I really don’t care that the government is (allegedly) reading my emails and keeping a thick file on my exciting correspondence. And I don’t care that all the cloud services (not really, but people think) claim all my stuff that lands there. But I absolutely hate it when people email me with read receipt requests. I always say no, and mentally put that person on a list of people to wonder about. So anyone who uses this on me will be banned from communicating with me.

Honestly, sometimes I think so-called (but not by my definition) Christians are trying to alienate people. It’s a shame when people (like me) who believe in God are hesitant to call themselves Christians because they don’t want to be associated with the haters that have co-opted so much of organized religion.

If you haven’t watched Vikings, you’re in for a treat. I really like it. Dude was crazy, though, letting his (extremely hot and warrior-like) wife split.

Yes, there is way too much smoking in rural areas. It’s a close cousin of the biggest rural problem- littering. Anyone who litters and anyone under 60 who smokes is an idiot. Period. No exceptions. It’s just not as cool as you think it is. And it will kill you.

Speaking of things I don’t care about, can we please never talk about Edward Snowden again? I just don’t care.

New app fist impressions: I’m coming around pretty good on DayOne (especially with some added IFTTT/Dropbox hacks).  OmniFocus, not so much. Maybe David Sparks’ screen casts will help, but here’s the thing- if I have to work hard to use your app, then by definition it’s not making my life easier.

I’m going pretty much all-in with Google Drive, thanks to the huge cost reductions. Lifehacker shows you how to make it a media server.  Speaking of Google, I still do my primary off-site backups to Amazon via AWS, but it looks like Google is moving on that space too. Regardless, it will be hard to top the AWS/Arq combo for backing up massive amounts of data.

WordPress.Com continues to prove it is the best blog/website hosting service in the world. It’s now ridiculously easy to create audio playlists.

This is well-deserved. My love of tech in general and computers specifically was nurtured writing basic code and doing early automation in DOS. I still remember how cool it was when you wrote some code, finally found all the errors, and watched it work.

PDF Printer looks like an interesting app. I’m still looking for the ideal iOS to pdf/scanned toolbox.

10 Scary Holes With Deadly Pasts. No, not people who went to UNC. The kind in the ground.

Sorry, but I don’t feel even a little sorry for this dude.

As I get more and more into podcasting, I find that I enjoyed daily, short and informative podcasts. One of my favorite is TUAW’s  Daily Update Podcast.

I use Target Display Mode all the time with my second iMac. MakeUseOf  has a great summary of how you can use a second Mac as the additional display. I wish there was a way to keep the second Mac in Target Display Mode even after sleep.

I can’t back this up with empirical data, but almost guarantee you that Microsoft changes the name of its products more than any other company in history.

I tried really hard to believe in Obamacare. Unfortunately, I have concluded that it is lacking, at best, and a disaster, at worst.

OS X became a teenager today. While I was not a huge fan of the early OS X iterations, starting around Snow Leopard and continuing through Mavericks, OS X has been wonderful. At this point, I can’t imagine anyone voluntarily choosing a Windows machine over a Mac.

While I have only used iTunes radio sparingly so far, it is encouraging that Apple is adding additional streaming content. Hopefully, the addition of NPR news is the first of many additions.

One of the most interesting things about the rumored  Apple-Comcast TV deal will be to see how a combination of my most favorite company and least favorite company turns out.

John Prine and Steve Earle did the second best cover of Townes Van Zandt’s excellent Loretta.

 

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, the best cover is, without a doubt, by Jesse Dayton.

 

Lucky Dog got himself bitten by a snake. We’ve been all over the creek, and in the wilderness lately, working on various projects. He was generally behind me, which proves my uncle was right. First one scares ’em, second one gets bit.

I kid you not, I ported my old landline (via a temporary cell phone) to Google Voice this morning.  And, it goes on life support.  Awesome.

There is nothing surprising about the fact that music sales have stalled. Music sales are over. I have 25,000 (legal and purchased over the decades) songs on a music server at home, and I haven’t listened to a one of them in years. I subscribe to and get all my music from Spotify and Google Music. My kids haven’t bought a full record in years. They use streaming too, and will occasionally buy a single song or two from iTunes.

It’s really cool when human beings do awesome things for each other.

There is nothing short of littering that I detest more than Facebook games. Why does Facebook put two separate games-related links in my sidebar and refuse to let me delete them? Why isn’t there a one-click setting to make every single game related thing disappear forever from my Facebook feed and apps. It’s not like I’m going to wake up one day and feel differently. Yes, I still filter as much game-related content as possible.

10 Innocent Things That Caused Incredible Violence. The 11th would be the last time I asked my kids to agree on where they wanted to go to dinner.

