I've deposited quite a few rebate checks over the past few years using Deposit@Home without any problems. Even deposited a USPS money order (purchased on base), as a last-resort way to get cash from my wallet in Germany into my USAA bank account.
If memory serves, there may have been one rebate check (out of dozens) that the system couldn't handle. Might be worth your while to give it another shot...
My brother pilots a DC-3 for Missionary Flights International out of Fort Pierce, Florida, and recently posted this status update on Facebook:
Many people have been asking how to help with the relief work in Haiti...we've been directing people to the MFI website www.missionaryflights.org The website gives a donation needs list as well as an online donation link for a Disaster Relief fund. We flew to Haiti with relief supplies today and I get to go tomorrow...
The relevant link is here, but it looks like supply donations have to be dropped off locally, so that may only make sense for people who live in the area. I'm sure monetary donations would be happily accepted from everyone, though, regardless of where you live!
Definitely interested here... I nearly paid for a commercial VPN service, but they required that you pre-pay for a year, and made no allowance for the possibility of being blocked in the future by Hulu, et al. Guess my fear was justified.
By the way, any old proxy won't do. It's gotta be VPN.
Here in Germany, the light turns amber not only when turning from green to red, but vice-versa as well... A la drag racing!
They don't get everything right (right on red is not allowed, no sensors at the traffic lights), but I sure enjoy the lack of speed limit on the autobahn, and the mini-drag-races I get to take part in daily.:D
I signed on with Netflix when their business first opened its doors. As a military member assigned overseas, I was completely satisfied with their service, and would probably still be a member today, $900 later, if it weren't for...
SPAM.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam!
This was right around the time spam was becoming a real problem (2002-ish), and I found myself receiving multiple "offers" from Netflix on a daily basis, despite being a current customer. Blame it on "affiliates", but the company itself had to have, at a minimum, turned a blind eye... I bet they knowingly hired spammers. So I dropped my subscription (sending them an email explaining why), and bought a subscription to Easynews instead. (Later research would confirm my suspicions)
It's funny... I was actually considering re-subscribing after all this time, to check out the online-streaming option. Looks like that won't be happening any time soon!
I haven't tried it myself yet, personally, but he's sold it to quite a few people who he says have seen incredible results. Personally, I wouldn't vouch for something like this without having seen the results myself, but thought I'd share in case anyone here found it interesting.
Try maximizing a window on a mac. Minimize a window, then alt-tab back to that app. You get the app, with no window! You then get the 'pleasure' of moving the mouse to the menu bar, selecting the window menu, and hopefully finding the window you wanted.
I couldn't reproduce this. Which app?
I've actually seen this before: When he says "minimize", he means to click the small "-" in the "X-+" group of buttons, or double-click the title bar. You end up with a small icon near the trash can. If you Command-tab back to that app, you end up with the app's menu bar, and no window.
Of course, I stopped "minimizing" windows about a week after I 'switched' from Windows, finding the "Hide" command much more practical. [Command-H] (And 2 years later, I think I finally convinced my wife, too...:)
However, Dreamhost has made a deal with Google whereas all new customers have their mail hosted by Google. So if all you're looking for as an email service, might as well go straight to Google itself.
New customers (and new user accounts created for existing customers) have the *option* to use Google Apps for domains, including Google Mail, but it's certainly not compulsory.
Were it not for my custom SpamAssassin setup on Dreamhost, I probably would have ditched them a long time ago in favor of GMail, especially if GMail had supported IMAP at the time.
I will agree that Dreamhost's email service has been pretty solid, if a bit slow. But it's still been an excellent value!
Does this work for any monitor, for a specific list of monitors, or only for Apple monitors? I haven't been using OS X exclusively for a very long time, but so far (fingers crossed), it works for every single monitor I've tried, including a few generic-brand LCD panels.
It really is impressive, especially compared to Windows and Linux...
Even the lack of FTP support for me is a "do not care" since I don't mind using Terminal for that anyway, and it can have files drug into it just like finder... I bought my first OS X Mac about a year ago, use Terminal almost every day, and didn't know that you can drag files onto it. Crazy!
Just wanted to plug MacFusion, which provides a GUI to mount FTP (and SSH!) as Volumes which show up on the Desktop. Love it!
Amazon has eccellent prices compared to Apple's educational discount.... in MY country! Which is Finland. But of course, I can't buy such stuff from Amazon (won't ship overseas). Bummer. I mean, why does Apple care if Amazon sells their goods to Europeans, Chinese, Tunguzians.... ??
