Looking at that site, they say they offer “shopping carts” as a feature, but I don’t see any way to find out what that means, so I can’t address their setup directly. It’s likely they have some sort of click-to-install e-commerce type widget, which may be fine for what you need. What I can do is tell you a little about what I found out when I was recently slogging through the world of low-end e-commerce for a project my Dad was working on.

The e-commerce setup you choose will depend upon three things: What you're willing to pay, what level of complexity you need, and what level of design polish you need.

So, what are you willing to pay? If the answer is nothing (which seems likely), that’s okay. There are free options out there. “Free” obviously doesn’t include things like fees for credit card processing and merchant accounts; there is no free where those are concerned. The bank will have its take.

I recently took a look at all the low-end e-commerce systems for my dad, and the best thing I could find was WordPress with the WP eCommerce plugin. Both of those are free, and in my opinion they’re pretty easy to install and manage (relative to systems like Drupal and Joomla). The WP eCommerce plugin handles the highest level of complexity I could find at its price level (customizable shipping options by weight, product variations, multiple currencies, etc.)

I also find WordPress to be really easy to customize if you know a little bit of PHP, HTML, and CSS. For a moderate sum (less than $100) you can buy a sharp (if not unique) template. There are so many WordPress template offerings out there that it is impossible not to find them, so I won’t bother listing them here. Google “WordPress e-commerce templates”. I SAID GOOGLE IT

If WordPress won’t cut it for you, the best cheap-but-not-free options I could find were FoxyCart and Shopify.

FoxyCart works by including their scripts on your website, which then open up modals and/or popup windows when people do anything commercey like click “add to cart.” I haven’t used it, but it seems very easy and good. Their cheapest (only?) plan at time of this writing is $19 a month. If you are like my dad, you will find that to be an outrageous sum and you will shake your fist in the air. FoxyCart will be easier to implement than WordPress.

Shopify is a hosted solution, which means it’s not going to work on BigBytes; with Shopify, you sign in to their server and enter your products, and they do everything else. This is the easiest and most elegant solution, but also the most expensive of the acceptable low-end solutions I could find. ($29 a month! $29! shakes fist). Really, that is not very much money if you’re serious about setting up shop. If you know HTML and CSS you can customize your store as much as you like, but it will always be on their servers.

All three of these solutions are stable, which is to say they’ve been around a long time and they probably will continue to be around for a long time. There are most definitely other solutions – there are literally thousands of them – but these are what I came up with.

All three of these solutions will require understanding to some extent how products and shipping options and whatnot all fit together.

This is my answer if you’re looking for a way to set up a little store online and sell some stuff. If you’re after a way to learn how to build an e-commerce website so that you can know how to build an e-commerce website, my answer would be completely different (short version of that alternate answer: play with wordpress to see what it looks like, then go buy yourself a book called something like “Build your own e-commerce website with (PHP/Ruby on Rails/Django) today!”)

One last note: I know you didn’t ask for advice on hosting services. I don’t know anything about BigBytes (other than that their website gives me the wiggins) but I have had good luck with both Dreamhost and Site5.

Two last note: Lots of people seem to do well selling their wares through systems like Amazon stores and eBay, so if all you want to do is sell things, that may be an option.

Here’s a summary:

Free solution: WordPress and the WP e-Commerce plugin
- Pros: Free, sorta easy to set up if you know some stuff about clicking.
- Cons: It’s the least easy of these solutions to set up. It will scale, but not without some effort and know-how.

Less free solution: FoxyCart
- Pros: Cheap, pretty dang easy to set up. It’s mostly your regular site that “pops up” for cart and checkout stuff.
- Cons: More expensive than free, still takes knowing how to cut and paste, which some people do not know how to do.

Even less free solution: Shopify
- Pros: Very easy.
- Cons: $29 a month for the cheapest plan (which is still very cheap, but not free). It’s not portable, which is to say you couldn’t tell Shopify to shove it and move the store to another hosting solution.

