Lucky you live Hawaii: Beat the clock with Wootalyzer

Internet bargain hunters all know about the Wootalyzer. Or so it seems. This little pop-up program lurks in your notification tray (lower right, next to the taskbar) and monitors a number of one-day sale sites. When something new comes up, it shows a little information about it (you set how long the box stays, and if there is sound or not). If you're interested, or if you want to check all the sites, you can pop up the program and check them out.

On the Mainland, it seems that everyone knows about this, because it's hard to score one of the items before they sell out. New items are posted at midnight on some of the sites, so if you want one, you have to get up early. Or move to Hawaii, where they show up at a reasonable time in the early evening.

Problem is, many of the sites won't ship to Hawaii or shipping makes too big a dent in the bargain price. If you want it enough, you can have them send it to you via Ship to Hawaii, a consolidating service. Check the Ship to Hawaii website for how this works.

If you install this neat little program, you may want to take out the wine sites since shipping wine to Hawaii is not allowed apparently.

Also a caveat: these sites often carry what amounts to junk, stuff that is cheap because it doesn't work well for some reason. For example,  Monday you could have grabbed a Sandisk Sansa e260 4GB Media Player real cheap. The description might have sold you, but checking user reviews elsewhere might warn you off. It seems that the device has some kind of noise at low volume levels, according to reports. You have to do the research yourself.

Fortunately, there's time for you to do it. With most people asleep on the Mainland, you'll still be able to score an item if you want to buy it.