Anyhow, there is perhaps a few apps I'd love to have on MacOS X, which I really like and use: OO.o, Inkspace, Mathlab, vim32, Audacity and OpenWatcom. There's a bunch more that I use but I am sure there is a similar counterpart in the Mac world. The others I didn't have time to investigate, but I presume mostly (70%) have Mac ports. Running them under a VMed Windows is perhaps a solution, but I'm not looking forward to it. Let's see. Sorry, I didn't realize you weren't from the States. Having spent a few years living in Germany (during that time I visited Norway, but never Finland), I can certainly understand the frustration and aggravation trying to shop online...
Anyway, I don't know about vim32 or OpenWatcom, but the others have Mac releases. Running in a VM is possible, but would be better avoided. I don't have many occasions to open a VM on my Mac. Maybe once a month, if that. I think Macs are popular enough that only very unique niche applications lack a Mac solution.
You may not feel right at home, but you do have Terminal, and it's nice to be able to run X, and lots of Unix-y stuff can be found in MacPorts, too.
Windows can be run in a VM, or with Boot Camp, natively. I've only had to reboot into Windows once in the past year, to run a proprietary firmware update application for a SanDisk MP3 player.
If you do decide to buy, shop around. Depending on which state you live in, that educational discount may not be worth it, compared to buying from Amazon... (in my case it wasn't--had no use for a Nano, and buying from Amazon meant no sales tax, plus a rebate)
I understand having to pay taxes, but the "fees" that Vonage charges are nothing more than a thinly veiled way of getting you to pay more, while they continue to advertise a deceptively lower monthly rate.
I left Vonage after they added taxes and more than doubled their fees, and unfortunately moved to Sunrocket, who went out of business a few months later. I've yet to find another company that delivers that level of service for the price...
Yeah... so we are accepting submissions in strange, stupid, vulgar alien languages (and not editing them) now?
Actually, that wasn't part of the submission, that was the editor's commentary! Not exactly dripping with professionalism, eh? I'd say "you must be new here", but... looks like you've been around about as long as I have, leading me to wonder if I'm actually telling you something you don't already know.
I've made it several YEARS with absolutely no spam, following the same procedure as you. And then, late last year, my grandmother submitted my email address to a web site set up to harvest email addresses, under the guise of offering "free stuff" to folks whose email addresses you submitted. The jerks would send multiple emails per day, and finally I looked up contact info for the owner of the domain, and called the guy up at 2am. He was apologetic, and promised to remove my address as we spoke.
For the next 6 months, my private address was clean, but then one spam showed up. Then another. Now I guess I need to just admit that my private address is probably in the wild, and will eventually attract hundreds of spams per day.
For your sake, I hope your friends and family know better than to give your email address out to anyone, or never CC your address, lest it go to someone else whose machine gets pwned and harvested...
If I had it all to do over again, I would assign individual addresses for everyone, including family and close friends.
I recently stumbled across this solution, and it works fairly decent. There's a bit of granularity, where you can block just porn, nudes, lingerie, stuff in "bad taste", all individually. And unless the kid figured out how to change DNS settings, or use a web-based DNS lookup tool, it's fairly effective.
It's almost a perfect solution for problem we have, which is blocking inadvertent trips to "naughty" sites by younger kids. It's been a few days, and only one false positive so far...
A few people contacted me wanting to know if I was accepting donations for my legal fund. Donations would be greatly appreciated. If more funds are raised than are actually needed I will donate the excess to the ACLU. Donations can be made via PayPal to: paypal@michaelrighi.com.
Today was an eventful day. I drove to Cleveland, reunited with my father's side of the family and got arrested. More on that arrested part to come.
For the labor day weekend my father decided to host a small family reunion. My sister flew in from California and I drove in from Pittsburgh to visit my father, his wife and my little brother and sister. Shortly after arriving we packed the whole family into my father's Buick and headed off to the grocery store to buy some ingredients to make monkeybread. (It's my little sister's birthday today and that was her cute/bizare birthday request.)
Next to the grocery store was a Circuit City. (The Brooklyn, Ohio Circuit City to be exact.) Having forgotten that it was my sister's birthday I decided to run in and buy her a last minute gift. I settled on Disney's "Cars" game for the Nintendo Wii. I also needed to purchase a Power Squid surge protector which I paid for separately with my business credit card. As I headed towards the exit doors I passed a gentleman whose name I would later learn is Santura. As I began to walk towards the doors Santura said, "Sir, I need to examine your receipt." I responded by continuing to walk past him while saying, "No thank you."