Good luck!

You'd be hard pressed to get even an interview without either a formal education and/or tons of experience. That being said, 99% of what I learned for my degree, I don't use in my programming job.

The language(s) you learn are basically unimportant. Once you show the ability to program in more than one language, you should be able to pick up any other language fairly quickly.

In your position I would pick up a book on Data Structures, one on SQL, and two language books. I would probably suggest Java/C# for one book and the other I would suggest a more web focused language (Python/Ruby/PHP). Work with that on your own. For the SQL books find ones that are fairly generic but work with either MySQL or PostgresSQL (since they are free). Get comfortable programming and working through the books.

The problem is that once you finish that, you aren't likely to be hired (even though you could probably do most of the available jobs). You're going to need some sort of proof that you can actually do the work. What I would do is get a book on Android and/or iPhone development. I'd also get a book on AJAX. Specifically get an AJAX book geared toward the web focused language you focused on (I like Python, but Ruby might be more prevalent). Get comfortable learning and working through the examples in those books. If you have the expertise and space, I'd suggest having both a Linux/Apache environment and a Windows environment. Though you will need an Apple OS X environment if you want to do iPhone work (you might want to buy a Mac and triple boot or build a Hackintosh, which also would be a good skill to have).

Now you actually need to build some stuff. Build yourself a super kick ass website with the tech you've learned. Use as much database, HTML 5, and AJAX as you can. Hook into as many external API's as possible. Make sure that the website is available (buy a domain name) for viewing and use it on your resume.

Also, develop as many mobile applications as you can. I would suggest Android over iOS simply because it's easier and cheaper to get into the store, and you don't need a Mac to develop on, but the choice is yours. Make pages for your apps on your personal website.

I might also pick a small open source project to contribute to at this point. It will get you comfortable working with a code revisioning system at least.

Once you've done all this (and this may take 6 months to a year), you'll actually have a resume that will get past HR. That's the hard part. If you can get an interview with the other developers you'll be working with and show them your skill, you'll have a good chance of being hired.

Make sure you resume plays up your formal education as much as possible. List as many languages and technologies as skills. For example you might do this.

Langagues: Objective C, Java (with Android Davlik extensions), JavaScript, HTML 5, SQL, Python

Technologies: Eclipse IDE, Visual Studio, Microsoft IIS, Apache, XML, JSON, Linux, Android, iPhone, MySQL, PostgresSQL, SQLite

Any reason why it needs to be wireless? I think any NAS drive would be fine if you just plugged it into your Network.

I have 3 computers I care about. A PC desktop running Windows 7; a headless Linux box running Debian; and a Macbook Pro running OSX.

I use the built in backup/restore in Windows 7. It syncs my desktop to a network share that is a RAID1 mirror from the Linux box.

The Linux box has 3 drives: an SSD for the OS; a software RAID1 for /home; and a hardware RAID5 for media. A weekly backup of the OS is made onto /home using rsync.

While the media is on RAID5 and I have uneventfully lost a drive with this controller, something bad may happen to the array one day. All I really care about on it is the ~100gigs of mp3s. They get rsynced to 3 places -- one that is offsite on another RAID5 array. I don't really have the motivation to backup the 2T of videos that is constantly rotating. The RAID5 controller itself is monitored using command line tools and email.

For the laptop, I use an external USB WD Passport drive that is split into 2 partitions. One 320G for Time Machine; and the other 300G of the USB drive is used to backup /home -- where everything I care about lives or is backed up to.

A weekly rsync also backs up /home to an offsite location.

I keep my iPhone and iPad synced at least weekly so Time Machine picks those up. I keep a dump of my router and wifi AP's settings around in case they ever need to be restored. I encrypt and put important private keys for SSH and VPN onto Dropbox which all 3 machines have clients for.

For me to lose any backed up data, 4-6 drives here and 2 drives in another state would all have to fail at the same time.

