Animated GIFs are something of an internet art form, shared by all. Yet, they are created by a comparatively small slice of the internet. There's no reason you can't join in the fun, though. From beginners to advanced tools, we've got the ultimate guide to making your own silent internet picture films.
    
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Great discussions are par for the course here on Lifehacker. Each day, we highlight a discussion that is particularly helpful or insightful, along with other great discussions and reader questions you may have missed. Check out these discussions and add your own thoughts to make them even more wonderful!
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Saving a lot of money is like trying to run a marathon. If you dwell on how long the race is, you might not even get off the couch. But if, instead, you focus on putting one foot in front of the other and running one mile, and then two miles, and so on, suddenly a marathon doesn't seem quite as intimidating. Try to think about your finances in the same way.
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All you want to do is drill a little hole in your wall to hang a heavy picture or maybe a shelf. But no, you pull your drill out, drywall dust falls all over the floor, and now you've got to go find a broom or a vacuum. Why not save a little effort and catch that dust before it hits the floor?
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Costco is one of the best places to buy quality ingredients in bulk and save money on food. With just one trip and $150, you can pick up enough to make nearly three weeks' worth of dinners (4 servings each)—and have lots of leftovers.
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Scallions, or green onions, add a lovely bite to dishes. Even their greens are super tasty. But the next time you cut them up, hang on to the scraps and you can regrow your own scallions in no time.
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Having a foggy mirror is a price you pay for those nice, hot, steamy showers. But what do you do next? Towel off a streaky, little hole big enough to see through? Stand there with a blow dryer trying to banish the fog? Instead, how about preventing the mirror from fogging in the first place?
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Coffee (or caffeine) is a wonderful tool to combat our natural energy swings during the day. Over time, though, we get less and less of the cognitive benefits of drinking coffee, thanks to caffeine tolerance. One strategy for maximum focus is to switch up your coffee routine and combine it with the restorative powers of a nap.
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With the internet, there's no shortage of free media out there if you can find it. So much, in fact, that if you're ever looking for inspiration, you should be able to find it. Zero Dollar Movies is just another source of free entertainment.
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Most people use LinkedIn to connect with coworkers old and new, meet new people in their field, and search for jobs or networking opportunities. Now, the service can help you find volunteering opportunities too, and match you up with non-profits that need your skills and can offer you valuable experience in return.
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(YouTube)
Local news outlets found something interesting, though: the monkey’s owner and his twin brother were charged last year with the theft of two gibbons in Nebraska. They were caught with the animals in Florida and arrested.
This appears to be a video of Brodi, the white-bellied spider monkey in question, sitting in front of a webcam.
Police discovered that the animal’s owner did not have an exotic animals permit, required to own a spider monkey in Ohio. He did have insurance and the animal had a recent rabies vaccination. Police verified his vaccination status with a Missouri veterinarian.
The monkey was quarantined for 72 hours as a precaution, and the owner has not been charged with doing anything wrong.. The bitten employee drove himself to a local hospital, and had a small puncture wound on his right thumb.
Spider monkey bites Beachwood man at Pat O’Brien Chevrolet [News Herald]
Fresh from the Gatorade vine.
Back when I was growing up on my grandparents’ farm out on the prairie, whenever I was exhausted from a long day of playing professional sports I simply went to the Gatorade well and pulled up a bucketful of natural Gatorade. Nothing like it! Straight from the earth! That’s not true, but there was a “natural” line of Gatorade that PepsiCo has now decided just isn’t working.
Apparently Pepsi had marketed the natural line as a drink that does everything regular Gatorade is supposed to do, but using ingredients like sea salt. You might not have seen Gatorade Naturals on your grocery store’s shelves, however, as it was released in limited distribution at certain Whole Foods and Kroger stores, reports the Associated Press.
Pepsi says in a statement that through “engagement with athletes on their fueling needs, we found that Gatorade Naturals and G2 Naturals did not resonate with this core consumer.”
While consumers have been getting into the whole natural foods thing in recent years, most people probably don’t quite look for natural ingredients in a sports beverage that traditionally comes in colors that light up the neon dreams of acid users.
It’s also not an easy thing to just slap the word “natural” on a product, as Pepsi discovered with its Naked Juice drinks, which a lawsuit said contained a synthetic fiber.
Pepsi wants to make sure you know that the Gatorade Naturals line wasn’t smacked with any lawsuits. It just isn’t popular enough with the cool kids.
