Blog is changing locations

Hi everyone, after several years of trying to keep this technology blog alive on blogger, I've decided to merge it back to our family blog. I was never able to get the kind of readership I wanted here and to be truthful I want to share all this stuff with the folks that read our family blog anyways. As in everything else, it's hard to compartmentalize technology or work separately from family. It's all intertwined and it all happens at the same time. So I invite everyone to join us at {redacted - contact author for link} to continue reading. Hope you enjoy the family stuff too.

Grant Study reveals what makes us happy

http://www.businessinsider.com/grant-study-reveals-what-makes-us-happy-2013-4

"Happiness is Love. Full Stop."

U.S. female sailor beats Dubai rapist bus driver into submission - Washington Times

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/25/us-female-sailor-beats-dubai-rapist-bus-driver-sub

" An off-duty U.S. navy sailor wrestled a Dubai bus driver to the ground and beat him into submission after he tried to rape her at knifepoint on Jan. 19, a courtroom heard Wednesday.

Prosecutors said that she knocked the knife from his hand, broke it in two, bit him in the hand, forced him to the ground and locked him between her thighs, the Daily Mail reports."

http://i.imgur.com/vW6D8Mn.jpg How to pick a video game

Culture shock

How to cook Country and Classic omelets, the French way, with Jacques Pepin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57afEWn-QDg&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Then, there's omelets the Indian way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNQ886KNw10&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Watch them back to back

Vanity Fair: Coachella, Week Two: How to Fake Your Way Through

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vanity-fair/coachella-week-two-how-to_b_3101254.html

" The more your anecdotes sound like an acid dream, the more realistic they will appear. Case in point: shooting paint-covered tennis balls at a pool party where Katy Perry was petting an alligator while wearing a matching Salvador Dalí–emblazoned skirt and bikini top and other guests were eating Patron popsicles while getting a complimentary mani/pedi and a guy nicknamed DJ Mom Jeans played music was apparently a very real Coachella option."

Facebook who?

As long as Facebook continues serving ads in its feed, which I get 3-4 of every day, I have zero interest in Facebook Home. I spend more time on Reddit than Facebook these days, anyways.

http://reviews.cnet.com/facebook-home/

Definitive Link Confirms Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Transmits from Livestock to Humans

http://www.louise.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2882:definitive-link-confirms-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria-transmits-from-livestock-to-humans

" Today, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (NY-25), the only microbiologist in Congress, reacted to a new study that conclusively identified transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) from livestock to humans. Currently, MRSA kills more Americans each year than HIV/AIDS."
.

100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!) | TED Blog

http://blog.ted.com/2007/08/03/100_websites_yo/

In the spring of 2007, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, gave a legendary TED University talk: an ultra-fast-moving ride through the "100 websites you should know and use." Six years later, it remains one of the most viewed TED blog posts ever. Time for an update? We think so. Below, the 2013 edition of the 100 websites to put on your radar and in your browser.

Key moments in Hewlett-Packard's recent history

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/finance/news/rss/story/*http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/key-moments-hewlett-packards-recent-205929274.html

" Thursday: HP says Lane is stepping down as chairman, two weeks after a near ousting by shareholders. Hammergren and Thompson are also leaving. Board member Ralph V. Whitworth becomes interim chairman. Lane will stay on HP's board."

Roger Ebert dead at 70 after battle with cancer - Chicago Sun-Times

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/17320958-418/roger-ebert-dies-at-70-after-battle-with-cancer.html

"In 2011 his autobiography, "Life Itself," won rave reviews. "This is the best thing Mr. Ebert has ever written," Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. It is, fittingly enough, being made into a documentary, produced by his longtime friend, Martin Scorsese."

What If The Google Reader Readers Just Don't Come Back? - TechCrunch

http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/03/24/bees/

"For every person that got referred to a site via Reader, there were undoubtedly thousands more reading quietly on a daily basis that you would simply never see or hear from.

Again, while perhaps not directly monetizable, I'd imagine those readers are important in other ways. Maybe they're other bloggers who read everything and choose to link to your site because they read a post of yours in Reader. Or maybe they're one of those aforementioned "bees" that read your content in Reader and chose to then put it on Twitter, or Facebook, or Reddit, or Hacker News, or all of them.

