Month: March 2013

By J.D. Roth, Get Rich Slowly – Personal Finance That Makes Sense. – December 30, 2010 at 06:00AM

This is a guest post from Carl Hendley of The Motley Fool. He’s substituting for Robert Brokamp, the adviser for The Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement service. Brokamp generally contributes one new article to Get Rich Slowly every two weeks, but he’s had the audacity to take a vacation over the holidays, so Hendley is filling in.

$132,683 — That’s how much I’m paying for cable. Now, I do have HBO, Showtime, and 386 other channels of digital bliss, but $132,683!? Please. Is this a billing error? Not exactly.

I recently came across Jon Hanson’s Foolish book Good Debt, Bad Debt. In it, he notes:

If you are forty years of age, every $100 a month you continuously burn costs you over $132,000 at age sixty-five. Said differently, invest $100 a month for twenty-five years (ages forty to sixty-five for example) in a mutual fund or other investment at only 10% and you will have $132,683…Is it worth $132,683 for cable TV with all the premium channels?

Now for the record, I really like The Walking Dead, Boardwalk Empire, and (I can’t believe I am gonna cop to this) The Real Housewives of Orange County, New York, or any other municipality that celebrates elective surgery and afternoon cocktail parties. But do I like them $132,683 worth? I think not.

Paradebt
My monthly Comcast bill is just one example of what Hanson labels “paradebt”. This is debt that’s outside of the traditional “borrow now and pay back later” variety such as a Visa bill, car payment, or student loan. Hanson writes, “paradebt or ‘almost debt’ is the cumulative effect of all your nonessential monthly spending.” Sure, these are services you can cancel, and yes, these paradebts don’t come with an interest rate, but they do come at a cost. Debt is debt.

But what about the Housewives? And my health?
I’m not saying I plan to do away with all of the items that make up my paradebt. I pay $33 a month to go to the gym. Yes, this is paradebt, and yes, I could get the same benefits with a pair of Nikes and a chin-up bar. Nevertheless, I want to stay healthy and maybe live a few years longer. (Plus I’m single and drive a 1995 Civic with 170,000 miles and a broken door — I need all the help I can get.) So, I choose to allocate my money towards the folks at Fitness First.

The key is that I’m consciously deploying that capital. I know that my $33 a month membership will cost me around $40,000 at retirement if I can achieve a 10% return on my investments. That’s okay. I’m willing to spend $40,000 to feel better and maybe live longer. Watching housewives go shopping for $130,000? That’s a different matter entirely.

Under the knife
Now, I’m no doctor but I am reasonably certain that the Real Housewives are no strangers to the scalpel. (For those of you unfamiliar with the show, this isn’t a reference to their abilities as physicians.) And while I’ll let others judge the results of their time under the knife, I will note that we could learn something from their efforts in trimming the fat.

With the New Year just a few days away, I’m in the process of setting my financial goals for 2011. Just like the Housewives, I too plan to make some cuts. This need not be major surgery. I’m just looking to better deploy a few dollars here and there. Since I don’t owe anything on my credit cards and my car is paid off (it’s a 1995 Honda Civic with a busted door, remember), I’m tackling my paradebt, starting with that $130,000 Comcast bill. Not only is $130K a lot of money to me, it turns out I can get it without doing anything other than calling my cable company.

Even if Jon Hanson is wrong and I don’t make 10% on my money, it’s still a great proposition. If I only make a 5% return on my cable savings, I’d still net $60,000 at retirement. Not as much as $132,000, to be sure, but that’s still enough to make me give up a few dozen channels of Law & Order reruns.

Next on the list is my AT&T bill. Yes, unlimited text messages are great, but methinks I could do with fewer LOLs in my life.

Finally, I plan to look at all of those subscriptions that automatically renew every year. The stack of Economists, New York Times, and New Yorkers that show up at my door every week may make me feel smarter (even as they go largely unread), but the costs add up.

And the trade off? I figure that switching out cable for Netflix, dropping unlimited text messages, and doing my reading online will free up about $100 a month — or as Jon Hanson would put it, $132,683 for my retirement.

What say you? How might you trim your own paradebt in 2011? More importantly, any suggestions for coping with my upcoming TV withdrawal?

