Got a point there. The Pebble watch is functional, not pretty. Apple made a point in their announcement that they were following the history of watchmaking when it came to design and function. Pebble openly mocks this. While I think Pebble is good in it’s own way, it is not jewelry like the Apple Watch is positioned as. This will be interesting when the Apple Watch hits the market in April.
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In the time it took me to watch their video, the campaign went from $60,000 to $260,000. It’s now at $350,000 at the posting of this message. They were the first big hit of Kickstarter and one of the first smart watches on the market. Now they are back with a color screen and new interface.
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Once inside his dorm, in the 900 block of West Harrison Street, Hossain allegedly asked the woman to remove her clothing and she did, keeping on her bra and underwear, Karr said. He then bound her hands above her head and to a bed with a belt, used another belt to bind her legs and stuffed a necktie into her mouth, Karr said.
Hossain used a knit cap to cover the woman's eyes, Karr said, and removed the woman's bra and underwear. He then began striking the woman with a belt. After hitting her several times, the woman told Hossain he was hurting her, told him to stop, "and began shaking her head and crying," said Karr.
Hossain continued striking the woman — including with his fists, according to an arrest report — and she managed to get one arm, and then another, free. But he then held her arms behind her back and sexually assaulted her as she continued to plead for him to stop, according to Karr.
Chicago Tribune
This is normal sex, isn’t it?
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If you cannot tell from the 80 plus posts over the last 4 weeks, I’m a Republican. More over, I’m a Tea Party, Constitutional Republican. Conservative both economically and on personal freedom. The Net Neutrality battle is brewing again, and I thought I’d share why I’m opposed to it.
For a Republican, there is a difference between what one likes and what one supports politically. There are things that we support (freedom of speech) and things we don’t like (how Westboro Baptist uses their freedom of speech). Constitutionally, there is nothing wrong with what they do. They are free to do it. However, personally I don’t like how they do it. As such, I cannot write my senator to demand that Westboro not be allowed to protest in my county. I can mount a counter-protest.
When it comes to freedom of businesses to operate as they wish, I support them doing whatever they want. Now obviously, a businesses like Comcast has us customers sign Terms of Service agreements. With such an agreement, they lay out how they restrict us and themselves. If they do something against their terms, we have the right to sue them. Or leave them. Or right a harsh blog article about them. But constitutionally, we shouldn’t demand regulation to prevent them from doing something. Use the courts or your freedom to spend your money where you want to spend your money.
The battle over Net Neutrality is rallied behind a term that is clearly faulty. Like the Freedom to Choose (pro-choice), which avoids the truth that a baby is being ripped limb from limb or burned with chemicals, Net Neutrality is about taking something that is free and outside the government’s control, that is as neutral as something can be, and putting it in the hands of the same government that said, “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it*.”
In the current situation, businesses might control access, but we pay them for that access. If Comcast does something stupid, like renaming me Asshole Finley— what is this, grade school?—, I can leave. After hours on the phone. With the government regulating the Internet, you can be almost guaranteed that no new provider will appear as the hoops are too high and too expensive to jump through.
But isn’t it already that way? Comcast owns the lines in many apartment complexes and it prevents others from coming in! Yes, it does. Because they own the lines. Do you want the government to come in and say “that thing you own: you must share it with others.” I mean, that’s what they do with your income, so why not with something like Comcast’s property? That’s a horrible idea! Competition exists in the market when it is free from regulation! It’s why business is so hard in Illinois! Over-regulation by a Democrat state government has caused so many businesses to flee to cheaper states.
Don’t be sheep herded behind vague words and propaganda used to rally. Use your brains, people! You’re smarter than this. You don’t want the government to control everything. With a bigger government, the taxes only go up. The estimates are between 11 and 17 BILLION dollars in taxes and fees. Just leave Comcast, don’t force our taxes up even higher than they already are. Instead, use your collective power (it’s clear that you have it) to hold companies accountable.
