The Zana Zen

This guide provides detailed information on how to sell your own digital products by yourself, by digital products I mean: ebooks, software, graphics, etc… digital files. I’ll show you, step by step, the easy way to sell a digital file, I’ll describe to you how PayPal works and how to use PayPal’s IPN (Instant Payment Notification) service into your advantage in order to send your digital products automatically when you receive payments from your customers. Passive income, here we come

This guide is focused on absolute beginners, if you feel you can skip some of these sections, it won’t hurt my feelings

Choose Your Hosting Service

A Hosting service allows an individual to host his files (usually a website) on a server, in exchange for a monthly or a yearly payment. I’m using Hostgator as my hosting service and I’m really satisfied, you can also try to check if this coupon still works: “freetrial”.

Be sure that you get what you need from your hosting service so ask questions and read what they offer, it can be MySQL databases, PHP scripting, Python, CGI, etc…

Choose a Good Domain Name

In choosing a domain name you have 3 options:

• Going for a brand name, the advantage here is that your site will be more reliable, a brand name is a name to trust on. An example will be www.amazon.com
• Going for a more generic name, if your site is small and you do not plan to spend a lot of money on advertising then I guess this option is better for you – its advantage is that your site will be found more quickly by search engines. An example will be www.FreeWebsiteTemplates.com
• This method is just the combination of the last two, just create a brand name that contains two words or a derivative. This is the best choice of the three in my opinion

Your domain name will eventually be controlled by the DNS network protocol.

What is DNS?

DNS is an acronym for Domain Name System. It is a method of conversion between IP addresses, which are difficult to remember, to domain names, which are easier to use and remember. When your computer tries to connect to a remote computer by using a domain name, it needs first to resolve the remote computer’s IP address.

All connections throughout the Internet are done using the IP network protocol, the IP protocol identifies each computer by a unique IP address. An IP address is a 32 bit number which is represented in the following way: “aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd”, where each dotted separated bin is a number between 0 to 255.

In order to resolve the IP address from a domain name, there is a need for a DNS server. A DNS Server is a computer that is connected to the Internet and responds to DNS queries. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) provides you with a DNS server, your computer probably queries it.

How To Setup the DNS Settings?

Now that you have a domain name, you should setup your DNS settings, if you don’t know how to do that, then you should contact the technical support of your domain registrar. In the settings, make sure you set the right values for the MX record of the DNS, it should be set to your hosting mail server, and it will let you receive emails to your domain name.

Also add some sub domains that will let you manage your hosting more easily:

• ftp.your-domain.com – should point to your hosting FTP server.
• mail.your-domain.com – should point to your hosting mail server.

Getting Money From Buyers using PayPal

I presume that you know what PayPal is, and that you have used it some time in your life, I won’t cover the basics here. PayPal offers some merchant tools, the one that we will talk about is the buy now button. If you sell something, your website should describe the features & benefits of your product and contain a buy now button at the bottom.

When your customers push this button, they will be redirected to PayPal for checkout, after they will pay, you will receive a payment notification from PayPal. The Buy Now Button is the most common merchant tool that PayPal has to offer, it’s simple, fast and secure. It’s easy to configure too. Actually, the button is a simple HTML form that POSTs (sends) data (like the price of the product and the name of the product, see for a list below) to PayPal. A Buy Now Button could also be encrypted with PayPal’s public key, so it prevents hackers from seeing the button details.

A standard Buy Now Button’s form contains these fields:

• business – who to pay for. This is the seller’s email address, your email address that you use to login to PayPal.
• item_name – the product’s name. When the customer clicks the Buy Now button, he will be redirected to PayPal to purchase your product, item_name is the name of the product that will be displayed at PayPal.
• amount – the product’s price.
• currency_code – states what currency to use, where “USD” identifies US Dollars.
• return – the URL that the customer will return to when he is done paying.
• cancel_return – the URL that the customer will be redirected to if he presses cancel after he is redirected to PayPal.
• notify_url – this is optional, it states the URL that receives a payment notifications from Paypal using the IPN service, read more below.

How Paypal’s IPN (Instant Payment Notification) Works?

