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No thanks. I use it for the free shipping, but don't use any of the other features. I've watched Alpha House via the streaming service, but that's about it.

Free shipping is pretty slow, though. And they may play tricks with it…

What else is there, really? Seriously.

Ann Elizabeth Mitchell passed away yesterday at 11:30am, about two hours before I was able to arrive. She was my maternal grandmother and one of my favorite people. She will be greatly missed. I loved her very much.

I'm comforted by the many wonderful memories I have of her, and by the fact that she knew I was on my way to see her. I talked to her Thursday evening and told her I loved her then. You don't often get to say your last words to someone are "I love you" (and their words back to you are), so I'm grateful this was one of those times.

My grandma was 86 years young.

I just canceled our "two screens at a time streaming only" Netflix account. Even at only $7.99/month, it wasn't worth it. Netflix seems to have fewer and fewer of the movies we want to watch, and Amazon Prime's streaming may actually be pretty good soon. But mostly, we don't really stream movies much anymore.

At least I'll get to watch the second season of House of Cards before it ends on February 16th. 🙂

How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username — Medium

Why someone would pay $50k for "@N" is beyond me, though.

Is this worth buying?

Amazon.com: Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that changed Everything eBook: Steven Levy: Kindle Store

Edit: Never mind. The Kindle version was only $4.99. Duh.

Creating Animated GIFs for Documentation - David Smith

Step 1: Record using QuickTime Player
Step 2: Convert using GIF Brewery
Step 3: Profit!

The Wizards of Odds - Video - NYTimes.com

Pro gamblers win about 55% of the time.

I know a friend who has a system for winning 55-57% of the time based on a very simple rule (I will not share this rule with you). He's done it over four or five years now, and he's considering very seriously being a "professional gambler" at least "part time" to start.

It's not difficult. Basically, you get to take advantage of people being stupid.

Michael Tsai - Blog - 30 Years of Mac is well worth a read, if for no other reason than it links to the mac-icon-standard.ttf font first reported by Greg Barbosa (from Apple) (more here).

Many of the links are worth following as well, including this one.

And duh, the Apple page is here.

P.S. Another good link.

The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley's most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers' wages | PandoDaily

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple's board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt "got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple."

Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"

I never liked Quark, but I respected the position it held in the industry.

But now, it is no more:

As the big dog of desktop publishing in the '80s and '90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.

Quark's demise is truly the stuff of legend. In fact, the story reads like the fall of any empire: failed battles, growing discontent among the overtaxed masses, hungry and energized foes, hubris, greed, and… uh, CMYK PDFs. What did QuarkXPress do—or fail to do—that saw its complete dominance of desktop publishing wither in less than a decade? In short, it didn't listen.

I once told Carey that Natalie had to "learn to fail." She reacted strongly at the time, basically telling me that I was stupid, and what did I know about failing at anything?

I've learned a lot about failing, and it's important to learn to fail. You can't learn how to avoid future failures if you don't fail the first few times. You won't take risks if you fear failure. You won't know how to recover from failure if you don't have experience at it.

Yet another creepy video showing the "power" of augmented reality via glasses.

The guy not only cheats at 8-ball, but uses his glasses to access personal information to scam on a bartender.

Nice. Real nice. 😛

Peter Smart lives up to his name with this little article: Rethink the Airline Boarding Pass. Brilliant. I'm flying somewhere right now (to Orlando, for the PGA Show). I've already had my boarding passes fall apart because I've had to shove them in my pocket.

The Verge has a bunch of tweets and commentary on Nest's acquisition by Google: Why is everyone disappointed by Google buying Nest?.

Review & Outlook: Apple's Star Chamber - WSJ.com:

Which gets to the heart of this bizarre case: The numbers show that, far from hurting the market, the publishers' and Apple's agency model actually helped it. They allowed Barnes & Noble to gain a foothold in the e-book market, provided relief to the independent brick-and-mortar stores, and gave consumers lower rather than higher prices.

:doh: