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The mobile email app space is highly competitive, with great entries from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many others. The best email apps tend to do more than just manage your mail — they make it easy to view your calendar, contacts, and file attachments all in one place. Today, Boxer is joining that crowd with version 6.0 of its email app, which brings along a full-fledged calendar app.

Boxer 6.0 introduces a refreshed design of Boxer's email experience, with updated visuals and performance. But the real appeal is the new calendar app, which is integrated into the iOS version of Boxer email and available as a stand-alone app for Android. It allows you to view your calendar right from your email and quickly share availability with...

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If you want to completely ruin your budget, the rest of the world will be happy to help. You can buy something to fix nearly every minor annoyance you’ve ever had. You’ll also go broke doing it. Instead, accept that some things will just be imperfect to make your budget a little lighter.

As personal finance blog Frugalwoods points out, accepting the occasional imperfection is necessary to saving money. Whether it’s living with a cheaper alternative that’s slightly inconvenient, living in a home that isn’t your dream house, or driving your old car a couple years longer than you wanted to, the tiny imperfections can add up to a fortune if you try to throw money at the problem:

What we’ve discovered...is that accepting imperfection is not only frugal, it’s also liberating. Instead of chasing our tails, we spend time learning new skills and devising ways to circumvent the consumer spending machine. Far more interesting and fulfilling than simply slapping down money to solve every little inconvenient nuance that comes our way.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you have to just live with every bad thing that happens. If you’re sick, go to a doctor. If you need to spend money to get into a better position, by all means, do it. The whole point of earning money is to make your life better. However, if the problem you’re going to spend money on is one you could just as easily live with, save your cash.

Perfection Is The Enemy Of Frugality | Frugalwoods via Rockstar Finance

Photo by emdot.

Reddit’s head of community, Jessica Moreno, has left the company. She is the fourth senior female employee to exit in less than a month.

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No big deal.

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“Here is my puppy Peanut Butter trying to go down the stairs at 9 weeks old.”

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IFTTT's web service can automate your life. You create recipes that do what you want done using simple if this then that commands. But to get cooking, you need to have on the right channel.

Today IFTTT has announced a new Spotify channel that lets you integrate your music library. Examples of what you can do include automatically posting to your social network accounts whenever you add a song to a playlist and emailing yourself a summary of all the tracks you save over the course of a week.

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New IFTTT Channel Adds Spotify Integration To Enhance How You Use Your Online Music Library was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

When we launched Google+, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink. So over the next few months, we’re going to be making some important changes. Here’s more about what you can expect:

A more focused Google+ experience
Google+ is quickly becoming a place where people engage around their shared interests, with the content and people who inspire them. In line with that focus, we’re continuing to add new features like Google+ Collections, where you can share and enjoy posts organized by the topics you care about. At the same time, we’ll also move some features that aren’t essential to an interest-based social experience out of Google+. For example, many elements of Google+ Photos have been moved into the new Google Photos app, and we’re well underway putting location sharing into Hangouts and other apps, where it really belongs. We think changes like these will lead to a more focused, more useful, more engaging Google+.

Using Google without a Google+ profile
People have told us that accessing all of their Google stuff with one account makes life a whole lot easier. But we’ve also heard that it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.

So in the coming months, a Google Account will be all you’ll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google. YouTube will be one of the first products to make this change, and you can learn more on their blog. As always, your underlying Google Account won’t be searchable or followable, unlike public Google+ profiles. And for people who already created Google+ profiles but don’t plan to use Google+ itself, we’ll offer better options for managing and removing those public profiles.

You’ll see these changes roll out in stages over several months. While they won’t happen overnight, they’re right for Google’s users—both the people who are on Google+ every single day, and the people who aren’t.

