Fun and Games

Because you can never spend too much on cat toys... how about an

iPad app for your cat

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Someday this may help us figure out how to always have a good hair day

Like How Your Hair Hangs? Praise the Laws of Physics

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So if I ever get hold of a jetpack and go flitting about the world, this is something to remember

Hovering isn’t difficult if you’re top heavy

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Apparently the International Space Station is passing over as I type this. Sadly it's cloudy outside.

However, if you are on twitter and follow

@twisst47

They will DM you with the times you can go look for it to pass overhead. So far it's been in the wee hours of the am until tonight... tonight it was supposed to be at 7:30pm. Perfect... except for the clouds. Oh well. Next time.

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Lastly, I may have to start wearing zebra stripes at certain times of the year.

Zebra stripes evolved to keep biting flies at bay

I wonder if it works for mosquitoes too... hmmm.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 07:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Odds and Ends

My son sent this today

The Scale of the Universe

Really really cool.

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Every few months I think I want to try the new Reminders list on my iphone. Then I realize that not only do I not have Siri, but the app doesn't let me use landscape to type (seriously? WTF apple?) And the location based reminders are so not ready for prime time yet.

I figure in about 5 years it will be fantastic. Right now it's just meh. Oh well.

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One of my friends sent me this link. I really need at least one of these, if not an entire army of them for my garden...

Combat Garden Gnomes.

Awesomeness. Sheer awesomeness.

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My husband found that some web sites he visits have video ads that run whenever you hit the site, a feature that is downright irritating. He is using ad block plus on Firefox and the ads still run. (even more irritating).

After a bit of investigating I found that under tools in the browser bar, there is an entry for Ad Block Plus. One can open a window of "blockable items" and you can scroll down through the list and look for links with swf. Then you can block their happy little asses.

I hate those wankers. I don't mind unobtrusive print ads but I loathe blinking ads or videos that run without my okay. They must all be stopped.

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And last but not least in news you need to know...

Mating call of an extinct bush-cricket rings out again after 165m years

Why?  Well, because they can. Or maybe they find crickets sexy. Hard to say.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 03:17 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Not So Super Anymore

I just finished watching my last Super Bowl (maybe even football game).  This has been coming on for a while, but tonight I decided I've had enough.

We watched most of the game with the sound muted because the "National Call" is simply dreadful.  They vacillate between one team and the other being "the best ever".  They fawn over players to the point where you want to tell them to get a room from crap's sake. There's so much inane blather I want to throw things at the television.  It's too much. 

If one was at a bar where other things were going on it might be tolerable.  But sitting at home with only the game on, it's too dreadful for words.

Sadly the radio call here is even worse.  I have no idea where they got those two guys, but wow, bad doesn't even begin to describe it.

Of course then we have the game itself.  It's so full of show off showboaters I cringe after nearly every play.  So, a guy who makes a bazillion bucks tackles someone on the other team and he dances or does a little praying thing or points at the crowd, or flexes his biceps or whatever... Dude why are you showing off for doing your friggin' job???  It gets worse every year.  Pretty soon we'll have entire teams out there doing some sort of salsa dance after every play.  Just because the play is over and aren't they great...

Seriously?

What happened to the football games I used to watch with my dad all those years ago?  The guys went out and did their job.  If they won the game they celebrated.  Otherwise they played the game.  They didn't suck oxygen on the sidelines, they didn't dance in the end zone, and they didn't need a lawyer on the field to figure out which hits were okay and which were bad or did they really catch the ball or not.  

Oh and let's not forget about the play reviews... why do we bother with refs on the field?  Just have cameras do all the work.  Now that the guys in stripes know every play will be reviewed they don't even watch well enough to make good calls - the on field mistakes happen more and more often.  Of course it might help if the NFL would decide they want to be a professional sport and actually hire their refs full time... you know like other sports do. 

I'll stick with hockey.  It's way more fun to watch, the players are tough as nails and the local call is always good (no matter which team it is).  Of course now that hockey is getting more attention with HD TV it may go the way of football and baseball and become completely unwatchable.  I hope not, but I won't be surprised. 

I guess then I'll have to see if I can find some Rugby to watch.  Sheesh.

Posted by: Teresa in Ho-Hum at 11:38 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I Wonder If I Could Break The Machine Just by Thinking Hard

I saw a link to this story today:

Mind-Reading May Be Reality Soon

By looking only at maps of electrical activity in the human brain, scientists were able to tell which words a person was listening to. The discovery is a major step toward being able to "hear” the thoughts of people who can’t speak.

