, aka a Razr with Symbian. It takes good-enough video and pretty decent photos.

Camera

Hope you brought your petrodollars

If you’re abroad for any amount of time, you’ll probably want to take photos of the local landmarks. For example, I took photos of what turned out to be a strip club in Berlin the other night. We (my party and I) didn’t know it was a strip club, but we didn’t much complain when it turned into one. I do, and have in the past, suggested at the very least an entry level dSLR if you want to at least have the potential to take better than average photos. (I’m using an old Rebel.) If you don’t want to carry around something that cumbersome—a legitimate reason, I admit—then go with a point-and-shoot. To be frank, pretty much all of these point-and-shoots we talk about are so similar to each other in quality of photo taken, you really can’t go wrong. Canon, Nikon, Olympus (get one of those if you plan on taking photos from the beach because they’re water-resistant). Again, whatever type you get—dSLR or point-and-shoot—totally depends on what you feel comfortable like carrying.

GPS

The days of carrying around a giant map and looking like a jerk are over! Now you get to carry around a GPS device (or your cellphone) and look like a jerk! But seriously, having your current location in the palm of your hands while in a strange and exotic city is so fantastic. “Where the hell is Nou de la Rambla? Oh, way the F over there, cool.” It beats having to ask for directions, or unfold a map in the middle of the street at a phone booth. I’ve been using Google Maps on the N76 and it does the job. If at all possible, make sure you phone can browse the Web (BlackBerry, iPhone, fancy Nokia, etc.) because then you’re just a few clicks away from Google Maps Mobile. Even if it doesn’t have GPS, or a cell-based GPS approximation, at least you’ll be able to search around the electronic map to see where you are and where you’re going.

I would recommend against walking around with your iPod all day, not only for safety reasons, but you’ve heard your favorite playlist 1,000 times already, and you’re traveling to experience something different, right?

Other helpful advice

You’re better off getting batting advice from A-Rod than any type of advice from me, but here we are. When traveling abroad, it’s best to do some research before actually buying your airplane ticket. (I assume you already have a passport.) Find out if you need a visa to stay past a certain length, find out what type of power adapters the country uses (I bought a WORLD TRAVELER KIT! from Wal-Mart the day before leaving for like $20 and it works great), find out what the currency is and what the exchange rate is (from me, one Euro buys about $1.50, so if a beer costs €3, I know I’m actually paying $4.50), etc. Little things like that.

So yeah, common sense stuff to be sure, but they don’t call me Thomas Paine for nothing.

A TC/CG reader Teresa asks we, the gadget-nation, a question: where are the good smartphones for seniors? Sure, they have ClarityLife and the Jitterbug but neither of those work as real smartphones. Teresa wants something with a little power. She writes:

I am one of the 22% of seniors (39 million) that have a laptop, cell phone, etc.
Most seniors are barely online and not often.  They still stick steadfastly to offline behaviors-watch TV & read newspapers etc
 
What I don’t understand is why no company is making a product that, as a senior, is adapted to aging, as follows:
 
1. Easy to use/large print Smartphone that is already loaded with wi fi…with large letters, screen etc. -everyone over 50 has eye changes and everyone over 65 has some limitation in texting due to arthritis etc. 
 
2. Since Nokia & Android may be joining together to create new Smartphone…this would be a perfect time to design, develop & create one that the Boomers (43-63)-81 million adults and Seniors (65+)-39 million adults=120 million adults could use that does is not difficult to use & adapted to aging population.
 
3.  I have had various cell phones and computers and they always have instructions that are long, arduous and only a geek can understand.  As a consumer, shouldn’t I not only be able to understand how to operate it, but also have a choice of what I want on it??  
 
4.  The smart thing to do, would be to create a Smartphone “shell” , making, numbers, screen everything big enough for groups above to read and use, then give them a choice of what they want with it when they purchase it (ie, text messaging, camera, GPS, etc..).  They then are offered choices that can be customized to what they want.
 
5.  It should also include mobile VolP software connectivity without GSM contract & a flate fee plan.  Or use dedicated handset for VolP & GSM cards pre-installed. International travel in this package, is essential, many  travel frequently. Could adapt the Nokia N95 to above & lower the price.