As I walked through the double doors I heard Santura yelling for his manager behind me. My father and the family had the Buick pulled up waiting for me outside the doors to Circuit City. I opened the door and got into the back seat while Santura and his manager, whose name I have since learned is Joe Atha, came running up to the vehicle. I closed the door and as my father was just about to pull away the manager, Joe, yelled for us to stop. Of course I knew what this was about, but I played dumb and pretended that I didn't know what the problem was. I wanted to give Joe the chance to explain what all the fuss was for.
I reopened the door to talk with Joe and at this point Joe positioned his body between the open car door and myself. (I was still seated in the Buick.) Joe placed his left hand on the roof of the car and his right hand on the open car door. I asked Joe if there was a problem. The conversation went something like this:
Me: "Is there a problem?"
Joe: "I need to examine your bag and receipt before letting you leave this parking lot."
Me: "I paid for the contents in this bag. Are you accusing me of stealing?"
Joe: "I'm not accusing you of anything, but I'm allowed by law to look through your bag when you leave."
Me: "Which law states that? Name the law that gives you the right to examine my bag when I leave a Circuit City."
Of course Joe wasn't able to name the law that gives him, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City employee the right to examine anything that I, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City customer am carrying out of the store. I've dealt with these scare tactics at other stores in the past including other Circuit Cities, Best Buys and Guitar Centers. I've always taken the stance that retail stores shouldn't treat their loyal customers as criminals and that customers shouldn't so willingly give up their rights along with their money. Theft sucks and I wish that shoplifters were treated more harshly than they are, but the fact is that I am not a shiplifter shoplifter and shouldn't have to forfeit my civil rights when leaving a store.
I twice asked Joe to back away from the car so that I could close the door. Joe refused. On three occasions I tried to pull the door closed but Joe pushed back on the door with his hip and hands. I then gave Joe three options:
Slashdot Mirror
Not if you renounce your US citizenship. By the way, that used to be free of charge, but I think it'll cost you >$400 nowadays...
Buy a new iPhone. Not that big of a deal.
Steve
Sent from my iPhone
I've deposited quite a few rebate checks over the past few years using Deposit@Home without any problems. Even deposited a USPS money order (purchased on base), as a last-resort way to get cash from my wallet in Germany into my USAA bank account.
If memory serves, there may have been one rebate check (out of dozens) that the system couldn't handle. Might be worth your while to give it another shot...
My brother pilots a DC-3 for Missionary Flights International out of Fort Pierce, Florida, and recently posted this status update on Facebook:
Many people have been asking how to help with the relief work in Haiti...we've been directing people to the MFI website www.missionaryflights.org The website gives a donation needs list as well as an online donation link for a Disaster Relief fund. We flew to Haiti with relief supplies today and I get to go tomorrow...
The relevant link is here, but it looks like supply donations have to be dropped off locally, so that may only make sense for people who live in the area. I'm sure monetary donations would be happily accepted from everyone, though, regardless of where you live!
Definitely interested here... I nearly paid for a commercial VPN service, but they required that you pre-pay for a year, and made no allowance for the possibility of being blocked in the future by Hulu, et al. Guess my fear was justified.
By the way, any old proxy won't do. It's gotta be VPN.
Yes, the blueman project is great! I can't for the life of me understand why it wasn't included in Jaunty...
Here in Germany, the light turns amber not only when turning from green to red, but vice-versa as well... A la drag racing!
They don't get everything right (right on red is not allowed, no sensors at the traffic lights), but I sure enjoy the lack of speed limit on the autobahn, and the mini-drag-races I get to take part in daily. :D
I signed on with Netflix when their business first opened its doors. As a military member assigned overseas, I was completely satisfied with their service, and would probably still be a member today, $900 later, if it weren't for...
SPAM.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam!
This was right around the time spam was becoming a real problem (2002-ish), and I found myself receiving multiple "offers" from Netflix on a daily basis, despite being a current customer. Blame it on "affiliates", but the company itself had to have, at a minimum, turned a blind eye... I bet they knowingly hired spammers. So I dropped my subscription (sending them an email explaining why), and bought a subscription to Easynews instead. (Later research would confirm my suspicions)
It's funny... I was actually considering re-subscribing after all this time, to check out the online-streaming option. Looks like that won't be happening any time soon!