1. When a user are pressing on your buy now button, he will be redirected to PayPal.
2. PayPal receives the payments and POSTs the payment details to your IPN URL you specified in the notify_url parameter.
3. Your notification url should be a web script that will validate the request against PayPal (security measurement).
4. PayPal IPN responds and verifies the payment or denies it. The IPN script should processes only valid payment requests.
5. The PayPal IPN script should send your digital product by email to your customers automatically, unless passive income doesn’t interest you and you wish to send it manually every time by yourself

EasyIPN

EasyIPN is a script that lets you automate online orders, protect your products from distribution and manage everything from a simple admin panel. You may wish to you use it if you don’t want to mess with the PayPal settings by yourself. EasyIPN’s responsibility is to offload the work you need to do in order to integrate with PayPal IPN.

EasyIPN will send your digital product to the purchaser without your intervention, thus making your website a true passive income source.

So I used remote desktop to control the computer in the 2nd floor of my house,
and I want to restart it!!!! But where is the restart button??

For some reason windows xp and vista think restarting your computer over remote dekstop should be forbidden!
So either start using “net use… and shutdown -m…” or just use a simple command on the remote computer to restart the computer.

Start > Run > shutdown -r -f -t 10
(Restart , Force application exit , in 10 seconds…)

Hello folks,
Recently I bought a dell inspiron 1520 laptop, Life was good, everything was working great!!!
Till one day – My room mate, bought a Dell XPS 1530M laptop,
If it was not enough that he has GDDR3 memory and I have GDDR2, he also received a little dell remote that fits inside the
express card socket on the side – This remote also worked on my computer.
So I went to ebay and got me a remote as well!
But I still had to top the GDDR3 superiority his laptop had, in one way or another.
So I decided i want to be able to control my winamp from my N95 via bluetooth.

The result was pretty nice (:

A Server program written in TCL which listens for tcp connections and bluetooth serial connections,
the server generates playlists when it starts according to the music folder structure on the computer,
and allows the user to load playlists and control winamp from the phone over internet, WiFi and bluetooth.

A Client python program sitting on your phone that acts as a remote.

The program requires a few steps to get going so if you really want it to work on your phone
(symbian s60 v3) you will need to put some effort in preparing the needed prerequisites.

1. Install TCL on your computer from Activestate
2. Extract twapi.zip to your c:/tcl/lib/twapi (or any other /tcl/lib/twapi folder)
3. Install python for s60, and python shell for s60 on your phone.
4. On your phone, Create a folder in your memory card called IMG inside Python
   This will look like /memorycard/Python/IMG
   Extract all these Images to this folder, so they will all be inside /python/IMG/
5. Copy this python file to your phone.
6. On your computer, Create a bluetooth com (serial port)
   consult your bluetooth manual on doing so.
7. Put this inside a folder, extract it and run hotkeys.tcl – This is the server side application that should always run on your computer.
   (Run it with wish/wish84/wish85)
8. If an error message pops, read it – and follow the instructions until they stop popping – they do not pop for no reason!!!
9. After all is set, run the remotebt3.py in the interactive python interpeter on your s60 phone.
10. Choose a connection method, if you choose Bluetooth, be sure to have a paring to your computer already set.
11. If you choose TCP, make sure you have a wifi with DHCP and no firewall is blocking hotkeys.tcl which on default listenes on tcp port 9090 for new connections.
12. If you get connected a green box will appear with the connection method, now for a few stuff you can do :
    • Press 2 for a menu of things you can do.
      They are pretty easy to understand – the only one which needs some clearing is :
      Rebuild m3u list – this one recreates your m3u files from your music folder configured inside hotkeys.conf
    • press 8 to select a playlist from the ones generated by hotkeys on your computer.
    • press SEND to connect in a different connection way (bluetooth/wireless/internet)
    • Pressing 3 times on W will open/close winamp.

Feel free to change / Distribute / do anything with the tcl and python code,
“Clamp” is a free tool downloaded from the internet, and all right about this cool tool is kept for it’s original creator
I am just using it – I did not create it.

I know the install prcedure is not fun,
but i did not have time to study nokia .sis creation and making a nice installer for windows
if you feel these are lacking – Create them!
For questions, contact me at eitamaa (at) gmail (dot) com.

(Have I topped the GDDR3 or not??)

Cheers,

If you would like to sell something online, especially if it’s a digital product such as software or media, it is wise to build a website that will operate automatically without your interference, this way it saves you time and it is considered to be passive income.

So, after you set up a website, you can use a script that I’m selling, it is being used by many people for more than 2 years now so it does the job right The script is called EasyIPN and once you installed it on your web server, it lets you manage your digital content very easily with an admin panel. Basically it lets you:

1. Upload your digital products
2. Create auto-selling PayPal Buy Now buttons and connect them with the digital files that you uploaded
3. Easily integrate the buttons into your existing websites (written in PHP)

Once a buyer payed using that PayPal buy now button, PayPal notifies EasyIPN (being done automatically), and after a verification process EasyIPN makes with PayPal, an email with a download link is being sent to the buyer PayPal’s email address.