Okay so this is something they are working on for a good cause.  Really I could see this being a wonderful thing for many people.

Then my brain veers off into.... what if land. 

What if they finally get a workable machine then install them in airports.  I mean they already do the strip scan because anyone traveling is considered totally bonkers.  (well really, don't you HAVE to be totally bonkers to want to fly anywhere these days with airports being like humongous cattle ranches... you can hear TSA now "Line 'em up boys, time for branding!")

Anyhow, where was I... oh yeah.  They install these things in airports and damn if that wouldn't cut down on the crowds.  They'd be hauling people out of line right and left.  Jails would overflow.

Come to think of it... might make air travel nice again.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 10:32 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Winding Your Way Through Google's Latest Privacy Maze - UPDATE

***sorry wrong wrong link earlier - fixed now. Ha! ***

If you don't want to completely drop Google from your world, Naked Security will give you the step by step of what to look for.

How to navigate Google's privacy options

It's so tiring having to go back and redo privacy options all the time. Of course we all know the reason these places keep changing things is in hopes you'll eventually just say "the hell with it, I'm tired of messing with these things" and then they get their way and get to track you all over.

Posted by: Teresa in WebTech at 03:23 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Trackery

In the comments to the previous post there is some discussion of tracking by google. Thoughts of which tend to make me feel extremely paranoid.

Then I remembered this post from Ars Technica the other day.

Google already knows you're a 24-year old woman who loves wombats

And I checked to see what google thinks of me...

Your categories and demographics

No interest or demographic categories are associated with your ads preferences so far. You can add or edit interests and demographics at any time.

Yes, I must have opted out of ad tracking a while back and forgotten. I don't think it's the "ad block plus" I use on my browser... but maybe it is.

Right now google is not owning up to tracking me around the web. Not sure if that makes me feel better or not. Hmmm...

Posted by: Teresa in Ummmmm at 12:51 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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End of the Week

So I've been doing quite a lot of backend system cleanup on my Mac.  When one does an upgrade there are bound to be things that don't work quite right. 

I've had the Console open for the last few days and I've been chasing down error messages in the log files and fixing as much stuff as I can.  So far I haven't broken anything... I guess that's good.

In the meantime, out in the real world there have been some interesting developments.

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Like over in Germany where Babette hit "Reply All" and brought the German Parliament email system to a halt. Nice little Denial of Service.

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Facebook is planning an IPO.  Can't wait to see what happens once they have to start disclosing information about themselves instead of us.

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Supposedly there is going to be a Twitter boycott.  I'm trying to figure out how they'll do it without using twitter to communicate about the boycott...

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Face it - there is no such thing as "privacy" out there anymore.  Privacy on the net is an illusion.  I've seen people who wouldn't touch Facebook ever, turn around an use Google for all their stuff.  Someone tell me what the difference is because I must be missing something.

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So there you go. Have a great weekend!  You are now up to date on almost nothing.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 01:00 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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IPhone Battery Life : now with a tiny update

When Apple updated their stuff (all at the same time... what could POSSIBLY go wrong?).  There was a sudden battery life issue for many iphone users. 

It seemed to be random. Some people had issues others didn't.  Why? What could have caused it? 

I think I found the answer. (although only the few peeps who read my blog will ever know - you'll be cutting edge - ha!).

I did not do all the upgrades at once.  The first thing I did was upgrade my iphone 4 to iOS 5.  That's it.  No other changes.  No iCloud, no Lion on my Mac... just  iOS 5.  And my battery life went into a tailspin. 

I did all the little tricks that have been posted and I mostly got a better battery life, but it wasn't great.  I mean smartphones already have sucky battery life it doesn't help if one upgrades and it's suddenly worse. 

I waited around for a few months.  I let masses of Apple fans upgrade immediately and fail on all aspects.  They moaned and complained and lost stuff.  I waited longer still.  I had Mobile Me and I had until June. 

In another post I talked about the next upgrade. Lion went smoothly but iCloud was a huge annoyance.  I finally got the account straight. Thank heaven!  But my iphone battery life went straight down the toilet... again. 

This time I knew it had to be something to do with iCloud or there was a slim possibility it had to do with my gmail account being on my iphone. 

First of all I deleted my gmail account and added it back.  It's all imap and no mail actually sits on my phone thus it was simple.  No change though.  One down. On to the next.

Then I went into the iCloud settings.  I turned off everything except Mail... the others are (contacts, calendars, reminders, bookmarks, notes, photostream, documents and find my iphone).  Rebooted.  Battery life - phenominal!

