Hacker Challenge Winner: Silence Sports Commentators with a Simple Switch

In last week's Hacker Challenge, we asked you to share your best home theater hack. We received some great entries, but the winning hack shows us how to throw the switch on televised sports commentators.

Check out the description of the winning entry below and read about some of our other favorite entries.

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Winner: Silence Sports Commentators with a Simple Switch

RobRixmann30 discovered that most sporting events broadcast in surround sound only push the commentator audio through the center channel. Sure, he could unplug the center channel speaker or dig out the A/V remote and turn the center channel volume down to zero, but instead he decide to add single pole, single throw (SPST) switch to one of the two speaker wires running to his center channel speaker. We have to admit that throwing an actual switch on the commentators sounds more satisfying.

Note that this hack won't work for stereo broadcasts or if you don't have at least a 5.1 surround sound setup. Also, you should test your own system and the broadcasts you typically watch before actually installing a switch by simply unplugging the center speaker. In an impromptu test, we found that this hack worked on all the games being broadcast in 5.1 surround by our cable provider.

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Honorable Mentions

We got a lot of great entries and we'd be remiss if we didn't share some of our favorites. Here are some of the entries that really impressed us.

Vent Heat With a Laptop Cooler

Gr8rt3k had a somewhat cramped cabinet for his A/V equipment and heat was a bit of an issue. He didn't want to pay for a specialized A/V cabinet cooling solution, so instead he bought Thermaltake laptop cooler with a 200mm fan and adjustable speed controller for under $20. The large fan moves more air while spinning more slowly (and thus quieter) than units with smaller fans. Because the laptop cooler was USB powered, Gr8rt3k also bought a USB-to-AC adapter. He took the whole unit apart so that he could reverse the air flow of the fan, cut a hole in the top of his A/V cabinet, and now all the hot air is vented out to the attic.

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Repurpose an Old Dresser as an Entertainment Center

Remi and his family moved to a new house, leaving their IKEA entertainment center behind. They didn't want to spend much money on a new one, since entertainment centers tend to be on the expensive side. Instead, Remi repurposed an old dresser they found at an antique store for about $60 to serve new duty. He removed the upper shelves and most of the drawers, drilled holes in the back for cables, and was up and running in just a couple of hours. They've got more than enough room for all their gear, which includes a TiVo, router, 8-port switch, Monster power conditioner, Harman Kardon receiver, Xbox 360, Mac Mini, and an Apple TV. He left the 2 large drawers on the bottom for additional storage and used the removed drawers to organize their daughter's toys inside their built-in bench seating storage. Nothing wasted!

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Reposition Your Projector Using a Sliding Mount

Acpowell has a make-shift home theater in his basement that includes a projector and a homemade screen. However, he had difficulty getting the projected image to fill the whole screen because he couldn't get it mounted far enough back. He solved this problem by creating a sliding mount out of some server slide rails he happened to have. The new mount allowed him to move the projector back a couple of extra feet so that the larger picture would fill the screen.

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A big thanks to everyone who took the time to send us entries! Be sure to check back every week for a new challenge.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/pdY3GW-uJV8/hacker-challenge-winner-silence-sports-commentators-with-a-simple-switch

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Justin Bieber Says He Handles Fame Like Jay-Z

'I don't need to address every speculation,' singer tells Teen Vogue about the rumors surrounding him.
By Jocelyn Vena

Justin Bieber on the cover of "Teen Vogue"
Photo: Teen Vogue

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1704825/justin-bieber-teen-vogue-jay-z.jhtml

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PayPal tests merchant financing as Kabbage raises debt

By Alistair Barr

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - EBay Inc's payments business, PayPal, already lends money to online shoppers, but it is now starting to finance the merchants who sell on the company's online marketplaces.

PayPal has already tested a financing program for eBay sellers in the UK and it plans similar tests in the United States this year, a company spokesman said on Tuesday.

"Marketplaces is a great innovation lab for us to test new experiences," Gary Marino, senior vice president, global financial services at PayPal, said at eBay's investor day last week. "We've done it successfully with credit and we are experimenting with many new capabilities which will drive share like small business lending."

The UK program and the up-coming U.S. test focus on merchants selling on eBay.com, which number in the millions. The PayPal spokesman said the UK test was only available to a small number of merchants who were pre-selected.

"The pilot program has now ended," he added. "We are working on full rollout plans."