PepsiCo discontinues ‘natural’ Gatorade [Associated Press]
The complaint [PDF] filed yesterday in a U.S. District Court in Utah by four snowboarders and a local nonprofit group, alleges that Alta’s no-snowboarding policy is in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that the government shall not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Specifically, they believe that this rule against snowboarding prohibits the “use and enjoyment of the public land on which Alta operates, unlawfully discriminates against snowboarders, and denies snowboarders equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The plaintiffs claim that the ban, which was put into place in the mid-1980s was born out of “animus held by Alta’s ownership, management, and
customers towards the type of people they believed to be ‘snowboarders,’” and that the resort and the USFS continue to enforce this ban “as a consequence of this animus towards snowboarders.”
By enforcing the ban, the lawsuit alleges Alta and USFS are effectively creating two, unequal classes of people — those who ski and those who snowboard. One class is given full access to the Alta slopes while the other is persona non grata.
“Discrimination without any rational basis perpetuates inequality by creating, fostering, and encouraging skier-versus-snowboarder attitudes that are hostile and divisive in a world where skiers and snowboarders, as a general matter, share the mountains, including those on all other public land, in harmony and without issue,” reads the complaint.
The suit asks the court to order Alta to lift then ban and enjoin the resort from putting a similar prohibition in place in the future.
As some have pointed out, one could argue that the snowboarders, as people, are not forbidden from using the slopes at Alta. It’s the act of snowboarding that is forbidden. Could they make the same argument if a skating rink on public land had a “no speed skating” policy? The question is really — at which point does a rule against an activity become discriminatory toward an entire class of people?
We’re not lawyers so we’ll refrain from rendering judgement. But feel free to do so yourself in the following poll:
Snowboarders Sue Alta Ski Area [Outside]
Yesterday many of us were bummed out by hearing that it’s perfectly legal for a repair shop employee to take a customer’s car for a joyride. And if the car gets wrecked in the process, well, there’s not much police can do. Which is why it’s heartening to hear that a man whose $55,000 Camaro was wrecked during a dealership worker’s joyride is getting his car replaced… after the dealership had a good dose of public shaming.
A Delaware car dealership employee took a customer’s rare Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 for a spin last month and sent it straight into a telephone poll, reports the News Journal, and since then the owner says it’s been a helluva time getting it replaced.
John, who’s been collecting Camaros for a long time, wanted the dealership to find him a replacement for his black 2012 version of the car, which is the most powerful four-passenger car Chevrolet makes. Current models start at around $55,000.
But at first the dealership’s managers said they weren’t responsible for the joyride and instead simply blamed the employee. Once John took his tale of woe to the camaro5.com forums, however, the bad publicity stirred up a firestorm for the dealership.
After hundreds of phone calls, a few posts on blogs and an onslaught of comments on Facebook, the dealership has finally found a replacement for John’s Camaro that he can live with. He’s agreed to pay the same payments he had been making on his wrecked car.
“I cried for about 10 minutes, looking at my black car, trashed,” John said of when he got the phone call that his car had been totaled. He’d brought it in for a paint repair under warranty. “It was a very sentimental car. And I know the collectability of these cars.”
State Police charged the employee with with careless driving and failure to have proof of insurance in the Decemver accident, and he was fired from his job the day he was due back at work after the crash. That’s when the dealership started dragging its feet on providing insurance information and didn’t want to help him find a replacement, John said in his forum posts.
Eventually the dealership offered him another 2012 Zl1 they’d found, but John said it was subpar and wouldn’t do. When his posts went viral this month, he says retired General Motors executives called him personally to say that GM would probably step in.
He met with the dealership this week and finally was offered a better replacement, a 2013 model he’s agreed to buy.
“An unfortunate thing that happened to the consumer has turned into an unfortunate situation for the dealer as well,” a sales manager at the dealership said. “We feel we’ve done as best we can.”
In the meantime, John is grateful for some of the dealership’s employees, saying they’ve gone through quite a lot in this whole ordeal. He even brought the receptionist flowers for having to field so many angry phone calls.
“It was really overwhelming,” John explained of the posts’ popularity. “I want to try to get everything back to normal. I don’t want no hard feelings over all this.”
*Thanks for the link, Kenneth!
Wrecked Camaro’s tale goes viral; owner getting replacement ZL1 [The News Journal]
(smcgee)
Remember, money can’t buy you love. Especially, if that love costs you more than half a million dollars. That’s how much a San Jose woman lost when she fell victim to an online dating scam.
The 66-year-old woman sent more than $500,000 to a purported Nigerian scammer she met on ChristianMingle.com, SFGate reports.
The man, who posed as a British citizen stuck at sea on a Scottish oil rig, called, texted and sent flowers to the woman before asking her to loan him money to run a business.
