August Deals

@therealjrn Seems like when Sam’s does the Groupon offer, membership is also cheaper? I think I paid $45 last year.

@ruouttaurmind It works out about the same. My Sams card from Groupon was $45 with a $20 gift card and $20 in free merchandise. I only have a Sams card when I can get it essentially free, but I renew my Costco automatically.

@therealjrn gas is an even better deal if you use their credit cards, Costco/SAMS, 4%/5% cash back… and around us (We have 3-5 of each warehouse within 10-15 miles), their pump price tends to be 20+ cents cheaper per gallon to start.

Another money saver that works at SAMs since they take most credit cards - Discover regularly offers 5% back on warehouse purchases.

@therealjrn SAMs has an amazing checkout line buster, their Scan & Go app. Super fast bar code scanner so you scan as you load your cart. When you’re ready to leave, walk right by the checkout lines and tap the checkout button in the app. That brings up a bar code on your phone you show to the door gestapo.

Costco claims they’re trying to launch an app, but they’re taking their time.

@RedOak I’ve used Sams self-checkout frequently. I like having a business membership so I can shop there in the mornings, they put out coffee, fruit, danish and water for us high-powered business people, before they let the riff-raff in. At Costco, a business membership don’t mean nuttin’.

@therealjrn aha! I have a business membership as well but haven’t tested their business hours hospitality! Will have to test it out. Thanks.

Agreed about Costco - the executive memebership gets all the perks and the business membership seems a non issue.

@RedOak It’s a beautiful thing, from 7 to 10… One can nosh on danish and fruit, while sipping freshly brewed coffee or perhaps a bottle of chilled spring water… You can meander about without the unwashed masses in your way. All the while you can appreciate how your hard work and dedication has put you in that exact spot at that exact time for a reason.

When you go, don’t make the n00b mistake of using the “in” door. All traffic from 7 to 10 AM is through the “out” door.

@therealjrn excellent, thanks!

I’ll try to remember to report back on the welcoming factor at the SAMs I frequent.

Too late, you missed it!

I received my iPhone cases Wednesday, and I think they may be the best twelve cent phone cases I’ve ever purchased!

Seriously though, they are decent cases, particularly considering the price.

@communist Also at my store they don’t care about the same address thing. I always gave my second card to my best friend who lived across town and they didn’t care. YMMV.

@communist Sometime this fall a brand new Costco will open five miles from my house. Then a new Ikea will open about twelve miles away. I plan to wear my sneakers and Fitbit and do a circuit of each store once or twice a week. Just for the exercise, you know.

@OldCatLady Be careful with Costco, the free samples may undermine your hard work. They have a lot of healthy food, though, which is one of the reasons I prefer them.

@OldCatLady @moondrake
There’s Actually No Limit For Free Samples At Costco

FWIW, I tend to avoid the samples while I’m there, so you’re welcome to have my share.

@dashcloud I played Bayonetta on Wii U. Decent game.

@dashcloud regarding the Gold member limitation, what if your membership lapses and you renew it later?

@jbartus I don’t know about this promo, but they can’t retro to the lapse date…can you say class action lawsuit?

@jbartus I imagine your license to those games gets revoked when you’re no longer a member, but the download itself is still present on your drive if it was there. Effectively you’d have a full size demo.
If you renew while one of the games you’ve downloaded is still available for download, my guess is that you can re-acquire the license.

@mikibell opps wrong gold star
Membership…everyone disregard

@somf69 Expired offer, but nothing is something.
https://www.woot.com/offers/gift-of-nothing-1

@OldCatLady
Link?

/giphy lazy

@f00l The Blue Fairy Book is here; the others show up as ‘next in series’. The Red one shows up as free, but not all editions.

@djslack Looks like they fixed it- $90 for one.

@sammydog01 They sure did. Thanks.

So it’s the same price as best buy now.

@djslack
according to the comments

The $100 off promo ended last night on Aug 3 and they started the new lowered price of $89 on midnight of Aug 4.

@communist Yep. I came here to post the regular deal (Best Buy) but when I did the last comment on that thread was the user who got 2 for $80, which was more exciting so I led with it.

