pileofcrapola

Android: We love our widgets, but so far Google has yet to provide one for its messaging centerpiece app: Hangouts. Fortunately, a third-party app is on the case.

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There is a wide range of financial information available to us at any time if we are committed to doing a little research. We can learn how to budget, invest, save– everything we need to know in order to be financially stable. So with all that available information, why are so many of us living financially stressful lives centered around overspending and under-planning?

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Chrome: Previously mentioned low-cost calling service Keku has a new Chrome App that gives you the powe to assign "local" numbers to your international friends and call them one-on-one or in a group super cheap, right from your browser.

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Netflix is now offering new customers a cheaper streaming plan for $6.99, which lacks support for HD. The cheaper plan also only allows one device to stream at a time, while the standard $7.99 plan supports two simultaneous streams (and, of course, HD). Read more on The Verge.

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Say hi to Dick Talens, co-founder of Fitocracy and a nutritional/fitness coach who specializes in helping people achieve their fitness goals. Earlier this year, Dick lent his expertise on failed resolutions, and today, he's here to make sure you don't fail in the first place if your willpower doesn't work! Have questions on making (and keeping) your health and fitness goals in 2014? Ask away—Dick is here for the next hour.

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There are valid reasons to abstain from using social media. Perhaps you're concerned about privacy or maybe just feel it's not a good use of your time. Still, some level of participation is expected in many professional circles. If you've got advice to share, jump in and help out a fellow reader.

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New Year’s is a great opportunity to reflect on how far we’ve come and where we hope to go next. The trouble is, most of us then proceed to set entirely unrealistic resolutions that we ultimately fail. Here are the most common failed resolutions, and how to approach them instead.

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Smartphone cameras keep getting better and better, but they can do more than just take beautiful photos. They can turn your smartphone into a translator, product price matcher, a scanner, and more. You just need to know how to use it.

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If a cup of hot chocolate sounds good to you, this video from America's Test Kitchen shows you how to make your own "instant" hot chocolate from real chocolate that you can heat up any time you want a cup. Best of all, you can make it using whatever chocolate you prefer, and flavor to your tastes.

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We've talked about the best ways to unclog a drain before, but these handy toilet-clearing tablets are helpful to have on-hand in case yours stops flushing the way it should. Plus, they're really easy to make.

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Home screen shortcuts on Android are as awesome as they are underrated. Rather than scrolling through giant lists or digging through apps, you can find the exact info you need directly from the home screen. Here are some of the best shortcuts.

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2013 ends in a few hours, and in the year since we last popped champagne corks and pretended to know the words to “Auld Lang Syne,” we’ve posted more than 5,000 stories to Consumerist, covering everything from Wall Street to Capitol Hill to the drive-thru lane. Some of these posts attracted a few more readers than others.

Here are the 10 posts that received the most interest from Consumerist readers:

1. EA Makes Worst Company In America History, Wins Title For Second Year In A Row!
In which the video game publisher again beats out Bank of America to win the Golden Poo.

2. Waitress Who Posted No-Tip Receipt From “Pastor” Customer Fired From Job and Diner Thinks That Saying He’s A Pastor Allows Him To Stiff Waiter On Tip
In which a waitress posts a rude receipt note online, then loses her job even though she never revealed the customer’s name… and tells Consumerist all about it afterward.

3. Using The EECB Gets Me A SimCity Refund, But What About Everyone Else?
In which customers go up the ladder to get a worthwhile response from EA following the badly botched release of its long-awaited Sim City update.

4. Time Warner Boosts My Speed, Cuts My Bill: I Just Happen To Live Near Google Fiber
In which Time Warner Cable’s actions quietly demonstrate the urgent need for pricing competition in the consumer broadband market.

5. Waiter Praised For Refusing To Serve Family Who Insults Child With Down Syndrome
In which a Houston-area waiter puts his job at risk by standing up to customers who made rude comments about a young customer in the next booth.

6. Here’s A Photo That May Change Your Mind About Having Taco Bell For Lunch Today
In which an idiot California teen earns his way to the unemployment line by having himself photographed licking a stack of taco shells.

