Month: March 2013

By Matt Smith, MakeUseOf – July 29, 2010 at 09:31PM

As Mac OS X users will tell you, Apple computers are far less likely to contract a virus than Windows based PCs. This is not, however, because OS X is a virtually impenetrable operating system, but rather because the meager market share of Mac computers makes them less appealing targets. The entire point of many viruses is to harvest data and create networks of “zombie” computers, so it doesn’t make sense to target OS X.

That does not mean, however, that OS X viruses don’t exist. They are rare, but they are possible, and can be just as damaging as Windows viruses when they do pop up. Also, OS X machines can pass on viruses that target Windows machines unknowingly.

To protect yourself (and your friends using Windows computers) you of course will need an antivirus for Mac.

PC Tools – iAntivirus for Mac

The strange irony of the name aside, iAntivirus is one of the more popular antivirus options currently available for Mac OS X. It is made by PC Tools, a company responsible for products I have previously recommended such as PC Tools Free Firewall for the PC.

If there is any one thing I’ve consistently noticed about PC Tools it is that they put a high value on an easy to use and understand interface. The PC Tools iAntivirus software is simple to install and does not require that you make any decisions.

Once installed, a crosshair icon appears as a menu extra in the upper right. Clicking on it will let you open the program proper, but even then you’ll find only two options staring back at you. One is the option to scan your Mac and the other is the option to turn protection on or off.

The rest of the program’s options can be accessed by clicking on Preferences after opening the menu extra icon, but there aren’t many options to choose from. You can examine any items that are in quarantine, change the automated virus scan schedule, and view the history of the actions iAntivirus has taken. That’s it.  iAntivirus does not include advanced features like a phishing filter, nor does it include firewall software. It is an antivirus program for the Mac, plain and simple.

Choosing such a minimalist design is a bold move for a mostly Windows oriented company, but it feels appropriate. Of course, the downside to this is obvious. With so few options there is very little that you can do to change settings that you don’t like. If you want an antivirus that depends more on user control, read on.

ClamXav

ClamXav is a different kind of beast. It is a free antivirus program that is based off ClamAV, an open source antivirus engine for UNIX machines. ClamXav is largely the work of one developer who works on the program regularly and provides it free of charge.

This is a valiant image – the lone programmer working for nothing to provide his OS X compatriots with antivirus protection – but it shows in the program’s overall usability. The first thing you’ll notice about ClamXav is that the installation processor is a bit confusing. You have to install the program into the Applications folder, but then an installer front end appears when you launch the program, and there is some kind of plugin to install as well. It isn’t rocket science, but it is more complex than it needs to be.

Once launched you’ll find that the interface’s basic functions are simple, but the more in-depth options (such as those in the Preferences menu) can be hard to understand. The program makes up for this by providing a buffet of features. An exclusions system lets you place certain files outside the jurisdiction of ClamXav so that you don’t waste time scanning files you know are safe. The scheduling software lets you choose the parts of your system you want to have scanned. Finally, ClamXav has a feature called Sentry that actively monitors folders of your choosing for viruses.

All of these advantages aside, ClamXav does feel a little out of place. Mac OS X is about simplicity and ease of use, but neither of these traits seem to have been a part of ClamXav’s design. Instead, the program serves as a reminder than Macs, simple though they may, uses UNIX as a foundation. But if creating antivirus exclusions by writing regular expressions is up your alley (or you even understand what that means) ClamXav is worth a look.

Conclusion

ClamXav and iAntivirus couldn’t be more different. While ClamXav is a detailed, customizable antivirus for Mac, targeted towards users who know more than the average bear, iAntivirus is a simple program that sacrifices user control at the altar of usability.

The decision here is not difficult. If you consider yourself a Mac power user, and you don’t mind acknowledging the UNIX foundation of OS X, ClamXav is for you. But if you think a UNIX just might be a male unicorn you’re probably better off with iAntivirus.

Which one do you prefer?

Do you like MakeUseOf articles? Don’t forget to share our articles with others! It’s really important to us.