I kinda felt bad after as it was a mistake and not a traditional deal, but after 5 minutes, what’s said on Meh goes on my permanent record…

I bought one Echo for $90 on Prime Day as they never go on that kind of sale and I didn’t buy at the intro price of $99. Now everyone has that sale price, and in 6 months it will probably be obsolete

@djslack have you seen the echo show

@communistjack Yep, but when i checked it out it had heavy marketing as a fashion assistant (this may have changed since then). Home automation? Cool. Streaming music? Cool. Buying shit? Maybe cool. Consultants and/or AI to analyze robo selfies and tell me which clothes I should wear/buy? No thanks.

I thought of this when posting about echo becoming obsolete but i don’t think adding a camera and screen fills the same niche. A new echo that is twice as loud, twice as good at listening, or somehow provides surround sound out of a single cylinder might. Echo that can stream the same music in multiple rooms (like a Sonos-lite) also would be good, but this should be doable in software on current gear.

@djslack Echo Look was the fashion assistant.

@medz my bad, didn’t notice the difference…

Is that actually my bad, or bad marketing?

@djslack
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@medz it’s my bad. I looked and they’re nothing alike. Somewhere in my brain i read about the look but associated it with the touchscreen show. By spending 10 seconds on Google instead of talking out of my ass, I’ve learned the difference.

@djslack

Talking out of one’s ass is more than appropriate here.

It’s desired.

@mikibell What kind of beer is in it?

@JT954 We did that yesterday, but I didn’t think of posting it here. They had quite a pile of water bottles.

@medz

You have manually add the vr headset to the cart to get that free.

@medz just a heads up that its discounted because the google pixel 2 is coming out soon

@communist

Yup. And rumors say expensive and no headset lack. It may be wonderful, but I’m into discounted at the moment.

@communist I still owe on the Pixel…

@communist
/giphy doy

@f00l I usually jump on freebies but this is too batshit even for me.

@f00l, @sammydog01, Ok, so if I get this for my dog, how’s she gonna hit the play button on her iPod? SHE GOT NO THUMBS!

@ruouttaurmind
@sammydog01

Timer, obviously. Human servants to taste care of that.

Barely skimmed there publishers intro. I think the idea is that the right audiobooks playing at home for the animal to hear can be comforting.

But it’s free so I thought I’d find out more.

@f00l See that gap by the Border Collie in the above picture? That was Lady’s place. She got bored and left.

Hey, thanks for the audiobook, I’ll listen to it if Lady won’t.

@f00l I think the idea is that the right people convinced that audiobooks make their dog happy create more revenue for Audible.

And it’s recurring revenue, because we can’t have puppy getting bored with the same audiobooks day in and day out, can we?

@f00l This was in a pre-produced package on the local noon news today. No mention of the freebie. Very good native advertising!

America’s News, keeping it real.

Thanks for the freebie @f00l!

@f00l

[Interview Series] Free for a limited time. MacArthur Genius Grant winners share their stories and ideas with Peabody award-winning host, Bob Garfield.
Episode 1: What natural ingredients are your birth control pill or your antidepressant made of? And what happens when Mother Nature can’t keep up with the demand? Enter chemist Phil Baran, the Sultan of Synthesis.
Episode 2: The creator and host of Radiolab - one of the most popular and innovative shows today - thought he’d grow up to be a music composer. He utterly failed…or, at least, he thought he did.
Episode 3: Luis von Ahn hates to waste time. After building ReCaptcha, which he sold to Google, he moved on to build the wildly popular language-learning app, Duolingo.
Episode 4: What is the dance equivalent of poetry’s iambic pentameter? Listen to Elizabeth Streb explore the sweet science of action with her performers, who dodge steel i-beams and smash into plexiglass walls.
Episode 5: She joined picket lines as a child and now writes for the New Yorker, investigating injustices you didn’t know existed. Millennial Sarah Stillman is keeping the 4th estate alive and well.
Episode 6: If you were a world famous magician, what might drive you to publicly debunk some of your fellow performers as charlatans and frauds? Hear the Amazing James Randi discuss his work and his arch nemesis, Uri Geller.
Episode 7: Will Allen has been a pro basketball player, the manager of a restaurant chain, and an excellent paper-goods salesmen. Today, he believes many of our nation’s woes begin with food issues. Allen is working towards change, one square foot of downtown Milwaukee farmland at a time.
Episode 8: Some might call her a humanitarian MacGyver: Amy B. Smith has invented better ways for farmers worldwide to sift flour, shuck corn, and cook with cleaner fuels.
Episode 9: A Cuban-American sculptor and artist, Pardo uses lamps as his sketchpad to play along the boundaries of the very definition of art.
Episode 10: Manu Prakash sees beauty and inspiration in a bug’s eyes, a Boston T stop, and even a parasite lodged in his own foot. He’s developing pencil-like microscopes to share that wonder with the world.
Episode 11: Carl Haber developed particle collider technology to uncover the origins of the universe, along the way figuring out how to revive decaying audio recordings.
Episode 12: A beat newspaper reporter at heart, Simon has managed to spin societal crises into critically revered TV series, time and time again.

