D G

These jeans were made for walking….

See Your Folks is a new website that’s gotten the attention of a lot of people. It’s not a new social network or some photo-sharing site. Rather, it’s a calculator of sorts that lets you know how many times you’re going to see your parents before they die.

It sounds morbid, but that wasn’t the intention of the site creators.

Co-create Luke Tipping explains: “We believe that increasing awareness of death can help us to make the most of our lives. The right kind of reminders can help us to focus on what matters, and perhaps make us better people.”

That definitely makes sense. It’s kind of like an extension to World Parent’s Day, only it’s not just a day because it essentially encourages everyone to go see their parents more.

Head on over to See Your Folks to see how high (or low) your number is… and do something about it while you still can.

[via C|NET]

A California Obamacare call center won’t be offering health insurance to about half of its staff who suddenly found out they were part time and ineligible for benefits.

A local politician called the development about no health benefits for those misled workers who are now training for the jobs a “comedy of errors.”

About 7,000 persons applied for the 204 positions at the call center in Concord, Calif., which is being set up to answer consumer questions about accessing benefits via the Affordable Care Act.

The call center allegedly ran a bait and switch because the jobs were originally advertised as full time according to the Contra Costa Times.

According to one of the call center workers, “What’s really ironic is working for a call center and trying to help people get health care, but we can’t afford it ourselves… It reminded me of that George Clooney movie where he goes around the country firing people (‘Up in the Air’). [A supervisor] said, ‘I know you were led to believe you would be full time, but things have changed…. You are actually ‘part-time intermittent.’ ”

Noting the hiring process was a comedy of errors, Contra Costa County Supervisor Karen Mitchoff added that “The battle for the call center was over jobs with good working wages and benefits; I never dreamed they would be part-time.” She has conveyed her “extreme displeasure” to call center supervisors after hearing from outraged constituents.

As it stands now, the part-time workers will have to pay for their own health insurance, but it will be so expensive that for many it will be out of reach. The call center is supposed to be up and running as of October 1 when the healthcare exchanges take effect. In many states, the healthcare exchanges don’t exist or are way behind schedule. These delays prompted US Senator Max Baucus in April to describe the Obamacare implementation as a huge train wreck.

About two weeks ago, California’s insurance commissioner suggested that the Obamacare implementation in his state was shaping up to be a real disaster in terms of identity theft and fraud potentially committed by enrollment counselors.

In early July, the Obama administration announced it was postponing the employer (but not the individual) mandate by one year. Forbes claims there a two big problems with the employer mandate delay: “First, the delay implies that Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores of government health spending will become even less realistic than they currently are. Second, employers who take advantage of the delay will be on very shaky legal grounds.”

Do you find it ironic that a group of Obamacare employees don’t qualify for Obamacare?

Obamacare Call Center Employees Denied Healthcare Insurance is a post from: The Inquisitr

Customer: “I want to return this phone; it won’t turn on.”

(I turn on the phone, and it works perfectly.)

Me: “Hmm, seems to be turning on just fine.”

Customer: “I’ve been doing that all yesterday, and it didn’t work! You must have magic hands or something.”

Me: “That’s the only explanation I can think of. I should use my powers for good and go out and use my magic touch to heal things like leprosy.”

Lady: *in all seriousness* “Oh no, I don’t have that.”

odditiesoflife:

The Abandoned Sanzhi UFO Houses

These colorful flying saucer-style buildings, located in the Sanzhi district of New Taipei City in Taiwan, were built in 1978 but were forsaken before anyone ever stayed in them. They were originally targeted towards U.S. military officers stationed in East Asia who were on leave, but investment losses and deaths due to accidents during construction caused the project to be abandoned in 1980. The misfortune of the UFO houses is said to have been caused by the unfortunate act of bisecting the Chinese dragon sculpture located near the resort gates for widening the road to the buildings, cursing the project.

For almost thirty years, these strange pod-like structures were left to crack, crumble and decay due to acts of nature and vandalism. Smashed, broken buildings and debris were all that remained of Pod City. It’s sad that such unique architecture and design was never enjoyed by any residents. Unfortunately, this favorite of urban explorers and travelers no longer exists.