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By apaulandrew, Smashing Magazine Feed – July 29, 2010 at 03:41AM

Just a few ago ago, WordPress introduced there 13th major release, the much anticipated ‘Thelonious’ (WP 3.0). As with every other major release, to accommodate all of the new features there has been some (mostly minor) compatibility issues with a number of themes. As such, the WP community has been working hard to update all of there themes and plugins to make them WP3.0 ready and to make best use of all of the exciting and new features.
After some extensive research from todays author (Sven Salmonsson ) we have a list of his top ten favorite free WordPress 3.0 fully compatible themes.

1. The Morning After by WooThemes

Morning After is perhaps the original WordPress magazine-styled theme, with more than 100,000 downloads to date it is also by far the most popular. It has been recently purchased by the guys behind WooThemes and been updated with there powerful framework and is now fully WP 3.0 compatible.
The Morning After Home →
Live Demo →

2. Structure by Organic Themes

Structure is a WP 3.0 theme available in four variants, all based on an attractive and effective minimalist style. This theme will integrate seamlessly with any established blog.
Structure Home →
Live Demo →

3. Mansion by GraphPaperPress

Mansion is a distinct theme geared toward photobloggers. It features a flexible-width thumbnail grid for both images and photo journal entries. Mansion is perfect for those who want to primarily showcase their photographs and occasionally write blog posts. If you appreciate an image-oriented style and want something unique, Mansion is definitely worth your time.
Mansion Home →
Live Demo →

4. Twenty Ten by The WordPress Crew

It might seem a little silly to include the default WordPress 3.0 theme, but it is damn good, it would be a disservice not to include it.
Twenty Ten
Live Demo →

5. Magazeen by WeFunction & Smashing Magazine

The premium quality Magazeen theme oozes functionality and style. Its bold two column magazine layout and style has been designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and its overall magazine-feel.
Magazeen Home →
Live Demo →

6. Mystique by Digital Nature

This smooth WP 3.0 template is a perfect choice for CMS publishers and bloggers alike. There is a ton of customization options, with a solid design, built-in widgets and a intuitive theme settings interface.If there is one drawback, it is that it can at times be an overwhelming amount.
Mystique Home →
Live Demo →

7. AutoFocus+ by Fthrwght (Allan Cole)

AutoFocus+ is a clean and simple WordPress theme developed for photographers looking to showcase their work. It has designed on an 800px, 8 column grid which will truly allow your images to shine and boasts a sharper typographic approach with a 22px baseline grid, and a Garamond/Helvetica (Times/Arial for you PC users) font stack that’s much easier to read.
AutoFocus+ Home →
Live Demo →

8. Gadget by ThemeJam

Gadget is one of the sharpest and sleekest themes available for WordPress 3.0 right now.s
Gadget Home →
Live Demo →

9. Suffusion by Aquoid

Suffusion is an elegant, versatile and browser-safe theme with a power-packed set of options. It has 10 widget areas, one-column, two-column and three-column fixed-width formats, 10 pre-defined templates, 17 pre-defined color schemes, two customizable multi-level drop-down menus, featured posts, a magazine layout, tabbed sidebars, widgets for Twitter, Social Networks and Google Translator, translations in many languages and RTL language support.
Channel Home →
Live Demo →

10. Titan by The Theme Foundry

A refined, balanced, and exceptionally handsome WordPress theme. Features a robust theme options menu allowing you to integrate your Flickr photos, Twitter updates, and Feedburner email updates. Use the custom code box to include photos, video, or whatever else your heart desires.
Titan Home →
Live Demo →

About the Author

This is a guest post by the guys behind WpBlogHost.net, an excellent resource if you’re looking to obtain WordPress hosting or WordPress themes.

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By Jeffry Thurana, MakeUseOf – July 28, 2010 at 11:31AM

People love to personalize things that they own to make those items stand out among other similar items that other people have. We can see examples everywhere such as people painting their houses with different colors, styling their hair, using and customizing different themes for their blogs, putting their laptops into colorful cases, and customizing the ringtones for their phones.

If you own an iPhone and you want to use your favorite songs to personalize it, but you don’t want to pay another buck for each song that you already own to have those songs converted into iPhone ringtones; here’s a fun and free way to do it.

The Preparation

For those who love Garageband, you can use that amazing music maker to create ringtones. But for today’s discussion, we’ll use a small free program called MakeiPhoneRingtone.