7. Geek Squad Accused Of Stealing, Distributing Customer’s Naked Photos. Yes, Again
In which Best Buy shows that its employees could use a refresher course on the whole “don’t snoop on customers’ devices” thing.

8. EA Admits It “Can Do Better” But Blames Worst Company Success On Homophobes And Whiny Madden Fans
In which the Worst Company In America winner places the blame for its bad reputation on hate groups and people who didn’t like Peyton Hillis on the cover of Madden NFL 12.

9. Straight Talk’s Unlimited Data: Actually Sort Of Limited
In which everyone learns that prepaid wireless service is just as anti-consumer as post-paid.

10. How Not To React To Internet Criticism: The Epic Facebook Meltdown Of Amy’s Baking Company
In which Gordon Ramsay thanks his lucky stars his producers convinced him to visit a small Arizona eatery owned by two of the most high-strung people to ever grace the TV.

Later today, we’ll be posting our editors’ picks for those stories near and dear to our hearts that didn’t make the top 10 for the year.

Still stinging from yet another legal defeat against a small New Hampshire coffee company over the “Charbucks” brand, the Starbucks legal team appears to be going after lower-hanging fruit, sending a cease-and-desist letter to a small Missouri brewpub that dared to sell something called Frappicino beer.

The owner of Exit 6 Pub and Brewery in Cottleville, MO, posted the legal letter on his company’s Facebook page last week.

“As you probably know, Starbucks Coffee Co. is the owner of a number of world-famous trademarks, including the well-known FRAPPUCINO trademark,” reads the letter, which then takes issue with Exit 6′s Frappicino, which the letter notes “only differs from Starbucks Coffee Co.’s FRAPPUCINO mark by one letter, and is phonetically identical.”

Starbucks feels that the use of the similar sounding names “is likely to cause confusion, mistake, or deception among consumers” and requests that Exit 6 stop using the term “Frappicino” and have the beer de-listed from the Untappd website on which Starbucks located the beverage.

We have no idea if Exit 6 makes good beer or food, but the reply to the cease-and-desist order was worth a laugh.

In a tongue-in-cheek attempt to avoid further confusion, the response from the owner opts to refer to “Frappuccino” as “The F Word,” and his tone matches the haughty legalese that is always packed into c&d notices.

“As you probably don’t know, Exit 6 is the proud owner of no trademarks,” reads the response, “including our own name much less than the name ‘F Word’ and nothing about Exit 6 is incontestable.”

Whereas the original Starbucks letter establishes the company’s bona fides by needlessly stating that Starbucks had sold millions of cups of coffee in the U.S. and abroad, the brewpub’s response notes that “Exit 6 has proudly sold at least 38 drinks in Cottleville, MO.”

The response also points out that, while there was that one-letter difference between the Starbucks trademark and the Exit 6 beer, the brewpub owners has actually planned on copying the name.

“Luck for us, we’re poor spelers,” reads the response.

However, in spite of the plan to use the Frappucino name, the owners say they never had any intention of confusing consumers.

“We never thought that our beer drinking customers would have thought that the alcoholic beverage coming out of the tap would have actually been coffee from one of the many, many, many stores located a few blocks away,” explains the letter. “I guess with there being a Starbucks on every corner of every block in every city that some people may think they could get a Starbucks at a local bar. So that was our mistake.”

The brewpub has also pledged to stop selling its “Starbuck-McDonalds-Coca Cola-Marlboro Honey Lager.”

In order to atone for its sins, Exit 6 chose to send Starbucks a check for $6, thus covering all of the profits it received from the three Frappicino beers customers mentioned buying on Untappd. The owners hope it can go toward Starbucks’ legal fees, as it certainly cost the coffee colossus more than that just to have its lawyer send the form letter.

“We just want to help a business like Starbucks,” concludes the response. “Us small businesses need to stick together.”

Local brewpub’s sarcastic response to Starbucks letter [KSDK.com via Eater.com]

- Looking around a Mexico dotted by Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Krispy Kreme outlets, it's hard to remember the country before the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has dramatically expanded consumer choice and trade since it took effect 20 years ago Jan. 1.