I haven't even RTFA (this *is* /., right?), but my father is selling an herbal product called "Stem Enhance" that's supposed to do exactly what's described in the summary.
I haven't tried it myself yet, personally, but he's sold it to quite a few people who he says have seen incredible results. Personally, I wouldn't vouch for something like this without having seen the results myself, but thought I'd share in case anyone here found it interesting.
Try maximizing a window on a mac. Minimize a window, then alt-tab back to that app. You get the app, with no window! You then get the 'pleasure' of moving the mouse to the menu bar, selecting the window menu, and hopefully finding the window you wanted.
I couldn't reproduce this. Which app?
I've actually seen this before: When he says "minimize", he means to click the small "-" in the "X-+" group of buttons, or double-click the title bar. You end up with a small icon near the trash can. If you Command-tab back to that app, you end up with the app's menu bar, and no window.
Of course, I stopped "minimizing" windows about a week after I 'switched' from Windows, finding the "Hide" command much more practical. [Command-H] (And 2 years later, I think I finally convinced my wife, too... :)
However, Dreamhost has made a deal with Google whereas all new customers have their mail hosted by Google. So if all you're looking for as an email service, might as well go straight to Google itself.
New customers (and new user accounts created for existing customers) have the *option* to use Google Apps for domains, including Google Mail, but it's certainly not compulsory.
Were it not for my custom SpamAssassin setup on Dreamhost, I probably would have ditched them a long time ago in favor of GMail, especially if GMail had supported IMAP at the time.
I will agree that Dreamhost's email service has been pretty solid, if a bit slow. But it's still been an excellent value!
You can just get the Vonage Linksys: WRT54GP2. Has built in vonage and QOS for it.
Yeah, then watch it crash on a daily basis if you try to run bittorrent? No thanks. (speaking from experience here)
After plenty of trial-and-error, I've found a router with Tomato installed and QOS properly configured to be the best solution.
It really is impressive, especially compared to Windows and Linux...
If any post on this topic deserves a +5 Insightful, this is the one.
Just wanted to plug MacFusion, which provides a GUI to mount FTP (and SSH!) as Volumes which show up on the Desktop. Love it!
Anyhow, there is perhaps a few apps I'd love to have on MacOS X, which I really like and use: OO.o, Inkspace, Mathlab, vim32, Audacity and OpenWatcom. There's a bunch more that I use but I am sure there is a similar counterpart in the Mac world. The others I didn't have time to investigate, but I presume mostly (70%) have Mac ports. Running them under a VMed Windows is perhaps a solution, but I'm not looking forward to it. Let's see. Sorry, I didn't realize you weren't from the States. Having spent a few years living in Germany (during that time I visited Norway, but never Finland), I can certainly understand the frustration and aggravation trying to shop online...
Anyway, I don't know about vim32 or OpenWatcom, but the others have Mac releases. Running in a VM is possible, but would be better avoided. I don't have many occasions to open a VM on my Mac. Maybe once a month, if that. I think Macs are popular enough that only very unique niche applications lack a Mac solution.
Good luck...
No dice here.
You may not feel right at home, but you do have Terminal, and it's nice to be able to run X, and lots of Unix-y stuff can be found in MacPorts, too.
Windows can be run in a VM, or with Boot Camp, natively. I've only had to reboot into Windows once in the past year, to run a proprietary firmware update application for a SanDisk MP3 player.
If you do decide to buy, shop around. Depending on which state you live in, that educational discount may not be worth it, compared to buying from Amazon... (in my case it wasn't--had no use for a Nano, and buying from Amazon meant no sales tax, plus a rebate)
Off topic:
I understand having to pay taxes, but the "fees" that Vonage charges are nothing more than a thinly veiled way of getting you to pay more, while they continue to advertise a deceptively lower monthly rate.
I left Vonage after they added taxes and more than doubled their fees, and unfortunately moved to Sunrocket, who went out of business a few months later. I've yet to find another company that delivers that level of service for the price...
Actually, that wasn't part of the submission, that was the editor's commentary ! Not exactly dripping with professionalism, eh?
I'd say "you must be new here", but... looks like you've been around about as long as I have, leading me to wonder if I'm actually telling you something you don't already know.
No.
