Here are the things I’ve been talking and writing about over at <a href="http://moviebyte.com/">MovieByte</a>.
<h2>The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1</h2>
Last week, the focus was The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1. I quite liked the film. Fizz joined me on the podcast since Joe needed to take a week off, and he didn't like it as much as I did.
I wrote a review as well:
<a href="http://moviebyte.com/mbpodcast/114">The MovieByte Podcast #114: Anti-Captain America »</a>
<blockquote>
TJ and Fizz discuss what’s good and bad about ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1’. As ever, they don’t always see eye to eye, but that will give you, dear listeners, some fun things to chew on. They also discuss the redesign of the MovieByte website, Disney’s live action ‘Cinderella’ trailer (no, really, it’s a thing), the Russos possibly directing ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ parts one and two as opposed to Joss Whedon — which leads to a lot of discussion — and of course what theaters will have the ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ trailer.
</blockquote>
<a href="http://moviebyte.com/entry/2014/11/the-hunger-games-mockingjay-part-1">The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 — Review »</a>
<blockquote>
Don’t let the critics fool you. They are such a fickle lot. The <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_hunger_games_mockingjay_part_1">Rotten Tomatoes Critic Consensus</a> says that the film comes up short on the action. As if the critics think action is the end all and be all — what a joke. I found the film to be compelling, it did in fact have some action which I deemed to be enough for me, I liked the pacing and much of the acting, the story is improved upon from the book, and I quite enjoyed watching the film in the theater.
</blockquote>
<h2>Star Wars: The Force Awakens Teaser Trailer</h2>
Last week, Disney and Lucas Film released the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Despite some misgivings, I'm super excited!
<a href="http://moviebyte.com/entry/2014/11/star-wars-vii-teaser-trailer">The ‘Star Wars VII’ Teaser Trailer is HERE!!!! »</a>
<blockquote>
Overall, I’d say this teaser is trying to strike a balance between making us feel nostalgia for the old Star Wars (and I certainly don’t mean any of the prequels), and making us feel like this is something altogether new and interesting and different.
</blockquote>
<a href="http://moviebyte.com/mbpodcast/115">The MovieByte Podcast #115: Bonus Episode - ‘The Force Awakens’ Teaser Trailer »</a>
<blockquote>
It’s a special bonus episode of The MovieByte Podcast where TJ, Joe, and Clark talk about — actually dissect might be a better word — the first new teaser trailer for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’. There’s no shortage of opinions, fun, and just generally geeking out. You won’t want to miss this!
</blockquote>
<h2>Birdman</h2>
Joe and I had intended to review The Immitation Game on The MovieByte Podcast this week, but it turns out that film is in an extremely limited release at the moment. We didn't feel like driving a few thousand miles to see it. So we decided to see Birdman and talk about it instead.
<a href="http://moviebyte.com/mbpodcast/116">The MovieByte Podcast #116: It Felt Purposeless »</a>
<blockquote>
TJ and Joe didn’t get to watch the movie they wanted to watch because it was in limited release, so they watched ‘Birdman’ instead. And they are glad they did. There’s a lot to chew on with Birdman and TJ and Joe relish in the analysis. Also don’t miss some follow up on ‘The Force Awakens’ trailer, news of the ‘House of Cards’ season 3 premiere date, and Batman vs. Darth Vader. It’s most impressive!
</blockquote>
<a href="http://moviebyte.com/entry/2014/12/birdman">Birdman — Review »</a>
<blockquote>
This film is filled with fantastic performances, not the least of which is, of course, Michael Keaton. There is hardly a moment when the film leaves his headspace. He plays someone who has become quite the odd-ball.
</blockquote>
So if any of that interests you, be sure to check out MovieByte!

