STOP SOPA AND PIPA!

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STOP SOPA!

drawing courtesy of Nsponge200

Today is officially SOPA Resistance Day. If you haven’t heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (Protect IP Act), don’t let their names fool you as they’re anything but.

Learn why Wikipedia, Google and many other sites are protesting against these 2 bills.

I had emailed my 3 congressmen sometime in December:

I understand that a similar proposal to the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act called Protect-IP will be up for voting in the Senate early next year.

Given the huge opposition from the people against SOPA, I implore that you understand the implications of Protect-IP and not only vote against it, but convince your peers to do so too.

Thank you.

Of course my email to my House rep was worded a bit differently since SOPA is the House bill and PIPA is the Senate bill. Unfortunately I no longer have a copy of that email.

So far I’ve received 2 responses and all I got out of it was “Thanks for your expressing your view. Please sign up for my newsletter.”

So contact your representatives TODAY. Don’t wait till tomorrow or when you think you’ll have some spare time.

Hopefully as more and more people contact them, we’ll be able to stop the destruction of what made the internet great.

Here’s Rep. David Reichert’s response:

Thank you for contacting me regarding the protection of intellectual property on the Internet. I appreciate hearing your views on this matter and welcome the opportunity to respond.

U.S. law enforcement agencies may protect against violations of intellectual property rights when perpetrators are acting within the United States. However, the Internet provides a way for businesses to expand across borders, and poses a challenge for the enforcement of intellectual property rights when violators are acting outside the U.S. Currently, U.S. authorities cannot reach foreign websites offering pirated or counterfeit goods to U.S. citizens.

In response to these concerns, Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) introduced the PROTECT IP Act (S. 968) on May 12, 2011. This legislation would authorize the Justice Department or an intellectual property rights owner harmed by an Internet site “dedicated to infringing activities” to pursue a cause of action against either the registrant of an infringing domain name or an owner or operator of one. Moreover, the bill allows the Justice Department to pursue such actions against registrants, owners, or operators of foreign domain names as well. The bill has been placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar for consideration. Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) in the House of Representatives on October 26, 2011. This legislation would also authorize an action by the Justice Department against registrants, owners, or operators of foreign infringing sites. Though both bills would increase the criminal penalties for those that sell counterfeit goods of certain categories, like counterfeit medicine, the House legislation includes military equipment as a special category.

Promoting and protecting innovation is critical to U.S. businesses remaining competitive in the global economy. Many industries, from pharmaceutical companies to recording studios, depend on intellectual property protections. These industries contribute greatly to the U.S. economy and serve as significant job-creators. At the same time, some have expressed concern that this legislation goes too far, and would lead to government overreach resulting in the chilling of free speech online and the stifling of innovation. As a result of these concerns, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) have released an alternative proposal, called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, which would authorize the International Trade Commission to investigate, and if necessary, take action against foreign websites involved in the advertising or selling of counterfeit products. This proposal is based on the premise that the International Trade Commission would be better suited to investigate such issues because of its current investigative role in determining whether certain imports into the U.S. violate U.S. property rights. Rest assured, should this legislation come to the House floor vote a vote, I will be sure to keep your thoughts in mind.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to get in touch with me. Your interest and input are valued and I hope to hear from you in the future regarding other matters of importance. I encourage you to visit my website and sign-up for my monthly e-newsletter at http://reichert.house.gov to learn more about other issues impacting the 8th Congressional District and our nation. You can also follow my work online and receive frequent updates on legislation being considered in Congress by visiting me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/davereichert) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/repdavereichert).

Sincerely,

David G. Reichert
Member of Congress

Here’s Sen. Patty Murray’s response:

Thank you for contacting me regarding H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act , which is currently pending in the United States House of Representatives. I appreciate knowing your views on this matter.

In the Senate, this legislation would fall under the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee. While I am not a member of that Committee, I want to assure you that I will be following the progress of this bill and will keep your views in mind if this or related legislation comes before the full Senate for consideration.

If you would like to know more about my work in the Senate, please feel free to sign up for my weekly updates at http://murray.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=GetEmailUpdates. Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me.

Sincerely,
Patty Murray
United States Senator

Update: At least we know Sen. Maria Cantwell is on our side: Internet Censorship Bill Coming Up in Senate in Three Weeks

Nevertheless, Wyden has at least three colleagues from both parties opposed to cloture – Jerry Moran, Maria Cantwell and Rand Paul. They will need a lot of help to block the 60 votes needed to clear cloture and get PIPA to the floor.