—
Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly – Personal Finance That Makes Sense.:

• How I Cut my Comcast Cable Bill by 33% (Without Losing Any Service)
• Mastering the Art of Haggling
• Your Turn! How to Share Your Financial Stories with GRS Readers
• Reader Story: How I Saved Hundreds of Dollars on Insurance
• How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates

By Whitson Gordon, Gizmodo – December 30, 2010 at 03:40AM

Firefox isn’t the only browser for power users anymore, but that didn’t stop it from having a great year of updates, extensions, and tweaks in 2010. Here’s a look back at the most popular Firefox extensions and posts. More »

By Adrian Covert, Gizmodo – December 28, 2010 at 01:00AM

In three months between 1910 and 1911, the plane you see here became the first ever to take off from and land on runways aboard the USS Birmingham and USS Pennsylvania carriers, respectively. Recently, photos from both experiments were uncovered. More »

By (author unknown), Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine – November 07, 2010 at 06:51PM

Samsung has filed a patent for a new type of liquid lens that provides not only autofocus capability, but also true optical zoom capability. Liquid lenses, with their small form factor and lack of motors or moving parts, are ideal for use in compact cameras, phones, and other mobile devices. Where a conventional liquid lens may provide only autofocus, Samsung’s design uses two separately controllable liquid lenses in a single array to provide both functions…
Continue Reading Samsung files patent for liquid zoom lens

Tags: Camera Phone,
Lens,
Optical,
Patent,
Samsung

Related Articles:

• Liquid zoom lenses to be available in camera phones before the end of 2005
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• Samsung puts camera controls on the lens with new mirrorless NX100
• CasioTransparent Ceramic Lens technology reduces zoom lens size
• Breakthrough Programmable Refracting OLED Lens

By Vlad Savov, Engadget RSS Feed – September 23, 2010 at 02:17PM

Yes, you read that correctly. The fevered dreams of crime scene investigators up and down the country are being brought to reality by Adobe, with just a single extra lens and some crafty software knowhow. Basically, a plenoptic lens is composed of a litany of tiny “sub-lenses,” which allow those precious photons you’re capturing to be recorded from multiple perspectives. The result is that you get a bunch more data in your image and an “infinite” depth of field, meaning you can toggle at what distance you want your image to be focused after the act of taking it. These plenoptic lenses are inserted between your shooter’s usual lens and its sensor, though commercialization is sadly said to still be a fair distance away. Never fear, you can get hold of a video demo much sooner than that — you know where it’s at.

Continue reading Adobe shows off plenoptic lenses that let you refocus an image after it’s taken (video)

Adobe shows off plenoptic lenses that let you refocus an image after it’s taken (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – June 16, 2010 at 12:00PM

The sweet spot of a foolproof hard drive backup plan includes local backup to an external drive and off-site backup to the cloud. The problem: Most people don’t do it. Here’s a set-it-and-forget-it, step-by-step guide to backing up your data.

Photo by ArtMast.

You’ll find no shortage of ways to backup your data—to other hard drives, to network drives, to external drives, to the cloud, to your neighbor’s house, to a data center in Houston, etc.—but not everyone makes computer tinkering and data backup their part-time hobby. We understand the allure of patching together your own awesome and custom-fit backup system, but we also understand the allure of the “It Just Works” method. Whether you want to set up a data protection plan for yourself or for a less than computer-savvy relative (we’ll be referring to this relative as Uncle Ted for the rest of the guide), Mozy provides a dead-simple backup plan for both Windows and Macs.

Step 1: Signing Up and Installing the Software

Mozy comes in three flavors. MozyHome Free is a no-cost solution that uses the same software and syncing as MozyHome Unlimited but is limited to backing up 2GB of data. If you’ve never used Mozy before and you’re curious if this guide will really help you automate your backups with no fuss or headaches, you should really sign up for a free account and give it a try. At the end of the day, we’d strongly recommend paying for MozyHome Unlimited. It’s $4.95 per month (or $55 per year) for unlimited backup on home computers, both locally and to Mozy’s servers (where privacy hounds will be happy to know the backups are sent completely encrypted).

First, head over to Mozy and sign up for an account. After you’ve signed up, grab a copy of MozyHome. Run the installer, and when you’ve finished, the setup menu will automatically pop up. This is a great time to plug in an external hard drive if you want to take advantage of Mozy’s secondary backup features—which you do, so plug the drive in now! (Note: Make sure your external hard drive is at least as big as the drives you’re backing up so you don’t run into any problems with your data pool exceeding the size of the backup media.)