Hungry Birdman Had a War in the Stars

<blockquote>
TUSCALOOSA, Alabama -- The on-going strife between the city of Tuscaloosa and the app-based ride-sharing service <a href="https://www.uber.com/">Uber</a> may come to a head this week after city officials said they'd begin Wednesday to arrest Uber drivers operating there.
Billy Guernier, the general manager for Uber Tuscaloosa, said more than a dozen city employees met with an Uber policy specialist Friday and drew a clear line in the sand, promising begin on Wednesday to arrest any Uber driver in the city and charge them with violating city codes that govern taxi services in Tuscaloosa.
</blockquote>
Oh yeah, this is the type of thing you would expect in a free society.
<blockquote>
Guernier said the ultimatum comes after a month of failing negotiations between the two parties. He said he personally flew to Tuscaloosa to meet its mayor Walt Maddox last month, but the meeting never materialized. Guernier said Sunday morning that Uber has come to the table willing to compromise and ready to cooperate with the city, but has been met with continued resistance and a 'my way or the highway' attitude from city officials.
In their defense, city employees said it's Uber that is unwilling to compromise even after it was made clear that the city was willing to be flexible to make Uber work in the Druid City.
</blockquote>
I don't even understand what compromise would look like. Where does this end? I have a car, my friend needs a ride to the airport. Do I need to have background checks and a commercial taxi license? This is complete and utter non-sense. Well, any regulations on any services is non-sense to begin with, and maybe that's the problem.
This is, by the way, not a failure of capitalism or free market. It is in fact a failure of our current society here in the U.S. to recognize the ridiculousness of some of these regulations and to adapt to changing economic conditions and innovations. Uber is an amazing service and an amazing idea. It saves money, takes advantage of modern technologies, and provides a service people want. And here's the thing — make no mistake — people are using this and people want it.
Last night, me and several friends at a conference near Washington, D.C. used the Uber app to get a ride downtown for food and drinks and to have some fun. It was cheap and worked great. We received better service and rates than we would have from a cab. The man driving was happy because he made some money, and we were happy because we were in D.C. without our own car and needed to get from point A to point B. This is basic, free market capitalism 101. The fact that this is even happening — that Uber is even under threat anywhere for any reason, is a painful reminder that we are not in fact in a free market capitalist society.
It's also a good reminder that the regulation that has been set up around transportation services lends itself to propping up old business models that need to naturally die out or evolve. When you allow the free market to work, all this is taken care of.

Stephen Dethrage — AL.com

I Have a Car, You Need a Ride

I am always on a quest to have specific aspects of the sites I build, both mine and the sites I build for others, behave in exactly the way I want. Sometimes I get obsessive over seemingly meaningless and small details. For a very long time I have been obsessed with URL control. I want my URLs to work in a specific way. For instance, on this site I want the year and the month to be in the permalink URLs. I like having that data in the URL when I glance at it. <a href="#fn:eeulrs1">1</a> Thankfully, though not common, ExpressionEngine does have the means for me to create a way for this to work. <a href="#fn:eeurls2">2</a>
Another aspect of the URL I like to control is to remove index.php from the URLs. You see, everything in ExpressionEngine runs through the index.php file. Without any server side modifications, a typical ExpressionEngine URL looks like this:
<pre><code>http://mysite.com/index.php/template_group/template_or_url_title
</code></pre>
Index.php is the door through which the entire front end of an ExpressionEngine site must go. Everything is called through index.php.
I don’t like it. I don’t want it. It makes my URLs look ugly, it’s unfriendly and uncouth. No one cares that ExpressionEngine uses PHP to work. It’s an unnecessary and irritating part of the URL. Thankfully, as with all CMSes of this type, we can remove the index.php from the URL by rewriting the URL. We do this on typical LAMP servers with htaccess. So in my typical .htaccess file, I have this:
<pre><code>## remove index.php
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
</code></pre>
Okay, so what is that? The first two lines are rewrite conditions. If the filename in the URL requested is not a file (!-f) and if it is not a folder/directory (!-d), then we apply the rewrite rule to transparently run the URL through index.php. So the URL demo from above can now be:
<pre><code>http://mysite.com/template_group/template_or_url_title
</code></pre>
No index.php needed or required and the URL looks much more pretty. This is a standard way of doing things. You can find a tutorial on this in 5 seconds flat on a Google search. But there is a problem with this method that I had not considered until I read <a href="http://kevinthompson.info/blog/2011/03/04/completely-remove-index-php-from-expressionengine-urls.html">this article</a> by Kevin Thompson:
<blockquote>
While there are a number of known solutions for removing index.php from ExpressionEngine URLs, few developers realize that although URLs now resolve without index.php, the previous URLs including index.php also still exist.
</blockquote>
Right, I had never considered that for a second. I want to fix that right away. I do not like, and Google does not like (in terms of SEO) duplicate URLs for content. If your content is available at two distinct URLs it hurts your SEO and not only that but it’s confusing and irritating. I want the content to be available at one URL and one only. But with my htaccess rule, both URLs would work to get to the content. Omitting index.php was only an option, not a hard fact.
Thankfully it only takes two lines added to my .htaccess file:
<pre><code>## Redirect requests that use index.php
 RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC]
 RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L]
</code></pre>
The condition is that if index.php is in the URL, rewrite the URL without and send a 301 code (permanent redirect). So for example, previously this URL would work to get to this article:
<pre><code>http://buzzingpixel.com/index.php/article/2013/02/completely-remove-index-php
</code></pre>
But now, if you try that, it redirects to the URL without index.php in it. It’s simple, but much to my chagrin, it’s something I never thought of before. I’m glad it’s fixed now!
<hr>
<ol>
<li>
Do you know how many people actually care about the URL? Hint, it’s not very many, only a geeky (nerdy?) few like me. <a href="#fnref:eeulrs1">↩</a>
</li>
<li>
Notice I did not say ExpressionEngine has this feature because I had to jump through a few hoops with the Channel Entries tag to make it work. I’m not doing anything hacky or undocumented, but it’s a little weird and not really the way it was intended to work. <a href="#fnref:eeurls2">↩</a>
</li>
</ol>