I've made it several YEARS with absolutely no spam, following the same procedure as you. And then, late last year, my grandmother submitted my email address to a web site set up to harvest email addresses, under the guise of offering "free stuff" to folks whose email addresses you submitted. The jerks would send multiple emails per day, and finally I looked up contact info for the owner of the domain, and called the guy up at 2am. He was apologetic, and promised to remove my address as we spoke.
For the next 6 months, my private address was clean, but then one spam showed up. Then another. Now I guess I need to just admit that my private address is probably in the wild, and will eventually attract hundreds of spams per day.
For your sake, I hope your friends and family know better than to give your email address out to anyone, or never CC your address, lest it go to someone else whose machine gets pwned and harvested...
If I had it all to do over again, I would assign individual addresses for everyone, including family and close friends.
You just made my day... I laughed so loud, I fear I may have woken up others in the house.
Usually, my moderation points go wasted and unused. Oh, how I yearn for them now!
I recently stumbled across this solution, and it works fairly decent. There's a bit of granularity, where you can block just porn, nudes, lingerie, stuff in "bad taste", all individually. And unless the kid figured out how to change DNS settings, or use a web-based DNS lookup tool, it's fairly effective.
It's almost a perfect solution for problem we have, which is blocking inadvertent trips to "naughty" sites by younger kids. It's been a few days, and only one false positive so far...
A few people contacted me wanting to know if I was accepting donations for my legal fund. Donations would be greatly appreciated. If more
funds are raised than are actually needed I will donate the excess to the ACLU. Donations can be made via PayPal to: paypal@michaelrighi.com.
Today was an eventful day. I drove to Cleveland, reunited with my father's side of the family and got arrested. More on that arrested part to come.
For the labor day weekend my father decided to host a small family reunion. My sister flew in from California and I drove in from Pittsburgh to visit my father, his wife and my little brother and sister. Shortly after arriving we packed the whole family into my father's Buick and headed off to the grocery store to buy some ingredients to make monkeybread. (It's my little sister's birthday today and that was her cute/bizare birthday request.)
Next to the grocery store was a Circuit City. (The Brooklyn, Ohio Circuit City to be exact.) Having forgotten that it was my sister's birthday I decided to run in and buy her a last minute gift. I settled on Disney's "Cars" game for the Nintendo Wii. I also needed to purchase a Power Squid surge protector which I paid for separately with my business credit card. As I headed towards the exit doors I passed a gentleman whose name I would later learn is Santura. As I began to walk towards the doors Santura said, "Sir, I need to examine your receipt." I responded by continuing to walk past him while saying, "No thank you."
As I walked through the double doors I heard Santura yelling for his manager behind me. My father and the family had the Buick pulled up waiting for me outside the doors to Circuit City. I opened the door and got into the back seat while Santura and his manager, whose name I have since learned is Joe Atha, came running up to the vehicle. I closed the door and as my father was just about to pull away the manager, Joe, yelled for us to stop. Of course I knew what this was about, but I played dumb and pretended that I didn't know what the problem was. I wanted to give Joe the chance to explain what all the fuss was for.
I reopened the door to talk with Joe and at this point Joe positioned his body between the open car door and myself. (I was still seated in the Buick.) Joe placed his left hand on the roof of the car and his right hand on the open car door. I asked Joe if there was a problem. The conversation went something like this:
Me: "Is there a problem?"
Joe: "I need to examine your bag and receipt before letting you leave this parking lot."
Me: "I paid for the contents in this bag. Are you accusing me of stealing?"
Joe: "I'm not accusing you of anything, but I'm allowed by law to look through your bag when you leave."
Me: "Which law states that? Name the law that gives you the right to examine my bag when I leave a Circuit City."
Of course Joe wasn't able to name the law that gives him, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City employee the right to examine anything that I, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City customer am carrying out of the store. I've dealt with these scare tactics at other stores in the past including other Circuit Cities, Best Buys and Guitar Centers. I've always taken the stance that retail stores shouldn't treat their loyal customers as criminals and that customers shouldn't so willingly give up their rights along with their money. Theft sucks and I wish that shoplifters were treated more harshly than they are, but the fact is that I am not a shiplifter shoplifter and shouldn't have to forfeit my civil rights when leaving a store.
I twice asked Joe to back away from the car so that I could close the door. Joe refused. On three occasions I tried to pull the door closed but Joe pushed back on the door with his hip and hands. I then gave Joe three options:
1. "Accuse me of shoplifting and call the pol