The Groupon competition has gotten so bad that competitors are springing up like weeds. If you just tuned in, Groupon is a website that offers daily discounts on just about anything. It’s been very popular with shoppers looking for deals. So popular, in fact, that web giant, Amazon, has decided to get into the act. Their new service is called “Amazon Local” and you can find it at Local.Amazon.com.

The pitch is that Amazon Local will present special deals near the viewer’s location. However, their only location so far is Boise, Idaho. We doubt this is making Groupon tremble. Not that we have anything against Boise we know people in Boise, nice people. We asked one of them if he would try Amazon Local and report back. “Works great,” he said; “got good concert tickets for $10.” If you sign up for Amazon Local now, they’ll let you know when your location is in their universe.

There are a couple of catches. First, you don’t get actual cash back. After a three-month earning period, you get an “eBay Bucks certificate” you can use to buy more stuff on eBay. After you receive your certificate, you have 30 days to spend it.

The second catch, according to a Techcrunch report: The Bucks program excludes all purchases from Classifieds, Business & Industrial Capital Equipment, Real Estate, and eBay Motors categories (except Parts & Accessories). eBay has been implementing Bucks through a pilot program over the past year and says that consumers in the program spent five times more on eBay than others did.

For example, we clicked on the “SoftCity Café” button and found raging discussions on everything from the Apple iPad to Facebook’s “like” buttons and the new Opera web browser for the Mac. We clicked on a “Creativity” tab and discovered “FontStruct,” a neat little program for creating your own type fonts.

We learned about NexusRadio.com which lets you choose from 11,000 online radio stations and even record the music you hear.  To find out more, we clicked on the reviewer’s name and sent him a message. You can do this with any of their tech experts and reviewers.

The café techies also told us about a free file compression program from 7-Zip.org. We don’t do file compression much, since we use cheap flash drives for storage, and websites like yousendit.com for large files. But occasionally we need to open compressed files that Windows can’t handle; 7-Zip handled them with no problems.

You can earn “soft dollars” at SoftCity to get discounts on products. If you upload your picture to SoftCity and fill out a tiny bit of information about yourself, you get 2500 soft dollars, which can be redeemed at their store, once you earn 6000 points. You can also earn soft dollars for commenting on reviews or submitting one of your own, even if it’s just one sentence.

SoftCity has around 150 free trials of software for Windows, Mac and Linux machines, and some titles for mobile users. Right now, we’re trying out their video converter for iPods and iPads, their PowerPoint quiz creator, and a free website creator. By her second day, Joy earned enough softdollars to buy the video converter for $9, instead of $15.

We tried the new “Clock Rack” which puts a series of clocks on your desktop. It’s handy to see at a glance the time in Bangkok, where some of our readers are. But the clocks were wrong for England, Scotland, and India. We checked them against timeanddate.com, which is accurate.

We also tried out “CL Helper,” which gives you alerts when a Craigslist item goes on sale. We found it cumbersome, and even worse, it didn’t fully uninstall when we tried to remove it.

A better bet is  ”StartUp Cop” which tells you which programs start up when your computer does and makes it easy to block unwanted startups. There’s also “DiskPie” for telling you which files and programs are hogging your computer’s storage space.  We also liked “ViewThru” which lets you see through one window on your desktop to the ones underneath.

With this deal, McAfee gets access to 350 million potential new customers. But what do you get?  Bob is very leery of this deal because they ask you for your credit card number before giving you the “free” product.  Almost every time a company asks for your credit card number before they give you a “free” product or service, you find yourself on an automatic billing program when that free deal expires. Surprise!  You probably forgot all about it six months later, but they didn’t.

McAfeee doesn’t charge you during the first six months, but when that’s over, you’re charged $35 for a year’s subscription. That’s a 30 percent discount over the regular price.  But it still may not be a good deal.

If you take the deal, you’ll be asked to uninstall any anti-virus product you’re currently using. We’re currently using Avast anti-virus. Unlike McAfee and most other products, it never bugs you with difficult questions about what to keep and what to throw out. If it’s malware, a category that includes viruses, trojans and the like, it’s eliminated, period. You can get the basic version of Avast for  free at  Avast.com.