Banks and other providers of loans for merchants pulled back after the 2008 financial crisis, leaving an opening for alternative sources of financing. Factoring, a common source of financing in the retail business that is provided by lenders such as CIT Group and Wells Fargo, can be tough to tap for smaller merchants.

The combination of fast-growing online shopping and a lack of credit for smaller businesses has created strong demand for new types of financing among sellers that ply their trade on Amazon.com, eBay.com and other marketplaces.

KABBAGE RAISES DEBT

Internet firms have already stepped in to satisfy demand from these merchants, who need financing to pay upfront for inventory, buy supplies and even hire extra staff, especially ahead of the annual holiday shopping rush.

Amazon.com Inc, the world's largest Internet retailer, launched a merchant financing program before the holidays last year called Amazon Lending.

On Wednesday, Kabbage Inc, a start-up focused on providing financing to online merchants, said it closed a $75 million credit facility, its largest to date, to fund more advances to merchants selling via online marketplaces including Amazon.com and eBay.com.

"There is a clear void in the market as traditional financing sources remain reluctant to lend," said Tom Affolter, principal at Victory Park Capital, an alternative asset-management firm that led the Kabbage debt financing.

Existing equity investor Thomvest Ventures contributed a significant amount to the $75 million debt financing. Kabbage declined to say how much. Thomvest Chairman Peter J. Thomson is a director of Thomson Reuters Corp, which owns the publisher of this report.

Kabbage, which is also backed by BlueRun Ventures, United Parcel Service Inc and TPG Capital Founder David Bonderman, made 39,048 advances to merchants last year and expects to make almost 100,000 in 2013, Co-Founder Marc Gorlin said. Kabbage has not disclosed the dollar amount of money it has advanced.

PAYPAL'S UK PROGRAM

PayPal's Marino founded Bill Me Later, an online consumer credit business that eBay acquired in 2008. This business, which lends money to shoppers on eBay.com and other websites, is one of the company's fastest growing operations.

BML, as it is known, has helped boost sales on eBay.com, while lowering PayPal's funding costs.

Advancing money to online merchants may increase sales on eBay.com, according to R.J. Hottovy, an equity analyst at Morningstar.

"Allowing merchants to purchase additional inventory, or increase advertising budgets, should theoretically lead to additional eBay listings," he added.

In the UK, PayPal teamed with United Kapital, a financial-service firm that specializes in merchant cash advances.

The UK program offered merchants up to 25,000 pounds from United Kapital to spend on anything related to their business, including advertising, buying new products to sell, website re-design, refurbishing physical stores and hiring staff.

Merchants applied online by entering their PayPal account details. If approved, the size of the advance they got was based on their past PayPal sales receipts. Merchants got a decision within 72 hours of applying, according to PayPal.

The advances were paid into merchants' PayPal accounts. They were charged a fee based on their credit risk.

In a working example provided by PayPal, a merchant got an advance of 12,000 pounds. The fee for this was 3,240 pounds, or 27 percent of the amount advanced.

Merchants could then choose to re-pay the money as a percentage of their daily PayPal sales receipts. In the example provided, the merchant agreed to a 12 percent rate, meaning 12 percent of their daily sales were used to repay the advance.

(Reporting by Alistair Barr; Editing by Bernard Orr and Kenneth Barry)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/paypal-tests-financing-online-sellers-kabbage-raises-debt-123353926--sector.html

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Consumers Overestimate Benefits of Organic Foods

Consumers see a lot of value in organic foods and new research has found that those shoppers are willing to pay a great deal more for that value.

Overall, researchers found that people were willing to pay up to 23.4 percent more for organic foods than they were for the same products not labeled organic. Consumers are willing to pay more for organic foods?because of the so-called "health-halo effect," researchers say.?

That effect, where consumers overvalue the benefits of organic foods, was shown in research by Cornell University?s Food and Brand Lab researchers?Wan-chen Jenny Lee, Mitsuru Shimizu, Kevin Kniffin and Brian Wansink. In that research, 115 people were recruited from a shopping mall in Ithaca, N.Y.

Each of those shoppers was then asked to evaluate three pairs of products. The catch was that one of those products was labeled organic while the other was not. However, both pairs of yogurt, cookies and potato chips used in the study were identical.? Consumers were not able to make the distinction between the products and rated organically labeled food?lower in fat, more nutritious, more appetizing and more flavorful. The only difference came when consumers rated cookies not labeled organic as tasting better.?