Completely Remove index.php

I have, since the day the iPhone came out, and I subsequently purchased one that same day, loathed all note taking options. Obviously the first iteration of iPhone OS iOS did not have third party apps or any ability to sync notes of any kind. It had a notes app and any notes one took there were forever siloed in that app. And any notes one took in any form on a Mac were also not able to be synced to one's iPhone. There have been various web based solutions, none of them good.
With third party apps came note taking apps. I have never been happy with any of them. I've tried various services and apps, like them all a little for a time, found them frustrating and moved on. For a while, I used Evernote. And to some extent I liked it. But both the Mac app and the iOS app have been through various stages of bugginess. I have had trouble with sync between the apps, sometimes, notes simply, stubbornly refused to sync at all. Additionally, I found the interface for both confusing and cluttered.
The last straw for Evernote came when the app ate a very VERY important note. I was editing the note on my phone when the app crashed. When I returned to the app, the note was gone. My computer had been left on, connected to the internet in another location so it naturally synced the lack of note and that was that. I could never get that note back. I left Evernote.
For a time I used the built in Mac and iOS notes app, which strangely, uses an IMAP mailbox on your mail server to sync. I find this to also be buggy and unreliable, but it never offered to flat out eat any of my notes and the interface is much less cluttered. But in the end, it just was not powerful enough.
I moved on to Simplenote. It's too simple, and syncing can again be a bit of a pain.
So in frustration, about a week ago, I complained on Twitter about the state of note taking and syncing.
<blockquote>
It’s 2013, can we please have a really good note taking app that syncs between computers and phones now? So far I hate all the current ones.
— TJ Draper (@tjdraperpro) <a href="https://twitter.com/tjdraperpro/status/297473239645569024">February 1, 2013</a>
</blockquote>

I received several recommendations to try Evernote again, they've been through a major overhaul and are rock solid now. I was skeptical, but thought it could not hurt since I was simply not happy with any note syncing solution/app in any capacity.
And I’ve been using Evernote since February 1 and I'm impressed. The interface has been seriously cleaned up, note syncing is rock solid and instantaneous (so far... knock on wood), and it is doing almost exactly what I want a note app and note syncing to do:
<ul>
<li>Multiple Notebooks</li>
<li>Tags</li>
<li>Nice, Lion Mail style wide screen layout on the mac, very intuitive interface on the iPhone</li>
<li>Nice, simple and clean, WYSIWYG note editing (in the past I found the WYSIWYG note editor to be very buggy, that seems to be gone)</li>
<li>A lot less cluttery feeling.</li>
</ul>
In short, if you have not used Evernote in a while due to frustrations with syncing and the interface, give it another try, it has changed much for the better and so far, this is the happiest I have ever been with note taking and syncing.

Note Taking and Syncing

<blockquote>
The company on Tuesday reported that the Monday after the game was its biggest sales day in company history. The company provided Mashable with the following stats that illustrate a big increase over the comparable day in 2012:
<ul>
<li>Hosting sales jumped 45%.</li>
<li>Dot-com domain sales rose 40%.</li>
<li>New mobile customers increased by 35%.</li>
<li>The company added 10,000 customers in total.</li>
</ul>
Go Daddy, a Super Bowl advertiser for the past nine years, ran two ads during the game, including "<a href="http://mashable.com/2013/02/01/bar-refaeli-makes-out-with-nerdy-guy-in-go-daddy-super-bowl-ad/">Perfect Match</a>," which featured supermodel Bar Refaeli making out with a nerdy-looking guy and "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&#x26;v=aE6ugHoIB_Q">YourBigIdea.co</a>," which showed entrepreneurs across the world coming up with ideas though only one acts fast and secures a .co domain name.
</blockquote>
What is wrong with people! I've already tried to minimize my business with that tasteless and horrible company. Their "Perfect Match" ad just made me want to go out and anti-evangelize GoDaddy. My word what is wrong with people?

