Tunlr is a web site that let’s you watch on-demand video streams from U.S.-based television networks outside the U.S. I’m able to watch ABC, CBS and MTV TV shows on my Mac. MTV even streams some shows in HD quality. Looks great! I can watch full Saturday Night Live episodes on Hulu, pretty cool. Tunlr unblocks watching Netflix on AppleTV and iPad on any location on this planet. It also removes the stupid 50 song limit on last.fm.

Probably the coolest thing about Tunlr is that it’s completely free. Check it out!

Iodine is a software that let’s you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. If you’re wondering why on earth you’d ever need such a thing, read here. You basically need a client (in my case an Apple MacBook Air) and a Linux server (see here for some super cheap low end Linux VPS boxes) to start off. Please see one of the tutorials on how to setup the Iodine daemon (iodined) on the Linux server. In this post I’m focusing on the client setup for OS X.

Iodine can be easily compiled using Xcode but I’m providing the binaries in this site’s download area for your convenience. You also need to install a tunnel device on the OS X client. Check out the TunTap virtual interface device kernel extension. Read more »

I’m currently running an AdWords campaign for my new project wheniskeynote.com. Since that web site is strictly non-commercial and won’t ever generate any revenues I have to bear the costs for the ad myself. It’s more like a test to learn how Google AdWords works and how it could be useful to me in future projects.

The CPC (cost-per-click) for the keywords I use (permutations of something like “next apple keynote”) is around 50 cents, which is pretty high considering that my ad is the only ad ever showing up in searches (I’m not using the content network btw.) using these keywords. Google’s answer to this particular situation is rather cryptic and not really comprehensible for an AdWords client. Fortunately, the CPC for my campaign is still far off from keywords like “auto insurance price quotes”, “consolidate graduate student loans” which sell for a whopping $50 per click on average!

Interestingly, one of my keyword combinations which was already running successfully for a few days suddenly showed a 20% CPC increase. My ad wasn’t even shown in searches anymore for that combination because the CPC now was higher than my maximum default bid. The reason why I suspect a CPC manipulation is that there’s no other bidder for this combination. If I increase the CPC to the requested bid level, my ad is showing up again but still the only one showing up. Needless to say that I won’t be bullied into bidding for artificially increased CPC. Someone at Google should redesign this revenue-generating algorithm in a way that isn’t THAT obvious :-)