I can't help but get the feeling that the ramifications of Google killing off Reader are going to be far more wide-reaching than they may appear at first glance."
.

The Four Children... Of Star Wars | Reform Judaism

http://www.reformjudaism.org/blog/2013/03/05/four-children-star-wars

Brilliant

LEGO spill shuts down highway lane in West Virginia: prepare for puns

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/19qud8/lego_spill_shuts_down_highway_lane_in_west/

Sailors of Reddit, what is one thing about the open ocean that most people don't know about?

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/19ci1a/sailors_of_reddit_what_is_one_thing_about_the/

The Google Store Experience

From http://allthingsd.com/20130222/the-google-store-experience-comic/

Sequoia Capital Analysis of Apple

http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/41794001551/perspective-on-apple-amid-the-clamour

Why maybe it's not time to sell Apple stock just yet:

"... almost every company in the world suffers from acute Apple envy. Apple has thrown several mainline industries, including music, movies, television, publishing, cameras and 35mm film, into convulsions. The entire Japanese consumer electronics sector, bereft of the software that helps distinguish Apple's products, has been hopelessly outpaced, as have Finland's Nokia and Canada's RIM.

Others – chip suppliers, wireless carriers, specialised glassmakers, outsourced manufacturers and hundreds of thousands of app developers – watch every twitch with hopeless admiration and silent apprehension. Anyone with their wits about them has been galvanised into action by Apple's success."
.

What’s Inside America’s Banks? - Atlantic Mobile

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/whats-inside-americas-banks/309196/

" A disturbing number of former bankers have recently declared that the banking industry is broken (this newfound clarity typically follows their passage from financial titan to rich retiree). Herbert Allison, the ex-president of Merrill Lynch and former head of the Obama administration's Troubled Asset Relief Program, wrote a scathing e-book about the failures of the large banks, stopping just short of labeling them all vampire squids. A parade of former high-ranking executives has called for bank breakups, tighter regulation, or a return to the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law, which separated commercial banking from investment banking. Among them: Philip Purcell (ex-CEO of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter), Sallie Krawcheck (ex-CFO of Citigroup), David Komansky (ex-CEO of Merrill Lynch), and John Reed (former coâ€'CEO of Citigroup). Sandy Weill, another ex-CEO of Citigroup, who built a career on financial megamergers, did a stunning about-face this summer, advising, with breathtaking chutzpah, that the banks should now be broken up."
.

The Unwritable Memoirs of Teddy Forstmann: How the Billionaire Treated His Ghostwriters | Vanity Fair

http://m.vanityfair.com/business/2013/02/memoirs-teddy-forstmann-billionaire-ghostwriters

In the spirit of E True Hollywood Stories - one of my favorite shows - learning how the rich get rich and how they live.

" One afternoon we drove to Roland Garros for the French Open, the reason Teddy was in Paris. As president of IMG, whose clients included Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, he belonged at the tournament. IMG had a box at center court, four seats five or six rows up from the clay, amid the families of players. Teddy was out there every day, cooking in the sun. People stopped by to chat. Teddy would stand and smile. He'd been at the helm of IMG for several years and loved it. Not only was it the greatest sports agency in the world, it also represented top fashion models. When Teddy acquired the agency, some reporters depicted it as a lark: here's an aging LBO king seeking to spend his golden years immersed in his two great loves, athletes and models.

This infuriated Teddy. They think this is fun! They think this is a party, a walk in the park? Horseshit! This company was underperforming when I acquired it, and I took it over for the same reason I've acquired every company: hidden value! I saw something the others missed. You do not buy a $750 million company because you like pretty girls and want to sit at center court!

Meanwhile, we were at center court, in the wind, the sky a flawless early-summer blue, like the sky in a dream. Colorful pennants waved on the rim of the jewel box.

Between sets, a girl lingered near our seats. She was long and lovely and dark, with hair that went halfway down her back and the sort of heart-shaped French face that the existentialists could never properly explain. Teddy leaned over, whispered in my ear: "Do you see that girl?"

"Yeah, yeah, I see her."

"I mean, a girl like that, in Paris … "

"Yeah, I know."