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This week was a good week for Finley.im. Not only did the site cross into the 80+ post realm, but a lot of this week was featured articles. Of the prior weeks I’ve posted 1 or 2 featured article along with 15-20 links. This week, 6 featured articles, including my first game review, first album review, first tutorial, and an article on Writer’s Block. Let’s say that I’ve started to write my way out of writer’s block.
I will be publishing my take on net neutrality next week, but Stu makes some excellent points here on why it won’t make the Internet better.
Been following Dustin for a while and this is a great piece looking at the auto industry, the computer industry, and where we’re going over the next few years.
So much awesomeness here. This article shook the Internet this week with how open it was about Apple and Jony Ive, as well as tidbits about his relationship with Steve Jobs.
50 Shades of Grey is not about romance, but abuse. There is nothing sexual about beating a woman. It is purely psychological. As in, they need professional help, not a woman that will save them.
I love Tapbots. Love. So them updating Calcbot has brought it back to my home screen, sharing space with Tweetbot of course.
So that’s the week. Next week I’ll be publishing articles on ISIS and Net Neutrality as well as a full review of Red’s new album that will be out on Tuesday. Thanks for reading!
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Have I mentioned my love for Adam4d? That phrase you hear too often, “God helps those who help themselves”? That’s not in the Bible. You cannot help yourself. The sooner you admit it, the sooner you’ll find a peace that only exists under the blood of Christ.
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Rashbaum told Rosen that he sometimes had troubling thoughts while doing abortions, as well as disturbing dreams about aborted babies. One image that often haunted him was the mental picture of a preborn baby hanging onto the walls of her mother’s womb with her tiny fingernails as Rashbaum tried to abort her. Rashbaum, of course, saw the torn apart bodies of aborted babies daily. The fact that he had disturbing thoughts and dreams is not surprising. But what he said next is. When Rosen asked Rashbaum how he dealt with the disturbing image of the struggling baby. Rausbaum replied:
Learned to live with it. Like people in concentration camps.
Seemingly taken aback, Rosen asked the abortionist if he really meant to make such an extreme comparison. Rashbaum answered:
I think it’s apt – destruction of life. Look! I’m a person, I’m entitled to my feelings. And my feelings are who gave me or anybody the right to terminate a pregnancy? I’m entitled to that feeling, but I also have no right communicating it to the patient who desperately wants that abortion. I don’t get paid for my feelings. I get paid for my skills… I’ll be frank. I began to do abortions in large numbers at the time of my divorce when I needed money. But I also believe in the woman’s right to control their biological destiny. I spent a lot of years learning to deliver babies. Sure, it sometimes hurts to end life instead of bringing it into the world.
Live Action News
There is a reason why conservatives like myself reference the Holocaust when talking about abortion. The actions these “doctors” take, the way they extinguish life, is a horror of it’s own, beyond anything we could imagine is happening inside our nation. The nightmares that this man choose to live with are the natural reaction to ripping a child limb from limb.
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For Christmas my wife got me a record player. It was on my list. I had been wanting to get away from Spotify for a few months and after doing the math, found it to be a better financial choice to leave Spotify and start buying my music again. With an iTunes library of nearly 2000 songs, I didn’t exactly have to start fresh.
As a Mac guy, I have my Apple TV, iPhones, iPads, and Mac all speaking the same language of AirPlay. I can quickly toss a video up to my television or stream music from my phone. Going analog is delightful, I’ll be honest. Many nights this year we have played Settlers of Catan while having some vinyl spinning. The speakers on my player are good. Not great, but good. Hooked to the television is a set of JBL speakers that I’ve had for some time. They’re better than nothing. So last night I decided to look into a way to make my record player wireless.
Following a lead from GeekDad, I took an audio cable (male-to-male) and plugged my record player into my Mac Mini. Using free software from Rogue Amoeba called LineIn, I can take that line-in audio coming from the player and send it to the Mini’s speakers or to any audio output, including AirPlay devices.
