Browsing through the items on Light In The Box might not be quite the adventure and bargain offered by markets in China. But it isn't far off.
If you’ve traveled to China and been to an electronics or fashion market there chances are you’ve been struck by two facts:
1) How cheap the prices are (relative to North America and Europe); and
2) How many products are available there that aren’t in your home country.
To take advantage of these facts you could travel to China with extra room in your suitcase. Or, you could shop at what might be Spot Cool Stuff’s single favorite online store: Light In The Box.
Continue →
House remodeling and decoration has been part of owning a home for as long as there have been homes to own. (Even back in the caveman days we can imagine Mrs. Caveman working to remodel the fire pit area while Mr. Caveman sought to improve his spear storage area.) In today’s real estate market fixing up a current home is an especially desirable option when compared to the difficulties of selling your house and buying a new one.
Here are our favorite websites for finding a contractor, finding home remodeling inspiration and finding new home furnishings:
Continue →
There are thousands of websites where you can research trip ideas (Spot Cool Stuff’s own travel blog not least among them) and hundreds of websites where you make your trip reservations—from general booking engines like Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz to niche sites like Cruise Direct, Mr & Mrs Smith and HostelBookers, to a site like Tripology that will hook you up with a travel specialist for free.
But what after your accommodations are booked, after your travel guidebook is bought, after your general itinerary is set and after you’ve left for your trip? What are some useful sites for while you are traveling?
Here is a selection of our favorites for doing the following from the road:
Continue →
Spot Cool Stuff is fascinated by the ever expanding functionality companies are bringing to Twitter. Some hotels offer concierge services via Twitter. Some take-out restaurants allow customers to place orders via Twitter. And now at least one VoIP company, Jajah, is launching a service that places telephone calls via Twitter.
Here’s how Jajah’s Twitter calling works:
Continue →
Pets can make absolutely wonderful travel companions. The process of finding pet-friendly accommodations, however, can be a less-than-wonderful experience. Fortunately there are several websites that specialize in helping your little Rover or Fluffy enjoy your vacation along with you.
Reviews of our three favorite:
Continue →
The increased affordability of excellent prosumer digital SLR cameras, such as the high-end Canon 1D Mark III and the affordable, new Nikon D500, has helped create a surge in the number of excellent photos being taken. And nowhere is that more apparent than on the popular photo sharing website Flickr.
The number of suberb photostreams—collections of photographs published by a single user—on Flickr easily stretches into the hundreds. Here’s a look at eight that, for whatever reason, grabbed our fancy today:
Continue →
Almost everyone knows Amazon.com for its bargain deals on books and electronics. Amazon is also a good source for discount groceries. We like their DRM-free MP3 store (even more than iTunes). And we love their Amazon Kindle. But Amazon also has a surprisingly large selection items that defy categorization, from the odd to the downright wacky.
Here’s our look at some of the weirdest items for sale on Amazon and the solution they provide to some of life’s most common problems:
Continue →
It probably isn’t feasible for you to drive an all-electric vehicle, grow your own organic food or power your house entirely off of solar panels. That’s okay. It can make a big difference to the planet when of people take small steps towards reducing their carbon footprint.
Like using a more environmentally-friendly website host.
Website hosting is a surprisingly electricity-intensive (and thus surprisingly polluting) enterprise. A single website server can produce as much as 12.5 tones of CO2 each year. It is estimated that by 2020 the website hosting companies will be as polluting as the airline industry!
Fortunately, there are a variety of green website hosts. We’ve found several that offer as good a service, for as cheap a price, as the regular polluting hosting companies provide. Here are our three favorites:
Continue →
