Tapping Tricks for Your iPhone




05.01.09






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• Tap the Status bar at the top of the screen (where the clock usually is) to return instantly to the top of long pages.



• Hold a finger on a link in Safari to get a pop-up saying where the link goes.



• Tap the bottom left or right corner to scroll left or right.



• Tap with two fingers to zoom out in Maps.



• Drag inside text boxes with two fingers to scroll without scrolling the whole page.



• Double-click the Power/Lock button to send incoming calls to your voice mail.



• Double-click the Home button in any app to bring up the iPod controls.

But imagine if you could get online anywhere you liked — in a taxi, on the beach, in a hotel with disgustingly overpriced Wi-Fi — without messing around with cellular modems. What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go?

Incredibly, there is such a thing. It’s the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.

The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270.

In essence, the MiFi converts that cellular Internet signal into an umbrella of Wi-Fi coverage that up to five people can share. (The speed suffers if all five are doing heavy downloads at once, but that’s a rarity.)

ROME – Rita Levi Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20.

Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute.

She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.

"At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her.

The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from them."

"I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom," the scientist said.

Her white hair elegantly coifed and wearing a smart navy blue suit, she raised a glass of sparkling wine in a toast to her long life.

Mr. Lucas, an architectural hobbyist, laid out the original designs for the project and donated an initial $175 million to build and support it. Industry benefactors like Warner Brothers, Fox and the Walt Disney Company have contributed another $50 million.

About $50 million still must be raised — in the face of hard times, even for Hollywood — to equip a second phase that would include a 36,000-square-foot animation building. Nonetheless school officials said that construction is fully paid for and was scheduled to be finished by August 2010.

For Mr. Lucas the grand expansion — which serves a full-time enrollment of about 1,500 graduate and undergraduate cinema students, along with thousands who take an occasional class — is all about sending a message.

“The only way you are going to get respect on a college campus, or a university campus, is to build something that is important,” Mr. Lucas said of his reasons for backing the complex. “Schools and universities mainly understand money.”

iPhone/iPod touch only: Free application HearPlanet plays audio tracks of Wikipedia articles based on points of interest surrounding your current location, turning your iPhone or iPod touch into an audio tour guide.

HearPlanet uses your iPhone's location awareness to find places of interest near you. When you choose a topic, HearPlanet loads up a screen with both the text and audio of the Wikipedia article in question. If your iPhone or iPod touch can't find you, HearPlanet offers a search option in which you can enter a search topic and location. That means that even if you don't want the audio tour guide, you can still use HearPlanet to listen to Wikipedia articles on the go—if you don't mind a little robot voice, that is.

If you don't want to serve a totally plain couscous, you can make the lemon and herb variation (below). It's light and lovely and would go nicely with any tagine recipe - chicken or whatever. But just so you know, in traditional Moroccan cooking, the couscous prepared entirely plain so that it can soak up the sauce from the tagine without any interference. Either way would be fine. As a side dish, I've made roasted sweet potato chunks, tossed in olive oil and spiced with ras-el-hanout or another aromatic Moroccan spice mixture before roasting. And a salad that includes some citrus - like oranges - would go well.

Lemon and Herb Couscous
1 tbsp. 15 mL olive oil
1 cup 250 mL couscous
1/4 cup 50 mL chopped fresh parsley
2 tbsp. 30 mL chopped chives or green onion tops
1 tsp. 5 mL grated lemon zest
1/2 tsp. 2 mL crumbled dried thyme
1/2 tsp. 2 mL salt
1/4 tsp. 1 mL black pepper
1-1/4 cup 300 mL chicken broth, heated to boiling
2 tbsp. 30 mL lemon juice

Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the dry couscous, the parsley, chives, lemon zest, thyme, salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, for one minute, until well combined. Add the boiling chicken broth and the lemon juice, stir, cover and remove from heat. Let the mixture sit, covered, for 5 to 7 minutes, or until the couscous is tender and all the liquid has been absorbed. Fluff with a fork and serve.

The Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) study disclosing that Barack Obama actually raised most of his campaign money from "larger" not "small" donors has gained wide, approving, coverage in recent days, from USA Today to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and countless web sites, even making Huffington Post at least twice, including as a top link. Inevitably the headlines refer to the "myth" of Obama riding a wave of small donations to victory. That study's author himself uses it.

But the "myth" is actually in the spinning of the report, including by its author, Michael Malbin, a former speechwriter for Dick Cheney, when he was Pentagon chief, and a resident fellow at The American Enterprise Institute from 1977 to 1986.

As usual in these cases, it's not that the numbers are wrong, it's the analysis and how the interpretation is being played by the media. Because, buried in the report, are all the figures and arguments for showing that the CFI's "myth" is actually a myth

I went on to make the point that I've often made in the past - the point that conservatives simply want everyone to forget: Namely, that President Clinton faced down a recession in 1993 by raising taxes on the wealthy in order to finance an economic stimulus package, and the economy subsequently boomed.

That simple, undeniable bit of history undermines the entire structure of conservatives claim that raising taxes on the super-rich will hurt the economy.

Why did mortgage securities and bank stocks fall so much more sharply in the last few weeks? The market was expecting that Hank Paulson would act in a manner consistent with Congressional intent when it passed the bailout. As time passed, anxiety about treasury's inaction increased. Then on November 12, Paulson announced that he would do nothing soon to provide foreclosure relief to homeowners.

