I am not a couponing expert. In fact, I have no flippin’ idea what I’m doing, to the point that I selected “clip all” from Coupons.com and watched in horror as it nom’d 80 sheets of paper. Whoops.

Well, today I needed laundry detergent. I decided now or never and checked the coupons I have. $5 off your first web pick-up order at Walgreens. Sounds good! But none of the coupons I had matched the detergent on sale at Walgreens. Booo.

Next stop, the circular. Arm & Hammer detergent is 50% off, and I managed to find a coupon for $1 off 3 bottles. I made up the difference on what I needed to get the $5 off by putting some Huggies diapers in the basket. Those were $2.50 off per pack, and I had a $3 off 2 coupon.

Total without sales/coupons: $44.95
Total after sales: $29.45
Total after coupons: $20.45
Total savings: $24.50

While I don’t expect to be on an episode of Extreme Couponing anytime soon, my initial adventure was a decent success, with a 55% savings. I’ll be trying to keep a more organized system and an eye on the fliers, as my next goal is to tackle Target’s gift card offer: purchase 2 large packages of diapers and receive a $10 gift card. Without any adjustments, that’s $60 out of pocket, so I’d like so see how low I can get it.

Here’s the jist of the problem: your modem will assign your router either (a) no IPs or (b) unroutable local IPs. Sometimes, you’ll get what seem to be routable IPs, but they really aren’t, and you won’t get assigned a DNS address. Your modem will be fucking convinced you have Internet access, when in reality you have jackshit.

Solution: force a hard reboot on the modem.

1. Unplug the router’s power
2. Unplug the modem’s power
3. Unscrew the modem’s coax cable
4. Wait 10 seconds
5. Plug in modem power, modem coax, router power, in that order.
6. Check to see if you have updated and routable IPs (hint: if the IP starts with 192 it’s not routable)

Interestingly enough, the voicemails have an associated database. The database is a standard SQL format, so you can use the Firefox SQL Explorer to open it up (if you don’t have a SQL browser already). You will probably have to add the extension .sql to the file.

Using the structure from the previous post, the database is located at C:\android\data\com.coremobility.app.vnotes\files\vnotes_db

The second little gem is in this backup you can view your SMS messages, as well. The SMS database contains the datestamp, sender, recipient, and the message body (among other things). Being a [bored] investigator, I spent some [probably too much] time exporting the database to MySQL so I could search the SMS via PHP. Turns out I really didn’t have anything worthwhile, but, if you do, here’s where the database in located in the extracted backup.

C:\android\data\com.android.providers.telephony\databases\mmssms

Recently, my man’s brother-in-law and I got to talking about his business. He didn’t have a website. My first thought jumped to a standard WordPress deployment with static pages and a nice little blog to keep the content fresh in search rankings. Hell, I even know a designer who is a whiz at WP templates, so let’s get this party started!

But I sat down and talked with him about what he wanted, and, really, he just wants another way people can find his business. His business is pretty straight-forward and definitely not conducive to a blog. He doesn’t need a storefront. Or a gallery. He doesn’t really need…anything, aside from a few pages detailing what he does. He wanted a domain name, and e-mail, and, yup. That’s about it.

Google Apps is the perfect solution here. In less than 4 hours, I

• Registered a domain name through GoDaddy
• Edited the zone file to route mail to Google, use the domain name for Google Sites, and authorize Analytics and Webmaster tools
• Enabled Google Voice in case he wants a business-specific phone number
• Listed an advertisement on Google Places for Businesses
• Deployed a small, yet functional, Google Site to outline the services offered
• Submitted the site-map to Webmaster Tools for indexing

Here’s the kicker: a lot of the time, when handling a fresh deployment for a client, I need to know something about their industry. In this case, because it’s simply a list of what the company does and a few photos (supplied by the client), I didn’t have to know a goddamn thing. Because Google Sites is so simple to work with, I can spare myself the hassle of going back and forth over content and let the client fill it in on their own.

Since everything in Apps is intertwined, half of the usual set-up nonsense – copy/paste, change, edit, integrate – vanished. In the future, should he want a blog, I can simply set-up a subdomain using Blogger. I can say with a decent amount of certainty that his business will never outgrow this solution.