Mashable

GoDaddy Sales Surge After Tasteless Super Bowl Ad

<blockquote>
Currently, I’m under the gun with some pretty big pressures at work. So much so, that 512 has been collecting dust for a couple of weeks. It’s frustrating being so busy I don’t have time to read what’s clogging up my RSS and Instapaper accounts or write what’s bouncing around my head. I have to remember that my day job pays the bills, not this, so if things are little quiet for the coming weeks, please forgive me.
</blockquote>
I'm only posting this because, man do I know the feeling!

Stephen Hackett

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

<blockquote>
Following reports that <a href="http://bgr.com/2013/02/04/ios-6-1-jailbreak-release-date-315664/">an untethered jailbreak was finally set to be made available for iOS 6.1 users on Monday</a>, the Evad3rs Jailbreak Team has made their jailbreak tool evasi0n available for download. The tool jailbreaks <a href="http://bgr.com/tag/apple">Apple’s</a> (<a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL">AAPL</a>) <a href="http://bgr.com/tag/iphone-5">iPhone 5</a>, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, <a href="http://bgr.com/tag/ipad-mini">iPad mini</a>, all iPad models and third-, fourth- and fifth-generation iPod touch models running iOS 6.0 or iOS 6.1.
</blockquote>
Wait, is jailbreaking still a thing? I really could not possibly care any less about this.