The only part of this setup that needs human interaction is plugging the USB drive into the laptop and clicking 1 button; and plugging the USB drive into the Linux box and running 1 script. I do this about every 10 days.

If you are comfortable with tinkering with devices get a Nook Color and root it (easy on this device) then install android on it. Cheap 7" tablet.

I have a 1.5 Tb drive hooked up to my main machine that does a daily backup of everything using Apple's TimeMachine.

I keep my music and movie files on an external portable USB drive, which is also backed up to the big drive every night.

My Documents folder (which is far and away the most precious thing on my computer) backups to Mozy every night automatically.

I manually backup to DropBox and access my documents with my netbook through DropBox.

I also have a couple of thumb drives floating around that I occasionally toss my Documents folder onto.

With that setup I have yet to lose anything, including when my Macbook refused to boot and I had to wipe the harddrive and reinstall from scratch. Having the TimeMachine backup made the recovery process utterly painless.

I'm old fashioned and unautomated - here's my list
(Aside from keeping all my old typewriter ribbons, carbons, and all my pencil & paper notepads...)

Files copied to a backup laptop (netbook),

Cut & paste to an external HD,

superimportant docs are in triplicate on various 8 and 16gb usb drives,

once yearly I burn data CDs of new docs/music/art/etc. and mail one to a friend. I likewise keep his backup "fire insurance" cds.

Whenever you get around to it?

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.flashplayer

Am I missing something here?

Be careful what you wish for. I'm happy without Flash on my iPhone and I don't believe I'll ever need it on there. Flash causes my browser to crash on my laptop more than anything else and eats up RAM/CPU. It would criple my phone and chew through the battery life.

You may get it on Android but you'll likely never get it on your itouch.

I use Dropbox for selected files, but that's mostly so I have access to them at work or elsewhere--not really for backup purposes.

I use TimeMachine to back up most the contents of my hard drive on an hourly basis. I like having immediate access to those backups, and having multiple versions going back for days and weeks. Those backups go on an external USB drive that's connected to my computer all the time.

And in case of a real disaster--my house burns down, a burglar steals everything, etc.--I have a little portable USB drive that I keep at work. Once a month I bring it home overnight and do a backup of everything--100% of my hard drive, a bootable mirror copy--using SuperDuper.

And after all that...I still managed to lose some very important files a few months ago. I was new to using Dropbox, and I admit, I was pretty slow on the uptake about how it worked. I put my whole Documents folder there, then decided I didn't want all those files stored in the cloud after all, and moved them back. Somehow in the process I lost some of them--copied one folder and its sub-folders, but the contents didn't get copied with them. I wasn't using TimeMachine then, and I didn't notice the files were gone until I'd done four months of backups of those empty folders to my portable drive--so they weren't backed up anywhere. I got most of the files back eventually, but it took a $99 file recovery program and hours of combing through the 10,000 nameless files it recovered.

Moral of the story: You can't be too careful. There are two kinds of computer users--the kind who've lost their data, and the kind who haven't...yet.

Well, I'm not sure I qualify as a member of your target group here, but I'll lay it out anyway:

At home:
Crashplan backs up all my irreplaceable stuff (mostly media, some document, and email) to Crashplan Central and to a drive attached to my work computer.
Time Machine backs up whatever to a dedicated Time Machine drive.
All my media are on a RAID 5 array, which isn't backup as you say, but has some redundancy.
I SuperDuper my boot drive to an external drive every night.
I have some random old ChronoSync routines that make additional copies of my photos and music.

At work I just SuperDuper and Crashplan.

My laptop I TimeMachine when it's on my home network and plugged in, and Crashplan to Crashplan Central. I don't keep anything unique or critical on my laptop, though. Mail is IMAP, calendars and contacts are synced with MobileMe, and I use Dropbox for various files I want to access everywhere.

Most important to me in all this is that it's all virtually 100% unattended. I try to take a look every now and then to make sure everything's still running, but otherwise I don't notice it. The downside of course is that I also might not notice if something isn't working until I really need it, but I think I have enough copies of the important stuff to cover me.

