The best National Cheeseburger Day deals (starting at 1 cent!)
PLUS: A fantastic Google TV hack and how I made a $5 *profit* on a Sling TV subscription.
DISCLAIMER: Some of the links included herein are affiliate links (usually those in bold blue type), meaning if you make a purchase via one of them, I may get a small commission. I promise you, now and forever, that I won’t choose deals based on whether there’s an affiliate option available.
Sometimes I like to poke fun at the nonsensical seller names that populate Amazon these days, because many of them are just bananas. Here’s how they’re conceived — in my imagination:
Company President Bob: “Okay, what are we going to call our new Amazon store that sells Bluetooth bath mats?”
[Cat walks across keyboard]
Bob: “Genius! Pl8gnache it is!”
Anyway, here’s a quiz; answer next week!
September 18 is National Cheeseburger Day; these are the best deals
Name a more perfect food than the cheeseburger. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Correct: pizza. But the burger runs it an awfully close second, especially when paired with fries (which, let’s face it, don’t go with pizza).
Monday, Sept. 18, is National Cheeseburger Day, and lots of chains are rolling out major deals. (Note that you may need an app to get some of them, and they’re almost all limited to one per customer.) Here’s where you can stuff your burger hole on the cheap:
Burger King: Free cheeseburger with the purchase of $1 or more.
Dairy Queen: I’ve never tried a burger here, but I might on Monday: You get a free one with a purchase of $1 or more.
McDonald’s: 50-cent double cheeseburgers.
Wendy’s: 1-cent (!) Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger with any purchase. And this is available from Sept. 18-22.
Here’s a more complete list of the best National Cheeseburger Day deals.
Make your Google TV interface better in 30 seconds
Do you own a Google TV, by which I mean one that uses Google’s operating system? It’s found in models from Hisense, LG, Sony, TCL, and other brands. I’ve always considered it an overly busy and somewhat unintuitive interface, which is why I strongly prefer Roku.
Good news! There’s a little-known but very easy way to make Google’s UI more Roku-like. (Full credit to TechRadar for this tip, as it was totally new to me.)
All you do is venture into settings and enable Apps Only Mode, which removes a lot of the clutter (including personalized recommendations) from the interface, leaving you with a simple, straightforward app grid.
You can try it out by going to Settings > Accounts > Your primary account > Apps-Only Mode.
There’s a full tutorial for this at TechRadar. I just flipped the switch on my Hisense TV and, sure enough, it works. To my thinking it’s a huge improvement. Your thoughts?
How I made $5 signing up for a month of Sling TV
Here’s my annual (okay, monthly) reminder to use cash-back services — and, when possible, more than one. Recently I signed up for a month of Sling TV so I could watch Lions football. Current promo: $20 for the first month. Rakuten’s current cash-back offer: $15 on any purchase of $20 or more. Bingo! So I signed up, and later the same day, Rakuten credited $15 to my account. Final price for that first month of Sling: $5.
But, wait, that wasn’t the final price: Before pulling the trigger on the subscription, I checked the Offers section for my Chase Sapphire Visa card, which has dozens of rotating cash-back deals every months. Bingo: $10 cash back on a Sling purchase of $20 or more!
These two entities have nothing to do with each other, so the end result is I just made $5 on this deal.
But, wait, even that wasn’t the end of it: I also use the Drop app to passively earn points on purchases from places like Amazon, Kroger, Target, Rite-Aid, and Sunoco. I’d checked the app before subscribing to Sling, and, sure enough, I’d get 100 points per dollar spent — so I added 2,000 points to my tally. That brought me closer to the $50 Amazon gift card I’m gunning for.
You can’t always triple-dip like this, and even landing a double-dip is somewhat rare. But it’s certainly worth the 30 seconds of investigation before you buy anything. So let me recap what tools I use, and what you can get when signing up for them with my links:
Rakuten: If you’re new to this cash-back service, this is the time to sign up — you’ll get a $40 credit (seriously!) on your first purchase of $40 or more. Free money, even if you only use it once.
Chase Sapphire Visa: 60,000 bonus points when you spend $4,000 over the first three months. That’s equivalent to $750 in travel. You also get a $50 hotel credit each year, free DoorDash deliveries, and lots of other perks.
Drop: Add a credit card and you’ll start earning points you can redeem for gift cards. There’s an automatic $5 credit (in points form) when you sign up with code cvm40.
REVIEW: The Edifier W320TN is the regular-AirPods alternative you’ve been waiting for
Raise your hand if you don’t like the feel of AirPods Pro or other silicone-eartip earbuds in your ears. Ah, I see quite a lot of hands. No surprise: Some folks get weirded out by screwing those things into their ear canals. But if you want active noise-canceling (ANC) — and you do — what’s the alternative? Apple’s 2nd- and 3rd-generation AirPods, the ones with hard-plastic earbuds, don’t do ANC.
Ta-daa: Edifier’s new W320TN ($99.99) bridges the gap, delivering robust ANC without the silicone. And I’m here to tell you: They’re damn good. They’re among the more comfortable “open fit” earbuds I’ve worn (though I have decidedly medium-size ears; your mileage may vary), and they sound superb. Edifier is no slouch at audio; this is a real company with real fidelity bona-fides.
To wit: These earbuds have 13mm drivers (versus 11mm on current-gen AirPods) and support Hi-Res and Hi-Res Wireless Audio. They also incorporate Sony’s LDAC encoding and decoding technology, which allows for higher bit rates. I won’t pretend to fully understand most of that; I’ll just say that I’ve tested these against 2nd-gen AirPods, and to my ears they sound just as good.
Plus: ANC! This works surprisingly well given that the earbuds don’t have the added noise isolation afforded by silicone ear tips. There’s a tiny bit of hiss when you enable ANC, but it pretty much vanishes when music kicks in.
The W320TNs have stem-based “pinch” controls, much like AirPods Pro. I like this far better than touch controls, which are either too easy to graze by accident or too hard to engage on purpose. Within Edifier’s companion app, you can fine-tune what the pinch-controls actually do: skip a track, raise/lower the volume, switch ANC modes, etc.
I do wish the app offered more than just four equalizer presets; it should have a custom option as well, but no luck there. I also don’t love the drab gray color of the case or earbuds; at least they’re available in a more pleasing ivory as well.
Because this is a new product, it’s yet to be discounted. If you’re not in a hurry, I’d wait until Black Friday gets closer, as sale pricing is pretty likely. Until then, just know that the Edifier W320TN is arguably the best AirPod alternative you can get right now, at least if you want open-fit earbuds that also do noise-canceling.
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I don't like the Google interface either, but I feel the need to keep it in order to still be able to use voice search
To each their own, I guess. I much prefer the GoogleTV interface to Roku, as it gets right to the content rather than make me choose a service first.