This program can quickly turn your favorite songs into iPhone-compatible ringtones. However, there are limitations to this feature: you can only use AAC files, and the ringtone duration is limited to 40 seconds. A set of preparation steps is needed prior to the conversion process. But don’t be afraid as we can do everything using iTunes.

• The first step is to convert the songs from MP3 into AAC. Open “iTunes – Preferences” menu or use “Command + Comma“.

• Open the “General” tab and click the “Import Settings” button.

• Choose “AAC Encoder” from the “Import Using” field, and choose “iTunes Plus” quality from “Setting” for the best quality.

• Find the song(s) that you want to use as an iPhone ringtone, right click and choose “Create AAC” version from the pop up menu.

• You can also access this option from “Advanced – Create AAC Version” menu.

• The song(s) will be converted by iTunes into AAC, and the process will take about several seconds for every song. After that, right click on the converted song and choose “Get Info” from the pop up menu.

• Choose “Options” tab and set the Start and Stop Time to fit the 40 seconds duration. If you want to go the easy way, just choose 0:00 for the start time and 0:39 for the stop time.

But why go the easy way when you can go the fun way? You can set the start and stop time in the part of the song that you like the most. Play the song and notice the time of the beginning and end of your favorite part.

Even though you can adjust the precision to one-thousandth of a second to get the perfect timing if you want to, my experience has told me that one-tenth precision is enough. For example, you can set the time to 1:12.5 (one minute twelve point five seconds) or maybe 3:42.73 (three minutes forty-two point seventy-three seconds).

This might look tedious, but I personally find the process of determining the perfect beginning and ending of the ringtone fun and addictive. The 40 seconds limit just make the “estimating game” more challenging.

Then repeat the “Create AAC Version” process to the adjusted song, to get the less-than-40-second fragment.

The Making Of The Ringtones

• After getting the perfect slice of the song, right click on the item and choose “Show in Finder“.

• Open MakeiPhoneRingtone and drag that short AAC Version (with the “.m4a” extension) to the app.

• If the edited song is more than 40 seconds, you’ll get a warning (and an offer to try a paid audio editor by the same developer).

• If you do everything correctly, you’ll get your ringtone in iTunes’ “Ringtones” folder in just a blink of an eye.

• Repeat the process for other songs.

Syncing & Using Ringtones

• To make sure that your newly created iPhone ringtones find their way to your iPhone, go to the “Ringtones” tab and check the “Sync Ringtones” box before you synchronize your phone.

• Then click the Sync button.

• In iPhone, you can use different tones for different person. You can also use customized ringtones for your Alarm.

• To assign a ringtone to a contact, select a person and tap on the ringtone option. Choose one of the “Custom” tones and tap “Save“.

• The same thing goes for assigning custom ringtones to your alarms. Open one, tap “Edit” and slide right. Tap “Sound” and choose your preferred sound.

After using the method several times, I began to look at (or listen to?) my song collection differently. Now I always try to find parts of the songs that would make cool ringtones.

What about you? Do you personalize your contacts with different tones? Do you know other free methods to convert your favorite songs into ringtones?  If so, please share using the comments section below.

Do you like MakeUseOf articles? Don’t forget to share our articles with others! It’s really important to us.

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By Andrew Maier, Smashing Magazine Feed – July 06, 2010 at 09:30AM

Because each website appeals to its audience differently, the prudent user experience designer takes a measured approach when communicating, especially when they do so on behalf of their client. No matter what the vision and no matter how it’s executed, a design can always communicate more effectively.

Online and off, we gauge the effectiveness of design—of communication—by its affect; in other words: what action(s) do people take after they give us their attention? Properly utilized, Web Analytics and Measurement helps us answer this fundamental question.

In the early days of the Internet, webmasters used hits (remember counters?) to gauge their website’s success. The logic went like this: if people liked what was written on a site, they would request that content more often. This made sense because, at the time, the web was largely state-driven. People navigated the Web one page at a time.

Today, however, that’s far from true.

As a consequence, analysts have turned their attention towards the constant in the Internet + User equation: the User. Instead of simply tracking hits, analysts track user behavior. Emphasis has appropriately gone from answering the question “what is the web server doing?” to “what is the user doing?” (Joshua Porter details this trend in his post User Engagement Metrics.)

Both the metrics and methods required to illustrate what our users do are nuanced. In this article we’ll take a closer look at how these methods inform our design process.