 
Before I retired 3 yrs ago I was Nurse Consultant for State of California Preventive Health Care for the Aging and have the scientific, medical expertise to see where the world of techonogy is very unresponsive to a population that is aging. I am curious to see if any of those corporations will respond to my request/challenge.
 
AAA Magazine advertises one with large #’s etc…but it’s features are so limiting, it wouldn’t serve many people’s purpose for one.

What have you guys gotten for the seniors in your life? What would be a good phone for Teresa and her friends?

Just got my direct fulfillment order and seem to be no backups or backorder’s at the time. This is for a 16 gb White. others seem to be shipping out still in the quoted 5-7 days.

Our advice? Ask for a 16GB white when you’re put on back-order and enjoy your iPhone a few days early while the rest of the world stands in line outside the Rancho Fashion Mall getting skin cancer. Too manly for the white? You’re going to put the bugger in a case anyway, right?

1. Before going on any international trip, back up all of your important and potentially embarrassing, incriminating, or troubling data. This includes any copyrighted content which you may not be able to prove you own.
2. Create an encrypted disk image/encrypted folder of that data. This can be done with Pretty Good Privacy, Truecrypt, or software built into many operating systems.
3. Remember the password. This is very important, as if you forget it, you lose all your data.
4. Upload the encrypted data to a reliable place on the Internet (or two). Personally, I use Amazon S3, which charges 15 cents per GB-month of storage plus 17 cents per GB of data transfer.
5. Wipe your laptop clean (do this properly, or the data may be accessible after the fact with forensics software), and install a fresh copy of your OS onto it.
6. Travel. You should have no problem at U.S. Customs (or in any other country) as you won’t have anything problematic on your computer.
7. At your hotel/office, fire up your Web browser and download the encrypted data file from Amazon’s servers.
8. Decrypt the data.

I’ve actually gotten to the point where most of my in-progress work is sitting in the cloud somewhere, but if that’s not the case uploading and encryption could be the answer.

OS X users can also add a little security through obscurity by hiding their user names at login:

1. Open System Preferences -> Accounts
2. Create a dummy user to populate the screen. Put up a picture of a kitten as the desktop and some photos in iPhone.
3. Click on the lock and click on Login Options.
4. Click “Display login window as: Name and password.”
5. Login as the dummy user when asked. The rest of your accounts should be nicely hidden and inaccessible except by customs agents with a background in OS X.

UPDATED – Fixed to reflect customs doing this, not TSA screeners.

This just in from a BFF poster:

Unlocking the iPhone is getting popular in the undergrounds and AT&T is lossing millions dollars because of this activity. What with Jailbreak and Metasploit, people can now easily unlock their iPhones or tinker with their units.

But there are a lot of reasons why you should not unlock your iPhone. http://www.iphone-codes.com says aside from the risk of getting virus or other malicious codes from third party applications, you disqualify your phone from the official support page of Apple.

A lot of those how have unlocked their iPhones have complained of several malfunctions, including unresponsive buttons, sudden screen pause, changing colors of the screen, etc. And when you post questions about these problems at Apple’s Support Forum, you will not get any answer.

So if you are now thinking of unlocking your iPhone using Jailbreak of Metasploit, think again. My advice would be to leave the iPhone as it is and wait for the official unlocking of the iPhone by Apple.

CG’s BFF: Accepting unsubstantiated advice as gospel truth for less than a year.

iPhone Codes

My dad knows how to work computers, but he definitely doesn’t know how to prevent his disk from becoming a cesspool of filthy spyware. To that end, I went on a mission to protect him and my mom from certain destruction.

Step 1: Get rid of the old PC
In a misguided attempt to “get online,” my dad bought an old Pentium M machine with a 40GB hard drive and 256MB of memory. I believe he paid something like $100 for it after my old computer, a 486, died. It seemed to work fine, but every so often I’d get a call that it was crashing and that the Internet was busted. Tired of performing phone support I installed the excellent Xandros desktop, a $39.99 edition of Linux with a newbie bent. I know that there are many distributions out there but this one offers me some support — so dad could call someone else instead me all the time — and the sense that if things went south he could just stick the disk back in and read the manual.

I cannot recommend Linux more highly for a parent computer. It is easy to use, fun, and easily maintainable using VNC and ssh logins.