Those attitudes go a long way in explaining why consumers are willing to pay more for organic products than others, researchers say.?

"The study found that people tend to assume that organic foods are good for everything (e.g., low calorie, more fiber), so they tend to pay more for organic foods," said Shimizu, a postdoctoral research associate at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell. ?"This effect is stronger among those who rarely buy organic foods or those who do not pay attention to the nutrition labels."

However, consumers should take a slightly cautious view of organic foods, Shimizu says. That's because the researchers say that the health-halo effect can significantly bias consumers in their purchases of organic foods.?

"Thus, consumers, especially those types of consumers, need to be careful ? they should pay more attention to the nutrition label of organic foods," Shimizu said. "Organic foods?are not necessarily as good and worthy as they think."

This story was provided by BusinessNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Email?David Mielach?or follow him @D_M89. Follow us?@bndarticles,?Facebook?or?Google+.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/consumers-overestimate-benefits-organic-foods-210758789.html

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Postcards From Camp

I once went on a date with a man who did not appreciate camp. His preferred sensibility was a nervous, punk-inflected disaffection, and I found it exotic, frustrating, and somewhat arousing. When I began to gather, over my second glass of riesling, that he did not much identify with the ?gay stuff? that heavily defined my life, I asked him bluntly: ?Are you, um, into camp?? He informed me that camp had sometime in the 1980s or ?90s morphed into ?hipster irony? and been washed out by its diffusion into the general culture. New York was over, too; he would move to Canada soon.

I had heard this sigh of an argument before, of course, but it struck me as particularly disappointing coming from one ostensibly of my tribe, someone who by right of birth should ?get? camp. In retrospect, though, I realize that my sadness was misplaced: We weren?t really talking about camp at all; we were talking about campy.

More on the difference between noun and adjective in a moment; but first, a bit of necessary history. ?

A key problem (probably the key problem) with camp: Sontag?s 1964 essay ?Notes on Camp? was wildly influential. So influential, in fact, that even if you haven?t read it, those 58 little fragments have infected your mind as part of a larger cultural epidemic. You?ve picked them up on your fingers while leafing through the endless trove of film reviews, television recaps, ?think pieces,? and newspaper articles contagious with throwaway lines like ?campy performance? and ?camp appeal.? You?ve heard that Pink Flamingos or American Horror Story or Lady Gaga is ?campy,? inferred that the word must indicate a certain feral, transgressive, winking decadence, and caught Sontag?s nasty little bug. But it?s not your fault?there has never been an inoculation distributed widely enough to combat Sontag?s potent formulation. Her intoxicating brew of detached authority, stylistic showmanship, intimidating intellectual name-dropping, and mysterious subject matter?all distilled, it should be remembered, under the not unhelpful auspices of the Partisan Review?ensured that Sontag would corner the market on camp. Indeed, she would become, as literary critic Terry Castle has written, its ?philosopher? for the subsequent decades. ?

Susan Sontag.

Photo by Jens-Ulrich Koch/AFP/Getty Images

Unfortunately, the majority of ?Notes on Camp??past the part where Sontag rightly defines camp as ?one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon??is actually concerned with what I?ll distinguish as campiness or the campy. Campiness, as a style and sensibility, comprises a set of widely appreciated characteristics: frivolity, the celebration of the ?so bad it?s good,? the overwrought, the histrionic, what Sontag calls ?failed seriousness.? It?s standard midnight-screening fare. But these characteristics are not at all intrinsic to camp. In other words, camp is not the same thing as campy, and the latter, as a popular aesthetic, may well be fading into obscurity while the former, a ?way of seeing the world,? soldiers on.?

To understand this crucial difference, let?s turn to a film that is rich with both camp and campy potential?the 1958 classic Auntie Mame. Rosalind Russell stars in the title role as a wealthy, bohemian New York auntie determined to raise her newly orphaned nephew to resist the pressures of WASP conformity emanating from the rest of his family. While the entirety of the two-and-a-half hour film is worthy of study (preferably in the rakish company of Mame?s eye-opener, the Sidecar), the early sequence during which young Patrick and Mame initially meet contains more than enough material for our purposes.

