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Sunday, November 29, 2009
Macy's Coat Sale: Kenneth Cole Reaction Men's Eden Wool Pea Coat $70, London...
Black Friday Shopping Mayhem Roundup
See Memphis below...
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Black Friday Shopping Mayhem Roundup
For some reason, Walmart and Toys R Us were the focal points of this year's Black Friday mayhem nationwide. Shoppers and store employees survived the day with no deaths, major injuries, or significant property damage. It's sad that that's an accomplishment.
Rancho Cucamonga, California: After at least one fight broke out near the electronics department around 4:00 A.M, Walmart store management called the police. Reports differ on the question of whether the store was ever closed.
Upland, California: Walmart threw customers out and shut down for nearly three hours after customers tried to break into shrink-wrapped pallets of merchandise and fights broke out. Customers yelled, screamed, and pounded on the doors during the three-hour period.
Manchester, Connecticut: Customers tried to jump the line and get through the doors of the Toys R Us store shortly before midnight. Police intervened, and the store opened an hour late.
Atlanta, Georgia: Two men were stabbed in the Gwinnett Place mall on Friday morning. The stabbings turned out to be gang-related, not a shopping dispute. Their injuries were not life-threatening.
Indianapolis, Castleton, and Greenwood, Indiana: Police were called to multple stores after shoving and fights broke out over the limited supply of Zhu Zhu Pets and other toys.
Jantzen Beach, Oregon: Police called to help control the crowd outside a Toys R Us after shoving and other mayhem broke out.
Memphis, Tennessee: A group of late arrivals tried to rush the door at opening time, but were stopped. Members of the crowd went vigilante, threatening line-jumpers with Tasers and pepper spray.
Houston, Texas: As customers waited in line at Best Buy late Thursday night, tow trucks began hauling their cars away. The drivers assumed the cars belonged to patrons of a nightclub across the street.
...
~david
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Saturday, November 28, 2009
Lala Lets You Sample Whole Music Tracks Before Buying [Streaming Music]
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via LH -mac -news -roundup -sponsors on 11/18/09
Online music site lala allows you to listen to song after song and album after album for free. The catch? You can only listen to them once, unless you pick up a web album or MP3 version for cheap.
We've been playing around with lala for several days now and haven't had too many qualms with the service. Yes, we have our own extensive music collection, access to sites like Pandora or MixTape.me (developed by Adam) but lala has a few notable services of its own to recommend it.
You can choose to listen to songs by typing in an artist (LadyGaGa), theme (Christmas), or genre (Jazz), and lala will pull up a listing of tunes matching your search results. Without registering, you can listen to any song by clicking on the play button, but if you've taken the 30 seconds to register, you can hit play on a whole album to listen to while you go about your internet musings.
At first we were annoyed with the idea of not being able to listen to things more than once, but the more we started to play, the more we really got into the swing of things. There's been so many albums we've passed on downloading, not having heard the whole album, and it's been kind of refreshing to listen to new things outside of our own record collection.
It's an easy interface to look at and operate, and might allow you to check out a new release album before deciding to download or buy it for real. Lala isn't a brand new service by any means (it was originally a CD-trading service, incidentally), so if you've been using it recently, let's hear how you like it in the comments.
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You're Backing Up Your Data the Wrong Way [Backup]
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You're Backing Up Your Data the Wrong Way [Backup]
Time and time again, people tell me that they've bought an external hard drive to back up their pictures, music, and documents. Great, right? Sadly, that's not always the case.
There's one simple rule about backups that everybody needs to fully understand: Your files should exist in at least Two places, or it's no longer a backup—and your data is at risk. Too often people delete the files from their primary PC, assuming they are backed up.
It's time to educate people on proper backup strategy, so we'll run through your options and talk about the pros and cons. These days, you've got plenty of choices on the Windows side of things, Mac users have Time Machine, and there's online backup for anybody.
Backing Up to a Local Source
When it comes to local backup applications, it's really a matter of preference, since most of them do the job adequately without a lot of fuss. The Backup and Restore application built into Windows 7 or Vista is a perfectly acceptable choice, and will handle most backups with ease. My personal choice is a paid version of SyncBack SE, but there's plenty of other choices for Windows, and all of them do the job.
The most important thing to remember when backing up your data is that you can't delete it from your main system once it's been backed up to an external drive. By doing that, you've left yourself with only a single copy of your important files, on an external drive that has just as much chance of dying as your internal PC hard drive. Think it can't happen to you? One of my external drives died last week.
Backing Up to an Online Source
There's quite a few online backup services to choose from, and while the great thing about online backup is that you don't have to deal with external drives, you're leaving your data in somebody else's hands, and restoring all of your files can take an extremely long time, since yo...
~david
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SyncToy 2.1 Update Speeds Up Windows File Syncing [Updates]
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SyncToy 2.1 Update Speeds Up Windows File Syncing [Updates]
Windows: Microsoft's SyncToy is a simple but effective tool for mirroring folders across hard drive locations, networks, or USB devices. With a 2.1 update, it's been retooled to run faster, back up configurations, and handle errors much better.
