This about sums up how I feel about CBS’s hypocritical decision to show a pro-life ad but refusal to air a gay rights or pro-choice ads.
Comments rssI’ve recently been playing around with Firefox’s Add-on Collector, and I have to say it could be really useful but currently it fails to deliver on its potential.
Here’s how Mozilla describes the Add-on Collector:
Discover more of the best add-ons and organize your favorites in easy-to-manage collections. Subscribe to see how the collections you admire grow, and fans follow when you manage and update your own collections.
At first, I assumed this meant I could subscribe to lists (aka collections) of Firefox add-ons and have changes to those collections pushed to me. The truth is that it only half works like that.
Yes you can subscribe to collections of add-ons. And yes you will be notified when those collections change. So far so good. But the Add-On Collector provides no way for you to easily install all the add-ons from a collection. You still have to install each add-on one by one, manually. It even asks you to restart after each one (hint: you can wait until you’ve installed all of them before restarting).
I assume Mozilla didn’t think installing add-ons automatically was a good idea for security reasons. Imagine if the publisher of a popular collection quietly added a “Steal all your info” add-on to the list and then cackled as all his subscribers’ browsers auto-installed it. So it makes sense that the Add-On Collector doesn’t auto-install add-ons. But there’s not even a button to “Install All” when you subscribe to a collection (or “Remove All” when unsubscribing). Subscribing to a collection just shows you the list of add-ons and it’s up to you to go install them or not.
In addition, you have to register for a Mozilla account in order to add or manage subscriptions. Your subscriptions are stored on Mozilla’s servers. There’s no option to keep everything local on your machine. This isn’t a big deal, but it’s kind of a pain. Ideally after installing the Add-On Collector I could just start using it immediately without jumping through more hoops.
Overall, I’m a little disappointed in the Add-On Collector but it’s still better than nothing. It’s not an end-to-end solution for add-on installation and management. But once you have a Mozilla account (and remember to log in), it’s great for add-on discovery and for organizing your favorite add-ons.
You can install the Add-on Collector (which is itself a Firefox Add-on) from this page.
Once it’s installed, check out my “Can’t Browse Without” collection of add-ons. Or browse other popular collections.
Comments rssIn case you didn’t know, you’re entitled to a free credit report from each credit reporting bureau each year. And since there are three different reporting bureaus, that means you can alternate amongst them and check your credit report every 4 months. Why is it important to get regular, timely credit reports? Because it’s really the only way to know if you’re the victim of identity theft before significant damage is done.
The latest 2009 identity theft study from the Javelin Strategy and Research group shows that:
But the good news is that it’s easy and free to keep tabs on your financial identity. Just log onto AnnualCreditReport.com and request your report. You can then see all the open accounts in your name. Make sure that you were the one who opened every account. Set a reminder for yourself to do this every 4 months with a different credit bureau.
Make sure you only go to AnnualCreditReport.com. There are other sites that claim to offer free credit reports but often they will trick you into signing up for expensive and useless credit monitoring programs. The Federal Trace Commission website says that AnnualCreditReport is the only authorized source to get your free annual credit report under federal law.
Watch this video to learn more about protecting your identity.
Comments rssThe internets are full of walk-through guides and tips for jailbraking your iPhone. They gush about the benefits of jailbreaking without explaining many of the downsides. So here’s a counterpoint, from someone who has jailbroken and then un-jailbroken their iPhone. Not to say it’s not worth it for you to still jailbreak your iPhone, but you should have the facts to be able to make an informed decision.
1) There’s just not that many reasons to jailbreak anymore. Before the Apple App Store, you had to jailbreak your iPhone to get third party apps on your phone. In that time before time, the benefits of jailbreaking were totally worth the risks. But now almost every app that used to be available only on jailbroken phones is now available on the App Store. Sure, there are a few apps I miss from my jailbroken iPhone days (SBSettings, Backgrounder, etc) but in truth I don’t miss them all that much. In the end, jailbreaking my phone allowed me to waste tons of time fiddling with some settings and configurations I rarely used but it didn’t give me much added value over what the non-jailbroken OS already provides.