- A California girl declared brain dead after tonsil surgery will remain on life support for at least another week after a state judge on Monday extended a deadline.

The girl had fallen into a well along Ivey Road in Whitesburg, Ga.

A woman held the boyfriend of one her daughters against his will, slicing his penis with a box cutter.

The Hickman family of Philadelphia, Tenn. lost their house from an October fire, destroying nearly everything they had.

 A father has been arrested and charged for child neglect in Virginia, police said.

Need to paint the walls when moving out of an apartment? According to US News, you don't have to pay. Just head to your local recycling center.

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We’ve talked in the past about Walmart’s staffing and inventory issues, where some stores have empty shelves but full back rooms because there just aren’t enough employees around to deal with all the shelving. But a new video from an investment advisor firm claims to demonstrate that the nation’s largest retailer has so much leftover inventory from this holiday shopping season that it’s overflowing into the store.

The Vine video below was taken by the folks at Belus Capital Investors. According to the firm, this space with packed with loaded pallets is not the store room for a Walmart, but is actually the outdoor center of a store.

“[T]he company has stuffed its designated stockrooms too much with slow-moving inventory, for example large screen TVs, that a bit of creativity had to be tapped to store more truckloads of merchandise,” writes Belus. “Put all of this together and you get one read: higher than appreciated by the Street forward margin risk.”

This second video claims to show aisles still fully stocked with Christmas decorations days after the holiday:

Belus’ Brian Sozzi tells Mashable.com that Walmart likely purchased too much in the way of decorations and wrapping paper because the retailer is out of touch with its core, bargain-hunting customer.

“The Walmart mom is trying to figure out how to use the stuff from last year instead of buying new wrapping paper,” explains Sozzi.

In a bit of a silver lining for Walmart, Forbes predicts that the recent massive credit/debit card data breach at Target will result in Walmart, Costco and other competitors picking up shoppers who are either worried about visiting Target again or upset with the store for failing to keep their info secure.

When you think of peanut butter cups, you’re probably picturing a Reese’s version of the candy because really, the brand has got quite a lock on the candy in our collective consciousness. But lo, behold! A challenger is nigh and its name is Butterfinger.

While I’ve always thought that someone should start shilling The Princess Bride-branded Buttercup’s Buttercups, usually the only alternatives to Reese’s are smaller off-brand versions. But Nestle’s Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups are on the horizon, slated for a January 2014 arrival, reports the aptly named CandyBlog.net.

As for the candy itself, it looks a heck of a lot like Reese’s. Because when there’s only one big name competitor, why stray from the familiar? Butterfinger’s version is shaped a bit different, with “an angle towards the top which means that the ratio of chocolate to filling changes at the perimeter versus the center.”

Ah, the knowledge of a candy blogger. Not a bad gig, if you can get it. Or you can just eat lots of candy and never write a word about it, but know in your heart you are a connoisseur.

“There are a lot of similarities between the Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It’s probably not a coincidence,” she explains.

For the whole review check out the source link, or wait to have your own peanut butter cup-off.

Nestle Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups [CandyBlog.net]

The Affordable Care Act doesn’t just mean highly entertaining conversations over dessert amongst your relatives this holiday season. There’s one new requirement that’s been sort of overshadowed by health insurance exchanges and electronic medical records: companies that own more than 20 vending machines will have to post calorie counts for the items they sell.

Wait…don’t individually wrapped snack foods already have calorie counts? Sure, but those are on the back or side of the package, under glass. The new counts would have to be visible before you choose an item, helping consumers to make more sensible and less calorific choices. In theory.

The new requirements mean that about 5 million vending machines nationwide will display calorie information. That’s at a total cost to the industry of $25.8 million to set up machines, and $24 million per year to maintain and update the calorie counts.

The owner of one snack machine company interviewed by the Associated Press said that the new requirements would mean offering less variety in items as her five employees maintain the inventory and the nutrition information in hundreds of machines.