Using Sontag?s framework?that camp is interested in artifice and exaggeration, in the absurd and ?off,? in style over content?it?s easy to see what?s campy here. When Patrick and his nanny approach Mame?s apartment door, they are greeted with a smoke-breathing dragon peephole that only hints at the elaborate oriental decorative fantasy waiting within. Once through the portal, they find a gin-fueled ?affair? populated by a delightful mix of revelers suggesting a flapper-era superimposition of French salon and Studio 54 (campiness loves superimposition, especially when it?s anachronistic.) As Mame glides down the grand staircase brandishing an oversize cigarette holder and exclaiming ?dahhhling!? this and ?adorable little bootlegger? that, there?s no doubt that the tone is campy in the extreme. Much of the rapid-fire dialogue that follows is so nimble that you need multiple viewings to catch every witticism, but that?s in some sense by design: The stylistic effect of Mame?s frenetic chic is far more important than the specifics of what she?s actually saying. The point of this sequence, and indeed, the entirety of Auntie Mame, is to conjure a mood of madcap, jovial delight, to fuel a frolic at turns sassy and tender, but always light-hearted. It is, in a word, campy.

But as effervescent as Mame remains in my personal estimation, most contemporary viewers probably find it a little flat. Comedy at this late date depends, of course, on exhausting knots of irony, and?if Louie, Girls, and similar hits are any indication?an increasingly thick thread of self-deprecation fraying into outright abjection. By comparison, Auntie Mame feels altogether too forthright, too polished, and, most importantly, too sincere in its joyful exuberance to pass the smell test. Mame is the kind of character you?d imitate (think of April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation) now not because her campiness is authentically entertaining, but rather because putting on such an arch-aristocratic accent simultaneously conveys a certain cultural knowledge, an embarrassed self-consciousness of that knowledge, and, mediated through ?hipster irony,? a half-hearted apologia for that knowledge. We want people to know that we know what we know is maybe not authentically cool enough to know even as we can?t help but let them know that we know it. And lodged somewhere within all this tortured choreography, I?m told, is fun.

Suffice it to say, Mame?s campiness doesn?t translate well to the current vernacular, but fortunately that doesn?t mean it needs to be tossed. The film still has camp appeal to recommend it: You only need to know where?or better, how?to look. Tomorrow, we?ll revisit Mame?s affair, this time scouring it with a fine-toothed, jewel-inlaid ivory comb in search of the real thing.?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=6810bc1fca4e368d0e92b7dba6d04506

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High court denies appeal from ex-prof in Colorado

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill in his effort to reclaim his job.

The justices did not comment Monday in refusing to review a Colorado Supreme Court ruling in favor of the university.

Churchill faced condemnation and calls for his dismissal over an essay describing some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi leader who helped orchestrate the Holocaust.

The university investigated whether the piece was protected under the First Amendment and found that it was.

But while the investigation was under way, other academics accused Churchill of plagiarism and fraud in scholarly writings, which led to his termination in 2007. None of the allegations concerned the Sept. 11 essay.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-04-01-Supreme%20Court-Embattled%20Professor/id-4773b63fbc684a7c91a2d6daaa8d9411

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ECB's Draghi phoned Napolitano over resignation reports: press

ROME (Reuters) - European Central Bank President Mario Draghi phoned Italian President Giorgio Napolitano after media reports that the 87-year-old head of state was planning to resign early to clear the way for new elections, newspapers reported on Sunday.

Napolitano pledged on Saturday that he would stay in office until the end of his term on May 15 following reports that he planned to step down to break the deadlock created by last month's election, which left no party able to form a government.

The move would be needed to allow Italy to return to the polls before the summer holiday period, because of constitutional provisions which prevent a president from dissolving parliament in the final months of his mandate.

The main newspapers on Sunday all reported that Draghi had called Napolitano to express concern that his resignation would leave Italy without leadership at a time of mounting tension in financial markets, exacerbated by the bank crisis in Cyprus.

An ECB spokesman declined to comment. No comment was immediately available from Napolitano's office.

Helped by the ECB's pledge to backstop countries by buying their bonds if necessary, financial markets have not shown the levels of panic seen during the crisis which brought down Silvio Berlusconi's last government in 2011.

However a poorly received auction of mid and long-term debt last week underlined the danger of a renewed bout of turmoil that could destabilize Italy's 2-trillion-euro public debt if the impasse continues.

Rumors have been circulating for days that Moody's is preparing to cut its rating on Italy's sovereign debt, which is already only two notches above "junk" grade, partly due to the uncertain political outlook.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie and Paul Carrel in Frankfurt; editing by Andrew Roche)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ecbs-draghi-phoned-napolitano-over-resignation-reports-press-104806299.html

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