So yeah, I'm not sane in this regard. It's probably just like yours.

I second OpenOffice. It's a pretty powerful suite of tools that can open most files, including xls and ppt. It's not exactly light though, comparable to MS Office, but with 2GB RAM you shouldn't have any problems with it.

Torrenting works like this: you download a .torrent file, which is essentially a reference to the file you're actually trying to download. When you open the .torrent with a BitTorrent client (like uTorrent, Transmission, or the standard BitTorrent client), the client connects to a tracker (the server that coordinates the downloads), and starts to download the file in pieces, distributed between everyone else who has the file. So instead of downloading something from one person, you're downloading it in pieces from many. Once you've downloaded it, the BitTorrent client will let other people download from you. When you're uploading the file to other people, this is called Seeding. When you're downloading a file without uploading anything, this is called Leeching. When you go to a website that hosts .torrent files, it'll usually list the number of seeders and the number of leechers. The speed of the download highly depends on how many people are seeding it vs. how many people are leeching.

As for where to download music, that's illegal, so you'll have to find out on your own. Note that BitTorrent isn't anonymous, so there are the same risks as downloading from anywhere else. Also, be careful what you download, as files may contain trojans or other malware, so it's wise to read the comments on things you're downloading, if the site you're getting the torrent from has any.

You will need to start off with a torrent manager. The best one I know of for PC is uTorrent.

In regards to finding music, since the whole process is against the law in most countries, anything you find in the public domain is going to be shady at best. Of all of the public trackers, Demonoid.me is the least likely to infect your computer with some sort of virus, but all of the content is user created, so anything you get from anywhere can include a virus.

Your safest bet is to find a friend that has membership in a private tracking community. These are usually limited to genre, and are hard if not impossible to gain access to without an in. These sites are heavily moderated and policed to protect the users, and kept small as to reduce the chances of getting caught.

Getting a smartphone and data plan contract due to a bad charger is like getting married for the sex. Or buying a 747 because you like the peanuts.

There are tons of places to get a replacement charger for under $10, if that's all you want to do. Gimme a model number and I'll send you a link.

But if you really just want to get a smartphone, then all that doesn't matter. :-) So which do you really want?

I've never done it myself because it is most likely illegal, ahem, but from what I've heard, it's pretty easy to do.

For a very simple explanation, when someone uploads a torrent, they are creating and sharing a file that links back to a location on their computer with the shared data. Once other people have downloaded it, they also share that data with other people accessing the file. The more people who download/share, the faster the download speed. If you were to connect after 10 people downloaded the torrent, you would be getting parts of the whole share (bits) from different sources. There are better, more technical explanations for how it works online if you are interested.

The best software for OS X, from what these shady people tell me, is Transmission. Download your Torrent client of choice, then google for what you want to download. Include 'torrent' in your search. It won't be hard to find. If you're lucky enough to know someone who is a member of a specific torrent site, ask for an invite. There are loads of great sites that cater to all different interests. There's one whole site dedicated to Smiths bootlegs and another just for Joy Division/New Order bootlegs. Sites for UK TV shows and some general interest/random sites too. It won't be hard to find.

Download a torrent file and then simply drag & drop on the application or doubleclick. On a Mac you may need to get info on the file and select Transmission to open all torrent files. It may be necessary to designate a specific location where you want the files to live on your computer. For example, you could create a folder inside your Music/Media folder called Torrents and set that in the preferences of the application as the default location.

Good luck and use your new powers for good, not evil!

I really like Google Docs. Easy to use and free. Would have to see if you can view ppt files since I haven't done that yet but for doc's and xls files, Google Docs works great.

Google lets you block specific sites from showing up in your results from here: http://www.google.com/reviews/t?hl=en
Just sign in to your Google account, add answers.yahoo.com to your block list, and it should stop showing up.

For the Airport Express, you'll want to open Airport Admin Utility and enable Access Control lists.