@f00l When I tried to buy a few, I got ‘This title is not currently available for purchase’. Silva, Crombie, Axe - in fact, every one I tried was ‘not available’. This has happened a lot lately.

@OldCatLady They ran out of stock on digits.

@OldCatLady

I was able to purchase.

I suspect they had a software glitch?

I’d try again.

Here’s a diff l different link to the same thing

https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=KCdls_brws_kdd?ie=UTF8&node=6165851011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-leftnav&pf_rd_r=N1XKZ5BF7NCHHACQYAN3&pf_rd_r=N1XKZ5BF7NCHHACQYAN3&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=b0fb93db-8556-4c80-997d-758ea8f43ddf&pf_rd_p=b0fb93db-8556-4c80-997d-758ea8f43ddf&pf_rd_i=7533915011

Geographic issues (unlikely but possible)

You are in the US aren’t you? If you are temporarily in the Bahamas or something, they may block you due to geographical rights restrictions.

But you can call them and get an over the phone purchase I suspect, if you are out if the country. As long as your shipping and billing addresses are in the US.

Or use a VPN with a US exit point to purchase.

@f00l I spent $1.99 trying to buy a book just to see if I could. I could.

@sammydog01

Could you purchase successfully? Have you tried calling Amazon to ask them what’s going on?

(I don’t expect anyone to call if they don’t want to. Was just curious. I know that if I wanted to purchase a digital item from them and could not, I would call and try to get assistance.)

Now I wonder wtf is going on at Amazon.

@f00l Yes I could.
/giphy reading is fundamental

@sammydog01

/giphy "my unicorn"

@f00l I just bought some at the science museum- had to stand in line. They are having a viewing party and giving them free to the first 500 people. They expect crowds- ick.

@ruouttaurmind I don’t Need it, but I Want it.
Must resist.

@RiotDemon how can you resist all that purple? I mean… so much purple for under ten bucks?

@ruouttaurmind if I actually used the box fan I had more often, I’d buy it. I think I used it once this year. I did look at the reviews, and there was a couple of bad ones… So that helped with the resistance.

It’s such a pretty shade of purple.

@ruouttaurmind That would make a great herb drier and jerky dehydrator

@ruouttaurmind Gone

@ruouttaurmind That was a good deal. I enjoy mine, even if the motion detection has gotten a little flaky on it. I think it was $129 on Black Friday. The image quality on it is very good, even dialed back to 720p for easier streaming.

@djslack I noticed after the last firmware update my motion detection is significantly less sensitive as well. I haven’t contacted SkyBell yet.

I was also quite pleased when they fixed the notification tones in the app. In the iOS version, notification tones for button press and motion were the same sound. Now I get wind chimes for motion and ding-dong for press.

@ruouttaurmind I have noticed with OOS items that have expected in stock dates sometimes have great discounts. I wanted a certain waffle maker but didn’t want to pay full price ($40). I went on amazon warehouse and they were OOS but taking orders for $25. About a week later I got it and the thing was brand new with original packaging. Sweeeeet!

@ruouttaurmind I’ve had one of these on backorder through Amazon since May; I highly doubt that anyone that managed to order at this price is ever going to get it…

@Sabre99 I was successful in placing a backorder. If it ever gets fulfilled I will install it at Mom’s place. But, you are correct, it’s likely the orders will eventually be cancelled.

@djslack

That was a good deal. I enjoy mine, even if the motion detection has gotten a little flaky on it

I finally reached my frustration point with motion detection on the SkyBell. I contacted SkyBell support, and they pushed a new firmware update to the device. I already have noticed a big difference in the motion detection response. Recommend.