A simple setup that cost me nothing since I had an audio cable sitting around. Now I can play my vinyl through my JBL speakers wirelessly.
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Finley.im and Finley Home are powered by Ghost. Finley Home launched soon after the initial beta came out and, while it has been rough at times using beta software, I have loved the platform. The features that have been added over the last year have been fantastic, but I’m still waiting on some (for me) major features to really enhance my use of the platform.
1. Post Scheduling
With Finley.im, I save links as drafts all the time. Sometimes I jot down commentary in the moment, sometimes I wait. Once the post is ready to publish, I hold for specific times. I have nearly a dozen in the queue right now. Through analytics, I’m working to determine the high traffic times and work around them. Scheduling posts is a no brainer and really sets Ghost behind most platforms because of the lacking of this feature.
2. Access to Posts
Currently the posts array is only available in the home.hbs, index.hbs, and custom tag pages. This is paginated by the platform and the number per page are determined by a dropdown in the admin panel. Last week I tried to create a custom Featured page for featured posts and found that the posts array is not available to make it happen.
The Ghost team is working towards a query helper that will allow the theme to query posts, pages, and tags with filters. This would allow for many things, including a list of frequent tags, of featured posts, and even creating a custom archive page that lists all posts for easy access.
3. Real Custom Homepages
Ghost currently has the ability to create a custom home.hbs, but the page is treated like the first page of the blog. I’m doing this on Finley Home. It cannot be a standalone separate from the blog. So if you have 10 posts per page, the first 10 would be available on the home page and then page two would be starting with 11. Ghost defends this choice by saying that Ghost is purely a blogging platform, but that isn’t wholely true since they support custom pages.
My want would be to use the upcoming query helper (see #2) to display the first three posts on the homepage and then a link to view the blog in the navigation, which would start on page one.
For Finley.im, I’d love to have a Featured feed and a Links feed. I could see a simple interface for creating new feeds with custom filters or automatically creating tag-based feeds.
5. API
Both an OAuth API for full CRUD functions and a non-OAuth API for easy access to authors, posts, and tags would be wonderful. I would love to build a Ghost iOS app. Easily save a link to a new post with an iOS 8 share sheet, save as draft, publish, or schedule (see #1). This would be awesome for my flow.
These are my top 5, I want to hear yours. Share in the comments below!
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The frequency in which I whip out my calculator apparently (as per my quick office poll) is abhorrent. But I do. My grocery shopping involves a tight budget ($30/week) and a calculator tallying up the total as I walk through the aisles. For the longest time Calcbot was my go to. But it has slowly become dated. So when Numerical came out last year, it became my standard. Well, today Tapbots has gone and updated Calcbot to 2.0 and brought with it a brand new interface!
Along with the new interface comes Convertions, clearly replacing Convertbot from back in the day, and Themes. Two $0.99 In-App Purchase theme packs (including 4 themes each) are available right now along with a Calcbot Pro purchase that unlocks one more theme along with Unit Convertions, Unlimited History Tap, and Custom Constants. The Pro upgrade is $1.99.
For me at least, it’s goodbye Numerical and welcome back Calcbot! Glad to see you back!
Download Calcbot on the App Store!
Update
The Tapbots team seems to be getting a lot of slack for updating Calcbot and not Tweetbot for Mac or iPad. So much so that Mark Jardine, the designer of Tapbots, tweeted the above response. From prior posts, we know that Tapbots had Calcbot almost ready to launch right before iOS 7 was announced. The redesign of iOS 7 caused them to scrap Calcbot. Tweetbot, their most popular app, got updated next for iOS 7 and was a major overhaul visually to meet the new standard. Tapbots is, as per screenshots shared a couple weeks back, working on an update to Tweetbot for Yosemite. A two man team can only do so much and ultimately, as a business, must make money to survive. With Twitter being more and more hostile towards third-party developers over the last few years, the likelihood of Tweetbot dying one day is huge. So, personally, I’m glad they are diversifying. I love them too much to see them go out of business.
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