I hadn't realized I was a victim of the wp blank line bug in my RSS feeds. I found an extra space at the bottom of my wp-config.php file. Fixed. Perhaps that'll help the rss readers out there.

Normally I'm an email kind of guy and if a site takes so many precautions to not publish any possible way to contact them except via phone, I'd just bag it altogether and choose an alternative. I actually took the time to call Netflix though. Their streaming service is pretty much unusable for us. I've been tempted to just completely disable it and wait until some future date when they get it better but the kids want their cartoons you know..

Ah, that's the reason the problem exists in the first place. Kids. The story goes something like this: You hook up your Netflix ready device and are all excited to stream Netflix content right to your living room so your kids can watch TV for $8 a month instead of whatever unreasonable fees your cable provider would charge for content you don't want. You turn it on, log in and walah.. tons of content all on demand. So far so good.

Next you notice that right there along with your kids favorite cartoons they are advertising the latest horror flick complete with graphic images and sexually suggestive content. You think to yourself, ah, no problem. I'll just go ahead and enable those parental controls. Great. At first you try PG/unrated, thinking that will do it but you realize that there are still a bazillion Pre PG-13 films from the 80s that show up in your content and aren't exactly what you want your 7 and 5 year old browsing through.

Finally you choose rated G content as the last alternative. Great. Now the only thing your kids see is Barney, Thomas the Train, Care Bears and a bunch of other kids content. Problem solved. Sort of.

Problems Created:
* You can't override your Netflix ready device with a password when you want to watch something besides a kids show.
* If you change the controls back, it takes 6 hours before the devices are updated.

So yeah. It's either all good and safe for your kids, but unusable for you, or your kids don't get access. Hm.

Anyway, back to the phone call... they said they are aware of the issues and are working on a solution. In the mean time... I've ranted enough now I guess.

Well, have you ever wanted to pull a bunch of libraries off an Android phone? I bet you wish you could execute the command like this:

 
> adb pull /system/lib/*.so
 

Sorry. A no go. What about this then:

 
> for file in `adb ls /system/lib/`; do adb pull /system/lib/$file; done
 

Well, almost, but adb ls attaches the \n\r to the files. That wouldn't be a problem if adb pull didn't attach them to the names, so you have to get rid of the white space. This can work:

 
> for file in `adb ls /system/lib`; do adb pull `echo /system/lib/$file | tr -d '\n\r'`; done
 

Yea. Enjoy.

I've been recommending to friends and family that they use OpenDNS.com to help safeguard their homes from adult content. A few things have changed since I originally started using their service and I thought I'd write up a little article to help everyone understand.

Lets start with the "why". I'm not going to focus on the reason to have some filtering technology. Instead, I want to help educate on the different types of filters and why I prefer OpenDNS. Basically, there are two types of technology being used to filter content. One methodology is to install software on a computer that monitors the computers network activity and redirects filtered content to a blocked page. The second approach is to not intrude upon the computer's installed programs, but to handle the filtering at a network level. OpenDNS.com falls into the second category. I prefer it because I don't have to manage every computer in our home and I don't have to have software that potentially slows my computer down.

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OK, out of popular demand, I've decided to revisit this topic. My original Better Budgeting with GnuCash article is still highly relevant and worth a read for the background if you haven't read that yet.

The method I proposed in my 1st article works. I used it for over a year with great success. After some time though, I decided we could simplify a few things.

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So I've been playing around with video a bit more lately. I have two different cameras that record natively at 1920x1080 (1080p). I can get my videos into iMovie just fine, but one thing that always annoyed me is that when I went to share a move I created with iMovie, the default options were pretty pitiful.

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