Next I started turning things back on one at a time.  I never have Notes or documents to sync, so those remain off. If I want to sync a note I use Evernote. Since I wouldn't even be able to see a document on my iphone, there's no point in bringing those in.

First I turned on contacts, then calendars.  No problems. Then I turned on Reminders. Still no problems. Then Find my iphone.  Still okay.

Then Bookmark sync... OMG battery life started draining at a rate of about 10% (on further though I should make this 10-20%) per hour!!!  Holy crap!!!  Bookmarks? I vaguely remember getting a periodic message on my Mac telling me that Bookmarks were not syncing properly... I should have paid more attention. I always ignored it because I don't  use Safari. There is no reason for me to sync bookmarks  I just wanted to test it. I was absolutely blown away.  Bookmark sync must run continuously in the background.  If I had the battery charged to 100% it was dead by morning.  Completely dead. No life at all.

So Bookmark sync is off.  I even have photostream back on and the battery life continues in the phenomenal range.  How weird is that.  I have not heard a thing from anyone else anywhere with similar findings. 

If you know someone with an iphone and they are having battery issues... they might want to check for bookmark sync on either Mobile Me or iCloud. 

Geeze.  I'm still stunned.

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Tiny update: I do have a couple of apps like Omnifocus and a couple of calendar apps that tend to make my battery drain too fast for my liking.  If I turn those off in the background I'm much happier.  Thought I should throw that out there.

I should also be clear - I had the notes feature off on Mobile Me  (documents was not available and was not on by default) so neither of these could have been draining battery life.

Posted by: Teresa in WebTech at 11:01 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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A Couple of Random Thoughts

There are a couple of headlines on the Mac Rumors site I just couldn't pass up.

Apple Retail Stores Coming to India?

Will they have American help desk people serving them? 

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'Absinthe A5' Brings First Untethered Jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2

What will your device remember afterward?

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Have a great weekend!

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 04:08 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Awesomeness

Looks like yesterday's animated GIF from The Oatmeal has garnered him far more attention than he ever thought possible.  Really cool indeed!  Go read the post protest fun.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 11:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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SOPA and PIPA - Let's Try and Stop Them Before They Stop Us: Now Updated

Go here read this.

Thank you.

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UPDATE: This just in: a NSFW explanation of SOPA and PIPA by the Oatmeal.  I think this covers it.

I drew a Goat...

Posted by: Teresa in Current Affairs at 09:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The Internet... Clinging to Life by a Thread

Before the SOPA and PIPA bills shut down the internet for good... hurry up and check this out.

Monumental Paper Architecture

or these

Incredible Photographs of Jellyfish

Cool stuff.  I found these on Flipboard for iPad which is really quite amazing.  They find some of the most awesome photos.  Of course this brings home to me exactly how uninspired my own forays into photography have been.  Oh well. 

So, go read them now before you can't any more.  Soon apps like flipboard, not to mention social networking of every kind, may be shut down with a single complaint.  What a sucky way for such a tremendous thing like the internet to slowly lurch to a halt. *sigh*

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 11:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Upgrade

Over the weekend I upgraded my Mac from the Snow Leopard OS to Lion.  Then upgraded Mobile Me to iCloud. 

The only reason I did this is because Mobile Me is going away in June.  I didn't want to make the move until the initial uproar had died down, but didn't want to wait until the stragglers were doing a last minute switch.  I figured the middle of January would be a good time.

Luckily Don McAllister of Screencasts Online made a couple of tutorials to make things smoother for the rest of us.  I made 3 backups of my system, downloaded the Lion app from the App store. Made a copy of that and saved it to a separate drive, then installed. 

It all went so well I've been rather dazed.  Not only that, but my machine is behaving much better under Lion.  I think all the applications, with the "Lion ready" updates, didn't work so well in Snow Leopard anymore.

Of course the downside was the upgrade to iCloud.  It sucked.  Apple tells you to sign in with your Appleid.  This is okay if you are new to Apple and have no Mobile Me stuff.

If you have Mobile Me already DO NOT DO IT!  DO NOT!!!  Sign in using your Mobile Me account - trust me you will be very glad you did!

That was my big mistake.  My appleid and my mobile-meid were two different things.  I had to sit through about 3 hours of chat with an Apple Mobile-Me person to get it straight.  They knew what they were doing, but OMG it all takes forever on chat!  I got the 2 id's combined and it's all working finally! 

I have yet to see if Lion will continue to play nice... iCloud too for that matter.  I had no documents on Mobile Me so I think that works greatly in my favor. Many people had issues with disappearing documents. 