Still, if only a small percentage of snackers every day looked at those numbers and picked an item with 100 fewer calories, it could mean millions in savings for the country’s health care system. Not that this is all that comforting to the owners of vending machine companies, who complain that they have to make a large investment with nothing in it for their industry.

The Food and Drug Administration will draw up guidelines for the calorie-count program early in 2014, and they’ll roll out to machines after that.

Restaurants with more than 20 locations will have the same requirements, but many of them have a head start in posting calorie counts, spreading them nationwide after some municipalities started requiring them. Some soft drink companies already have a head start on posting stats on their vending machines, too.

HEALTH LAW TO PUT CALORIE INFO ON VENDING MACHINES [AP]

RELATED:
Healthy Offerings Or No, Study Says Teens Will Pile On The Fast Food Calories Anyway

Acetaminophen, best known under the brand name Tylenol, is an incredibly common medication for children.  While it’s safe at the recommended dose, it can be fatally harmful when taken in excess and the overdose threshold is surprisingly low.

One way to prevent harmful overdoses of liquid medicines is to install a device called a flow restrictor into the top of the bottle.  Not all flow restrictors work the same way, however.  There are two types on the market.  One is more effective; the other is the type overwhelmingly prevalent on store shelves.  Why is the more effective valve not also the one in use more often?  If you guessed “money,” congratulations: you understand exactly how business works.

Over the past year, ProPublica has been publishing a lengthy, detailed series of investigations into acetaminophen overdoses and related deaths.  There has been a particular problem with fatal overdoses in infants and young children.  Though many overdoses were due to unclear product labeling, 20% of the “adverse medical reactions” tracked were due to kids getting into bottles they shouldn’t have.

Flow restrictors can help this kind of overdose by making it much harder for a determined toddler to suck down a bottle of tempting-looking fruit-flavored medicine.  In a collaboration with ProPublica, Consumer Reports (Consumerist’s parent company) tested the two different kinds of flow restrictors to see which are more effective, and therefore more safe.

The flow restrictors come in the “open” and “closed” types.  Open flow restrictors are basically a disc of plastic with a hole in the middle across the top of a medicine bottle.  The open restrictor works with a syringe but doesn’t include any type of inner layer; the syringe just goes in the hole.  If a child picked up the bottle, he or she could still drink or suck out the medicine within.

The closed restrictor type, on the other hand, includes an inner seal.  A syringe, when inserted, opens the seal and can reach the liquid medicine inside, but if you were to turn the bottle over or try to drink directly from it, the seal would hold shut and block the liquid flow.

Consumer Reports tested all the children’s acetaminophen bottles they could find.  Five varieties came with closed restrictors; 26, including brand-name Tylenol, came with the open type.  The open restrictors did prevent simply pouring out the bottle contents.  The closed type, however, proved much more effective and “greatly reduced or completely eliminated the amount of liquid that a young child could squeeze, shake, or suck out of a bottle. “

As ProPublica reports, a major reason so many brands use the open type of restrictor is explicitly because McNeil, manufacturer of Tylenol, does.  In short, as goes the brand name, so go the generics.  A Walgreens spokesman said that the store and its suppliers “strive to offer products that are comparable to national brands,” and added, “In this case, the national brand uses the earlier generation of flow-restrictor.”

The installation of flow restrictors has been a voluntary move by drug companies; there is no FDA regulation requiring or regulating their use.  And although drug manufacturing companies have been placing them on acetaminophen since 2011, they remain absent from many other medications, including the many that contain acetaminophen.

ProPublica reports that the basic flow restrictors cost 2 to 3 cents per bottle to install, and that “more advanced” models cost 8 to 10 cents per bottle to install.  Companies not only have to pay for the parts, however, but also have to make changes to their manufacturing lines.  One manufacturer reported that it cost over $1 million to make the production change, and that making the use of closed restrictors more widespread will be “costly and time-consuming.”