Step 2: Setting Up Mozy

Mozy is pretty well set up out of the box but it does require a little tweaking to take advantage of all the options. The screenshot above shows you the initial screen you see after Mozy finishes installing. By default it scans your system and adds things like My Documents, videos, photos, contacts, and browser bookmarks to your backup set. To get finer control over individual folders and files move one tab over to “File System” and browse your entire computer like so:

In the “File System” menu you can check individual folders and files to get more granular control over exactly which items Mozy will back up. You can decide whether you want Mozy to back up your entire drive, or if you just want to pick and choose what needs backed up.

Once you’ve selected which files you want backed up, it’s time to customize how Mozy operates. Hop over to the “Options” tab. Let’s work our way through all the settings and get things tweaked just the way we want. First, the General options.

General Settings: If you’re setting things up for yourself and you want a lot of feedback on what gets backed up and when, then you’ll want to check “Show backup status icon on files” and crank down the “Alert me that a backup hasn’t happened in this many days.” variable to 1 or 2 days. If you’re setting it up for Uncle Ted you’ll want to leave the icons off and the alert set for a higher number of days to cut down on the number of tech-support calls you get. (Note: If you have the notifications shut off, you should occasionally check to make sure it’s backing up without any problems.)

Scheduling: Whether you opt for automatic backups or scheduled backups depends largely on whether or not your computer is on 24/7 or not. You’ve likely got a lot of data to back up off the bat, so to begin with it’s wise to turn on scheduled backups and set your computer to upload your data all night long every night until you’ve synced your system to the Mozy servers. This can take days depending on how big your drive is, but it’s worth it. (The local backup should take much less time.) Once Mozy finishes the initial online backup, you may want to switch to automatic backups for more frequent incremental backups.

If you’re setting things up for Uncle Ted, you can keep the backup frequency low. For power users that do a lot of work all day on the computer and frequent file editing, it’s best to tweak the number of daily backups to coincide with how often you take breaks from the computer so backups are frequent and timely.

Laptop users will want to switch the last setting, “Start automatic backups when the computer is running on battery power” depending on where they are in the process of backing up their data. Early on when you’re uploading tons of data for extended periods of time, it’s best to set Mozy to not backup when you’re on battery power in order to conserve your battery when you’re away from an outlet. Later, when your backups are small and incremental, it’s probably fine to let Mozy back up while on the battery.

Performance: You can throttle your bandwidth to make room for other applications and you can adjust the backup speed to emphasize faster computer performance or faster backup. If you throttle at all, definitely only throttle during the time your home network is being used for things where latency matters like video games, web browsing, and communication tools like Skype. As far as the “Backup Speed” setting goes, I’ve always just slammed the slider all the way over to “Quicker Backups”. If you have an older PC and you notice that Mozy is really chewing up the cycles you can adjust it to the left until your system seems less sluggish. Again, I’ve always put the emphasis on quicker backups without any problems.

Local Backup: Local backup is one of the best new featured in Mozy. When you enable local backup, Mozy will simultaneously backup to an external hard drive and the Mozy servers so you always have a copy of the data on your actual computer, a copy on an external drive right beside your computer, and then a copy on the Mozy servers in the cloud. It’s a really ideal setup, especially for those times that you want to restore a large file from the Mozy servers but you don’t want to wait.

As awesome as the addition of local backup is to Mozy you should be aware of one caveat. If you delete a file on your computer the Mozy servers will retain that file for 30 days in case you want to retrieve it. The file will be dropped from the local backup during the next file sync. It seems like an oversight—or a purposely over-dependence on the Mozy servers—but it’s something we’d love to see corrected so that the delay on the external drive matches the delay on the Mozy servers.

Advanced Settings: The advanced settings allow you to tweak things like whether or not Mozy will appear as a drive in My Computer—so you can browse your file backups like you would browse a regular drive. If you think having an extra drive would be too confusing for Uncle Ted, you can uncheck it. If you’re going for minimal user interaction and/or annoyance you should also uncheck “Show status when backup successfully completes.” I happen to like seeing when Mozy is doing its thing, but it’s easy enough to run it silently if you desire.

When you’re done configuring, click “OK” at the bottom to get started with your first backup.

Note: For the sake of getting a speedy screenshot on our test machine, we shrunk the size of our backup set down to the barebones. If you’re uploading a whole hard drive’s worth of photos, videos, and projects, be patient! It’ll take quite a while to upload it all to Mozy’s servers.

There When You Need It: Restoring Your Files

Once Mozy starts humming along—and assuming nothing catastrophic happens in the near future—that’s the last you’ll see of Mozy in your regular computing. It works in the background, the files get backed up, and you go on about your life knowing that your digital life isn’t hovering on the brink of a horrible hard drive catastrophe.

