Tag: bad ideas

Lena Dunham Is A Lying Liar Who Lies

Lena Dunham is a very clever writer, a brave actress and an intelligent woman with some insightful things to say about relationships. Relationships between: parents and their adult children, bosses and employees, husbands and wives, friends, roommates, idol-worshipped heroes and their worshippers, and between romantic or hook-up partners. She is also a savvy businesswoman who’s adroitly navigating the entertainment business. For all of these things, I greatly admire Lena Dunham. However, Lena Dunham is also a lying liar who lies. In her breakout hit HBO series Girls, which Dunham writes as well as sometimes directing and producing, Dunham casts and writes herself in the role of Hannah Horvath: the Regular Girl, the Smart Girl, the Not-Hottie, if you will. Hannah is smart and funny, and prone to bouts of neurosis and narcissism, but no more so than anyone in their 20s who lives in New York (or L.A., or Chicago, or London, etc….

Top Five Venmo Security Problems – Does Your Digital Payment Service Have Them, Too?

* * * Today’s post is brought to you by yet another unannounced $6.99 sale on SD Amazon Instant Videos, featuring many Oscar winners and box office hits. Advertisers make it possible for Digital Media Mom to bring you great content each day for free, so thanks for your support. * * * Venmo is the hip new electronic payments service owned and operated by PayPal, which in turn is owned and operated by eBay. Venmo has been generating buzz and gaining in popularity ever since it launched, but the convenience of being able to use the Venmo mobile app to instantly transfer funds to pretty much anyone with an email address or phone number may not be worth the risks. Last July the California Department of Business Oversight ordered Venmo to address twenty different security and operational problems. Here are the top five that are of most concern to consumers. 1….

Is It Dangerous To Leave My Laptop On A Bed?

* * * the Kindle Paperwhite, the absolute top-of-the-line—yet affordable at $119—ereader for folks who only need a device for reading. Advertisers make it possible for Digital Media Mom to bring you great content each day for free, so thanks for your support. * * * “I Heard Leaving My Laptop Turned On, On My Bed, Can Start A Fire. Is That True?” Yes and no. Your laptop has little heat vents on the bottom and anything that blocks those vents can cause the laptop to overheat. Leaving the laptop powered on, on a soft surface like a bed, sofa or pillow, can definitely block the vents and lead to overheating. Overheating can damage the laptop’s wiring and rechargeable battery, either of which can cause a fire. However, when a fire is actually caused by an overheated laptop it’s usually because the laptop was very old, had faulty wiring, or had…

Technically Correct vs. Practical: Can Rechargeable Batteries Overheat Or Not?

Its battery shouldn’t overheat, but that doesn’t mean it can’t. From time to time I’ll get a comment or email from a tech-savvy person who’s read my post, Rechargeable Battery Problems: Overcharging, Leaving It Plugged In, and says I’m wrong about the possibility of rechargeable batteries becoming overcharged or overheated, because modern Lithium-ion rechargeables are designed with specific features to prevent this very problem. Every so often I’ll also get a note from an engineer or scholarly type saying one of my other posts isn’t technically correct for some esoteric reason or other. But I’m not here to provide technically correct details that would satisfy the most stringent engineer or scientist, I’m here to help consumers get the best and most economical use from their devices.

What Happens When You Buy A Pirated Kindle Book?

Today there’s a pirated edition of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye available for sale in Amazon’s Kindle Book Store. It’s very obviously a pirate copy, and here’s how you can tell: 1) No mainstream publisher name is listed in the book’s details, only “Amazon Digital Services” 2) The author’s name is misspelled right on the cover of the book 3) The cover is one of those generic ones that can be easily created using Amazon’s own Kindle book cover creation tools, and it’s the same as many self-publishers use to publish public domain works for sale in the Kindle store 4) The book is priced at $1.35—much lower than a mainstream publisher would go, unless they were running some kind of crazy (and probably highly-publicized) sale 5) Pretty much everyone in the book biz knows the real Salinger’s heirs have never given their permission to have his works released in…

How To Turn Off Amber Alerts On Your Cell Phone

Last week many Californians were jolted awake, or were at least startled, by a totally unfamiliar, high-pitched tone coming from their cell phones. Looking at their phones, they found they’d received an AMBER alert, per a new emergency broadcast notification system that went into effect January 1 of this year. Because they have no control over the timing of these messages (nor in some cases, the earsplitting ring tone that announces them), and because the messages themselves are somewhat cryptic and therefore somewhat useless, most recipients reacted with 1) irritation that they’d been subjected to an alert they never opted in to receive and 2) an immediate desire to disable this feature so they’d never receive another cell phone AMBER alert. Click here to learn more about the wireless AMBER alert system and the changes that went into effect 1/1/13. Yeah, But How Do I Turn It Off?! On an…

Wilderness Dumbass Movies

Let me open by saying I have done minimal research on the three real-life people whose stories are told in three of the movies I’m about to tear down, because I didn’t enjoy any of the films enough to want to learn more about the real life figures and frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time than study up on people I don’t care about. So if you’re about to come at me all, “But in real life…”, forget it. I don’t care about “in real life,” I’m only talking about these movies. And in these movies, those three guys are Wilderness Dumbasses. Two of the guys I’m about to talk smack about died on account of their Wilderness Dumbassery. While I am sorry for the loss to their family and friends, and do not celebrate the deaths of any well-meaning and essentially decent people, the lesson…