Back to topWhat is Web Analytics?

It’s nearly impossible to understand why someone does something online. How, then, can we possibly hope to evaluate trends across (potentially) thousands of viewers? As it turns out, it’s not so difficult.

Even with only a modicum of traffic, web servers generate a tremendous amount of data. Web Analytics tools were created to collate and refine this data. Typically manifested as web-based applications, Web Analytics tools (such as the popular Google Analytics) take data and, through a variety of computations, generate insightful charts and reports.

Unlike research methods—which are typically qualitative in nature—web analytics methods are decidedly quantitative. So instead of dealing with warm, fuzzy descriptions of problems (practically written by our users) web analysts look at reports based on cold, hard data about them. Where’s the love?

Louis Rosenfeld explains the conundrum:

…analytics tell us what is happening, not why. After detecting data patterns, we might guess what’s going on with reasonable accuracy. But we can’t know for sure unless we conduct qualitative analysis, such as actual user testing, where we can ask people why they do what they do.

Louis Rosenfeld

As a consequence, Avinash Kaushik motions to combine the two heretofore disparate disciplines with his definition of “Web Analytics 2.0:”

“[Web Analytics 2.0 is] the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition, to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers, and potential customers have, which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline).”

Avinash Kaushik, Web Analytics 2.0

Marko Hurst calls this behavioral metrics. He explores this amalgamation in his recent presentation, User Experience by the Numbers.

Back to topWhat is Web Measurement?

If Analytics provides the tools, Web Measurement is the process by which those tools are utilized. Thus, Web Measurement helps us make and act on inferences from the aforementioned tools. Marko Hurst makes an uncanny parallel in his presentation Analytics & Gambling—How Similar They Really Are.

Because analysis is rooted in mathematics, it’s typically accomplished following a logical, deductive process. We start by defining outcomes, then we proceed to measure, monitor, and act on our analysis. Let’s briefly cover each:

Outcomes

We begin measurement by establishing a desired outcome, or goal. In other words, what do we want to accomplish?

For example, say you want to improve your company’s next email blast. Their mailing list contains 150,000 members; what action do they want recipients to take? Fortunately for us, this email contains a coupon—perfect.

Outcomes are best when they are both specific and quantifiable. Let’s set a hypothetical goal of six percent. That is, six percent of our 150,000 members should convert (9,000). Next, let’s set a deadline: if we send this email out on Friday, let’s give users 1 week to determine whether or not they found our offer valuable to them.

Measure

We begin measurement by determining what’s quintessential to our desired outcome. In other words, a metric is anything we can track, but we’re looking for what we should track. For email, we’ll want to take a look at delivery rate, open rate, bounce/invalid rate, click-through rate, etc. Based on our desired outcome, though, we’ll put supreme emphasis on conversions. Thus, conversion (using our coupon) becomes our Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

Monitor

Monitoring keeps you aware of and lets you know three things at all times:

1. Where you are at—1,000 successes after 3 days.
2. Where do you want to be?—9,000 in 7 days. At the current rate you’d need 27 days to achieve your goal.
3. How you will get there?—Your current path and actions are not going to cut it, so you’ll need to change something to still have a chance to achieve the desired outcome of 9,000 conversions in the next four days. This is your output or delivery item for this phase. It tells what item or items can and should be acted upon to still achieve your goal.

Remember—the greatest gift monitoring can give you is time to make adjustments and manage expectations before it’s too late, in this case after the seven days.

Act

Action helps us refine measurement endeavors based on the data we’ve received thus far. In the case of our hypothetical email blast, we could:

• inform stakeholders of this campaign’s outlook.
• send a blast to a new set of subscribers (in case we’re not approaching our goal).
• send a blast to the same set of subscribers (minus those that have already converted) as a reminder.
• change the title of the email or the call-to-action in the email—the equivalent to an A/B Test.

Back to topWeb Analytics luminaries

On Twitter

Back to topTools of the trade

Many different tools enable Web analysts to do their jobs. Here’s a selection of some of the most popular:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the self–described enterprise-class web analytics solution. What does this mean to you? Google Analytics gives you insight into your website’s traffic and marketing effectiveness through user session metrics, including bounce rate, keyword frequency, etc.

