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First Hickok45 was banned by YouTube. Apparently the ban hammer came down due to some cross-posting issues with the Don’t-Be-Evilers at Google+. Then he was back. Then they zapped him again. The good news: he seems to be back … Read More
The post The Great YouTube Ban: Hickok45 Explains It All For You appeared first on The Truth About Guns.
via The Truth About Guns
The Great YouTube Ban: Hickok45 Explains It All For You
Netflix has tons of great content, but it can be hard to find it all if you don’t know what you’re looking for. The site’s algorithms show you what it thinks you want to watch, but these codes can help you venture outside the suggested depths.
Netflix fan site What’s On Netflix has a helpful list of codes that can reveal a multitude of narrow categories and category combinations that Netflix may not readily reveal to. To manually explore a category simple enter the following URL:
Then, replace INSERTNUMBER with one of the codes from the site below. What’s On Netflix has dozens of numbers for very specific categories, including everything from B-Horror Movies to Anime Fantasy. Check out the full list at the source link below.
The Netflix ID Bible – Every Category on Netflix | What’s On Netflix
via Lifehacker
These Secret Netflix Codes Can Reveal Tons of Hidden Categories
When you need a quick charge of your phone or other device, it’s easy to just connect it into any old untrusted computer or public charging station. The chance of malicious data getting through to your phone is pretty slim, but it still exists. Over on Node, they show off a way to make sure only power can get through the USB port.
You’ll essentially be disassembling a couple of different USB plugs and then reassembling them together to create a connection that blocks data transfers but allows powering. You’ll need some light soldering skills, but otherwise it’s a simple project to make for yourself. It’s probably not a necessity for most of us, but it’s a fun little thing to make either way.
How to Create a Tiny USB Condom | Node
via Lifehacker
Make Your Own “USB Condom” for Added Security When Charging from Untrusted USB Ports
A droid carrying important information is jettisoned on a remote desert planet. A mechanically inclined loner with a mysterious past finds it, setting them off on an adventure that will see the destruction of a huge weapon and more. Yes, The Force Awakens mirrors the original Star Wars, and J.J. Abrams thinks it had to.
“It was obviously a wildly intentional thing that we go backwards, in some ways, to go forwards in the important ways,” Abrams said in a podcast with The Hollywood Reporter. “Ultimately the structure of Star Wars itself is as classic and tried and true as you can get. It was itself derivative of all of these things that George loved so much, from the most obvious, Flash Gordon and Joseph Campbell, to the [Akira] Kurosawa references, to Westerns — I mean, all of these elements were part of what made Star Wars.”
Though Abrams admits to hitting all the tried and true beats from the original film, he thinks that pales in significance to everything else.
“I can understand that someone might say, ‘Oh, it’s a complete rip-off!’” he said. “We inherited Star Wars. The story of history repeating itself was, I believe, an obvious and intentional thing, and the structure of meeting a character who comes from a nowhere desert and discovers that she has a power within her, where the bad guys have a weapon that is destructive but that ends up being destroyed — those simple tenets are by far the least important aspects of this movie, and they provide bones that were well-proven long before they were used in Star Wars.”
Those bones, he feels, were necessary to get where this story had to be.
“What was important for me was introducing brand new characters using relationships that were embracing the history that we know to tell a story that is new — to go backwards to go forwards,” Abrams said “So I understand that this movie, I would argue much more than the ones that follow, needed to take a couple of steps backwards into very familiar terrain, and using a structure of nobodies becoming somebodies defeating the baddies — which is, again, I would argue, not a brand new concept, admittedly — but use that to do, I think, a far more important thing, which is introduce this young woman, who’s a character we’ve not seen before and who has a story we have not seen before, meeting the first Storm Trooper we’ve ever seen who we get to know as a human being; to see the two of them have an adventure in a way that no one has had yet, with Han Solo; to see those characters go to find someone who is a brand new character who, yes, may be diminutive, but is as far from Yoda as I think a description of a character can get, who gets to enlighten almost the way a wonderful older teacher or grandparent or great-aunt might, you know, something that is confirming a kind of belief system that is rejected by the main character; and to tell a story of being a parent and being a child and the struggles that that entails — clearly Star Wars has always been a familial story, but never in the way that we’ve told here.”