If your hard drive does crash or you delete a file here or there that needs restoring, you can access your files in several different ways. In the following screenshots and examples we’re still on a machine running Mozy that hasn’t suffered a catastrophic crash, but even if it had we could simply fire up a new hard drive and install Mozy to start grabbing our files.

The easiest way to get at the files is to simply use the Restore tab in the Mozy software. There you’ll find a directory structure of all the files you have backed up and Mozy will take care of the logistics of putting them back where they belong.

A few check marks and a click of the “Restore Files” button and you’re back in business. Alternately you can browse your external hard drive backup. The files are organized on the external drive in the same folder structure they are on your actual drives.

This is extremely convenient compared to some of the backup software tools on the market that package your backups in archive files. Sure the compression might save a little space but it’s a hassle to get back at the files when you need them in a pinch. Just as easily as you can browse the external hard drive you can also, through My Computer, browse your server-based backups on the Mozy servers.

The only difference is you’re only seeing the file headers and not the actual files so when it’s time to drag and drop that big file from the server-based file browser you’ll be dealing with the limitations of your broadband connection instead of your USB drive.

You can also, less conveniently than just hopping over to your external drive or server folders, log into the Mozy web site and restore files through the web-based interface.

Relax

Now that you’re all set up, you can relax in the knowledge that it would take a catastrophic fire or hard drive failure—both at your home and Mozy’s redundant server farm—for your data to go missing. Between your local data, your local backup copy, and your cloud-based copy, you’d either have to be terribly unlucky or the NSA is out to get you before you lost your data.

Have a tip, trick, or tweak to share for achieving dead-simple backups with a minimum of fuss? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Jason Fitzpatrick is a writer at Lifehacker and a missionary of the gospel of Good Backup Practices and he urges you to backup daily for a long and stress-free life.

By Dan Goodin, Ars Technica » Risk Assessment – March 14, 2013 at 09:00AM

Aurich Lawson

It was straight out of your favorite spy novel. The US and Israel felt threatened by Iran’s totalitarian-esque government and its budding nuclear program. If this initiative wasn’t stopped, there was no telling how far the growing conflict could escalate. So militaries from the two countries reportedly turned to one of the most novel weapons of the 21st century: malware. The result was Stuxnet, a powerful computer worm designed to sabotage uranium enrichment operations.

When Stuxnet was found infecting hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, it was only a matter of time until researchers unraveled its complex code to determine its true intent. Today, analysts are up against a similar challenge. But they’re finding considerably less success taking apart the Stuxnet cousin known as Gauss. A novel scheme encrypting one of its main engines has so far defied attempts to crack it, generating intrigue and raising speculation that it may deliver a warhead that’s more destructive than anything the world has seen before.

Gauss generated headlines almost immediately after its discovery was documented last year by researchers from Russia-based antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. State-of-the-art coding techniques that surreptitiously extracted sensitive data from thousands of Middle Eastern computers were worthy of a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie. Adding to the intrigue, code signatures showed Gauss was spawned from the same developers responsible for Stuxnet, the powerful computer worm reportedly unleashed by the US and Israeli governments to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. Gauss also had links to the highly advanced Flame and Duqu espionage trojans.

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

By Michael Seo, TechCrunch – March 14, 2013 at 10:14PM

Samsung is releasing a bombardment of accessories along with their Galaxy S 4, one of which is a fully functional, boda-fide wireless gaming controller.

The oval shaped controller is a great deal smaller and lighter than the Xbox and Playstation controllers you’re used to gripping. It has a plastic build, and it’s so light it feels almost hollow. It feels cheap, to be quite frank — I’m used to the heft of regular controllers, and it was a little oft putting to use at first. You’ll find the regular assortment of joysticks and buttons here: two analog sticks, inset d-pad controls, two triggers on the right and left – everything you’d expect.

The controller connects to the Galaxy S 4 via a Bluetooth connection, and sadly, it isn’t backwards compatible with the S 3 or any other Samsung phones. It’s powered by two AAA batteries and there are strangely two separate battery compartments for each battery. The coolest part of the controller, if anything, is that there’s a receptacle on the top of the phone that can be pulled out as a dock for the S 4.

Now for the bad news: the controller is only compatible with games that are purchased from Samsung’s curated app portal. For many of us Android users that have already purchased and downloaded a plethora of games from the Google Play Store, that’s a severe disappointment. It also appears as though the S 4 can only link up with one controller at a time, so multiplayer gaming is a no-go for now.