"What do you think if I went over and just told her, Hey, my name is Forstmann, and I happen to own the biggest modeling agency in the world?"

"I don't know."

"Or if I sent a note. Maybe you. Would you bring a note over, then point me out to her?"

"The note thing, I'm not sure."

"Yeah, yeah, you're right. Stupid idea." "
.

President Clinton at CES: The World Needs More Smartphones (And Fewer Guns) – AllThingsD

http://allthingsd.com/20130109/president-clinton-at-ces-the-world-needs-more-smartphones-and-fewer-guns/

If HP wants to get into mobile, they should start here:

" Efforts to get [smart] phones into the hands of people in impoverished rural areas, Clinton said, should be a priority in world humanitarian efforts. For many, the cellphone is the first — and only — point of entry to having a bank account, or to standardize commodity food prices across their particular region."

Now that's what I call battery life!

One error in my list of tips. Set "Wifi on during sleep" to "Always", not "only when plugged in". This setting seems to be a relic of the days when Wifi was a total battery hog, which isn't the case anymore - the 4G radio has taken that crown. It seems that otherwise the syncing that happens when the screen is off will use 4G. And 4G is writing checks the battery can't cash.

This is the biggest Achilles heel of Android phones today and should be phone makers top priority. There is way too much (default) background syncing going on. Or I should say, battery capacities have not caught up to the awesomeness of Your Android Data Everywhere, Right Now.

The attached picture is about as awesome a battery life graph as I can expect from Android. It shows a loss of only 23% battery capacity in five and a half hours. The graph is nearly flat when the screen is off, and very little "AWAKE" activity is happening when the screen is off. And, this performance was achieved without having to disable 4G! Which I still haven't found a way to do.  Guess I don't need to now.

more on battery life

a few more comments.

the infamous "media server" bug that is discussed on the internet seems to be caused by the media server indexing large numbers of files on the SD card, and consuming lots of battery. the two solutions seem to be to let it run its course (altho i believe it will repeat the indexing on every USB disconnect), or eliminate the cause of huge #s of files on your SD card. some are blaming backup programs for creating huge #s of files.

the changes that made the biggest difference for me were: turning down the display brightness, and setting "Wifi on during sleep" to ALWAYS.

success for me is a battery that doesn't die before bedtime - a nearly 18 hour timespan from 7am to 11pm.  i thought i'd have to disable 4G to achieve this. but there is no way to disable it on Verizon phones, that I have found so far.  before you send me email, go look - Verizon eliminated this setting from the settings page in the S3. you can't deselect LTE.  you must select Global, LTE/CDMA, or GSM. there must be some 3rd party app that can turn off LTE?!

at this point i seem to be getting 12-15 hours with light usage; that is probably a little better than i got with the Galaxy Note. the Note was SO bogged down by all the (mostly useless) apps i'd loaded. it really needed to be wiped clean and restored with only the apps i really needed.

why did i switch from the Note to the S3? i liked the Note a lot. but i was tired of having people gasp in disbelief when i took my "huuuge" phone out. and it WAS kinda crazy to hold up that huuuge phone to my ear to answer a phonecall. the stylus was very cool technology but i didn't find the stylus-enabled apps that compelling.  S-Note was a good idea but the app did not sync with the cloud. you had to email each page of each note to yourself and then attach it to OneNote, or Evernote.  really tedious when you can generate 5-7 pages of notes in a meeting. and the pages don't number themselves so you have to manually sequence them back together.  i just never found time to do this. i was sort of shocked that samsung had not considered the workflow of syncing SNote data to the cloud.  i have wasted too much time using proprietary software on smartphones that locked the data away inside itself with no easy way to export it (looking at you, HP 100LX notetaker, and Palm Pilot).  I had a file full of my detailed medical history and due to incompatible file formats it got lost during a data sync from phone to phone. now it's completely gone. And just becuase there is "a way" to export data doesn't mean that its a convenient way.  it should automatically sync by itself to your preferred cloud.  for me, it was OneNote for work and Evernote for personal.  we can all agree that multiple cloud archives is unmanageable, right?

 the Note's stylus performance was superb and it was really fun to draw with. i read that the new stylus has new button placement and a flexible tip for more realistic writing action, 1024 levels of pressure detection, and S-Note starts automatically when you take the stylus out.  if you are an artist i highly recommend checking out the Note's stylus.

long story short (TL; DR), i wasn't dying to get the Note II; I got the S3 instead, and I don't miss the stylus at all.

