DotResults

Saving OfficeMax and Office Depot, The Merger Matters

Kayla Selans — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 16:29:36 +0000

As you drive down familiar streets in your town, the commercial landscape is always changing. Old businesses close while others change owners and receive brand new names. What can be the most shocking is to see very large businesses completely cease operation, those companies which rent massive spaces over 20,000 square feet. The most recent of those was Borders, and then quite a few Albertsons grocery stores in our area. But now, there’s a new fiasco brewing. For over five years now, two major office supply brands, OfficeMax and Office Depot have been struggling to survive. Anytime I have walked into one of these stores, even Staples, it is just so completely boring and there’s never many people. All of these brands have tried to introduce new things, like cute folders to attract women, Martha Stewart product lines to attract organized people, and more products for kids to use at school. But at the end of the day, I don’t think any of those things have truly helped.

Staples has many government contracts behind them. I think they have stood out even because of their name. Staples. It is simple and fun. OfficeMax and Offce Depot both sound like generic, unhappy places. It seems like the merger will make OfficeMax obsolete and only the Office Depot locations will be left. Here comes a huge amount of empty spaces in a city near you. I wonder what will be filled in them eventually. Perhaps more Aldi stores for one, those are always popping up lately. This post has been very random, I wanted to talk about it and now do not have time to go back and organize it. I’ll come back to this merger discussion a bit later and clean things up. It always fascinates me when things like this are announced.

Use Online Services To Fix Your Credit Fast

Kayla Selans — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 06:08:16 +0000

While two of the most popular credit bureaus still rely heavily on phone calls and postal letters, you can get great results online with credit reporting services that use Experian. It is refreshing to know that at least one bureau has had an online setup for a long time and is giving results online. You know – dot results! I explain more about this on one of my sister websites, QueenCredit.com. But basically, if you sign up for a credit report and alert service that uses Experian to retrieve reports, you can initiate online disputes with Experian very easily. I have used this method to clean up credit reports within only a few months. Once you have your Experian report squeaky clean, you can actually print it and use it as an example once you start contacting the other two bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion, via mail. You can tell them in your letter, “My information on Experian is completely correct and true. I have attached it for your convenience. Please correct the following errors,” and list the errors in order along with the corrected information you would like on your credit report. This has worked perfectly for me and will work for you too.

Equifax and Transunion do have online disputing, but Experian has had it for the longest amount of time. I have not used online disputing at Equifax or Transunion so cannot comment on those results just yet. However, I have received letters back in the mail quite quickly from both once I sent in corrections.

How To Make More Money With Google Adsense

Kayla Selans — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 02:39:07 +0000

When I asked myself why this site was doing so poorly with Adsense lately, I did a little research and some cleaning. To make more money with Adsense, keeping your site tidy is essential. Here are my tips for doing a clean-up and seeing results within just a few days.

1. Make sure all of your articles are very similar
Some articles here at DotResults, while techy, were not techy enough. I deleted them. Yes, it was a little saddening to wipe out posts I spent so much time on, but it’s what had to be done. I had forty posts (some were drafts) in the trash! Only about twenty posts were left when I was done. This site is for very specific tips and tools and many of my old posts did not reflect that theme. Your click-through rate (CTR) is effected poorly if you have a lot of pages that do nothing good for you. A good way to figure out what is going right and going wrong is to take a look at your categories. See if you have some categories which do not have many posts in them. You are probably better off scrapping those entirely. Try to have, at the maximum, only ten categories. This can help you keep things in check. Even five categories would be better if you really need to do a “spring” cleaning.

2. Make sure all posts have tags
I haven’t actually done real research on it, but I have personal experience with this. All of my articles with tags have performed better in Google searches, have more comments, and have more clicks from Adsense. This may be because Google loves tags. I say, tag things up and do it in a hurry.

3. Define specific keywords and titles for every post
Do not skimp on putting extra work into your titles, descriptions, keywords and tags. Every post you make must have all of the goodies to go along with it. Having an awesome article is just not enough. To make more money with Adsense, you need traffic, traffic and more traffic.

If I am totally wrong on something, or missing a boat completely.. please let me know!