January to March Cash Back

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Starting of a new quarter means a new set of categories for cash back. For January to March:

Discover – 5% cash back

  • Gas
  • Museums
  • Movies

Chase – 5% cash back

  • Gas
  • Amazon.com

Fidelity – 4.5% cash back

  • Gas
  • Grocery
  • Drug Stores
  • Restaurants

Apparently every bank thinks gas is used the least often during the 1st quarter of the year. Fidelity is definitely the winner this round by having restaurants and groceries.

Online Stores Should Make It Easy To Convert Prepaid VISA Gift Cards

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prepaid credit cardOnline stores should take advantage of people disliking prepaid VISA gift cards with all the hidden fees and the fact that it’s hard to use up every last penny on that darn thing. I just got a prepaid American Express card from a recent deal I took apart of and I do what I always do, I convert them into Amazon.com gift cards and add it to my balance.

Today, if I wanted to cash out my prepaid credit card, I would have to go to Amazon.com, purchase a gift card, and send it to myself. Afterwards, I’d have to redeem it once I got the email. Though not a complicated process, it seems it can be easily simplified.

If I was an online store, I’d add a convert button on my website that’ll allow users to input a credit card number, expiration date, and an amount. The amount immediately gets charged and automatically gets added to my gift card balance. In fact, I’d probably advertise that there’s no hidden fees and no expiration date and stick it on any page where I already advertise about gift cards.

Simple, easy, fast.

iPod nano Replacement Got Upgraded!

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iPod Nano Replacement

I sent in my first gen iPod nano I purchased on launch day because of the battery defect issue. Apparently due to supply constraints, we are getting upgraded to the current gen with twice as much storage!

Dear Apple Customer:

Thank you for participating in the iPod nano (1st generation) Replacement Program. Please find your replacement iPod enclosed.

Serial Number
Please note that your replacement iPod has a serial number different to that of your original iPod nano. In some case due to limited availability of replacement stock of iPod nano (1st generation) Apple may have replaced your iPod with a more recent iPod model of equivalent or better specification. Always retain a record of your serial number(s) for future reference.

Warranty
Your replacement iPod product is warranted to be free from defects for 90 days from the date of service.

To ensure that your iPod software is up to date, download the latest iTunes from Apple’s website at http://www.apple.com/itunes/download. Questions regarding the operation of your iPod can be answered at Apple’s online support site at http://www.apple.com/support/ipod.

Exclude WordPress Categories from your Main Page or Feed

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So for a long time, I’ve gotten tired of having my Twitter logs fill my blog’s main page, and since I’ve winded down the HD-Trailers.net blog (moved everything to the main site), I didn’t want that to fill the blog up with Twitter spam either. But I love the archive ability of having my Twitter messages saved into my blog. It makes it a lot easier to search for stuff I’ve tweeted about.

After a bit of searching, I found this WordPress plugin: Ultimate Category Excluder. It allows you to exclude any category from your main page, feed, and archives.

As of now, I’ve excluded the Twitter category from the main page and feed, so it’ll still show up in the archives.

Pretty neat!

You are too awesome for Ping-o-matic.

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If you’re trying to automate pinging Ping-o-Matic! via PHP/cURL, you may have hit into an issue where the response you get is:

You are too awesome for Ping-o-matic.

To fix this, all you have to do is add a user-agent to your curl options, e.g.
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0" );

Once you set a user-agent, you should be able to get a valid response and have the Ping-o-Matic service ping all the services for you. Of course if you run that script too often, they’ll probably reject your request and tell you to slow down.

How to change margins / paper size when printing to PDF on Mac OSX

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So I was trying to save some D&D character sheets to PDF and noticed the bottom portion kept getting chopped off, while there was a big chunk of white space on the top of the page. What I thought would be a simple task of changing margins, turned out to be 30 minutes into searching online, without really finding a solution.

Coming from Windows, it took me a awhile to figure out that margins were set inside paper size, so I created a No Margin paper size following instructions from the help center (see below), but there wasn’t a way to choose a paper size from the Save as PDF… menu.

It turns out that Save as PDF… uses the default paper size set in your Print & Scan settings. If you go to Settings > Print & Scan, you’ll see a Default paper size near the bottom. Note, there isn’t a way to create a new paper size from this menu, but you can create one from any app that allows you to select a paper size from it’s print dialog (e.g. Safari)

Print & Scan Settings

From the help center:

Create a custom page size

If you want to print on paper that has an unusual size, such as an envelope or card, you may be able to choose the paper’s size from the Paper Size pop-up menu. To find the Paper Size pop-up menu, choose File > Page Setup. If you don’t see a Page Setup command, choose File > Print.

If you can’t find the size you need, you can create your own custom paper size.