Improving battery life on Verizon's Samsung Galaxy S3

Your overall goals in order to maximize battery life are (1) to eliminate AWAKE time when the screen is OFF, and (2) for the battery drain to be almost flat when the screen is OFF. Use the Settings/Battery graph as your main indicator. Battery and data transfer go hand in hand, so you need to balance syncronization needs with battery consumption.   

The list below is long and if you were to implement all of these (like I do), you could argue that this diminishes the smartphone experience, but without battery you won't have a smartphone experience at all.  For example, I try to configure news and RSS to update only every 24 hours.  Each user must judge how much functionality to trade off for battery life.

Most of the tips below work for any Android phone.

• Keep Wi-fi on during sleep "only when plugged in". Settings/wifi/Advanced (update: for me, the "ALWAYS" setting resulted in far lower battery use, so that is the setting i use now. THIS SETTING HAS THE BIGGEST IMPACT ON BATTERY LIFE) 
•  (Verizon specific) Avoid Global network mode, which was enabled with the Android 4.1.1 update (Jelly Bean). Settings/ Wireless and Network/More settings/Mobile networks: Change Network mode to "CDMA/LTE" rather than "Global"
• (Verizon specific) If possible, turn off LTE (4G) and use 3G. (but the PhoneInfo app that supposedly enables this, seems to have been taken off Google Market. There are several PhoneInfo apps in the market, but none match the screenshots shown here, so they may be virusware.) Yes, I know you bought a 4G phone for really fast downloads but if your battery life is terrible, you might try it.
  
• Turn the screen brightness down. Settings/display/brightness: turn auto brightness off and turn brightness level down to 20% or lower.
• Under Settings/display: Turn Smart stay off and Turn auto adjust screen tone ON.
• Settings/accounts/Google: click on your Google account and only enable syncing you need: for example, enable Calendar, Contacts, Gmail but disable Google Photos, Play Books, Play Mags, Play Movies, Play Music, Google+, Instant Upload, Internet Picasa Web Albums.
• "Restrict background data to Wi-fi" for apps like Gallery, Flipboard, Google+. Click on apps shown under Settings/Data usage.
• In Google+/settings: turn off notifications, messenger, hangouts, Instant Upload.
• Turn off Backup Assistant unless you really intend to use it and don't have a better backup system.
• Svoice/settings: turn off location data and disable the wake-up command (which states that it consumes battery).
• Google Maps/Location settings: turn off Location reporting, Location sharing, and location history
• Configure apps that sync news like Flipbook and RSS readers to sync as infrequently as you can tolerate.
• Turn Settings/Power Saver ON
• Under Settings/Applications/All: disable AllSharePlay, Verizon apps, Samsung apps.

Other ways to extend battery life:

• If you are rooted, you have access to apps like BetterBatteryStats, etc which can tell you exactly which apps are causing wakelocks. This is worth rooting for because otherwise it can be a painful process of trial and error to find battery consuming apps.
• The Facebook and Linkedin Apps are evil. They track you on GPS continually even when the phone is off, and run the battery down. Avoid them.
• Buy a portable pocket charger.  I like the PowerGen 5200mAHr and 8400mAHr portable chargers. This can charge any device that uses a USB charging cable.
• Populate your world with chargers. For example: Home-downstairs, Home-downstairs, Car (we like PowerGen's dual USB charger), and Office.

The following hints are from http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/galaxy-s3-problems-what-users-complain-about-the-most/

• If you have Chrome installed, fire it up and choose Settings > Developer tools and then uncheck Enable Tilt Scrolling.
• Some people believe that Samsung's preinstalled apps could eat a lot of battery life even if you're not using them. Some users reported success after disabling their Samsung account and various Samsung apps. Go to Settings > Applications manager and choose the All tab then disable Samsung Account, Samsung Backup, Samsung Apps, Samsung Cloud Data Relay along with anything else on the list you don't use. The disabled apps drop to the bottom of the All list so you can always enable them again if you encounter any problems.