Abrams continues from there:
“And yes, they destroy a weapon at the end of this movie, but then something else happens which is, I think, far more critical and far more important — and in fact even in that moment, when that is happening, the thing I think the audience is focused on and cares more about is not, ‘Is that big planet gonna blow up?’ — ‘cause we all know it’s gonna blow up. What you really care about is what’s gonna happen in the forest between these two characters who are now alone.”
“Yes, the bones of the thing we always knew would be a genre comfort zone,” Abrams concluded. “But what the thing looks like, we all have a skeleton that looks somewhat similar, but none of us look the same [on the outside]. To me, the important thing was not, ‘What are the bones of this thing?’ To me, it was meeting new characters who discover themselves that they are in a universe that is spiritual, that is optimistic and in a world where you meet people that will become your family.”
It’s a great podcast, that’s well worth a listen. They talk about Abrams’ early career, why he didn’t want to be “The sequel guy,” how Rian Johnson contributed to Episode VII, how Abrams influenced Episode VIII, and more. Here’s the link again.
Contact the author at germain@io9.com.
via Gizmodo
J.J. Abrams Explains Why The Force Awakens Isn’t Just a Carbon Copy of A New Hope
We pretty much loved Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The things this movie got right were so much more important than the things it got wrong. That said, it did get some things wrong. Allow us to elaborate.
So now that Episode VII has become the #1 non-inflation-adjusted domestic movie of all time in North America, it’s a good moment to be honest about it. In our movie review, we touched briefly on the fact that there were some flaws in the film that did seem to be a cause for concern, especially in the second half. But we didn’t want to go into detail about those until everybody had had a chance to see the film and chew it over. So here goes.
Warning: Major spoilers ahead…
So first off, just to reiterate—for the most part, we loved this film, and it even improved on subsequent viewings. But yeah, there are some issues.
First off, the biggest one is probably Leia. Even in a movie where Luke Skywalker gets a minute of screentime, Leia feels notably underserved, to the point where I wondered if a bunch of her stuff got cut at the last minute. (The thing where she hugs Rey, whom she’s never spoken to, and ignores Chewbacca, kind of supports that idea.)
In The Force Awakens, Leia gets a handful of snarky lines towards her ex, Han Solo, but is mostly just one long stoic reaction shot. Whatever she thinks of her brother running off and leaving the galaxy to die, we never really find out.
But worst of all, she and Han Solo have a couple of scenes that are like the executive summary of a couple talking about their relationship. It’s something I’ve seen a fair bit in movies lately: the scene where two people talk about their feelings, but they’re just summarizing the bullet points. The biggest Han-Leia conversation is half as-you-know-Bob exposition, and half quick-and-dirty, on-the-nose relationship synopsis. At no point do Han and Leia feel like people who once loved each other, had a child together, and have not seen each other in years.
This matters partly because Leia is a kickass character in her own right, and getting to see her as a general was one of the selling points of the film. And it also matters because the Leia-Han relationship was the emotional core of the original trilogy, so it’s weird to see it get such short shrift here.
But Leia getting shortchanged also saps a bit of the oomph out of the film’s climax. Not a lot, but some. Han Solo going to confront his fallen son Kylo Ren works on its own terms, because we’ve seen enough of Han and Kylo in the movie to get that Han has become kind of a sad reflection of who he used to be, and we know that Kylo is struggling with his feelings about his father. But Leia is the one who sends Han to talk to Kylo, and a big part of her scenes is selling us on the idea that Kylo Ren’s father (and not his mother) is the only one who can reach him now. Leia has to know that she’s probably sending Han Solo to his death—or at least, that it’s a likely outcome—and if the scenes where she asks him to do that carried more weight, then it would add more power to the Han-Kylo meeting.
And Leia, by dint of her status as leader of the Resistance, also participates in the film’s other biggest shortfall: the whole Starkiller Base storyline. At this point in the film, I’m invested enough in Rey, Finn and Kylo that their arcs paying off feels like enough of a culmination to the film, and it’s okay that Starkiller Base is kind of a forgettable contrivance.
But Starkiller Base absolutely does not carry any weight in the film. When it destroys the New Republic, this is pretty much the first we’ve heard of the New Republic in the movie, and I kept wondering if Jeet Heer had just been atomized or something. General Hux’s speech, coming with no context or setup, is the most unconvincing, random thing in the film, and I look forward to the “remix” videos where he’s shouting about unfair parking tickets and that one Shake Shack where they messed up his onion-ring order because goddamnit, he’s a General and onion rings are a prerogative of his rank.