So the next time you have a client say, “I really just want people to be able to find my business on the web” ask yourself a few questions.

• Does the client sell items/will they ever need an online catalog?
• Will the client need to maintain an online client database in the foreseeable future?
• Can all the elements on the page be off-loaded to free services (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc)?
• Does the client need the ability to make simple changes without waiting on me?

After you start asking these questions for every new-to-the-web client, you’ll be surprised how often you can spare them the expense (and hassle) of a self-hosted website. You’ll end up, ultimately, with a happier customer for reducing confusion and expense. In my case, the total cost for the year is $8.19 – the price of the domain through GoDaddy, after a coupon, of course.

While I’m cleaning up something, sobbing my eyes out, I notice my phone is prompting me to update. Whatever, phone, shut the fuck up. Do your thing.

The update was for Gingerbread. Unrooted Gingerbread. Rooted phone == brick.

I wanted my voicemail back. After crying to my dad, my aunt, my 2 year old son and bitching on Facebook, I decided to give the backup a shot.

Before you begin, make sure the microSD card in the phone has ~500 mb free. You may need more (or less) but if you’re anything like me, you probably have a spare/empty 2 gb card hanging around just in case. Use that.

1. Boot into Recovery Mode [Samsung Epic, at least] by pressing and holding Volume Down, Camera and Power. If it doesn’t work the first time, try again.
2. Mount the SD card. This will usually be fairly obvious, with a menu title similar to “Mounts and Storage” and an option to mount “/sdcard”.
3. Return to the main screen and find the “Backup and Recovery” sounding option. Run a full backup.
4. Without powering off your phone (if it’s quasi-bricked, you’re dealing with a delicate entity – don’t risk a reboot) remove the SD card.
5. Insert the SD card into your computer and navigate to [sdcardpath]\clockworkmod\backup\[datetime]\. The voicemail files are located in data.img

Now, if you’re a Linux user, you can handle it from here. If you’re a Windows user, here’s how to get those files.

1. Copy data.img to a root folder – I used c:\android\
2. Download unyaffs with cygwin.dll. See this thread on XDA Developers for a download link.
3. Extract the downloaded file to c:\android\. That folder should now have three files.
4. Open your Start Menu and type cmd in the Run box (and hit enter)
5. Type cd c:\android
6. Type unyaffs data.img
7. Type exit
8. Open a folder browser and navigate to C:\android\data\com.coremobility.app.vnotes\files\
9. Your voicemail files will be stored as .amr files which can be opened with VLC media player.

The files will have an alphanumeric name, giving you no indication whatsoever who they are from (booo) but you will have the audio files (yay!!).

Enjoy.

Here’s another one from Good Morning America.

I have an 8 year old. If she dared rip a piece of wood off the wall and threaten to kill her teacher with it, she’d get a whole hell of a lot worse than pepper spray. Not so in the world of fat-mom and fat-brat. In their world, all he does is OK, because, well, he doesn’t do it when mommy dearest is around. Gee, mom, wonder if that’s because she’s overindulgent?

A lot of bloggers/commentators/idiot liberals are blaming the cops, or the school, or the teachers, or Republicans, or Jesus. Of course, as per the usual fashion, very few are willing to blame the fucking parent. Repeat after me: her son is a shit head because she is an poor, overindulgent excuse for a parent.

I will bet this child runs the household. I will also bet his mother will swear he doesn’t. Before you think I’m being overly judgmental, ensure you didn’t miss these gems.

I think there is a problem, but it’s with school and Aidan. I don’t know what else there is for me to do when I’m not there at school to figure out what is causing the problems.

The medication just made him gain weight, didn’t affect his behavior at all, so we all decided it was better to take him off of it.

The medication made him gain weight because he isn’t broken in the head, he’s broken in the walking incubator. This woman is clearly not raising a functioning human being. Hell, she obviously isn’t a functioning human being, considering her views on cops as therapists.

You talk to him and you find out what it is that’s bothering him, as well. You don’t just walk in, ask him to stop and spray.