No Rules In Sparrow Mail Client, Saying Goodbye

Kayla Selans — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 19:16:47 +0000

It was a beautiful fall day on October 2, 2011 and I was itching to change the way I managed my email. That is the day when I purchased Sparrow v1.3.2 and immediately was so happy with it. Sparrow is an email client that is fast, sleek and just looks pretty. There, I said it. But since that beautiful day I have really missed having mail rules. You see, Sparrow doesn’t have rules. It imagines that we all live in a perfect email world without spam. Well no matter how many rules we put on our mail server, some stuff does get through. And because I heavily rely on my email and do not want to miss something important, our rules are not the crazy and overbearing kind. So at this point I really need rules and I’m going to have to stop using Sparrow. I am not sure what application I’ll be going back to at the moment, but it does sadden me to say goodbye to little Sparrow.

If there is something I am missing and there’s actually a way to have rules, please let me know.

Batch Convert PNGs to JPGs on Mac OS X

Kayla Selans — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:13:29 +0000

Computers are smart. I had a folder full of screen captures (PNG) and I needed them to all be JPGs.

Open Terminal and put in this command:

mkdir jpegs; sips -s format jpeg *.* --out jpegs

Voila!

You smart computer.

CD or DVD Stuck in Mac – How to Fix

Kayla Selans — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:13:29 +0000

I was going through some old CDs and they were pretty scratched. Some of them could not be read so my computer was a little slow on making a decision and spitting the discs back out. At one point, a certain CD didn’t come out at all (and was not showing up anywhere). In fact, I completely forgot it was in there. By that time, I had to resort to opening Terminal and typing in:

drutil tray eject

Then your disc will be out in a jiffy.

Best weather program for Mac OS X menubar or dock

Kayla Selans — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:09:09 +0000

“Meteorologist is a full featured, free, and open source weather program for Mac OS X. This version of Meteorologist supports multiple cities, new version checking, and many more features.”

Download here.

In a word, Meteorologist is awesome. As a photographer I always keep an eye on the weather. Often I find myself staring at weather.com and figuring out what the next days will hold as far as rain or shine. With this application I have the most handiest way ever to check the weather. And with one click it will go straight to the page on weather.com for the zipcode I’ve entered into the application. It also will show you a radar image immediately without having to go to any website at all.

This is probably the best weather program ever. The only thing it’s missing is sunrise/sunset time. If it had that I would never have to use my browser again to check anything for scheduling photo sessions.

Battlefield 3 Not Initializing – How to fix

Kayla Selans — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:33:21 +0000

It looks like there’s two main reasons that Battlefield 3 does not start.

1) You need to update your video card drivers manually – do not use any of the Windows walk-through updates
2) Or, you can remove (TM) from the name of the Battlefield 3 folder

Those are the two most popular fixes for the game, which by the way is certainly a beautiful one. Here is one of my favorite reviews of Battlefield 3 from Gamespot:

When it comes to virtual battlefields, nobody does it quite like the Battlefield series. It has a long history of creating sprawling conflict zones where players have an exhilarating range of ways to make powerful contributions to the war effort. The competitive multiplayer mode in Battlefield 3 stays true to tradition, delivering an online combat experience that is amazingly addictive, immersive, and exciting, with refinements and new elements that make the familiar action feel fresh.

How to disable caps lock on Mac OS X

Kayla Selans — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:56:31 +0000

Do you actually ever use the Caps Lock key? It seems like a key that should be removed from keyboards. No one has a need for it anymore because we’ve all learned it’s not polite to shout, and it doesn’t look good to post a yard sale sign in all caps either. Programmers don’t even use the caps lock key – changes in code are carefully ammended if capital characters are needed. All in all, I can’t think of any benefit to the key. Personally I wanted to turn it off because sometimes I am writing an email, etc. and I touch it accidentally. The bother is not huge, but it would give life two extra seconds if I turned it off. So here’s how to turn it off.

Open up System Preferences and choose Keyboard.

Click Modifier Keys on the lower right corner.

Select your keyboard if there is more than one in the drop down. Then select Caps Lock and set it to No Action. OK and done!

Featured image from ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME SHIRT FROM TSHIRTGROOVE.

New VPN Service at Tunnelr

Kayla Selans — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 02:05:06 +0000

There is a new VPN service on the block, which may be of interest to a lot of you who are here looking at the information on PuTTY! Whether you are blocked by a firewall at your company, university or even country – Tunnelr enables you to gain unrestricted access to all Internet enabled services and content. Their tunneling services run on all major service ports, so in the event your company blocks SSH, POP3 or IMAP, you still are able to use the service on one of their forwarded ports.