After recently wiring $200,000 to a Turkish bank, the woman realized she had been conned. She immediately contacted Santa Clara County prosecutors, who then contacted the Turkish bank. When an associate of the Nigerian scammer showed up to withdraw the funds, he was arrested by Turkish National Police. The associate, who entered Turkey using a fake passport, is currently being prosecuted for fraud in Turkey.
Online dating scams aren’t new, in fact, we’ve reported on several unfortunate souls searching for love in the wrong place and losing out on thousands of dollars. In 2012, the FBI estimated more 5,600 people lost more than $50 million in online dating scams.
San Jose woman loses $500,000 in online dating scam [SFGate.com]
If you’ve visited the cookie aisle recently, you might have noticed the proliferation of both year-round and seasonal Oreo flavors. We always thought that “Oreo” was the best Oreo flavor, but we must be less sophisticated than the rest of the American public. What’s Nabisco’s new addition? Lemon.
(The Impulsive Buy)
As with most novelty food items, we learned about these cookies from The Impulsive Buy, a blog that covers the crucial snack beat. The site actually reviewed a similar limited edition Oreo, the “lemon twist” cookie, last year. It’s not clear whether this is pretty much the same thing or a different formulation: you can twist all Oreos, can’t you?
SPOTTED ON SHELVES – Nabisco Lemon Oreo [The Impulsive Buy]
REVIEW: Nabisco Limited Edition Lemon Twist Oreo [The Impulsive Buy]
According to recent analysis done by the Wall Street Journal, of the 10 U.S. banks with the highest fees (as a percentage of deposits), four have branches located on the grounds of military bases, while three others have head offices near military bases and are owned by the same company that operates at least one of the on-base banking operations.
There is Armed Forces Bank N.A., which has branches on 35 military bases, the most of any single bank.
The Fort Leavenworth, KS, based Armed Forces Bank averages fees of $234 per account, more than four times the $56 weighted average for all the 7,000 banks included in the Journal’s analysis. Meanwhile, fees were 5.6% of the funds on deposit at the bank, compared with the industry average of only 0.4%.
By comparison, Bank of America has the second-largest number of on-base branches with 12. However, BofA’s fees were only 0.5% of deposits and fees per account averaged $82.
Armed Forces Bank N.A.’s parent company is Dickinson Financial Corp., which owns six of the 10 banks with the highest percentage of fees, including another on-base bank, Armed Forces Bank of California, where the average fees per account is $320 and fees are 10.3% of deposits.
Another on-base bank with huge fees is Fort Hood National Bank, where fees make up 6.8% of funds on deposit and average $328 per account.
And that’s not even the highest among banks with on-base locations. Oklahoma-based Fort Sill National Bank has the second-highest level of fees of all the banks in the analysis (18% of funds on deposit) and by far the highest per-account average — $620, more than 11 times the national average.
Fort Sill does have relatively low per-transaction overdraft fees ($19.50), but it does allow up to seven overdraft fees per customer a day.
The Military Lending Act sets caps on short-term loans made to servicemembers, effectively outlawing payday lenders from issuing loans to members of the armed forces (though some lenders are doing their best to get around these rules). But some cash-strapped servicemembers are turning to overdraft lines of credit at their banks as a way to continue making purchases when they don’t have the necessary funds.
However, these fees can snowball — with banks charging overdraft fees not just when customers dip into that line of credit, but for each transaction, regardless of dollar amount. So if someone buys three $3 lunches while waiting for his next paycheck, each $3 transaction can come with a fee of around $35 or more.
“They could never catch up. It was awful,” says a former employee of Fort Hood National who watched firsthand as young inexperienced servicemembers were repeatedly hit with fees they didn’t understand. “These guys are 18 years old and they never really managed money. The bank knows that.”
For example, there’s the Marine Corporal who needed $500 cash for a family emergency. His understanding of his overdraft policy was that it was $20. What he didn’t know was that it was $20 per transaction. Since his account limits ATM withdrawals to $200, he needed to make three separate withdrawals. Thus, his $500 cost him $60.
The nonprofit Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society says it counsels several soldiers every day on overdraft issues. “It’s the biggest wolf outside the door,” says the retired admiral who runs the Society.
The Army points to a 2011 study that found on-base banks actually have lower fees than other banks, which may be true when you factor in every single small regional bank that operates on a base in this country. But what about these ones that are charging the highest fees in the nation?
A rep for the Army tells the Journal that these banks may have higher fee structures because, unlike the Bank of Americas of the world, these institutions are not able to make up that money elsewhere via mortgages or commercial loans.