The buyer would click that download link which also contains the buyer’s PayPal transaction id, it is being used as a “password” to identify the specific buyer which bought a specific product. The lets you see if someone forwarded the link to someone by looking at the download requests in the logs. After all verifications have passed, the product is allowed to be downloaded.

Another protection layer is applied by using Watermarking, that is, embedding the buyer’s transaction ID on the products file. This way, if someone decides to “share” your work (aka, make illigel copies), you can tell who is he by getting your hands on the illegal copy and extract the transaction ID from it (this is “a secret” and only I can do that). The buyer is also aware of these protection schemes, and the deterrence should also work into your advantage as a seller.

If you are interested in selling software or media on your own website, EasyIPN can really be useful for your purpose, it includes all the features I described and the “security” checks as well, it lets you sell multiple products on multiple websites.
Have fun,
Guy.

This year (In November) I’ll begin my Biotechnological Engineering studies at the Ben-Gurion university at the Negev in Israel. I chose Biotechnology because I’m fascinated by life and because along with biology studies – you also get some math, physics and chemistry

So I began to think and study about life and how it is made, the material that we are composed of, etc. I thought about something some days ago that I think would be interesting to share, I’m first going to outline the most common and widely accepted theories among the scientific community regarding how the universe and life were created, this will give the reader some good background before proceeding. Afterwards I’m going to discuss what I think will happen to the universe in the future, most chances you’ll be surprised by it so keep reading!

Please read every sentence carefully, since it is very summarized.

Some Background

Today, from observations into outer space, we know that galaxies draws away from us, the farther the galaxy is away from us, the bigger its speed it goes away from us (Hubble’s Law). This is true from any point of view that you’ll look at it (principle of relativity, nothing special about earth), far galaxies will draw away faster from your observation point, aka the universe is expanding. This led to the birth of the Big Bang idea, or at least it supports it, the big bang theory suggests that these galaxies must have been closer in the past and at the beginning, the universe was in “singularity” ~13.7 billion years ago (singularity is defined as a point with infinite density and high temperature), when the big bang occurred it expanded and the universe was formed.

So lets say the universe was created somehow and matter was formed somehow (I want to get fast to the point). Matter as far as we know today obeys a certain dynamic, we don’t completely understand the dynamics, but we have built a really nice model of what we think matter is (quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons, etc…), lets hope CERN will push us a step further in the understanding of matter and our universe. “Playing” by these “matter dynamics”, planets, solar systems and galaxies were formed. One of these planets was earth, it was formed ~4.5 billion years ago, and then life is assumed to be created spontaneously later on, some says that life sprung almost immediately after the earth was formed.

Of course that we cannot prove this is true, but if you’ll study “life chemistry”, it will be seem more logical to you that if you apply Darwin’s process of evolution to molecules and atoms, it is imminent that life will be formed, solely by the nature of matter in our universe. A good explanation to that process is found in the book: Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene. There are two other points that you’ll have to accept if you follow this logic. 1) Earth is a single planet amongst billions of billions, so life was probably formed elsewhere as well (See the the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image to grasp how big the universe is). 2) On earth, life took a carbon based form, which was the best choice on earth’s environment, but no one said this is the only form of life available and there is a good chance that other forms exists as well.

The groundwork of life contain two things: survival and replication. Survival is done by “finding” the “fittest” form (Natural Selection) and replication is by producing more of the same molecule (DNA), cell or organism (interesting reading – Mitosis).

Another assumption I take is that the development of intelligence would be the next native step to take place after the creation of life, this is also derived from natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

The Future of the Universe

We can say that the creation of life and intelligence were native processes that would take place again and again if the universe was re-created again for any reason. If you’ll look at it in an abstract way you can say that matter aspire to become intelligent. Furthermore, the survival & replication process turns all matter bit by bit to become intelligent so inductively you can conclude that at a certain point all the matter in the universe will become intelligent.

Of course there are some certain limits to this process, but at the other hand, giving enough time (billions of years), and assuming intelligence can take many forms, you may conclude that the whole universe will aspire to become intelligence. Who said that there isn’t any life and intelligence in our sun? maybe it is based on plasma chemistry or whatever…

Maybe the whole universe may become a single organism one day.