I don’t care about Starkiller Base. At no point do I believe it’s going to destroy the bunker where Leia and her friends are hunkering down—and apparently neither do they, since they don’t try and evacuate or anything. The mission to destroy Starkiller Base is way too straightforward, and its weakness is glaringly easy. Ken Leung from Lost points out one vulnerable component that the base must have, Finn knows exactly what he means and where it is, and it’s the size of a city to boot.
And the mission goes off more or less without a hitch—both Death Star attacks in the Original Trilogy were disasters, only saved by a last-minute miracle. They even have Admiral Ackbar there in the room, so they oughta remember how it’s supposed to be a trap. [Edited to add: Okay, people in comments are pointing out that the mission does fail at first. But not in a way that feels like “all is lost.” And we cut away from Poe and the X-wings for a long stretch of time, during which we’re apparently not supposed to think they’ve all been destroyed.]
When Starkiller Base gets blown up, I feel basically nothing. (By contrast, Nero’s weapon in J.J. Abrams’ first Star Trek does actually feel menacing, because we actually see it destroy Vulcan, a place we have a connection to, which we’ve spent some time on in this film.)
And then there’s Maz Kanata, the pirate/bartender/Force-sensitive ancient alien who’s basically Guinan from Star Trek: The Next Generation. We know that Maz originally had a bigger role in the movie, but they didn’t really know what to do with her after her bar is destroyed. Actually, it sort of feels like they didn’t know what to do with her, in general.
Maz feels like kind of a non-entity. She’s there to help our heroes out, dispense homespun wisdom, and urge Rey to embrace her destiny via Anakin’s old lightsaber. She’s the least memorable character in the film, although I did keep wondering why she has a giant statue of herself outside her bar. She clearly sympathizes with the Resistance—her one memorable speech is about how Han Solo should stop running and join the fight—but she’s not helping them herself, and she probably knows her bar is full of First Order sympathizers, that she caters to.
Part of the problem with Maz is that she’s the film’s Yoda, but she’s also the film’s Lando Calrissian. She’s both the wise teacher who is on the side of good and the morally gray, neutral rogue who doesn’t want to pick a side. I guess. She’s a few archetypes cobbled together, but none of them actually sticks.
And that brings me to another problem with The Force Awakens—even though the Force is right there in the title, and we’re told a few times that the Force is coming back after a period of quiescence, I don’t really feel the Force very much in this movie.
That is, I don’t really get a ton of the feeling of mysticism and awe that I associate with the Force in this film, as compared to Empire Strikes Back or A New Hope. The weird poetry of it. And some of that is down to the fact that Maz Kanata is this movie’s Yoda or Obi-Wan, and she’s kind of an empty vessel.
I absolutely buy Rey becoming strong with the Force, because she’s clearly got an innate ability and every time she encounters Kylo Ren he shows her more stuff. My problems with the Force in this movie are not suspension-of-disbelief issues, or logistical ones, at all. But I didn’t have any “holy cow” spiritual moments involving that mysterious energy field that binds all living things together. There’s no “that is why you fail” moment in this movie.
Some of the lack of awe towards the Force in the movie could be down to John Williams’ music, which is great but never has any of the “wonder” moments that he layers into a lot of the first two moments.
In fact, after I saw Episode VII for the first time, I had a moment of wondering if the Force was just such a Baby Boomer zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance hippie concept that no film-maker born since 1965 could really encapsulate it. But I also hope that Rian Johnson finds a way to bring more of that awe and strangeness into Episode VIII, once Luke Skywalker actually opens his mouth. If Johnson talks to his friend Shane Carruth, who nailed some of the feeling of unspeakable connectedness in Upstream Color, we might be getting somewhere.
There’s a third female character who sort of lacks oomph in this film. But I don’t hold that against The Force Awakens. Captain Phasma, Finn’s commanding officer, was clearly meant to be a minor character who shows up in a couple of scenes and then Finn turns the tables on her in a funny moment before tossing her into a garbage compactor. And then they cast Gwendoline Christie in the role, and decided to upgrade her to major supporting character after all—Christie did a lot of press for this movie, remember.