Zach Epstein writing on BGR

iOS 6.1 Untethered Jailbreak Now Available

I’m writing this here because at the moment, I have no better place to write it. I can’t write about this sort of techie thing on <a href="http://moviebyte.com">MovieByte</a>, because you know, that’s for movies. I can’t write about it on <a href="http://tjdraper.com">my personal musings blog</a> (for lack of a better name), because nobody who reads that cares in the slightest. And when I do write there, it’s about politics that might offend you, or my cute kiddos.
And even though most of you probably don’t care, it’s something I want to write about because I’m excited about it. So here it is.
One of the advantages of ExpressionEngine is that it does not box you in to a certain way of doing things. I worked with WordPress a little in the early days, built one site in WordPress and messed around with a couple other sites. WordPress is just not my style at all. You see, WordPress renders the HTML you see on the front end from a very specific set of templates, things like header.html, sidebar.html, nav.html, footer.html etc. etc. A tag that you open in one might be closed in another template and so on. Yes I know that you can modify this scheme and do things in a different way to some extent, but to a very large extent WordPress has a predetermined box for you to work in or around. It’s no way to work for a guy like me.
And when I discovered EE, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. You see, what you see when you visit any given URL is the contents of the rendering of one template in which you can put whatever markup you want.
The way EE URLs and templates work looks like this:
<pre><code>http://mysite.com/the_template_group/the_template
</code></pre>
If no template group is specified in the URL, then the index template in that group is used (every template group must have an index template).
You can build each template on it’s own and put any markup you want in that template on a per-template basis (not very DRY), or you can split it up into chunks as you see fit.
Back in the EE 1 days, the way to do this was by embedding another template into your template.
<pre><code>{embed="the_template_group/the_template"}
</code></pre>
So in those days you might create a template group called “includes” and make all kinds of templates in there for your global markup that you would embed in your other templates. But doing that came at a cost. For every embed, the EE template parser would run again from the beginning. Embed about five templates and you are looking at some serious server overhead to crank out that page for your viewer. This might lead to a delay of 3 to 4 seconds, or more if you got crazy with embeds.
EE 2 debuted something new. EE 1 had something called Global Variables where you could store HTML markup to call in your template, but no EE template tags, because those would not get parsed. EE 2 built upon that premise by introducing Snippets. Snippets can contain both HTML markup AND EE template tags. And a snippet call does not restart the template parser.
So with EE 2 we have a low overhead way to slice up the template and include global markup. But even though this is an infinitely better solution than WP’s box approach, I was never complete satisfied with this.
<h2>A New Approach</h2>
Enter Mark Croxton’s excellent EE add-on called <a href="http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/stash">Stash</a>. I don’t know when he released it exactly, but I discovered it last year and it’s fantastic. There are a lot of uses this plugin can be put to that I will probably never in a million years figure out, but allow me to tell you how I use it.
Bye bye includes (via embeds or snippets) and hello one template to rule them all!
Here’s the structure. EE allows us to have hidden templates which may not be called by URL, but only by embed so I create a template group called <code>_layouts</code> where I store what I call my layout templates. The first and primary one I create is called <code>_default</code> (for a very large majority of sites, you will only need one). All my global markup goes in this layout template. If I need more than one layout template, I might break out the “super” global markup into snippets but for most sites, I just have the one template and keep all global markup there. So that’s the layout template.
In each actual site template, I call the layout template via embed:
<pre><code>{!-- Embed the Primary Template --}
{embed="_layouts/_default"}
</code></pre>
Okay, so now what? Each site template is going to have markup or variable content that we need to display somewhere in the embedded layout template. How do we get it there? Ahh, glad you asked. This is what I’m excited about. This is where Stash comes in.
EE template parse order is my nemesis. To this day I have trouble really internalizing the concepts and what gets rendered when, in what order and all that jazz. But I can tell you essentially how it works so far as I understand.
<ol>
<li>EE looks at your URL and loads the template you have called.</li>
<li>That template gets parsed, all EE template tags in that template get parsed.</li>
<li>If the template has any embeds, the template parser starts over on the embedded template</li>
<li>All template tags in the embedded template get parsed</li>
<li>The final parsed and rendered output is displayed</li>
</ol>
So this is how <a href="http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/stash">Stash</a> helps us. After embedding the layout template, we can set stuff in the template being called by URL with stash:set, and call it in the embedded template with stash:get because the called template gets parsed first, then the embedded template is parsed. So:
Setting content in the template called by URL:
<pre><code>{!-- Set some content --}
{exp:stash:set name="stuff"}stuff goes here{/exp:stash:set}
</code></pre>
Retrieving content:
<pre><code>{!-- Get some content --}
{exp:stash:get name='stuff'}
</code></pre>
Are you getting it? See the possibilities? After embedding the primary template, we wrap everything in the template called by URL in stash:set tags and essentially inject that content into the embedded template with the stash:get call. And that stash:get call can be anywhere in the embedded template. For instance, on this site I want to change the <code>&#x3C;title></code> area in the head of the page depending on the URL and page visited. So in my embedded layout template the title looks like this:
<pre><code>&#x3C;title>{exp:stash:get name='head_title'} | BuzzingPixel&#x3C;/title>
</code></pre>
And in the URL called template I have set the title that stash is retrieving like so:
<pre><code>{exp:stash:set name="head_title"}This is the page title{/exp:stash:set}
</code></pre>
Now do you see it? This is some seriously powerful mojo! And the fun doesn’t end there. What if I want to control various aspects of the layout template based on the URL? What if when I call a page template I want to turn certain aspects of the layout on or off. If it’s as easy as displaying or not displaying code we can still do it all with one layout template using Stash (for complicated sites, this is where you may need more than one layout template, but when you really get into this workflow, there is not actually a need to have more than one layout template very often).
An example is that on a site I recently developed, some templates required a sidebar layout and some did not. So I created a method with Stash to tell the layout template whether to display the sidebar. I used <a href="http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/switchee">Switchee</a> case logic (another great add-on by Croxton) to reduce template overhead, but I’ll use native EE <code>{if}</code> statements here for the simplicity of the demonstration:
Here is the value I set in my URL called template:
<pre><code>{!-- Show the Sidebar? Possible Values are: "sidebar" "nosidebar" --}
{exp:stash:set name="template_type"}sidebar{/exp:stash:set}
</code></pre>
And in the embedded layout template:
<pre><code>{if "{exp:stash:set name="template_type"}" == "sidebar"}
Sidebar Code
{/if}
</code></pre>
You can see the power of this method. But there is another benefit: speed. One embed per template. This is a really low overhead approach to keeping things DRY and I love it. This is the sort of thing I get excited about.
And I hope by writing about it here, someone comes across this and finds it useful. If you have any questions, or want to tell me about a better way to do things, shoot me an email. You will find the contact link in the menu above.