The current restrictors are a good first step, as Consumer Reports noted in their test.  Switching to closed restrictors, however, would be a better move.  As Doris Peter, associate director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, said: “While we applaud manufacturers for voluntarily placing these restrictors in liquid acetaminophen products, we think the more effective valve should be adopted industry-wide.  And, that these more effective flow restrictors should be used on all liquid medications for adults and children, including cough and cold medications.”

While parents should of course keep a close eye on their kids and store all medicines out of sight in hard to reach places, it’s almost impossible to overestimate how determined a young child can be to get into something–and how little a sense of self-preservation they tend to have.  Switching to a different type of valve on medicine bottles seems like a great move if it can save some kids’ lives.

How safe is your baby’s medicine bottle? [Consumer Reports]
The Fix Isn’t In: Why a Safety Device That Can Stop Overdoses by Kids Isn’t Widely Used [ProPublica]

This isn’t the earliest that we’ve ever seen it on the shelves, but we want to let our loyal readers know that Easter Candy is now available at selected grocery stores nationwide. How do we know this? Our loyal readers have spotted the displays and reported back.

Yes, the candy canes and Reese’s peanut butter Christmas trees have barely even gone on clearance sale, but here come the chocolate eggs.

Dessa spotted this Cadbury at QFC, a Kroger-owned chain. Our favorite part by far is the bottom sign, printed on Christmas-themed paper and promoting the eggs as great stocking stuffers. Which they are, we suppose. A few years ago, King Soopers, another arm of Kroger, said that their customers wanted Easter candy in their Christmas stockings.)

Sara took this rather blurry picture at a Stop & Shop in Connecticut:

Finally, Eric found this display at Kroger. Of course it was Kroger.

“Forget valentine’s candy, easter is here already!” he wrote.

Happy holidays! Every holiday. All at once.

Because we all want sweet things but don’t want to accept that eating too many sweet things can make us fat, the world’s largest producer of stevia says it has gotten the go-ahead from the Food and Drug Administration to start using a new version of the sweetener that it developed with the folks at Coca-Cola.

According to stevia-makers PureCircle, the FDA has issued a “No Objection” letter regarding the use of Rebaudioside M (Reb M) as a general purpose sweetener for foods and beverages in the United States.

The company claims that high-purity Reb M (also known as Reb X) “has a closer taste to table sugar than previous stevia ingredients, allowing for deeper calorie reductions in food and beverage products, particularly those that have higher levels of sweetness.”

The development and release of this new sweetener resulted from a 5-year partnership agreement between PureCircle and Coca-Cola. The beverage biggie has already released a stevia-sweetened version of its cola in other parts of the world, starting with Argentina earlier this year.

Coca-Cola had previously worked with agri-giant Cargill to develop stevia-based Truvia, which has been used in several of the beverage company’s juice and flavored-water products. PepsiCo has its own brand of stevia sweetener, PureVia, which is used in its mid-calorie juices and other drinks. Pepsi has also released stevia-sweetened cola outside of the U.S., even though PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi has publicly stated that stevia “does not work well in colas.”

A low/no-calorie sweetener that actually tastes like sugar (and does not make an alien head sprout from your shoulder) is the holy grail of the cola industry, but attempts at using everything from saccharine to aspartame to sucralose have failed to win over cola drinkers who can tell the real stuff from the pretenders.

And of course, we can’t mention stevia without thinking of Breaking Bad and (SPOILER ALERT for something that you should have watched months ago), poor Lydia Rodarte-Quayle:

As we learned when Spaghetti-Os sent a tweet commemorating the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor with a flag-waving noodle, some people take offense to the commercialization of tragedies that maybe their grandparents might remember. How soon is too soon to commercialize a tragedy? Does that extend to the tragedies of our great-grandparents’ time, too?

Worldwide fascination with the sinking of the Titanic has kept that particular tragedy fresh in everyone’s minds. That makes it particularly ripe for commercialization, but maybe also inappropriate.

That’s what a Consumerist reader named Laura who is not me thinks. She noticed this novelty tea infuser at Meijer, and found it inappropriate enough that she snapped a picture and sent it to us.

How unsinkable is it? Would playing with this infuser only be inappropriate if you smash sugar cubes into it?