As we've seen above, stabilizing home prices is key to stabilizing the broader economy. And the key to stabilizing home prices is to limit the spate of foreclosures that would flood the market. If homeowners are able to remain in their homes and make partial payments on their mortgages, lenders may attain a better recovery than from a series of fire sale liquidations.

The problem is concentrated among private-label securitizations. Though they represent only 20 percent of all mortgages, they represent 60 percent of all defaults, according to The Financial Times. Unlike most mortgage securities that follow the standardized underwriting guidelines of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, private-label securities make it almost impossible for the lender to negotiate modifications with the homeowner. Congress passed the bailout package on the condition that a large chunk of the $700 billion to assume control of these assets so that the government could renegotiate terms with distressed homeowners.

Paulson ignored Congressional intent, and went off into an entirely different direction, allocating funds to bolster securitization of credit card receivables. Barney Frank, with great specificity, called him on his bad faith bait-and-switch tactics. But that exchange didn't get nearly as much coverage amid Paulson's platitudinous soundbites and talk about bailing out GM.

Financial markets just gave Hank Paulson a vote of no confidence. Unfortunately, it's the rest of us who will pay the price. As Paulson made clear this past week, he is stalling, subverting the express intent of Congress when it passed the bailout bill, by his refusal to take action on foreclosure relief for distressed homeowners. Paulson's inaction has triggered a chain reaction that goes something like this:

First: Treasury says it won't take steps to prevent home foreclosures, so that

Second: Prices of mortgage securities collapse, so that

Third: Bank equity gets wiped out, so that

Fourth: Banks, with shrunken equity capital, are forced to cut back on all types of credit, so that

Fifth: Financing for anything, especially residential mortgage loans, dries up, so that

Sixth: Market values of homes decline further, so that

Seventh: Mortgage securities decline further, and the downward spiral becomes self perpetuating.

This phenomenon is best illustrated by the numbers.

15 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Working Another Day




October 17th, 2008 | Flourishing






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Are you in the right line of work? Should you be doing something else? Ask yourself the following questions:






1. Do you get to do your work, or do you have to do your work?


2. If you were guaranteed your current standard of living no matter what you did, would you still do what you’re doing?


3. True or false: When you think about what you do, are you dreaming or dreading?


4. Who decides when you work: you or your organization?


5. Do you get through your day or are days a chance to advance your goals and projects?


6. True or false: If you stopped liking what you’re doing, you would quit.


7. Does your productivity keep you working or does it help you maintain productive motion?


8. Do you like to talk about what you do, or would you rather people not ask about it?


9. True or false: What you’re doing today helps build skills and achievements that help will help you do what you want to do 6 months to a year from now?


10. Does doing what you do drain your energy or renew you?


11. Do you make your To Do list or does somebody else?


12. True or false: You would be proud if someone you loved did what you’re doing.


13. You get up early or stay late because…1) you want to work on the project or 2) you want to get the project done.


14. When you say what you do, do you say “I am a (_____) or I (_____). Example: I am a painter vs. I paint.


15. Would you do what you’re doing if you weren’t getting paid for it?






I recognize that some of the questions seem the same, but sometimes asking the question differently yields different answers. Please share some of your answers or thoughts if you’re up for it.

On Friday, September September 26, 2008, John McCain said the following:

"I know the veterans, I know them well, and I know that they know that I'll take care of them, and I have been proud of their support and their recognition of my service to the veterans, and I love them, and I'll take care of them, and they know that I'll take care of them."

This statement--made near the end of Friday's debate--immediately infuriated veterans across America and overseas. In fact, Senator John McCain has a very clear, long, and illustrious history of not supporting troops and veterans one bit.

Now, I've seen legislative examples, I've watched the YouTubes, and I've lived this lack of support in more ways than one. But now, for the first time, I've tried to compile as much of this non-support as possible into a single document--from a variety of sources--complete with links, quotes, and video clips. It's something that readers often ask me about, so I hope this helps. I'm sure there's a lot missing, so feel free to add more in the comments. But for now, I think this should give us a good start in exposing John McCain's abysmal of record of supporting troops and veterans. Here we go:

My decision came at the end of last week when it was demonstrated to the nation that McCain and this Bush White House have learned little in the last five years. They mishandled what became a crisis in the Caucusus, and this has undermined U.S. national security. At the same time, the McCain camp appears to be comfortable with running an unworthy Karl Rove–style political campaign. Will the McCain operation, and its sponsors, do anything to win?

This week, I changed my registration from Republican to independent. The two political parties as they exist today, and the partisanship that they foster, reflect the many fights of the cold war, the Vietnam era, the post–cold war and the 9/11 periods. Today we are in a different place altogether, where our security as a nation is challenged not just from abroad but also close to home. The energy, health-care and financial crises threaten our national prosperity and well-being, just as surely as any confrontation overseas or an attack by radical terrorists.

As an independent I want to be free of the constraints and burdens that have come with trying to make my own views explainable in the context of today’s party. Hijacked by a relatively small few, the GOP of today bears no resemblance to Lincoln, Roosevelt or Eisenhower’s party, or many of the other Republican administrations that came after. In my grandparents’ time, the thrust of the party was rooted in: a respect for the constitution; the defense of civil liberties; a commitment to fiscal responsibility; the pursuit and stewardship of America’s interests abroad; the use of multilateral international engagement and “soft power”; the advancement of civil rights; investment in infrastructure; environmental stewardship; the promotion of science and its discoveries; and a philosophical approach focused squarely on the future.

As an independent I will now feel comfortable supporting people of any political party who reflect those core values.