We've previously featured SyncToy as a handy way to sync files between computers and share an iTunes library. It also ended up ranking among our readers' five favorite syncing tools. 2.1 isn't a huge update with new features, but it does utilize a new syncing framework, and a few annoyance fixes that will win over those who dig this "toy":
- Better Performance: The speed of file copy operations is significantly increased across the board.
- Improved Robustness: Much more resilient to transient network and file system errors and better error reporting which pin-points which file the sync failed on in case there's a fatal error that stops the sync.
- Folder pair configuration backup: Folder pair configuration is automatically backed up under %localappdata%\microsoft\synctoy\2.0. User can replace SyncToyDirPairs.bin with the backup copy to resolve last saved configuration.
There are also a few bug fixes—notable among them is a fix for NAS syncing failure. SyncToy 2.1 is a free download for Windows systems, including 7, only.
SyncToy 2.1 [Microsoft]
~david
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Make Better, Less Messy Bacon in a Waffle Iron [Clever Uses]
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Make Better, Less Messy Bacon in a Waffle Iron [Clever Uses]
We've customized the above video embed to skip right to the waffle iron goodness. Watch the whole clip, however, and Alton explains not only what kind of bacon to buy at the grocery store, but why the waffle iron wins out as a cooking platform. In a pan, the fat and meat shrink and cook at different rates, and over time leave a troublesome amount of grease in the pan that makes multiple batches challenging. The waffle iron pulls away bacon grease in its nooks and notches, and you can collect it to use in another food, or leave a thin layer of grease on for seriously home-style waffles.
Got a better bacon technique? Drop that hot science in the comments.
~david
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Five Best Online Backup Tools [Hive Five]
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Five Best Online Backup Tools [Hive Five]
Local backup is a useful and necessary part of securing your data against catastrophe, but with the advent of broadband and inexpensive online storage, you've got little reason to not back up critical files to the cloud as well.
Photo by jared.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite online backup solutions. Now we're back to share the five most popular solutions Lifehacker readers use to back up their data online and keep it secure in the event that some unforeseen event at their on-site location—fire, flood, theft, someone casts Chain Lighting in the server room—wipes out their local backup.
Note: When contenders in the Hive Five have a free option, we've listed that first, followed by the first level of paid backup they provide. For additional levels and packages click on the name of the backup service for more information.
For additional information on both both Hive Five contenders and other online backup solutions, you can check out this comprehensive comparison chart.
CrashPlan (Windows/Mac/Linux/Open Solaris, Basic [No online storage] Free, Premium [Unlimited] $4.50 per month)
CrashPlan takes an interesting approach with their backup software. You can download the software for free and use it to perform local backups on your computer and home network as well as back up data to a friend's computer if they are also running CrashPlan (so it's sort of off-site if a friend's running it). They don't offer any free introductory plans for online storage like most other online backup providers, but their rate for an unlimited personal account is on par with other providers. The software is very user friendly, and even if you're not sure if you want to commit to paying for an online backup service, it's worth a download just to automate your local backups. If your data goes kaput, you can restore it using the software or you can order a hard copy of your data.
Mozy (Windows/Mac, Basic [2GB] Free, Home Premium [Unlimited] $4.95 per month)
Mozy is an automated backup solution. Once ...
~david
(sent via mobile device)
Eat Breakfast Like an Olympian with "Super" Oatmeal [Diet]
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Eat Breakfast Like an Olympian with "Super" Oatmeal [Diet]
Although Seebohar uses a rice cooker in the video above, your stove top or microwave would work just fine for creating this energy and antioxidant packed oatmeal. The mixture is packed with enough essentials to fuel your body through workout sessions, an afternoon hike, or maybe some Black Friday power shopping (assuming it's not all done online). The ingredient list is as follows:
- Rolled oats
- Water
- Whey protein powder
- Dark cocoa powder
- Ground flax
- Blueberries
- Raisins
- Banana
Do you have a power packed breakfast routine? Ever tried something similar to this "super" oatmeal? Let us know in the comments.
Upgrade Your Oatmeal [Social Workout]
~david
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Friday, November 27, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
GAP.com: Sweaters for Men & Women, Fleece for Kids & Babies 50% off + additi...
fyi...
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Monday, November 23, 2009
Christmas Books: Max's Christmas, A Christmas Carol, Christmas Magic, Santa Claustrophobia, Spot's First Christmas, Christmas Is Here, Corduroy! from $1.77
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Christmas Books: Max's Christmas, A Christmas Carol, Christmas Magic, Santa Claustrophobia, Spot's First Christmas, Christmas Is Here, Corduroy! from $1.77
~david
(sent via mobile device)
Thursday, November 19, 2009
sightseeing
free parking and admission: http://www.nationalheritagemuseum.org/
also this: http://www.nps.gov/MIMA/index.htm
also this: http://www.nps.gov/MIMA/index.htm
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Recipe Aggregators
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Recipe Aggregators
I love to cook but I don't have many recipes memorized, and much as I like cooking from any of the several cookbooks in my library, I often look for new recipes online. It's not an easy task. I'm amazed at the number of ad-riddled pages I find when typing the name of any dish into Google. I do have an online subscription to Cook's Illustrated (previously reviewed), and there are a handful of other individual free sites I turn to for recipes and technique info. However, as a research librarian, I'm always keen to execute a search in a manner that maximizes the number of relevant results by querying a specific set of targeted resources. For scientific queries, I use freely accessible databases such as Public Library of Science or PubMed, or I use one of my library accounts to access subscription-based databases such as Wiley InterScience or Elsevier's Science Direct. When I put my home-cook hat on, I approach recipe-finding with a similar set of expectations. Though there's no shortage of recipe information online, there's not really an equivalent set of databases for cookery. Here's a round-up of the best recipe aggregation resources I've found.
Epicurious is my go-to recipe site; I've used it for four years. One of the aspects I like most about it is the user comments. Because the site is older, most recipes have at least a handful of comments, and I've found that most users leave really helpful feedback (usually suggestions for how to scale or tweak recipes). However, it's also very easy to ignore user comments if you just want to stick to the original recipe. I usually cook from printed versions of the recipes (rather than bringing my laptop in the kitchen), and Epicurious offers several options for the size of the printed page, whether or not images are included, and even the option to print a separate shopping list.
Most recipes come from Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines (the site is owned by Conde Nast). Some come from cookbooks published by Random House, with whom Epicurious has some kind of republication agreement, it seems. Some have also been reprinted from other cookbooks, with permission. In addition to the 25,000 recipes from these professional resources, they also boast 50,000 member-submitted recipes. Epicurious is the online food site to beat.
~david
(sent via mobile device)
Monday, November 9, 2009
Hospital Sends $29,000 Bill To Parents Of Murdered College Student [Inapprop...
bad ucd, bad.
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via Consumerist by Meg Marco on 11/6/09
Not only did the UC Davis Medical Center send a $29,186.50 bill to the parents of college student who was beaten to death by his roommate, they also sent a letter letting them know that their son was considered indigent and was no longer welcome at the hospital if he needed further treatment. He doesn't, of course, because he is deceased.
Apparently he also had insurance, and the hospital should have sent the bill to his insurer.
"I can't believe that in any country besides the U.S., any civilized country, that the parents of a murdered boy would receive this bill for $29,000 and such an insulting letter," Gerald Hawkins, the victim's father, told ABC 10 in Sacramento, CA.
The bill in question was for "five minutes in [the hospital's] emergency room," says ABC 10, who tried to assess why 5 minutes could cost $29,000.
Scott Seamons with the California Hospital Council said the critical response to Hawkins is what cost the most. He said UC Davis is a Level 1 Trauma Center, which means the best and most expensive doctors were waiting for Scott.
"Whether it was five minutes or 55 minutes doesn't really matter in the initial review and assessment of the patient," he said.
Trauma surgeons, nurses, technicians and more had to treat Scott before they realized they couldn't help, according to Seamons.
"They're all right there," he said. "And those are highly trained, highly specialized and highly paid clinical experts. Clearly in the aftermath, in hindsight, they looked at it and determined there was probably less need for that, but in the first five minutes all of those resources were right there at the side of this patient, and they cost a lot of money."
ABC 10 says that the letter included with the bill instructed the deceased to take his health care needs to a county clinic in the future. The hospital has apologized.
Why was Murdered Sac State Student's ER Bill So High? [News 10]
Slain Sac State Student's Parents Stunned by Hospital Bill, Letter [News 10]
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Sunday, November 8, 2009
Here Are Your Shipping Deadlines For Christmas 2009 [Online Shopping]
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Here Are Your Shipping Deadlines For Christmas 2009 [Online Shopping]
If you're planning on spending the next 6-8 weeks pouring cash into Mammon's gaping maw—and really, who isn't? it's how we love each other—then here are the shipping deadlines for over 100 online retailers, courtesy of CouponSherpa. In today's UPS/FedEx world you can frequently wait right up until Christmas week, but you might want to double-check the list if there's a retailer you absolutely have to shop from.
"Holiday Shipping Deadlines for Christmas 2009" [CouponSherpa] (Thanks to Jeff!)
(Photo: dierken)
~david
(sent via mobile device)
Expansion And Extension Of Homebuyer Tax Credit Now Official [Real Estate]
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Expansion And Extension Of Homebuyer Tax Credit Now Official [Real Estate]
As anticipated, President Obama signed the 8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit extension into law on Friday. You can now collect the credit if your home purchase is complete by June 30, 2010. But wait, there's more! The extension also offers a tax credit for people who are purchasing a new residence, but aren't first-time homeowners.
The key, of course, is that the newly purchased home needs to be a primary residence—no rental properties or vacation homes, thank you. Current homeowners within the income guidelines can receive a $6,500 credit after purchasing a new home—new homeowners will still receive $8,000.
Expanded First-Time Home Buyer Tax Credit Becomes Law [U.S. News & World Report]
(Photo: nicolas.boullosa)
~david
(sent via mobile device)
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