@ruouttaurmind yesterday I was working in my front yard and it never went off when I walked by the front door. I thought to myself I need to reach out to them. I’ll make a point to do that this week. Thanks!

@djslack So I’ve had the new firmware for 24 hours now. Motion detection has improved dramatically. In fact, so dramatically I’m now getting notifications from trucks passing on the street in front of my house over 50 feet from the door (doesn’t seem like cars are big enough to set it off?).

I’ll have to tweak down the sensitivity a bit I suppose. Given the alternative (near total inop) I’ll happily accept extreme sensitivity.

@moondrake Have you ever done business with bestchoiceproducts.com?

@ruouttaurmind No. I’ve never had a problem with a deal recommended by Brad’s Deals, but I don’t know if they actually check them out.

@moondrake I wouldn’t mind one of those swings for the front courtyard, but I’m wary of the seller. I will likely have better piece of mind to hit the clearance sale at Walmart or Target. Pay a bit more, but take it home today and know the quality I’m getting.

Anyway, thanks for the OP! You’ve motivated me to get a swing, if not from that seller.

@moondrake Bonus! I actually discovered BestChoiceProducts is a AMZ Marketplace seller, and this swing is a Prime eligible item. Six bucks more, but it’s a returnable item if the quality is subpar.

@ruouttaurmind I have some bestchoiceproducts pool loungers bought through Amazon, and they’re solid.

I also have some of their barstools because the wrong product was shipped, and they just said to keep them. I haven’t assembled those, though.

@djslack Is that a photo of your pool? Can I come visit?

@sammydog01 Right? @djslack needs to have a pool party!

@sammydog01 I wish. That’s the Amazon photo. (And the lounge chairs didn’t come with those throw pillows either).

Recipe BOOK.

@moondrake

What is an airfryer?

@f00l It greatly reduces the oil in fried foods. Here’s a good article. Personally, I’ve never tried it. With a 6x6 (36 sq ft) kitchen and only three feet of counter space and the equivalent cabinets, there’s no room for gadgets.

@f00l a shitty small overpriced oven that celebrity chefs endorse like crazy

heres more info http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-air-fryer/

@sammydog01 I heard they carry these at the Dollar Tree now.

@sammydog01 fyi gearbest ships from china so it might take 2-8weeks to arrive depending on how much US customs hates you

@communist Yes, one came today- I forgot I ordered it so it was a surprise. I love surprise packages!

@sammydog01 that’s why I love ordering cheap items from eBay. Spend $1-2 and it’s a fun surprise months later.

@dashcloud Saw this years ago, but haven’t been back since. Is this really a repeat, or something that’s actually never gone away? Can’t see any reason for creating false urgency, but I’m still vaguely suspicious.

@walarney I think for sure some of them are repeats, but I believe the guy does this once or twice a year where he gathers up the links (and maybe talks to authors to get them to donate their books?), and then makes a big deal about it. I’m sure you can get at least some of these at other times, but this brings together a lot of things in one nice tidy package- I guess if you see an author or publisher you really like, follow them to get early notice of freebies like this.

@communist I’ve been needing a new phone for quite some time. Battery and camera on my cheapie phone suck. Son started school today and forgot to take his schedule (derp), so asked me to take a picture of it and send to him. Couldn’t even read the room numbers!

New phone just ordered, and will be a significant upgrade for me. So thanks for posting!

@pitamuffin no problem

pro-tip att prepaid gives you a $5 discount per month every month if you enroll your credit card in thier auto-pay

I still can’t figure out what to do with one …

@ruouttaurmind

https://shirt.woot.com/offers/always-awake?ref=meh_com

@narfcake If I may be frank? I positively cherish your interpretations of life via wootshirts.

@ruouttaurmind

The real credit goes to the artists designing them in the first place, however. (Hi, @fishbiscuit!)

BTW, this totally makes sense.

https://shirt.woot.com/offers/cat-drinking-coffee?ref=meh_com

@narfcake Aye, you may speak the truth, but it is you who always seems to post just the right shirt to fit the thread.

@2many2no if you look through the related albums there are more for free. Notable are Lewis Black’s The Rant is Due and Foo Fighters’ Saint Cecilia EP.

@djslack Free music = good.