Posted by Bradley Horowitz, VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing

 It’s like something from a bad movie: eager to learn the details of the bad guy’s plan, the good guys hack his phone armed with little more than knowledge of his phone number. No physical access to the phone, no tricking him into opening some shady application; just a quick message, and bam — they’re in. Alas, that’s essentially how a new Android hack works,… Read More

A year after Facebook introduced Internet.org, the company is making it easier for any mobile operator to sign up to offer free internet access to basic online services.

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Long ago, Google required anyone who comments on YouTube to have a Google+ profile. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Now, Google is beginning the process of breaking YouTube—as well as many of its other properties—away from your Google+ profile.

In a blog post today, Google announced that it’s going to spend the coming months removing your Google+ profile from products where it “doesn’t make sense.” The first of these changes will be YouTube. In a separate post on Google’s YouTube blog, the company explains that starting today, the comments you make on YouTube will no longer show up on Google+ and (crucially) vice versa.

Of course, that’s just the beginning. In the coming weeks, Google says it will remove other restrictions. In the future, you will no longer need a Google+ profile to upload videos, make comments, or create a channel. When this change eventually rolls out, you’ll be able to remove your Google+ profile, though the company advises not to do so yet, as this will remove your YouTube channel.

As for the long-term, it’s unclear what else Google will be removing Google+ profiles from. The company says it will allow you to “share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google.” One of the other main complaints about Google+ profiles was that you couldn’t leave reviews on places like the Play Store or Google Maps without one, but these aren’t mentioned. Still, this is a step in the right direction.

Keeping the conversation going | YouTube Blog

Everything in its right place | Google Blog

 It’s no secret that Google+ didn’t quite work out the way Google envisioned and now, after already moving Google Photos out of the service, it’s starting to decouple Google+ profiles from its regular Google accounts. The idea behind Google+ profiles was to give users a single identity across all the company’s platforms.  Users didn’t like this and as Google VP… Read More

Late last year leaked documents revealed that the MPAA helped Mississippi Attorney General (AG) Jim Hood to revive SOPA-like censorship efforts in the United States.

In a retaliatory move Google sued the Attorney General, hoping to find out more about the secret plan. The company also demanded copies of internal communications from the MPAA which are now revealing how far the anti-Google camp planned to go.

Emails between the MPAA and two of AG Hood’s top lawyers include a proposal that outlines how the parties could attack Google. In particular, they aim to smear Google through an advanced PR campaign involving high-profile news outlets such as The Today Show and The Wall Street Journal.

With help from Comcast and News Corp, they planned to hire a PR firm to “attack” Google and others who resisted the planned anti-piracy efforts. To hide links to the MPAA and the AG’s office, this firm should be hired through a seemingly unaffiliated nonprofit organization, the emails suggest.

“This PR firm can be funded through a nonprofit dedicated to IP issues. The ‘live buys’ should be available for the media to see, followed by a segment the next day on the Today Show (David green can help with this),” the plan reads (pdf).

The Today Show feature would be followed up by a statement from a large Google investor calling on the company to do more to tackle the piracy problem.

“After the Today Show segment, you want to have a large investor of Google (George can help us determine that) come forward and say that Google needs to change its behavior/demand reform.”

In addition, a planted piece in the Wall Street Journal should suggest that Google’s stock would lose value if the company doesn’t give in to the demands.

“Next, you want NewsCorp to develop and place an editorial in the WSJ emphasizing that Google’s stock will lose value in the face of a sustained attack by AGs and noting some of the possible causes of action we have developed,” the plan notes.

Previously, the MPAA accused Google of waging an “ongoing public relations war,” but the above shows that the Hollywood group is no different.

On top of the PR-campaign the plan also reveals details on how the parties would taint Google before the National Association of Attorneys General.

Through a series of live taped segments they would show how easy it is for minors to pirate R-rated movies, buy heroin and order an assault weapon with the help of Google’s search engine.

Finally, the plan includes a “final step” where Attorney General Hood would issue a civil investigatory demand to Google.

In its court filing (pdf) Google uses the information above to argue that the AG’s civil investigatory demand was not the basis of a legitimate investigation. Instead, it was another tool pressuring the company to implement more stringent anti-piracy measures.