“Wonder if Meijer will sell collapsible World Trade Center tea infusers in a hundred years or so?” Laura writes. “Yeesh!” No, it would need to be some other kind of food or beverage that collapses, but we see her point.

This is hardly the first whimsical piece of Titanic memorabilia, though. It might be the first sold at Meijer, but people have been cashing in on the wreck since it had barely reached the ocean floor.

Even modern, irreverent merch is hardly anything new. Titanic soap seems particularly inappropriate, especially when it comes with its own soap icebergs. Yet here it is.

Yes, Titanic merchandise is an entire industry. Does that mean that it belongs on the kitchen supplies shelf at Meijer?

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The people of New Jersey represent just about every racial and ethnic group you could imagine, so not everyone is going to fit into the standard mold of first name/middle initial/last name. And even though state authorities are well aware of this fact, they would rather have drivers legally change their names than update the state’s outdated license database.

Consumerist’s Karin Price Mueller — herself a New Jersey resident and the proud owner of a non-standard name — has been writing about this problem for years in the Newark Star Ledger’s Bamboozled column.

When she first wrote about it in 2009, the NJ Motor Vehicle Commission’s suggestion for a man whose last name is Dello Russo — which the state’s computer spits out as D. Russo — was to have him spend $1,000 to legally have his last name changed so that it was one word. The MVC couldn’t even offer him the option of hyphenating the name. Ultimately, it agreed to squash the two halves of his last name into one, but now his license doesn’t exactly match his other forms of identification.

You would think that in nearly five years, the state might have improved something, but you’d be wrong. Just ask the woman who recently moved from Pennsylvania to New Jersey only to find that her first name, Hao Ling, had been changed to “Hao L.” because in spite of all the Mary Ann’s and Ann Marie’s in New Jersey, the MVC’s computers still haven’t figured out that some people have two parts to their first names.

When the MVC clerk explained that the computers turn two-part first names into a first name and a middle initial, Hao Ling asked if they could just run the two halves together into one name for her license.

“She then went back and spoke to another lady and returned, insisting that I would have to get my name combined on my documentation in order for them to consider this as a first name,” she recalls. “In a post-9/11 world where everyone but NJ MVC seems to care about all legal documents matching names, I began to fret.”

Having no other recourse, she took the “Hao L.” license and left the MVC office.

Hao Ling then spoke to someone at a passport office about this naming issue. A clerk there gave her the U.S. State Department’s guidance on Cambodian names so she could show the MVC that Cambodian naming conventions don’t use middle names. But a rep for the MVC told her this was “not relevant” and she’d need to speak to immigration officials about getting her name legally changed to be a single word.

It’s worth noting that her concern wasn’t just a matter of having a license that accurately represented her name. Hao Ling had previously been the victim of ID theft, and because her name without the “Ling” is incredibly common, she had been accidentally linked to others with the same name and bad credit. Thus, it helps to have ID that exactly matches other forms of identification so you can prove to bureaucrats that you are who you claim to be.

And it’s not just people with hyphenated or two-part names that are limited by New Jersey’s horribly out of date system. The MVC database only allows for up to nine characters for a first name, so someone with my incredibly common first name of Christopher is shortened to “Christoph.” And anyone with a name like D’angelo has that apostrophe stripped right out to form “Dangelo.”

It’s like Ellis Island, but without the cute wool caps.

“We’re dealing with a database dating back to the 1980s,” a rep for the MVC actually admitted to Bamboozled, while adding that the agency is testing an update that would allow the database to eventually accept crazy things like spaces, hyphens and apostrophes. “If the planets all align, we’re hoping that by 2016 this should all be cleared up.”

Until then, we’re just going to refer to New Jersey as Newjersey.

Let Mommy Sleep, an overnight service for new babies, to begin franchising Washington Post A set of premature twins and a 17-month-old son led Denise Stern to her latest business venture, an overnight service for over-worked, over-tired parents. Stern, who lives in Haymarket, started Let Mommy Sleep — a company that provides nighttime care ...

State minimum wages will exceed the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour in 21 states on Jan. 1.