I’m all for rural neighborhood watch groups. We have one. What I really want is an army of heavily armed commandos to hunt down, warn (once) and then commit war crimes on litterers. The amount of littering in rural areas is hard to imagine if you haven’t experienced it.

A year or so ago, I had high hopes for the new Sim City game.  EA ruined it.  It’s too late now to fix it.

Yeah, I know.  But I’d rather panhandle in my golden years than trust the government with anything remotely resembling a national pension.  If states weren’t so busy “subsidizing corporations under the guise of economic development,” all those retirement accounts we fret over would be much smaller.

Google just tossed a (good for us kind of) bomb at other cloud services.  $1.99 per month for 100GB (previously $4.99) and $9.99 per month for 1TB (previously $49.99).

I’m looking forward to the return of Mad Men.  Speaking of which, here is a (new) review of my favorite episode so far.

One of the 3,000 reasons why Reddit is the best thing about the internet is IaMA, the place where people- many of the famous and/or interesting- answer questions.  One guy always asks the same question, and it is a great one (I’ve started asking it at important work meetings when someone goes on too long about something and then asks for questions).  “Would you rather fight one horse-size duck or a hundred duck size horses?”  Arnold Schwarzenegger gives a video demonstration (and confirms that he’s a pretty cool dude).

I wonder if Dave and Mike agree with this ranking of Australian breakfast cereal?  I just want a Vegemite sandwich.  Served by a strange lady who makes me nervous.

 

Who needs zombies?  Here is the real proof that the apocalypse is upon us.

Speaking of Reddit and IaMAs, Arthur Chu of Jeopardy fame is doing a very interesting one right now.

You’re only as old as you feel.

Agreed.  One of my favorite movies.  Along with Broken Flowers.

Guess I was the only one who “don’t need [his music player] around anyhow.”  Speaking of music, looks like my next Tundra could, in fact, have CarPlay.

Interesting read on how the Target data theft went down.

OK, I have a new favorite podcast.  Mac Power Users.  If you have a Mac, you need to listen to all of these.  I’ve been binge listening.  If you still use a Windows machine, you also need to listen to all of these to help you understand what you’re missing.  Here’s the feed and the iTunes link.

This Flappy Bird cat is doing a great job of marketing.  Seriously.  Yes, I tried it.  My high score was 1, and it took me several attempts to set it.

All I can say is anyone who actually prefers iTunes radio to Spotify hasn’t used Spotify.  I love Apple, but pretty much everything about iTunes sucks.  If you like good music, here’s my primary curated Spotify playlist.

That’s not just the best holiday movie ever made, it’s also chock full of socialist dogma!

How to get rid of telemarketers.  Some dude called me the other day wanting to recommend stocks for me to buy.  Rather than engage him on the very legitimate question of who would buy a stock just because some stranger called him on the phone, I took a new approach.  He said he wanted to send me some “market recommendations.”  I said “what sort of market are we talking about?”  He said “the stock market?”  I asked “you mean cattle and pork and whatnot?”  He said “no, stocks of companies.”  I said “nah, man, that’s just for rich people.”  He actually laughed and said goodbye.  True story.

World Science U makes me happy.

Looks like Mac users will finally get updated Microsoft Office apps this year.  I really like Pages, but the corporate world runs on Office.

Confessions of a Disgraced Crowdfunder.  I backed Instacube, and gave up on getting one many months ago.  Even if I do eventually get one, there’s little chance it won’t seem dated from the first use.  I don’t care anymore, but the excuse that “the product hasn’t shipped yet because the reality of hardware development is that hardware is hard,” is a load of crap.  Instacube sought $250K, and raised over $620K.  That was enough money to overcome a lot of “hard.”  Having said that, I have obtained a lot of really cool stuff via Kickstarter.  I’m sold on the platform, just not the excuses.

The only people who don’t want to kill all the feral hogs are city-dwelling yuppies who think they’re all like Babe.  They’re not.  They are extremely disruptive.  Here’s an app to help destroy as many as possible.

iOS 7.1 is here.  Macworld has more.  I can’t wait to use CarPlay.

On the other hand, Neil can keep his iPod substitute.  An iPhone man don’t need him around anyhow.

Interesting read on that kid who killed all those babies in Connecticut.  Even if that symphony of warning bells could have been missed or misinterpreted, to add a slew of accessible guns to the mix is stunningly idiotic.  But it’s not about gun control, either.  It comes down to obsession.  Guns are tools.  Like pliers.  Use guns and pliers for reasonable purposes?  No problem.  Obsess over guns or pliers, or cats?  Crazy.  Fill your house up with crazy people and accessible guns?  Insane.  This was a tragic storm of bad decisions.