  1. Do one of the following:
    • Choose File > Page Setup. Choose Page Attributes from the Settings pop-up menu, and then choose Any Printer from the Format For pop-up menu. Choosing Any Printer ensures that your document can print on any printer that supports the paper size you select.
    • If Page Setup is not available, choose File > Print. If you see a Show Details button, click it to show all available options.
  2. Choose Manage Custom Sizes from the Paper Size pop-up menu.
  3. Click the Add (+) button.
  4. Double-click the name of the paper size, and type a new name.
  5. Enter values in the Paper Size and Printer Margins fields, and then click OK.

After creating the custom paper size, go back to Settings > Print & Scan. You should now see the newly created paper size in your Default Paper Size drop down menu. If you choose the new paper size and try to Save as PDF again, you will notice that the new PDF will contain the new settings.

Hope this helps!

Apple’s Cards App NEEDS to Group Purchases

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So as I mentioned a couple days ago, I’ve been playing with the Apple’s Cards App on my iPhone 4S and have been mostly satisfied with the experience so far, but I hit into a couple hitches today.

The first thing I noticed was the server was overloaded this afternoon. Half the time, I would get an alert telling me there was a problem connecting to the server and to try again later. But if I tap Buy again, it usually went through.

Then I got to a point where my card was being declined. I logged into my credit card’s website and looked at the pending transactions:

Apple Cards App Charges

No, I didn’t create that many cards. Half of them are $1 authorizations. Of the remaining half, about 1/3 are duplicates from server failures, which I’m hoping I won’t be charged as these duplicate orders don’t show up under my account. The cards are $2.99 each + tax. If you want to deliver them internationally, it’s $4.99 + tax.

So I expected a call from my credit card fraud/security team, but that call never came. I eventually called customer support myself assuming that the flood of Apple transactions was the cause of my card being declined. After speaking with someone on the security team, it turns out there’s a limit of 25 transactions per day before my card starts rejecting additional charges. And each of those $1 authorizations count toward that limit.

Here’s my suggestion to Apple: Please group multiple card orders like you group iTunes purchases and make one charge at the end of the day. Given it’s the holiday season, the perfect time for someone to use your Cards app, sending out 13+ cards should not be uncommon and that assume I won’t be using the credit card anywhere else that day. Plus with your server issues, some charges are showing up twice. If needed, I can even create all the cards I want beforehand and then submit them all to be charged together, but that’s currently not an option via your app. This would not only avoid having so many transactions which would easily trigger fraud alerts, but you wouldn’t have to make so many separate authorization checks. Plus it’s better for you in the long run too, since you’ll be saving on per transaction credit card fees.

I’ve already submitted the same feedback at Apple – Cards – Feedback. Hopefully we’ll see this fixed soon before the holidays are over.

Apple Cards App

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Apple Cards AppGiven it’s the holiday season, I got a chance to play with Apple’s Card app. Despite the greatness of iPhone 4S’ camera, it still wasn’t as great as my Canon 60D SLR, so I took the picture I wanted with my Canon and imported it into iPhoto. Like magic, it was on my iPhone Photo Stream moments later.

The app is still rather primitive. The selection of templates to choose from was decent, but still felt lacking. I didn’t really find a particular one that stood out to me, but I guess the card is really about the photo you’ll be choosing.

After you select the photo you want, it allows you to zoom and move around. I guess if you wanted to edit the photo, you can use iPhone’s new photo editing software, which is supposedly good, but I haven’t had a chance to mess around with it yet.

The text was where I found the app lacking. There was no way to choose a different font or change the font size. When I wanted something left aligned, there wasn’t an option for that. Given a box, the font, size, and alignment were unchangeable. It also wasn’t immediately obvious that some text can be changed, but I soon found out that any text can be changed.

You can enter a name/address to mail the card to, but it was a lot easier to pick the person out from my address book.

Halfway through making a card, but need to stop temporarily? No worries. The app allows you to save the card and come back to it later.

I was hoping they would allow me to use my iTunes credit to purchase these cards, but unfortunately it’s hooked up with the Apple store and not the iTunes store. After logging in, it showed me my credit card on file and ask me to enter the card security code.

Then ZOOOOOOM, off my greeting card goes. The total cost was $2.99 + tax and I got my receipt in my email shortly.

Update: They also need to fix their Online Order Status for Cards. I’m not even talking about the inability to cancel the order as I can see how once your order is submitted, it could be processed for printing immediately. What I’m talking about is there’s no indication which order is which. You can click on order details or print invoice, but the only info you’ll see is your own. The email they send you does include who it’s for, but even on that email, there’s no confirmation of the mailing address. You can open the Cards app and confirm the mailing address there, but there’s no order # in the app so you can easily look up the order status.