The Center for Responsible Lending and others have asked lawmakers and regulators to require that overdrafts be held to the same 36% interest rate cap set on loans by the Military Lending Act. A rep for the Defense Department tells the Journal that a “revised rule regarding credit protections” is forthcoming.
One of the biggest names in military banking, USAA, doesn’t have on-base branches. It also doesn’t allow debit card overdrafts and caps overdraft fees at $50 per day (a maximum of two $25 fees). USAA’s fees below the national average (0.3% of deposits and a per-account average of $19).
If you were to pick up the phone in a hotel room and dial 9-1-1, what would you get? You probably wouldn’t be in the state of mind to dial 9 first, but that shouldn’t stop you from getting in contact with emergency services as fast as possible, which is why one member of the Federal Communications Commission is looking into how it works at different hotel chains across the country.
The move by FCC member Ajit Pai to send letters to 10 hotel chains in the United States asking whether guests dialing 9-1-1 are immediately connected to an emergency call center or an employee started after a 9-year-old tried to call for help when her mother was stabbed to death, the Associated Press reports.
The girl, her mom and two siblings were at a Baymont Inn in December when officials say the father dragged the woman into a bathroom and killed her. The daughter tried to call 9-1-1 three times, but because she didn’t press 9 first, she got no response.
The girl’s grandfather has since initiated the push to find out where else this could possibly happen. Pai calls the family’s situation “horrific,” adding that he wants to dig around and see how deep the problem goes before recommending an action to the FCC.
“If it’s a ’90 percent’ problem as opposed to a ’5 percent,’ obviously the contours of the problem will look very different and the nature of the solution will look very different,” Pai says.
It might seem like a no-brainer to have 9-1-1 always work — after all, even if you’re locked out of your smartphone you can still dial emergency services — but the problem seems to be far from solved. The grandfather noted that this week he was staying in a hotel in Waco and saw evidence that things need to change.
“There was a big card on the phone giving you instructions on how to do everything else, except dial 911,” he said of the hotel room’s phone. “It was disheartening.”
When he asked front desk workers how to call 9-1-1 from his room, they told him he had to dial 9 first.
FCC member studies Texas 911 dialing case [Associated Press]
While “Plastic Surgery for Barbie” might have been taken down, its clone “Girl Makeover” is still available on Google Play.
Judging by screenshots (because as much as I love the search for the truth, there’s not a chance in heck I’m downloading any of these apps), all the apps appear to be the same, even though they use different names.
The version getting the most publicity was labeled Plastic Surgery for Barbie, which had apparently been listed as suitable for children aged 9 and over. Players perform all manner of fun plastic surgery procedures on the initially overweight animated character until she’s been sliced, diced, molded and vacuumed into a different woman.
“This unfortunate girl has so much extra weight that no diet can help her,” read the description of the game. “In our clinic she can go through a surgery called liposuction that will make her slim and beautiful.”
The Plastic Surgery for Barbie game was pulled earlier this week from the Apple store, with toy-maker Mattel issuing a statement that the app had nothing to do with its line of Barbie products, which merely imply that women should have unrealistic figures but doesn’t outright demonstrate how to achieve them via surgery.
Other versions of the “game,” titled Plastic Surgery for Barbara or just Plastic Surgery, have shown up and subsequently been removed by Apple and Google. One app that is either a clone or is just the same app using yet another title is still available on Google Play under the name “Girl Makeover.” This one has actually been up since Christmas day and contains the presumably Google Translated description:
Very classic plastic game! Lara is a very cute and sweet girl，she likes to eat a lot of burgers and chocolates and once she found out that she looks ugly. She can’t make it up with this situation any additional second. And today plastic surgeon is going to make operation on her body and face in order to return cute look. She is afraid of all of this, but I know you will check that everything is over normally.
While this particular version of the app is listed as for mature users, the same developer has made apps like “Ugly Girl Makeover,” which involves prying the braces off a young woman’s teeth, which Google lists as appropriate for “Everyone.”
Plastic surgery game for kids removed from iOS, Android stores [Joystiq]
Plastic surgery app game aimed at children taken down [BBC]
Apple and Google pulls cosmetic surgery game aimed at children [Polygon]
Washington Post |
Fairfax County adopt a pet Washington Post 3Tigger, left, a neutered cat, is available from the Fairfax County Animal Shelter. Fenton, a male cat, is available from the Humane Society of Fairfax County. Stewart, a neutered 5½-month-old Doberman pinscher, is available at the Fairfax City Animal ... |