The UFO houses were demolished in 2008. A petition to try and save at least one of the buildings failed. Apparently a new beach resort and water park are being developed in its place.  Looking just like pop culture depictions of alien space pods, they were at least around long enough to serve as a minor tourist attraction and a ghost town for urban explorers. They provided a glimpse of a retro future that morphed into ruins from the future

source 1 , 2

After dabbling with the Raspberry Pi we were naturally interested when an even smaller BitTorrent-capable device was offered for review.

The CuBox (pronounced ‘queue box’) arrived in a small and basic cardboard box – no expensive (needless?) Apple-style retail packaging here. Inside were some basic instructions and just two other items – a power adapter and the CuBox itself.

The CuBox (CuBox Miniature Computer) is very small indeed. Living up to its name, it’s a cube measuring 2x2x2 inches (5x5x5cms) weighing in around 90g. The image below shows the CuBox next to a Raspberry Pi for comparison.

So what’s inside this black cube? According to creators Solid Run, the CuBox is an 800mhz Arm-based computer with 1GB DDR3, an OpenGL graphic engine and a 1080p video decoder engine (full specs here, comparison with other small computers here).

Its interfaces with the outside world include a gigabit ethernet port, HDMI for video out, a couple of USB2.0 ports and a Micro SD slot (with 4GB card included). In the main the connections are all on one side of the box, as illustrated in the picture below.

The eagle-eyed will notice that the CuBox has some additional connections the Raspberry Pi does not such as eSATA-II (for an external hard drive) and SPDIF. It also has an infra-red receiver for managing the device via remote control.

To get the best out of the device you’re also going to need a USB memory stick, USB mouse/keyboard, ethernet lead and an HDMI lead and TV/monitor.

The CuBox usually comes with Ubuntu pre-installed but there is an installer and an accompanying video in case any other distros or software packages are required instead. It’s not ridiculously simple to set up but it’s not rocket science either so if you can follow some fairly straightforward instructions you’ll be quickly up and running.

For our tests we took a look at GeeXbox, an open source Linux distro thats pack several multimedia applications into one place to make a neat home theater experience. The user interface is based on XBMC so that’s where we jumped in.

We’ve covered some of the things XBMC can do in the past, so this time we’ll look at what CuBox can do on the BitTorrent front.

Once the device is connected to your network and assigned an IP address, CuBox is accessible from other devices such as your desktop computer or smartphone. Since GeeXBox already contains ruTorrent, a web frontend for the rTorrent client, we can access a full-featured torrent client by entering the CuBox’s IP address (192.168.2.XXX in my case) followed by /rutorrent.

At this point it’s wise to flick through ruTorrent’s settings (settings > connection) to assign your preferred port and upload/download limits etc. You’ll then need to go to the ‘download’ tab to tell ruTorrent where to save your downloads. A full instructional video is available here.

All that remains is to browse to any torrent site (not The Pirate Bay since they only have magnets) and download a torrent to your desktop machine. Simply dragging and dropping that torrent to the web browser window displaying ruTorrent will initiate the transfers in the CuBox. For the security conscious, traffic can be routed through a VPN.

At this point any TV attached to the CuBox can be safely turned off until the downloads complete. What’s also neat for the environmentally aware is that CuBox operates on just three watts of power, even less than required by a Raspberry PI and a fraction of that consumed by a light bulb.

Of course, once downloads are complete the TV can be turned back on and XBMC can be used to enjoy the recently obtained media, whether that’s video or audio. SPDIF connector aside the CuBox lacks a dedicated audio out jack though, so the sound quality will be limited to that offered by your TV.

There were a few little niggles when setting CuBox up but nothing that couldn’t be solved after a breath of fresh air and the dumping of a faulty USB memory stick. At times the CuBox was also running close to its full usable memory so the Pro version with twice the RAM might be an option for power users. That said, video playback was always smooth, even if (just like the Raspberry Pi running XBMC) mouse response was sometimes a little laggy.

There are plenty of other possible uses for the CuBox including Android TV and NAS – the wiki lists some of them in greater detail.

CuBox from Solid-Run – $119.99, CuBox Pro $159.99

Source: CuBox:The World’s Smallest Desktop Computer Running BitTorrent