Yesterday, Joy’s friend Nancy, who uses McAfee, had several forms of malware on her computer. There was a huge “block or allow” message on the screen warning her of threats. But every time Nancy clicked  ”block,” the message stayed there. It turned out she had to exit completely out of the Web and then click “block,” to make the message go away. And it wasn’t at all clear what site was being blocked.

If you want to try out McAfee for yourself, go to facebook.com/mcafee and click “become a fan” or to facebook.com/security and click “protect your pc.”  Watch out for future billing.

Crime-novelist Carl Hiaasen

–Writers on Writing

The New York Times did a series called “Writers on Writing,” and if you enter those words in Google, the link comes up right away. Here you can learn some things about writing from famous novelists. They’re not interviews, they’re essays by the writers themselves.

What you see are dos-and-don’ts, problems, and how they solved them. Crime-novelist Carl Hiaasen starts out “One time I had to kill this guy. It was in a novel, but that didn’t make it easy.” Elmore Leonard, a master of dialogue, advises not starting with a description of the weather. (But what about: “It was a dark and stormy night.”)

This brings to mind tips and tricks from other writers, who don’t have essays in this series (probably because they’re dead). The French novelist, Balzac, ordered his man-servant to chain him to his writing desk from midnight to dawn and not release him no matter what the excuse. He also drank 50 cups of coffee every day (and night), eventually dying of caffeine poisoning.

Raymond Chandler, master of the hard-boiled detective novel, advised writers that whenever things seemed at an impasse, have a man walk into the room with a gun in his hand.

–Groupon.com has daily deals in 45 U.S. cities. We saw memberships at the Chicago Art Institute going for $40 — normally $110, and tickets to Cirque du Soleil for $49 instead of $82.

Casa Blanca "Here's Looking at You Kid"

– MovieClips.com has 12,000 two-minute video clips from the libraries of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures. The clips are all free. We typed in “Here’s Looking at You Kid” and watched the famous scene from Casablanca. One click sends it to Facebook or emails it to a friend. Watch The Terminator say “I’ll be back” one more time.

– Goodrecyclers.com has recycling locations.  The U.S. generates around three million tons of e-waste a year, and only 14 percent is recycled. Some recyclers just export the toxic stuff, which is worse. This site helps you find the good guys.

– StockTwits.com has “twits” –short comments about stocks. If you sign up, you get 60 people to follow who contribute regularly. Type in the stocks in your portfolio and see what others are saying about them or contribute views of your own.

–Groupon.com has daily deals for 45 U.S. cities. We saw membership at the Chicago Art Institute going for $40 — normally $110 — and tickets to Cirque du Soleil for $49 instead of $82.

If you don’t have an iPhone, you can get promo codes sent to your email address or cell phone, at redbox.com.

Redbox offers$1 video rentals from kiosks, typically found in  U.S. grocery stores and pharmacies. The iPhone app works by giving you promotional codes that you enter into the machine to get  free movies or discounts.  You start off with one free movie, which  pays for the 99 cent app.

– Pricefalls.com is an online reverse auction site using the “Dutch Auction” method of entering your bid as prices fall in a steady decline. (This is how Google’s stock went public, by the way.)  You can buy the item immediately at any point in the falling prices. The auction ends when a predetermined floor is reached.

– DisneyDigitalbooks.com is a great new website offering 500 Disney picture and story books with animated illustrations and characters that talk in the voices children know from movies.  Included are 60 Winnie the Pooh books, Mickey Mouse, Toy Story, etc. A “story builder” lets kids create their own stories and a dictionary lets children click on any word to hear it read aloud. There are three reading levels: beginner readers with a companion, independent readers and readers who are ready for chapter books. There is a free trial. Subscriptions are $9 a month.

– CommonKindness.com offers printable discount coupons for grocery and other stores, while also giving 20 percent of the sale (or 60 percent of the profits, whichever is greater) to charities you choose  from a list of more than a million.

MyBoneYard.com

MyRegistry.com provides a place to register your wishes for presents for any occasion. You can do this at several other Web sites, but this one claims a difference because you can request presents from particular stores.

Software-DOD.com offers discount deals on software. The “DOD” part of the name stands for “Deal of the Day,” so the deeply discounted price applies to one product for one day. The product changes every day. Discounts range from just 10 percent to more than 90 percent on some software.