So if you just think of Phasma as a slightly upgraded version of “hapless stormtrooper who gets bullied into turning off the force field,” it’s not a big deal. The fact that she turns off the force field for them is just part of the larger problem of Starkiller Base being kind of a pushover. On the other hand, if Episode VIII sees the return of Phasma—as it apparently will—she’ll have a bit of an uphill climb to regain her credibility.
There are a few other issues. Supreme Leader Snoke is another character who feels more or less forgettable—another CG mo-cap baddie with a generic “villain” look—and even the Vatican felt like Snoke could have been a more compelling villain. But he’s clearly meant to be in the background in this film, much as the Emperor was in A New Hope, and he’s got lots of chances to shine in the next two films.
There’s some choppy editing in the movie, which seems to be the result of last-minute cuts—Rey and Finn swapping Poe’s jacket back and forth in the final act being one of the clues.
It’s weird that the guys from The Raid are in this movie and get basically nothing to do.
And as usual with a J.J. Abrams film, some crucial stuff isn’t explained in the film, that probably should be. We had questions after we saw the film, and in some cases the answers are easy to find online. But R2D2 suddenly powering on at the end, and why Luke doesn’t want to be found but left a map to find him, are pieces of information that should be dropped into the film somehow. Poe randomly deciding not to look for BB-8 on Jakku, but instead just bugging out, is also kind of random.
And finally, there’s the fact that The Force Awakens so closely mirrors the structure and storyline of A New Hope, down to all the main beats. (Secret document hidden in a droid on a desert planet, escape in the Millennium Falcon, meeting a mentor figure who later dies, giant super-weapon blows up, etc.) That didn’t really bother me, because it was always in the cards that this film would be sort of a “greatest hits” of Star Wars, and these beats were remixed enough that I was into it.
Bottom line: As I said in the beginning, the things The Force Awakens does right are much more important than the things it does wrong. In particular, it makes you care about its brand new characters, as much as you ever cared about Han Solo or Luke Skywalker.
Additional reporting by Germain Lussier
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.
via Gizmodo
Everything That’s Wrong With Star Wars: The Force Awakens
If learning how to code isn’t on your list of new year’s resolutions, you should reconsider — The demand for tech skills is higher than ever, and you can master them from the comfort of your couch thanks to the wealth of information available online. However, with so many eLearning services around, it can be daunting to determine which are worth investing your money in. To help you out, we’ve rounded up some of the best deals on the top eLearning resources on the web. These huge discounts are only available for a limited time, so don’t wait — There’s never been a better time to start learning new skills.
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Apple at last decided to give its TV box an upgrade worthy of the name last year, and if you’ve bought yourself one of the new devices (or got one as a gift from Santa) then there’s lots to explore—the Apple TV has a simple, straightforward interface but there are still a number of hidden features and tools available to take advantage of.
Setting up passwords and networks on a device without a keyboard is never a pleasurable process, but if you’ve got a device running iOS 9.1 or above to hand then you can use it to beam important configuration information to your Apple TV, including your Apple ID and home wifi password.
All you need to do is unlock the device, switch on Bluetooth and keep it near the Apple TV while you’re configuring your new bit of kit—the TV box will do the rest. Watch for the prompt during the initial setup process and you can save yourself some time when getting your new box up and running.
A swipe down from the top of the remote trackpad while you’re watching something reveals details about the current movie or show as well as giving you access to some additional settings. Switch to the Audio section and it’s possible to change the current language or switch to a different set of AirPlay speakers.
On supported iTunes content you can use the same drop-down panel to skip between chapters (tap the Menu button to hide it again). Meanwhile, tapping and holding the left or right side of the top Touch pad on the remote will rewind or fast forward through whatever you’re watching or listening to.
You don’t have to settle for the layout of icons and apps presented to you by Apple on its TV device. A long press of the touch-sensitive trackpad button at the top of the remote and the current app icon starts to shake: swipe to move it to a new location on the grid of apps or press Play/Pause to remove it.
That means you can get the apps you use most often up at the top of the screen and banish the least helpful ones to the bottom of the list. This only works on the main home screen and only with the Apple TV apps—you can’t use it to rearrange the ‘featured’ carousel at the top of the interface.