Samsung wouldn’t tell us any details about the pricing, but we expect the controller to be released sometime in May.

By Joel Lee, MakeUseOf – March 14, 2013 at 10:01PM

Like most people, I enjoy going out to places with my friends. Restaurants, movies, overnight trips, amusement parks, paintballing – you name it and I’ll go. Going out as a group is great but sometimes there are complications, especially when it comes down to money.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll cover someone if they’re short on cash and I’ve been covered on occasion as well. However, if your group of friends (or family, coworkers, colleagues, etc.) is the type that expects everyone to be reimbursed perfectly, the whole act of tracking debts can become a headache. This is also applicable to roommate situations where different people are paying for different bills.

Fortunately, there’s a new website that aims to solve this problem. It’s called What Do I Owe You? and it’s an extremely simple solution that gets the job done – and it’s different from traditional bill splitters and budget managers.

Here’s the basic layout of the website. Don’t be turned away by its simplicity, though. Haven’t you ever heard not to judge a book by its cover?

The gist of What Do I Owe You? is that you can add or remove people from the group that you want to split bills with. Each person has a name (which is by default “Click to Edit“)  and a list of items that they’ve paid for. As far as I know, you can add as many items per person as you want.

When you’re done with all of the items for all of the people, a single “Who Owes What?” click will tell you what each person owes to whomever else.

Editing people in the group is easy, too. To change their names, all you have to do is click on the “Click to Edit” and start typing.

The “Add Bill” button will add more input fields where you can more items that they’ve paid for. The text field is smart because you can start it off with a money value (like $40.00) and the rest of it will be ignored, so you can use that to describe what that bill was for.

Here’s an example setup that I’ve created. As you can see, it’s as straightforward as can be. As far as I know, there are no limits to how many people can be added to the group. (I stopped at 25 because there will never be a situation where I need to track 25 casual debts with my friends.)

And finally, once you click that beautiful “Who Owes What?” button, the site will tell you what each person owes and to whom they owe that amount. Again, it’s not very pretty and there aren’t too many bells or whistles that go along with it, but the information is accurate.

If you want to start over, there’s a Reset option. You can also send an IOU Email to an address, which presumably reminds them in a friendly way that they have a debt to settle. Perfect for people who don’t like face-to-face confrontations!

The last two features are what make What Do I Owe You? something that will be used by many people – mobile support and progress saving.

At the bottom of the site, there’s a link that lets you switch into a mobile version of the site. On some devices, the site may detect that you’re on a mobile phone and change its format accordingly. Either way, I’m sure there are many applications for this website while on the go, so having mobile support is aces.

Progress saving is also quite nice. If you want to do long-term tracking of debts, just update the bills and click “Save” at the top right. This will tie your progress with your browser using a cookie and all of your data will be reloaded whenever you come back. However, in case you delete your cookies mistakenly, the site provides a link that you can use to restore your progress.

Overall, a fantastic website. The graphics could use some polish (okay, a LOT of polish) but the functionality is great. If more people used the site, I’m sure the creator would keep it updated with new features over time. There’s a “Feedback” link in case you want to send in your comments and suggestions.

Image Credits: Wallet Bills Via Shutterstock

The post Have a Hard Time Tracking Debts With Friends? Use What Do I Owe You appeared first on MakeUseOf.

By Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker – June 08, 2012 at 12:00PM

Firefox: Typing Stats is an add-on designed to help you improve your typing skills and, thus, your productivity. The add-on shows statistics about your typing speed and accuracy, and even which fingers made the most mistakes.

Typing Stats runs in the background while you type in the browser (e.g., typing up emails or a Google Doc). Its analysis is pretty comprehensive, with data on how many keystrokes you type correctly per minute, how many characters you correct using the backspace per minute, your total typing time, and the characters you’ve had to correct the most. If you’re a start-and-stop-again type of typist, the “histogram of intervals between keystrokes” will show you that.

All of this data can help you become better at typing by showing you want you need to work on. (I seem to constantly correct the “n” key, for example, thanks to my error-prone pointy finger on my right hand.)

Although the tool lets you display different intervals for the analysis (last 24 hours or last week, for example), it would be better if it showed a smaller interval, like the last hour—in case you want to do a typing test rather than see all your typing over time.

Still, faster and more accurate typing will catapult you, hopefully, into the productivity big leagues and Typing Stats is one useful tool to help you get there.

Typing Stats | Mozilla Add-Ons via AddictiveTips