Legal Site Groklaw Shuts Down Rather Than Face NSA
I stopped flying years ago, because it offends me to be scanned, groped, and treated like a criminal in order exercise my fundamental human right of travel. Now I am wondering how long it will be before I stop using email and the web. Perhaps I should have stopped already.
How did we become a cyberpunk dystopia without most of us noticing?
Short version: Not only is My Movies by Brian Binnerup the only app to receive five stars, it’s the only app to receive more than three stars!
This is a quick review of eleven Android apps for keeping track of one’s DVD collection. Here are the things I am looking for.
Here is how I tested them.
Each app starts with -1 points, and the total number of points it has after testing is the number of stars it has. For example, an app with three points will be rated two stars.
Here are the movie collection apps I tested, and the results.
DVD Shelf ★★☆☆☆
Movie Catalog ★☆☆☆☆
Movie Collection + Inventory ★★☆☆☆
Movie Manager ☆☆☆☆☆Movie Manager (from Sort It!) required an inconvenient web site login before I could use the program. That’s really annoying. On the other hand, Sort It! has a number of other collection apps, and the same login works for all of them, so that’s kind of nifty.
Movie Manager ☆☆☆☆☆
MoviesBook ★★☆☆☆
Movies Collector ☆☆☆☆☆
Moviethek ★☆☆☆☆
Movie Xpress ★★★☆☆
My Movies (by Brian Binnerup) ★★★★★My Movies by Brian Binnerup required a web site login before I could use the program. That annoys me. However, it does provide a tangible benefit: you can share your movie collection between devices, including Iphones and Windows desktops.
My Movies (by CamelDroid) ☆☆☆☆☆The user interface for this CamelDroid app is terrible. The buttons are super-tiny, which makes them hard to see and hard to touch, and they are placed right under or over a much larger banner ad.
Not only is My Movies by Brian Binnerup the only app to receive five stars, it’s the only app to receive more than three stars! Frankly, I am surprised how bad most of these apps are: four out of the eleven received no stars at all. My Movies has a “pro” version that costs $5.99. Seeing how much better it is than its competition, that seems like a bargain to me.
I received my lovely (and exorbitantly expensive) HTC One today. It’s a well made phone, attractive and solidly built. I was very pleased with it until I discovered it has no SD Card slot and, more importantly, no way to replace the battery!
Like most people, I assume, I am paying for this phone over the course of two years. As we all know, the Li-ion battery in a cell phone typically lasts a year or so. To put this into perspective, I have worn out and replaced three batteries in my previous phone before the phone itself died and needed replacing. (That’s why I bought the HTC One.)
So now I have a phone that will literally not last as long as the payments on it. I can’t express how disappointed I am. How on Earth could anyone think that making a disposable $580 phone was a good idea??
I’m sending this back tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll do for a phone. Maybe a Galaxy S4.
P.S. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S4, which arrived yesterday. I am well pleased, and would recommend the Samsung Galaxy S4 to anyone considering the HTC One.
When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture†patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.
If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.
[…]
Vicinanza made the unusual choice to fight back against Hill and “Project Paperlessâ€â€”and actually ended up with a pretty resounding victory. But the Project Paperless patents haven’t gone away. Instead, they’ve been passed on to a network of at least eight different shell companies with six-letter names like AdzPro, GosNel, and FasLan. Those entities are now sending out hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of the same demand letter to small businesses from New Hampshire to Minnesota. (For simplicity, I’ll just refer to one of those entities, AdzPro.)
Ars has acquired several copies of the AdzPro demand letter; the only variations are the six-letter name of the shell company and the royalty demands, which range from $900 to $1,200 per employee.
(from Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners, Ars Technica)
I just had a panic moment when I thought that a Google document I’d spent the better part of a week writing had vanished. This is what I plan to do from now on, once a week, until I forget about it and stop doing it.
I just spent too much time pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to get Google Docs to paste spaces and keep them spaces, rather than turning the spaces into tabs. I couldn’t find a way to prevent it, so here is what I did.
Is it ridiculous that you need to do this to keep Google Docs from corrupting what you are pasting? Yes. Yes, it is.
I have a number of web sites I administer. Most of these are hosted on Dreamhost, and most of them run MediaWiki.
Recently, I have noticed an error whenever I upload an image to the wikis. What is supposed to happen is that ImageMagick resizes the image to make a set of thumbnails. What has been happening is that ImageMagick displays an error:
Error creating thumnail:
Exactly like that, with nothing after the colon. After many hours of research (and great help from the Dreamhost tech support team), I finally found the solution. Add this line to the LocalSettings.php file:
$wgMaxShellMemory = 524288
The cost to stream videos is ridiculous. DirecTV wants $6 and Amazon wants $4 for the same movie I can drive around the block and rent from a box for $2. And why is it that neither version of The Thing (1982, 2011) is available on Netflix streaming? I know Netflix would have them if it could, so it’s the dumbass studio that doesn’t want me to stream them from Netflix. It’s like the studio execs want people to download the movies from the internet without paying for them. Movie studios should be down on their knees kissing Netflix’s red leather loafers. It makes me wonder just how short-sighted someone has to be to get a job at a movie studio. I expect a typical movie studio meeting room is full of people who think vaccines, homeowner’s insurance, and dental floss are a waste of money.
Oh, speaking of The Thing (2011), we watched that last night. Not as bad as I’d heard, but clearly not the masterpiece that the 1982 John carpenter movie is.
What do you call a project management tool that doesn’t have any way to set task status, doesn’t have any way to set task prerequisites or dependencies, doesn’t have any form of time tracking, doesn’t have a way to set task priority, doesn’t have a way to move a task from one category to another, doesn’t have Gantt charts, and quite simply doesn’t have any of the fundamentally essential features of a project management system?
It’s called Basecamp. And they charge money for this garbage, believe it or not. Even more astonishing, people actually pay for it.
Originally submitted at BatteryMart.com
The valve regulated, spill-proof construction of this battery allows trouble-free, safe operation in any position.
Good product, good price
Pros: Good Value, Reliable Performance
Best Uses: Emergency Equipment, Portable Electronics
Describe Yourself: Value Oriented
Primary use: Personal
Was this a gift?: No
I ordered four of these to replace the batteries in two APC UPSs. The batteries fit the UPS enclosures perfectly, charged up, and work perfectly. I needed to use the terminal clips from the old batteries, but I already knew that, so that was not a problem.
(legalese)
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Blackmoor Vituperative