Given this new information, Google hopes that the court will compel Fox, NBC and Viacom to hand over relevant internal documents, as they were “plainly privy” to the secretive campaign.

It’s now up to the judge to decide how to proceed, but based on the emails above, the MPAA and the AG’s office have some explaining to do.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and the best VPN services.

Dunkin' Donuts CEO Nigel Travis says it's just not fair that he makes $4800 an hour while his store employees make $15 an hour. To correct the situation, he thinks they should earn $12 an hour. Read the rest

“Our dog Buddy has become blind because of cataracts. My fiancé has made him this bumper harness so that he can confidently walk around the house without hurting himself!” (more…)

The Scorch will change everything

It’s a case of out of the frying pan (the maze) and into the fire (the Scorch) for Dylan O’Brien’s Thomas and the rest of the young heroes in the Maze Runner sequel. The new trailer for The Scorch Trials explains a little more of what they’re up against.

From the looks of this, though, the real answers to why they were sent to the maze and what the living heck is going on with the rest of society will remain tantalisingly just out of reach as, firmly convinced that mysterious organisation W.C.K.D. is up to no good, they decide that the best way to find what they’re looking for is to head into the blasted, ruined world. It’s going to be even tougher for Thomas and companions Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Minho (Ki Hong Lee), but they have to keep going.

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, taken once again from James Dashner’s book series, has Wes Ball back directing and Nathalie Emmanuel, Aidan Gillen, Giancarlo Esposito, Lili Taylor and Patricia Clarkson among the cast. It’ll be out in the UK this September.

Until last week, I used antiperspirant like a klutz. My wallet and undershirts suffered because of my ignorance. Yours need not suffer, too.

For 17 years, I had followed the same steps every day. After my morning shower, I applied two or three clicks of an antiperspirant stick. This sufficed. During my years in New York, sweat never manifested into a swampy, humiliating dilemma. Because I had to walk everywhere, deodorant wasn't good enough, but generic antiperspirant more or less did the trick. On days that reached the mid-90s, dark stains, shaped like the Great Lakes, formed on the T-shirt, just beneath my armpit, which I accepted as part of life.

But in Texas, where the temperature will pass 100 just for giggles, the routine began...

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Clouds darken and gather before they unleash fury onto wind-swept plains in The Chase, a remarkable new film by Mike Olbinski. Prepare for a memorable journey. Read the rest

Also wrong: vertical video.

London Metropolitan Police anti-terror squad had refused to make any comment on whether they were investigating the reporters who broke the Snowden story for two years, but now a court has ordered them to answer -- and they've copped to it. Read the rest

The State of Georgia claims that its statutes are a copyrighted work, and that rogue archivist Carl Malamud and public.resource.org committed an act of piracy by making the laws of Georgia free for all to see and copy. Read the rest

Air fresheners, rosaries, and pro-police car stickers give cops a justifiable reason to pull over a car, ruled the Fifth Circuit US Court of Appeals. The ruling was based on a 2011 Texas case in which a police officer pulled over a car that had those items on display. The officer suspected the occupants were transporting drugs. The officer search the car and didn't find drugs, but he found cash, which he confiscated. The driver was sent to jail. Read the rest

The bottoms of your feet contain blood vessels right below the skin surface. When exposed to cool air, this will lower your body temperature, making you sleepy. So stick a foot (or both) out of the covers and sleep better.

But, as one YouTuber points out, "what if the monster eats my foot away?

Garðar Ólafsson has been "around Iceland the last few months" shooting video. The results are spectacular, even by the high standards of Iceland Vimeo. Bonus points are awarded for not using Sigur Rós as the soundtrack.

The first full trailer for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 has arrived, and here it's all-out war between the Districts and the Capitol. Katniss and the soldiers of District 13 are finally ready to take the fight to President Snow, and there will be blood before the battle ends. Mockingjay Part 2 hits theaters on November 20th.

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