Get the MAC address from the people you want to allow access to your network and enter it in the Access Control List.

open airport utility
double click airport name in left column
select Access tab
select Timed Access in dropdown

shit, just follow this guide: http://arfore.com/2009/04/03/configure-airport-extreme-mac-filter-acl/

Tell your neighbors that you're monitoring their bandwidth usage and to be respectful. If necessary you can block the ports that torrents use.

You can see who's connected and other stats in Airport Utility under Advanced / Logs and Statistics / Wireless Clients

http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/products/platforms/pa-500.html

Approaching it from the direction of languages is a mistake. Just as you don't really learn a foreign language until you are using it for real, you aren't going to really learn a computer language until you're learning it for real. If you're serious, you should come up with a project that interests you on your own and try and work on that. It's not really going to provide you an entry into the industry, but you'll be able to learn if you even like it at a hobbyist level.

As far as getting into the industry, without a formal education or industry track record, it's not going to happen. You need one or both. The education could happen from a community college, continuing education classes or similar, but nobody is going to use up their interviewing time on somebody with nothing on their resume. The latter can be found through open source projects, but that's going to take a lot of work to get up to the point where you're able to make a significant contribution to a high enough profile open source project for it to be viable resume material. The computer industry does OK with hiring folks without formal training, but you need to have something like the equivalent of an impressive portfolio in order to make that happen.

As mentioned in Andrew's answer, until there's confirmation that the Flyer will be upgraded to Android 3.2 (the update being pushed out right now that contains support for 7" tablets), it's a clear do not buy. There is at least one 7" tablet that has been announced so far from Hauwei (http://www.bgr.com/2011/06/20/huawei-announces-7-inch-mediapad-android-honeycomb-tablet/) that will be running that OS, so we should expect it that form factor to start showing up. Your use cases are important here, though: if you're going to be doing a lot of e-reading, a 7" tablet makes a lot of sense, as I find the 10" tablets to be cumbersome for that. If you're going to be doing more general purpose stuff, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is my favorite of the current hardware that's out there right now. I wouldn't anticipate a lot of movement in the market over the next couple months, other than the appearance of 7" Android tablets, and then a renewed surge of stuff in the fall.

I would advise against the HTC Flyer. It's running Gingerbread (Android 2.3) and not the tablet specific Honeycomb (Android 3.x). It's unknown whether the Flyer will ever get upgraded to Honeycomb, much less upgraded to the next Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0).

If you want to stay with Android tablets, I would recommend the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Asus Eee Pad Transformer (especially with the keyboard dock), or the Toshiba Thrive. These are all 10.1" tablets.

If you want a smaller form factor the Archos 80 G9 will be coming out as an 8" tablet for $279 in September.

There are tons of other things I'd need to know before I give a recommendation. How much storage do you need? Are you already in the Android, iOS, or BlackBerry ecosystem? Do you need 3G/4G connectivity?

The iPhone and iPod aren't necessarily known for high quality sound. I've never felt the need to tweak any EQ settings ever on my devices. The quality of the audio is almost always limited by the quality of the headphones and the bitrate that your tracks are recorded in.

I've been perfectly happy with the latest version of the Google Music Player that supports Music Beta.

It is possible that your particular Samsung device has a defective headphone port.

An antenna may or may not help. The bigger problem is interference. The 2.4ghz band that WiFi operates on is very crowded. Portable phones and microwaves can wreak havoc on the signal. Are you able to change the channel that the WiFi operates on? I've found that I often have to experiment using different channels to find the one with the least interference.

9' is actually a really long way. SMPTE says the minimum you should have is 65" and if you believe THX you need 80". Since getting a TV that's too big isn't a concern, cost is going to be your biggest concern. What's your budget?

On the matter of your not being wealthy, I highly recommend you scope out Newegg.com. They have some crazy good deals.

Did you actually shatter it, or did you just knock a component off?

If you can find a qualified friend, you could always just purchase a replacement motherboard.