2) You can fubar your phone. In general, the non-approved apps from Cydia or Icy are well designed and won’t cause you any problems. But even the best intentions can’t prevent bugs, not to mention the danger of just plain shoddy apps. The net result is that installing or uninstalling a non-approved application, in rare cases, may cause your iPhone to crash or fail to boot. In these cases, the recommended course of action is either to restore to a clean firmware image and re-jailbreak or poke around your iPhone filesystem using SSH and fix the problem manually. Either of those sound fun to you? Me neither. This danger made me wary of installing apps from Cydia or Icy and isn’t that the whole reason to jailbreak in the first place?
3) Jailbreaking may introduce privacy or security problems with your phone. Some security researchers claim that jailbreaking your phone introduces more “entry points” for hackers (see Jailbroken iPhones – Security Risk?). Also, a few reports have surfaced recently about problems introduced by jailbroken apps. The most glaring was that a hack used to enable push notifications on jailbroken phones was actually sending your push notifications to the wrong people. Read about it on CrunchGear: Pushfix for Jailbroken iPhones caused Push broadcast problems. Say what you will about Apple and the App Store’s draconian approval process, but at least they do rigorous security and privacy testing.
4) You have to jump through hoops each time Apple releases an iPhone software update. OS 3.1 is rumored to be just around the corner. Each time Apple releases a new iPhone software update, users of jailbroken phones have to wait for a new jailbroken version to be released and then re-jailbreak their phone with the new updated version. I’d rather keep my phone un-jailbroken and just click the Update button iTunes.
5) By not jailbreaking, you can sleep easy at night knowing the Apple store will fix any problem you have. Jailbreaking your iPhone voids your warranty, which means that if you have a hardware problem with your jailbroken iPhone, you can’t take it into the Apple store to get fixed. Of course you can always restore your jailbroken phone back to it’s original condition and then take it in and then re-jailbreak once it’s fixed, assuming the problem doesn’t affect your ability to restore the phone. Just don’t try showing up at an Apple store with a pineapple boot logo on your iPhone or they will turn you away and possibly add you to a terrorist watchlist.
Summary: In the end, it boils down to how much time you are willing to spend fiddling with your iPhone. If you have ample free time and really enjoy customizing and tweaking (and restoring and re-jailbreaking), then I think the benefits you’ll get out of jailbreaking outweigh the risks. Or if you really just want to stick it to The Man, then more power to you as well. But I think for the vast majority of people, even the geeks among us who have been strongly considering jailbreaking their iPhone (as I was), it’s just not worth it.
Comments rssI just sent a Letter to the Editor to various newspaper on why I support a carbon cap on emissions.
A majority of Americans support a cap on carbon pollution, but you wouldn’t know it from what you read in the papers or see on the news. And right now it’s important that our Members of Congress know we aren’t fooled by the scare tactics.
For more on this issue, read the links in my letter below. If you want to send a message to you local paper too, it’s really simple — just use the tool on Al Gore’s Repower America website: Speakout about the Carbon Cap.
My Letter to the Editor:
The Financial Times heralds the President’s proposals as an “historic step” and I agree. For the first time in history, we actually have a chance of creating a system that will help us as a nation control our pollution problem. This is a classic “tragedy of the commons” dilemma – by not having any cost associated with polluting a shared resource (i.e., our environment), the established energy industry companies have no incentive to clean up their act. Capping carbon pollution will ignite the transition to clean energy and end our dependence on dirty fossil fuels. It will also encourage energy companies to become more efficient.
In addition, a cap on carbon pollution will create tens of thousands of good-paying American jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.
Now is the time for action. The economy can’t wait. The climate crisis can’t wait. I want our leaders to know that here in Virginia we support bold action on climate and energy, including a cap on carbon pollution.
Comments rss
