Earlier this week, the internet was exploding with the recollection of Mat Honen’s epic hacking, Apple and Amazon’s security flaws (which have been fixed), and what people can do to protect themselves. Step one, as always, stronger unique passwords. Step two… two factor authentication… but that’s not the point I wanted to bring up.

As things move towards the cloud and our lives are put more and more online, it’s important to remain vigilant and careful. Honen wasn’t targeted because he was special, important, or rich… he was targeted because he had a three letter Twitter handle.

So be careful out there. And back up everything…

Here are some of this week’s gems:
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It’s been quite some time since we’ve done a Roundup here at Bargaineering and I thought I’d start doing them again. Roundups are lists of links to other sites that I read and I scour the web for interesting posts that I hope you’ll find interesting as well. This week takes on the theme of Frugality, which is fitting since I also steward the Festival of Frugality, a blog carnival focused on squeezing pennies out of dollars.

Without further delay, here were a few posts I found interesting this week:
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If you’ve been surfing the web this week you probably saw this video of this contestant, Caitlin, guessing a puzzle using only one letter:

Esquire profiled her afterwards which included this other fantastic game show gem when Terry Kniess, on The Price is Right, won both showcase showdowns with a perfect guess. (video of his guess after the jump)

If that isn’t enough, all these game show antics reminded me of Ohio native Michael Larson on Press Your Luck in 1984. He hit 35 squares in a row by memorizing the patterns and accumulated $110,237 in about an hour! It’s a fantastic story and you can watch video of it here.

Great stuff huh? For more great stuff, here’s this week’s roundup!
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As this article posts we should be on our way home from Pittsburgh after the last wedding of the 2010 wedding season. We’ve seen a lot of our friends pair up this year, with a few pairs still scheduled for next year, and it’s been a lot of fun celebrating but draining because of all the travel. Weddings are ridiculously fun and I enjoy them immensely, don’t get me wrong, but the amount travel can start to wear on you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s totally worth it, but it’d be nice to have a few consecutive weekends at home just to relax, catch up on some projects, and spend more time just relaxing and enjoying a Sunday afternoon of football.

This is completely unrelated to weddings, that is the nature of these roundups, but if you’re a fan of Jon Stewart, here’s an entertaining interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air where they discuss a plethora of issues including the upcoming October 30th rallies.

Here are a few articles I’ve found interesting this past week:
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The last few weeks, the frugal world has been buzzing about how Mark Boyle lived an entire year without cash. It’s was more about sustainability and reducing waste than living without cash, but I think it’s was a pretty valuable social experiment. It reminded me of a more “important” Super Size Me type of experiment.

If we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn’t contaminate it.

Interesting stuff… here are a few more interesting things I read the last few weeks:
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It’s been insanely hot this past week as the thermometer has routinely broken 100 degrees in the Baltimore Washington area. We’ve been fortunate in that we live in an area where blackouts and brownouts, even as air conditioners are running full blast, are rare but the temperatures have just been unbearable. I don’t know what’s worst, the temperature or the humidity, walking outside is like being waterboarded!

A few tips on how to keep cool followed by our links for the week:

• Take advantage of other people’s A/C… and by other people I mean the local mall.
• Cook outside if you can, such as on the grill, or using the microwave to keep your home cooler. Avoid using burners and definitely avoid the oven.
• Eat cool dishes, rather than hot ones.
• Line dry clothes, you don’t need your dryer competing with your air conditioning.
• Only cool the rooms you use. If you live in a house and can block off some vents, do so when you have central air on. If you use an room-sized AC unit, stick it in the room you’ll be in.
• Use the fan. A fan works by blowing your body heat away from you, so you don’t need it on when you aren’t around. You can use it to exhaust hot air from a room by blowing it outside and create natural circulation in your home.
• Drink lots of water to stay hydrated!
• Limit your time outdoors, the sun can significantly sap your strength.

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It’s been a while since Bargaineering has been in a somewhat active “blog network” but I’m happy to announce that we’ve joined the Yakezie, an informal group of personal finance bloggers looking to help each other out. I sometimes miss the camaraderie of the blog networks in the past so I hope will bring some of that back. If nothing else, it’ll be fun!

Also, if you’re an aficionado of home remodeling, you need to check out my friend Fred’s Home Renovation Before and After Contest. You need to share your home renovation project story, submit some pictures, and starting June 20th they’ll select one winner each Sunday. Winner gets a $50 gift card to Lowes, Home Depot, or Amazon and they make a $100 donation to Habitat for Humanity. If you did a renovation, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t enter this contest.

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The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just keeps on going (though it’s down to a smaller leak)… it’s been spilling since the Deepwater Horizon exploded April 21st. Since then, oil has been “leaking” out at a staggering rate. These pictures are just sad. The effects of this disaster will be felt for decades. In Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where the Exxon Valdez spilled millions of crude twenty years ago, the herring have yet to return.

In other news…
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