Xandros worked for two years. Then I bought a Mac Mini, used it for a while, and then bought a Mac Pro. I cleared my data off of the Mac Mini, installed everything my Dad would need, namely Skype and Firefox, and sent him the machine. This leads me to our next step…

Step 2: Get a GMail account
Instead of relying on their spotty, shifty DSL provided email address, wouldn’t Mom and Dad enjoy a real spam-protected, personalized GMail address? Before I mailed off the Mini I set up a Skype account, an iChat/AIM account, a GMail address, and a special login for my father. I also created an admin account so I could remotely SSH in and perform changes as necessary. Not surprisingly, Mom and Dad were ready to go as soon as they opened the Mini box.

Step 3: Training
By weaning your parents off of your mad programming skills, you ensure hours of uninterrupted reverie. I began by sending my parents links to plane tickets — so they can come visit — and cool products they can buy for their grandchildren. This has culminated in them actually purchasing and sending flowers overseas to relatives in Poland without calling me once. Color me amazed.

Bonus Tip
Get a Presto printer. We’ve covered this device a few times here at CG but I sent my parents one a few months ago and they love it. The system is simple: you create a Presto account, buy the HP printer, and connect it to the telephone — trust me, the ‘rents still have a landline. You send an email to that account and the Presto prints it out. Easy as pie.

I send pictures to my mom in this manner and she’s mentioned that she goes to the printer every day looking for new treats. Like Pavlov’s dogs, my mother salivates at the sight of my young son. It’s $149.99 plus a service fee, but if you want to give it to grandma and let her get emails and pictures without having to resort to buying a whole PC, it might be a good idea.

With a bit of planning and some inexpensive hardware and software, your parents can stop calling you went the “computer won’t turn on.”

UPDATE – Yes, the steps were a little screwed up.

More Help Key…

If you were one of the tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of people who lined for hours, or even days, for a chance to get a Sony PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii, and actually scored a system you probably thought you were all set. But after a long night, you likely forgot something… or more to the point Sony and Nintendo planned to get a few more dollars from you with stuff that wasn’t in the box. But even then you might not have everything to get the absolute most out of these systems. Here’s a list of a few accessories and peripherals that you’ll want to put on the holiday list.

Memory – Remember when the old systems each had their own specific memory cards? Well, those days are long gone as the PS3 and Wii have moved to SD for transferring of saved games, downloads and other content. SanDisk has even introduced a line of Wii-branded SD cards, starting at $34.99 for a 512MB card.
Product Page

Second Controller – It is standard these days for the systems to ship with only one controller, so if you didn’t pick a second controller already, add it to the holiday list. And for the Wii consider getting the “Wii Classic” controller for those games you might download, especially if you don’t have a GameCube controller.
Product Page

Surge Protector – OK, you just dropped $600 on the PS3 and/or $250 on the Wii. Protect that investment with a quality power supply that includes a detected surge protector. Available for as low as $20, this also makes sure you have plenty of outputs too.
Product Page

Wii Component Video Cable – the Nintendo Wii supports 480p resolution, and if you have a TV that can display progressive scan then the first upgrade should be a component video cable… but these won’t be available until Dec. 1! This is almost worth waiting in line to buy!
Product Page

HDMI cable for the PS3 – likewise if your TV has HDMI inputs then go get an HDMI cable. These cables aren’t cheap, but if you dropped $600 on a system, you should plan to spend another $100 for a quality cable, such as the PureAV line of cables from Belkin.

1080p TV – The PS3 supports 1080p resolution, so there is finally a reason to make the move to a new HD set. With prices below $2,000 for some DLP sets, such as the Samsung 50-inch HL-S5087W. This is a bigger investment than the PS3 and Wii combined, but worth every penny.
Product Page

Stuff You Don’t Need

And for every accessory you should think about for your gaming pleasure, there are probably a dozen things that you don’t need:

Console stand – the designers took the time to figure out how you might use the system, so you probably don’t need a second stand from a third-party company.

Travel pack – if you’re taking your console on the go, don’t buy a travel pack. Save your money as you already have a great travel case… it’s called the box it came in!

Universal cleaning cloth – because a rag or towel isn’t good enough?

Wii controller glove – yes, someone took the time to invent a glove for the Wii controller… we don’t know why!

Happy gaming!