Templating with ExpressionEngine

<blockquote>
Headlines are whirling this week with talk of a cheaper iPhone, but Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller is apparently balking at the rumors.
Schiller allegedly admitted to the Shanghai Evening News (<a href="http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?act=url&#x26;depth=1&#x26;hl=en&#x26;ie=UTF8&#x26;prev=_t&#x26;rurl=translate.google.com&#x26;sl=auto&#x26;tl=en&#x26;twu=1&#x26;u=http://translate.google.com/translate%3Fsl%3Dauto%26tl%3Dde%26js%3Dn%26prev%3D_t%26hl%3Dde%26ie%3DUTF-8%26eotf%3D1%26u%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fnewspaper.jfdaily.com%2Fxwwb%2Fhtml%2F2013-01%2F09%2Fcontent_954119.htm&#x26;usg=ALkJrhhaaDunR17f-QvrAlM5_LWQsLiq0A">translation</a>) in an interview that his company is not developing a cheaper <a href="http://viglink.pgpartner.com/mrdr.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fviglink.pgpartner.com%2Fsearch_attrib.php%2Fform_keyword=smartphone&#x26;mt=~~~~~~~~n~~~">smartphone</a> to “grab market share away.” He reportedly said the <a href="http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=iphone+5">iPhone 5</a> is the best iPhone for Apple and his company is not concerned with market share.
</blockquote>
...
<blockquote>
He indicated cheap smartphones are popular, but they will never be the future of Apple’s products.
</blockquote>
I'm not a fan of theory that Apple is going to produce another, less expensive iPhone. I believe their strategy of selling last years iPhone at a bargain, and the 2 year old iPhone free on contract is a really great one. That said, I would like to pont out that he said “cheap” smartphones will never be the future of Apple products. He did not say “inexpensive”. They are never going to make cheap junk, that's just not Apple.

9to5Mac

Schiller and Cheap iPhones

<blockquote>
Walmart and <a href="http://www.straighttalk.com/">Straight Talk</a> Wireless are <a href="http://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2013/01/08/walmart-straight-talk-to-offer-the-iphone-on-its-45-no-contract-unlimited-plan">now carrying the iPhone 5</a>, offering a $45 unlimited talk, text and data plan with no contract. It was <a href="http://www.thatsitguys.com/news/straight-talk-to-carry-the-iphone-4-iphone-5#">previously reported</a> by That's It Guys. Straight Talk is a subsidiary of TracFone, and its iPhone customers will use AT&#x26;T's network. There is no indication of whether the phones will support AT&#x26;T's LTE network or not.
Like other prepaid plans such as Virgin Mobile, users must pay full price for their iPhones without having them subsidized by the carrier. Unlike Virgin Mobile, Walmart is offering holders of the Walmart credit card a no-interest fixed payment plan for $25/month. This allows customers to have a unlimited talk, text and data plan for a total of $70/month before taxes and fees.
</blockquote>
I am seriously thinking about switching to Straight Talk when my contract is up if I can stomach putting up with AT&#x26;T's network a while longer. It's less expensive, and I'm already only with AT&#x26;T because it's less expensive for me than Verizon. If that wasn't the case, I would be with Verizon in a heartbeat.

MacRumors

Walmart, iPhone, and Straight Talk Wireless

Those evil dangerous cell phones! They could all gang up one day and crash the plane you are on if you don't turn them off during take-off!!!
Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. It may be shocking for you to find out, but cell phones cannot crash planes. As usually, the FAA is behind the times with it's archaic rules.
You must watch this!

Airplanes and Phones

<blockquote>
Non-practicing entity WhitServe on Friday filed a complaint against Apple, claiming that the Quick Look function found in a number of OS X iterations infringes on its file viewing patent from 2011.
In its claim, filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, WhitServe alleges that Quick Look violates the company's U.S. Patent <a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&#x26;Sect2=HITOFF&#x26;p=1&#x26;u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&#x26;r=5&#x26;f=G&#x26;l=50&#x26;co1=AND&#x26;d=PTXT&#x26;s1=20110405.PD.&#x26;s2=%28CT.ASST.%29&#x26;OS=ISD/04/05/2011+AND+AS/CT&#x26;RS=ISD/04/05/2011+AND+AS/CT">No. 7,921,139</a> for a "System for sequentially opening and displaying files in a directory," which was applied for in 2006 and granted in April of 2011./p>
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This is why we can't have nice things. This is in a nutshell everything that is wrong with our patent and copyright system.

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