My advice to a friend whose parents thought Twilight sucked

Have them watch the worst half hour of "The Vampire Diaries" and it'll be more exciting than the entire Twilight series combined. Have them watch any 15 minutes of "True Blood" and you may just end up with a new baby sibling.

What New Years Means to Me - Pt. III

My New Year's Resolution is to not assume people who disagree with me are ignorant. Sometimes they DO have a lot of good data, upon which to make their decisions and judgments, but they simply don't have the tool-set to properly analyze the information.

#NoFixingStupid

- From "What The New Years Means to Me", by Dan Reams (shopping a publisher)

What New Years Means to Me - Pt. II

When I was three, I threw a baseball off the Earth, and the next year, I was hoping we would hit it and it would cause a big crater. I was so young and naive, then, in the ways of orbital mechanics.

Silly me. Little did I know that it had never achieved escape velocity, and it ended up killing a donkey in Tijuana about a week after I'd thrown it up. I guess the performer was po'd at the loss of her income.

- From "What The New Years Means to Me", by Dan Reams (shopping a publisher)

What New Years Means to Me

Blah blah Happy New Years blah blah.

What do I like about New Years? Back when I physically wrote checks, I really liked being able to write a different digit, in the one's place. Every decade I was like, "All right! I get to write TWO DIFFERENT DIGITS!". For now though, it's "Welcome, Two, and One, well, eff you."

Of course, now it's TYPING, not writing. So, like, I'll be doing a lot more 2012-MM-DD this year, and I'm looking forward to it.

- From "What The New Years Means to Me", by Dan Reams (shopping a publisher)

Nook Tablet Update - My Wife is Returning Hers - Readability Not as Good as an e-ink System

My wife very much enjoyed her Nook Tablet as a tablet.  However, as a book reader it gave her a headache when using it for an hour or more at a stretch.  She much more enjoys our kids e-ink based Nooks.

So off it goes, back to Barnes & Noble.

ref my posting: http://waukeshawestside.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-fodder-for-fire-nook-lightweight.html

UWM pantherLINK email - Thunderbird - Extracting AND Deleting Attachments - Review of "Attachment Extractor"

    While I utilized this tool on my UWM email account, one could likely use it on any Thunderbird email account.  Note that some of the deletion options may or may not work, depending on, for example, how your service provider implements IMAP, etc.  The choice to run the tool -- and possibly lose your email messages and/or file attachments -- is yours.

     I ran the Thunderbird add-on, "Attachment Extractor" (http://www.eviljeff.com/?page=moz-extensions) and (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/attachmentextractor/) against 5,174 messages in my IMAP inbox.

My Goals

• Extract the file attachments from my messages to a local folder.
  

• Utilize the option to keep a text (HTML) copy of the message itself, as a file, in addition to the extracted file attachment.
  

• Delete the file attachments, after downloading them from the email messages, while retaining the email messages themselves.
  

Environment

• Thunderbird 8.0
• Windows 7
• Extraction folder set to a local drive
  

    The entire process took about 20 minutes to extract the files and to create the text file copies of any messages that also had attachments.  Surprisingly, I could continue to use Thunderbird and other applications while the process ran.

    I found the tool to be useful.  I particularly liked the ability to include variable keys to include in the resulting file names.

    The first time I ran the utility I opted to use the 'Save message txt to file' option.  Doing so created a separate HTML file for every message in my inbox.  While an interesting backup, I found no real use for the HTML files, so I aborted the process, disabled that option, and simply downloaded the attachments themselves.

    For my UWM account I chose 'Delete the attachment from the message' and its 'Delete with AE's internal (experimental) routine.  This method allowed me to bypass having to okay the deletion of each message's attachments.  Again, just like using the tool itself, the risk of utilizing that option is your choice.

What Next?

    Once you download your file attachments, make sure to back them up to an external drive, a cloud drive, etc., using the desired encryption technique of your choice.  I suggest TrueCrypt, to encrypt containers, or Crypt4Free to encrypt individual files.  Both are free and easily locatable via your favorite search engine.

"Titanium Backup" is a HUGE Time-Saver for Restoring Android Apps to a new OS

I currently have the second incarnation of the HTC Incredible phone (meaning the updated screen, not the 'Incredible 2').  Verizon released the v2.3.4 Gingerbread update, in August, 2011, and then pulled it, citing difficulties.

As of November, 2011, Verizon has a known issue where the Gingerbread v2.3.4 update will offer to install, on some phones, but will fail to install, even after offering to update the phone.  This happened to me four times.  Even though the update claimed to have downloaded, I could never find it on my SD card.  Even though I answered, in the affirmative, to the prompt, "Install Update Now?", the update would not install.

Navigating through the phone's menu, to the software information, and asking for an update would always inform me my phone was on the current version and no updates would be needed.  Then, a few days later, I would again be prompted to run the update, and the cycle would repeat.

Googling this phenomenon, I found that many others were also experiencing this, and that upon calling Verizon, Verizon stated that they had pulled that update back in August.

Tired of all this, I performed the following steps:  [Note you will need to root your phone in order to run Titanium Backup.]

1. Ran 'Titanium Backup' and backed up all my apps and their related data, as well as my system settings.
2. Copied my TitaniumBackup folder, on my SD card, to my DropBox account, just in case something were to happen to the SD card folder during the OS update process.  [Note: Nothing bad happened to the SD card's folder.]
3. Located the Gingerbread 2.3.4 update on the web.  Because I like installing updates via the phone itself (versus via executable via my PC), I opted to place the update to the root of my SD card, then install it via HBOOT.  The update ran with no problems.
4. All my apps were gone, as expected, so I downloaded 'Titanium Backup' and reinstalled it, then ran through the process of restoring my apps.  'TB' found the backup folder without prompting, and I was off and running. Since the free version requires answering the install dialog separately, for each application -- and I had nearly 300 apps -- I aborted the restoration process and paid the $6+ for the full version.
5. I restarted the phone, ran Titantium Backup's restoration process, and all my previous apps installed.  I ran a sampling of 10 of the apps and found all my previous data had been successfully restored.  Note that I chose not to restore my system data, because I did not want to risk the chance that some setting, that changed between Android 2.2 (Froyo) and 2.3.4 (Gingerbread), would screw something up.  It' much easier to just tweak a few things, interface wise, and have the benefit of restored apps and their data.
   

Having the full version of 'TB' meant I was able to enable its "Use Dropbox" mode so that my phone's backups would be uploaded to my Dropbox account.  For good measure I also utilized an encryption key to protect my data in the cloud.