Whether you’ve gone for the 32GB or 64GB version of the fourth-generation Apple TV, you probably want to keep a close eye on how much room you’ve got left. Go to the Settings app, then select General and Manage Storage to see how much room each of your installed apps are currently using.
We’ve already mentioned how you can delete apps from the Apple TV home screen, but you can do it here too via the trash can icons that appear on the right. The only apps listed here are the non-native ones that don’t come with the Apple TV—you can’t see details of cached movies and television shows.
The selection of games available on the Apple TV when it first launched was fairly limited, but the situation is slowly getting better. If you can find your favorite games on the new device’s App Store then you won’t have to pay again for them (or at least that’s the case with the ones we tested).
To quickly check if any of your previously purchased games (or indeed apps) have versions specific to the Apple TV, scroll up from the front page of the App Store interface and then go across to Purchased—you can then drill down into the available selection based on your previous iOS installs.
The Siri remote is a big part of the new Apple TV experience and if it becomes unpaired with your device somehow, press and hold the Menu and Plus buttons to connect it again. You can only have one remote paired with your Apple TV at any one time, but that’s unlikely to be much of a problem.
Here’s another shortcut trick you can do with the Siri remote: hold down the Menu and Home buttons together and wait until the white LED on the front of the Apple TV starts to flash. This forces a reset of your device, which is handy if an app or the entire Apple TV becomes unresponsive for whatever reason.
The Siri searching capabilities are of course one of the major selling points of the fourth-generation Apple TV, so make sure you’re fully aware of all the different voice commands that are available: “show that Modern Family episode with Edward Norton” was an example used in the September demo.
Try “show me good movies from the 80s” or “show me TV comedies”. You can also ask Siri questions such as “will I need an umbrella tomorrow?” and “what was the Lakers score?” (as on iOS). Press and hold the Siri button (the microphone) to run a command, then talk into the top of the remote.
You can make use of the Siri button while enjoying your Apple TV content as well. Use “what did he/she say?” to skip back 15 seconds in a movie or television show and temporarily turn on the subtitles; or try commands like “skip” and “previous track” while you’re inside the Apple Music app.
Commands such as “go back 30 seconds” or “go forward seven minutes” work, as do setting commands like “reduce loud sounds”. If you ask “who stars in this?”, meanwhile, you get a roster of the talent in the film or show along the bottom of the screen (press the Menu button) to hide it again.
The Menu button takes you back one level through apps and menus, with a double-tap taking you back to the home screen. Tap again from the front page to activate those gorgeous Apple TV screensavers (if you haven’t already installed them, go to General then Screensaver in the Settings app).
Then there’s the Home button (with a picture of a television set on it)—this primarily serves as a way of getting quickly back to the Apple TV home screen, but if you double-tap it you get the device’s multitasking page, enabling you to quickly switch between all of your recently used apps.
Should you be writing up a guide to the Apple TV or wanting to show off your Crossy Road achievements, it’s not particular difficult to take an Apple TV screenshot (or video) if you have a Mac computer and a USB Type-C cable to hand—although it doesn’t work with DRM-protected content on screen.
Hook up your computer to the Apple TV via its USB Type-C port, launch the latest version of QuickTime on OS X and you should be able to see the Apple TV as an input option when you choose New Movie Recording from the File menu. To capture a still, press Cmd+Shift+4 and then hit Space.
One of the new features in El Capitan and iOS 9 is “Proactive,” which supposedly helps you find email addresses and other info automatically. It doesn’t always work great though. Thankfully, Macworld points to where you can turn it off.
Proactive is supposed to automatically skim emails to pull contact info to make it easier to get in touch with people. This is useful sometimes, but other times it just sits there suggesting email addresses from some random person you don’t care about or worse, pulls up old emails for people for no apparent reason. For example, when I type in my own name, Mail suggests eight different email addresses, including some I haven’t used since college. To clean this up and only allow Mail to suggest emails from your actual Contacts, you just need to toggle a couple settings.
On Mac
Launch Contacts, then head to Contacts > Preferences > General. Uncheck the “Show Contacts Found in Mail” option.
On iOS
Head to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and uncheck the box marked “Contacts Found in Mail.”
With those settings disabled, the only autosuggested recipients will be the email addresses you actually have in your address book.
How to disable unconfirmed email suggestions | Macworld
via Lifehacker
Disable OS X and iOS Contact Email Suggestions to Clean Up the Recipient Field