Well, there are 29 places I still need to go see.  Lots of cool places on that list.

This is crap, because the implication is that divine intervention put those other people on there.  Again, I love God.  I just dislike about 80% of what human beings say about God.

The other day I posted the first photo I ever uploaded to Flickr.  Here’s the first digital photo I ever took.

30 Cult Movies Everyone Must See.  I’ve seen 17 of them.  Altered States and the Holy Grail are two of my all-time favorites.  The Warriors, Lost Boys, Night of the Living Dead and Rocky Horror are excellent.  Eraserhead is horrible.  People only claim to like it because somewhere along the way, it became cool to claim to like it.  Where is The Belly of an Architect on this list?

Speaking of awesome movies (the first one was on the list above), Sharknado 2 will be here on July 31!

Yet another reason why I dislike Bank of America.

Thank goodness for this.  Otherwise, my entire family (including me) would be goners.

Good.  I may lose my liberal card for saying this, but it’s a horse race between crazy people who harm kids and death row inmates for the group I have the least sympathy for.  Stated another way, were I to list the ways we should spend our time improving the earth, there would be a lot of things above helping those folks.

 

OK, some of these are pretty funny.

The bad news on retirement.  On top of that, I think 300 is too low.

I’ve talked about flow before.  The related podcast is very, very interesting.  I have been aware of this concept/experience for a long time.  It’s good to see someone study it.  Here’s the podcast.

10 URLs That Every Google User Should Know.  Unfortunately, the one I want to use the most doesn’t work with Google Apps: “You are trying to access Inactive Account Manager from a Google Apps Account. Inactive Account Manager is only available for Google Accounts.”

I just love WordPress.Com (where this blog is hosted).  Yesterday, Getty Images makes a lot of images free.  Today, WordPress enables easy embedding.

I can’t believe I’d never heard of sonder before.  It’s early, but I think this might be important.  I’ve been thinking about it.

sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.  (via Reddit, with what may be a really good example)

I think maybe it’s important to be a good extra.

A friend lost her husband this week.  I saw this song on Reddit.  For all that have gone…

 

One of the things I have learned over the years is that if I buy a stock, the price will go down.  If I love an application, someone will kill it.  So when I started to really enjoy and rely on Zite, it was only a matter of time.  Flipboard is OK, but there’s something about having my preferred application nuked in the hopes of forcing me to become a Flipboard user that rubs me the wrong way.  TechHive has more on the likely results of this acquisition.

While I will miss Zite, I wouldn’t miss optical drives at all.  I can’t remember the last time I loaded a DVD on a computer or a DVD player.

The SAT, like the times, is a changin’.

Speaking of things that I (at least used to) love whose days may be numbered.  I ported my mobile number to Google Voice years ago.  Google doesn’t seem to be doing much with it, which is never a good sign.  I also find that I use Google Voice less and less, because it still doesn’t fully integrate with my iPhone.  Would I do it again?  Probably not.

Run, hide, fight.  Sadly necessary advice.

16 Family Feud Answers That Caused Steve Harvey To Lose Faith In Humanity.  Cupine was priceless.

“For those who disagree, I can only say that I am doing what I think is right. In the final analysis, I had to make a decision that I could be proud of — for me now, and my daughters’ judgment in the future.”  I wish more politicians would think and act this way.

That was the first photo I uploaded to Flickr, on June 20, 2005 at 11.23 p.m. CST.  Anyone else remember my failed Flickr experiment?

OK, so you think you’re not tech-savvy enough?  Trust me, you’re good.  27% of respondents identified “gigabyte” as an insect commonly found in South America.

June Squibb was excellent in Nebraska.  Highly recommended.

Which TV series from today will stand the test of time?  Assuming today means the last 10 years or so, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and (at least season 1 of) True Detective.

10 mysteries of the Bible that we’ll never solve.  Well, John Prine solved one of them.

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I finished the new Kent Haruf novel, Benediction, last night.  I really like rural literature and Kent is a great writer.  Having said that, this is an easy, but pretty shallow, read.  It’s an OK way to kill a few hours, but it’s not his best.

TV Streaming Head-to-Head: Netflix vs Hulu vs Amazon Prime.  I haven’t tried Hulu in a while, but when I did, the ads were an immediate deal-stopper for me.

Free Up Bathroom Counter Space with Mounted Mason Jars.  This is really cool.  I’m going to do this, soon.

It’s probably piling on (given my numerous earlier rants), but why are people still trying to make us take Bitcoin seriously?  I’ll tell you the only logical reason I can think of- because they think they can make money off of it.

Living off the land, 1950’s style.