So I've now gone through the painful process. It's nearly as bad as when a computer dies and you have to get a new one.  It's why I wait as long as I think I can before doing anything. 

Let's hope that's it for a while. Whew!

Posted by: Teresa in Ummmmm at 03:26 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Patch It Up

Yesterday was patch Tuesday for Windows machines.  If this is your OS, get the patches done please.

Also, you may remember my post from December about the Zero Day exploits for Adobe.  If you must use Adobe Reader and/or Acrobat, they now have the patches available. 

That is all.

Posted by: Teresa in WebTech at 11:56 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Are We Past the Holidays?

I think all the Christmas commercials are finally finished. I've never understood why car companies play them into the ground through the beginning of January... we're already sick of them by November 1.  No it won't make me buy someone a car for Christmas. Geeze.

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Heard that some girl bungee jumped and the chord broke. Someone explain to me why one jumps off a perfectly good bridge.

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The sports world is in meltdown because Tim Tebow played a competent game and has moved his team along in the finals. Here's a tip for everyone who is having issues with this... stop listening to sports talk while this is going on. If you don't listen you don't have to hear Tim talk about his religion. I'm pretty sure the Patriots will take out Denver this coming weekend. We'll see.

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Headline of the day:

Extinct Giant Tortoise May Still Be Alive in Galapagos

Ummm... so is it extinct or alive... it can't be both.  They need a new headline writer. Let me do the job an editor should have done:

Galapagos Giant Tortoise May Not Be Extinct

How's that?

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Last of all, if you exercise, please pay attention to what your body is telling you.  Although they specifically pick on yoga this time, this could be any type of exercise.  Unless you are an Olympic athlete, it's not a contest... really it's not.  So stop trying to outdo everyone around you and pay attention.

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Okay that's it for now. 

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 11:41 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Map It

One man, two years... an award winning map.

The Greatest Paper Map of the United States You’ll Ever See

I think I'll have to order one of these.  It's very cool! 

Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

Posted by: Teresa in Current Affairs at 10:35 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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My Current Favorite Commercial

I'm not sure if they play these commercials other than during hockey games.  So if you aren't a hockey fan, you might not have seen Tim Thomas in his acting debut trying to get "Peggy" to help him with his credit card.



It cracks me up because it's so very Boston.  The cabbie is played by a local DJ Alicia Love, here's a bit about her. 

If we have to watch commercials about 1000 times per event, at least they should make us laugh.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 10:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Out With the Old and In With the New

As always I'm ready to move on to a new year.  Not that this particular year was bad, but I like to look ahead and not back.

So Happy New Year to all of you and may 2012 bring you many wonderful things indeed! 

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 11:15 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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News You Can Use

Tim Thomas is the best goalie in the NHL.  He's also a really fantastic guy.  AND he's 37 years old!  I don't endorse athletes as role models, but many kids could benefit from knowing how he got where he is today.  My favorite quote:

"Sometimes it seemed like they would have rather had goalies in the NHL who looked good getting scored on than ones who looked bad stopping the puck,” he remembers.

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Stop brain shrink?  Well that's what these people are touting to keep you from losing your memory as you get older.  Does it work?  Who knows.  It's about as good as anything else out there I guess.

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A couple of scientists are proposing SETI be used to look for alien footprints on the moon.  I think they should look for human ones first and if they find them, then go on to the alien type. 

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So there you go.  Have fun. 

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 05:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Tweetings That Make me Laugh

One of the things I like about Twitter is the humor factor whether intentional or not.  If you follow the right people you will see some very funny things. 

Unintentionally funny:

DON'T DRIVE DRUNK. From 6pm-6am on New Year's Eve/Day AAA will take your drunk self and your car home for FREE, member or not: 800-222-4357

This was a retweet and I don't follow the original person who posted, but the first thing I thought was "so any other time it's okay to drive drunk... alrighty then".

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Here's another retweet from a person I don't follow but maybe I should....

BROS-DO NOT HIRE A MÖBIUS STRIPPER 4 A BACHELOR PARTY.OURS TOOK OFF ALL HER CLOTHES AND YET END UP FULLY DRESSED.FEELING PERPLEXED+RIPPD OFF

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And here's one from @deathstarPR who I do follow. It's all in how you look at it:

You say, "Force choke", we say, "thoughtful long-distance throat massage". #StarWars

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Do be careful though and don't look at twitter's public timeline - you'll need to bleach your eyes if you do.  Just sayin'...

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 01:42 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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