I’m more than slightly pissed off by all of this. These are the kids of fucktarded parents that are littered across the nation and send their maladjusted children to school – possibly, the school my children attend. While my kids are sitting back, minding their own business, not screaming I will kill you motherfuckers at teachers while brandishing a sharp stick, these kids are committing felonies on school property and possibly harming my kids.

And, guess what, the teachers can’t do jackshit about it, because worthless parents like this would call the cops on any teacher who dared lay a hand on her precious baby.

Oh, and yeah, all this shit about him being “only 8″ and “only 80 pounds” – until you’ve wrestled an 80-pound child to the floor during a temper tantrum, STFU. You will walk away injured. They can hurt you. And a closing thought for mom

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Go to your Admin Panel, then Appearance -> Editor -> Theme Functions. At the bottom of the file, add this code.

function modify_post_mime_types($post_mime_types) {
	$post_mime_types['application/pdf'] = array(
							__('PDFs'),
							__('Manage PDFs'),
							_n_noop('PDFs (%s)', 'PDFs (%s)')
							);

	$post_mime_types['application/zip'] = array(
							__('Zips'),
							__('Manage Zips'),
							_n_noop('Zips (%s)', 'Zips (%s)')
							);
	return $post_mime_types;
}

add_filter('post_mime_types', 'modify_post_mime_types');

This is what you get.

(Hattip to the WP support forums for the original code).

So, let’s break that code down. application/pdf and application/zip are the mime types of the files I wanted. You could, however, drop in any mime type that you use frequently. After that, you need to replace PDFs/ZIPs with whatever you want to use to denote that file type. For example, if you want a tab for documents.

$post_mime_types['application/doc'] = array(
						__('Docs'),
						__('Manage Docs'),
						_n_noop('Docs (%s)', 'Docs (%s)')
						);

WordPress will also allow a wild-card mime type search. In essence, that’s all the image/video/audio tabs are. The image tab matches image/*, for example. So, you can create a forth option that applies to “application” – unfortunately, pretty much everything that is not audio, video or image falls under that category. That option will result in a list that displays docs, PDFs, archives and anything else that matches application/*.

The answer to this dilemma is exceptionally simple. Go to a new, blank tab. Click on the little wrench next to the Google Talk app and uninstall it. Then, you just need to keep Gmail open all the time.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to do that, you can use an online chat program like Meebo.

My daughter reported that the sound has been working just fine for her. I shut down, restarted and logged into her account. Yes, sound works. So, step 1 is to see if the sound works on another account. If it does, continue. If it doesn’t, reflash via dev switch.

Log back into the account that isn’t working. Check if the other keys are working. Can you refresh, move forward/back and switch to full screen? If you can’t, you might need to reflash. If you can, continue.

Close all your windows and restart. Press the other keys first. Refresh the screen, etc. If those work, try the volume keys. It seemed on my Chromebook, the volume keys got “stuck” and needed a little kick in the ass to get moving again. It’s working fine now. Of course, if it still doesn’t work, reflash!

Did you get hit with the new Facebook bullshit? You probably saw one of these headlines in your friends’ feeds

SICK! I lost all respect for Miley Cyrus after I watched this video!

SICK! I lost all respect for Emma Watson after I watched this video!

OK, I’m sure there are more, but those are the two I saw. See, my friend (according to the News Feed) Liked the first video. So I clicked the link. Shenanigans! There’s nothing there! Then the second link showed up in MY feed,. Suddenly, I like this page that has no content AND I can’t figure out how to mark it as spam while simultaneously unliking it. (Facebook, your UI team sucks.) I will reveal the secret of how I finally accomplished such a feat…after a cute cat sums up the situation
see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Tihehehe. OK, back to business.

First, locate the offending post. Click the ‘x’ next to it and select “Mark as Spam”

Shimmy on over to your Profile. Click on “Info” under your profile picture. Scroll down until you see Activities and Interests. Click “Edit”.

Click on “Show Other Pages”.

Find the page (“I lost all respect for whoever after I saw this video/picture”), and click on “Remove Page.” The button looks like that. Now you’re done. Yippee!