Google Website Optimizer

From their product page:

Which phrase will earn more clicks: “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now”? Should you use a photo of your product or a photo of someone using it? Or no photo at all?
Website Optimizer will find out. It shows the alternatives at random to your website visitors, then measures which versions lead to the conversions you want. And it’s all free.

MINT

Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages, and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard.

KISS Insights

KISS Insights is a tool that allows designers to place a small survey bar across the bottom of their websites. Curious visitors can take a peek and are then presented with a simple survey in which they can evaluate the experience design of your website.

4Q

The 4Q Online Survey is a free online survey solution that allows you to find out why visitors are at your website, and whether or not they are completing their tasks (and if they aren’t, what’s getting in the way?).

ClickTale

ClickTale captures every mouse move, click, scroll, and keystroke that a visitor makes inside a webpage, and then sends this information back to the ClickTale servers in a highly compressed package. In addition, ClickTale takes a snapshot of the webpage as it was experienced by the visitor, and combines it with the recording to recreate the original browsing session.

PostRank Analytics

Engagement events are individual activities performed using specific social networks, sites, or applications. One tweet is an engagement event, for example as is posting one comment, or voting one digg. PostRank tracks these events and gives analysts the tools to extrapolate meaningful insights from this data.

Compete.com

Compete.com is a simple tool for gauging a website’s traffic versus that of its competitors. Compete also allows members to track that data over time to make calculated decisions based on their competitor’s strategy.

Quantcast Planner

Quantcast Planner lets you search, rank, and sort millions of Web properties in real-time according to the criteria that matter to you, including audience age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, and geographic location as well as constraints such as property size, content category, and ad acceptance. They claim that once you identify your audience, you can “buy” that audience.

Icerocket.com

Icerocket is a simple off–site analytics tool that gives interested parties a glimpse into the latest chatter going on around their website.

Back to topWeb Analytics Books

• Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
• Web Analytics 2.0
• Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing …and Tuning for Conversions
• Search Analytics
• Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

If you’re itching for more UX tools, checkout our articles: Top 29 Free UX Tools and Extensions and Information Gathering: a Roundup of UX Applications.

Back to topAdditional Resources

• Why Bloggers Need Analytics and Usability Testing
• How to Increase Site Performance through A/B Split Testing
• Using Google’s Website Optimizer to Improve Customer Experiences
• Successful Web Analytics Approaches by Avinash Kaushik
• A List Apart Issue 292: Triple issue on UX and Search

Editor’s Note

Many thanks to Marko Hurst and Louis Rosenfeld for their contributions to this article.

By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – August 21, 2010 at 07:00PM

Two years ago we shared a DIY bubble wand guide, this amazing video—featuring a super-size version of that DIY bubble wand—prompted us to dig the old post out of the archives.

In the above video Sterling Johnson, an engineer turned bubble smith, is blowing enormous bubbles at Stinson Beach, CA. He’s using a super-size version of the dowel and string bubble wand found here. Don’t think you need to be a professional bubble performer to pull those kind of bubbles off, however, the style of bubble wand he is using is very forgiving. Combine it with the right solution, open and close it gently in the wind—cloudy humid days are a bubble’s best friend—and you’ll be creating gigantic bubbles in no time.

You can check out the original tutorial we shared to get an idea how to build a big—or, as in the video above, super-size—bubble wand as well as a great DIY bubble recipe. For more bubble recipes, including the recipe used by Sterling Johnson, check out bubble-making site SoapBubbleDK. Have some creative and fun DIY projects to pack in before the summer check out? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – August 20, 2010 at 07:15PM

Last fall we wrote about how a company named Ultramercial had sued Hulu, YouTube and WildTangent over patent 7,346,545 for requiring people to watch an ad before being able to access content. It resulted in an interesting discussion in our comments, where some patent system defenders insisted that the patent was perfectly legit. Unfortunately, the court disagrees with those folks. It has ruled that the patent is not valid (the ruling covers Hulu and WildTangent — YouTube was dismissed from the case). Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the court chose to use the “machine or transformation test” for judging the patent. While some have read the Bilski ruling to “reject” the “machine or transformation” test, that’s not quite true. It just said that’s not the only test. The court in this case went through an explanation for why it felt this was still an appropriate test:

It is important to note, however, that even after the Supreme Court’s decision in Bilski, the
machine or transformation test appears to have a major screening function–albeit not perfect– that
separates unpatentable ideas from patentable ones. Indeed, four of the Justices, listed on Justice
Stevens’s concurring opinion, would have taken the machine or transformation test to its logical limit to
hold that business methods are categorically unpatentable. Id. at 3257 (Stevens, J., concurring). Joining
a concurring opinion, Justice Scalia, who signed on to parts of the plurality opinion as well, would not
hold all business methods unpatentable, but would agree with Justice Breyer that “not [] many
patentable processes lie beyond [the] reach [of the machine or transformation test].” Id. at 3258 (Breyer,
J., concurring). In sum, at least five (and maybe all) Justices seem to agree that the machine or
transformation test should retain much of its utility after the Supreme Court’s decision in Bilski.
Therefore, even though the machine or transformation is no longer the litmus test for patentability, the
Court will use it here as a key indicator of patentability.

And, using that test, the court finds this particular invention not patentable subject matter. It also points out that the patent is really just covering an abstract idea (the reasoning used by the Supreme Court to reject the Bilski patent):

At the core of the ‘545 patent is the basic idea that one can use
advertisement as an exchange or currency. An Internet user can pay for copyrighted media by sitting
through a sponsored message instead of paying money to download the media. This core principle,
similar to the core of the Bilski patent, is an abstract idea. Indeed, public television channels have used
the same basic idea for years to provide free (or offset the cost of) media to their viewers. At its heart,
therefore, the patent does no more than disclose an abstract idea.

I’m guessing this will likely be appealed, so it should be an interesting case to follow. You can read the full (quite clear) decision below:

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By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – August 20, 2010 at 04:11PM

We’ve never quite understood the general fears about Google Street View’s photographs, since they’re photographs of public places. However, many still seem somewhat freaked out by it all, and especially in Europe, they’ve continually put new rules and restrictions on Google’s Street View operation. Apparently, in Germany, people can specifically request that Google remove images of certain buildings. Of course, this is silly, and to prove that point, a German photographer is going to go photograph all of those buildings that have been excluded, then upload them to Google’s Picasa image hosting service, link them up to their GPS coordinates, and then “re-connect” them with Google Maps.

He’s basically doing a good job of pointing out how incredibly silly it is to say that you can’t photograph something that’s in public view. Anyone can photograph it, and with today’s technology, those photographs will likely end up online. Pretending that opting out of Google’s Street View protects any sort of privacy is folly, so congrats to Jens Best, for coming up with a simple and effective way of showing that.

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By Jason Kottke, kottke.org – August 20, 2010 at 02:28PM

This is a Google Maps interface with everything but the location labels taken away.

Take a little time with this one, zoom it in and out, especially on big cities. Excluding everything but the labels from the map emphasizes the Powers of Ten-like design of highly effective zoomable online maps. (via waxy)

Tags: Google Maps   long zoom   maps

By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – August 20, 2010 at 08:30AM

Keeping a house, or even a modest apartment, in tip-top shape can feel overwhelming. The Hierarchy of Cleaning aims to help you prioritize your cleaning needs.

Small Notebook, a lifestyle simplification and organization blog, has shared a clever hierarchy chart to help you focus on what cleaning tasks are important. Organized in a similar fashion to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the most basic cleaning requirements are on the bottom. Already took a shower? Good, do some laundry. Laundry in the washer? Worry about the dishes and take out the trash. You can work your way all the way up the hierarchy until your floors are clean and you’ve started on the extras like deep and detail cleaning.

While you’re at it, check out our guide to using procedure checklists for flawless task execution. You’d be amazed how much cleaner your place is when you’ve got a solid procedure list to guide you through routine cleaning chores.

Visit the link below to download a printable version. Disagree with the ranking on the Hierarchy of Cleaning? Sound off in the comments to tell us how you’d rank things.

By CmdrTaco, Slashdot – August 19, 2010 at 11:52AM

Tootech writes “Using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitimate purposes, a federal appeals court has ruled. ‘The defendant must have the intent to use the illicit recording to commit a tort of crime beyond the act of recording itself,’ the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. Friday’s decision, which involves a civil lawsuit over a secret audio recording produced from the 99-cent Recorder app, mirrors decisions in at least three other federal appeals courts.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.