Review of 5 HDTV Indoor Antennas: Mohu Leaf, Terk FDTV2A, Antennas Direct Clearstream 2, RCA 1450B and Rabbit Ears

Cord-cutting is a growing trend to get rid of expensive cable in favor of old-fashion TV antennas and the myriad of streaming services, such as Amazon Instant Video and Netflix (each with free trials). So what's the best antenna to receive the most channels over the air when nearby trees, tall buildings, and weather all affect reception? Here's a quick review of several of the best antennas for 2014 that I found after some online research.

For those wanting to watch Netflix and Hulu on an HDTV check out this review of streaming media players, including: Roku, Boxee, and Apple TV.

Review of 4 Drill Kits: Dewalt, Makita, Black & Decker, and Genesis

Here we compare four of the best cordless drill/driver kits for 2014: Black & Decker BDC120VA100, Dewalt DC970K-2, Genesis GCD18BK, and Makita LXFD01CW. The review power tool reviews the best drills with a range of prices and best cordless drill brands, like the pricier Makita LXFD01CW and the more affordable/inexpensive Genesis GCD18BK model.

Review of Best Energy Efficient Space Heaters: Lasko Ceramic vs Holmes Fan vs Vornado Vortex vs DeLonghi Mica

Reviewed here are some of the best energy efficient space heaters for 2014, including heaters by Lasko, Holmes, Vornado, and DeLonghi. The heaters come with a range of different features to meet your heating needs.

Review of Best Tablets For Kids Buying Guide: InnoTab 3S vs LeapPad Ultra vs Fuhu Nabi 2 vs Kindle Fire HD

This review will look at some of the best tablets for kids in 2014, including the VTech InnoTab 3S, the LeapFrog LeapPad Ultra, and the Fuhu Nabi 2. We'll also compare these tablets to the Amazon Kindle Fire HD, as an alternative to a purely kid tablet that your children are less likely to outgrow quickly. If these, tablets still don't fit your needs, others you might want to look at include the Kurio Kids Tablet or the Tabeo 7 Inch Kids Tablet.

Review of the Best Digital Multimeters for HVAC and DIYers in 2014: Fluke, Fieldpiece, and Extech

Reviewed here are some of the best digital multimeters (DMM) for 2014, including multimeters by Fluke, Fieldpiece, and Extech. Digital multimeters come with a range of different features whether you are a professional or student working in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) or a hobbyist or interested in do-it-yourself (DIY) projects looking for a quality multimeter rather than a cheap alternative. Reviewed here are true RMS (root-mean-squared) multimeters, unlike more affordable "average responding meters", true RMS (TRMS) meters are more accurate at taking voltage and current readings. Quoting the Stedi-Power website, average responding meters produce correct readings on linear loads such as standard induction motors, resistance heating, and incandescent lights. But when loads are non-linear, those containing semiconductors, the average responding meters typically read low. You can find more information on the benefits of true RMS meters on the Stedi-Power website. If a multimeter does not describe itself as a true RMS meter, you are probably dealing with a averaging responding meter.

Review of Streaming Media Players: Roku vs Boxee vs Apple TV vs Chromecast

Reviewed here are streaming media players; the Boxee Box vs Roku 3 vs Apple TV vs Chromecast allow users to play media from internet web services, like HBO Go, Netflix, Vudu, Pandora, etc. on HDTVs. These are some of the best media boxes around, and each device has its own advantages and disadvantages that are reviewed and depending on what services you're most interested in these devices may help you get rid of your cable bill for good.

Review of the Best Smartwatches: Sony MN2SW, Nike Sportswatch, Motorola MotoACTV, Pebble Watch, and LunaTik/iPod Nano Watch

There has been a lot of recent buzz regarding smartwatches. There are several promising alternatives, a couple of which are geared towards exercise buffs. Reviewed here are several top smartwatches for 2014: Sony MN2SW SmartWatch, Nike+ SportWatch, Motorola MOTOACTV, Pebble Watch, and the LunaTik Wrist Watch Strap for the iPod Nano 6G.

Review of Android Gaming Consoles: Ouya vs Gamestick

Both the Ouya and the GameStick are Kickstarter-funded Android gaming platforms being released in 2013. These two consoles show the power of Android for gaming and how far mobile gaming has come in recent years. These two consoles push Android gaming to the next level over devices like the Moga Pro game controller for smartphones. There are a lot of similarities between the Ouya vs Gamestick, but there are several key differences, especially, in the hardware that potential buyers should keep in mind. The Ouya and the GameStick reviewed here are competing as alternatives against the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One that are already being pre-sold.

How to Detect Ad Blocking using Javascript and Google Analytics Event Tracking

For website publishers that depend on ad revenue, an increasingly pressing question is what is the percentage Internet users are actively using the ad blocking plugin AdBlock Plus or similar adblocking plugins, such as NoScript and Ghostery? Research by ClarityRay, in an answer on Quora, has produced statistics stating that on average about 9% of ad impressions may be blocked, that ad blocking is higher in the US and Europe, and that users of Firefox and Linux have an ad blocking rate of about 18% and 29%, respectively. In the case of Firefox, AdBlock Plus has over 15 million daily active users and the ad blocking rate for Android users is gaining to the point that Google has recently taken the step of removing Adblock Plus and similar ad blocking apps from its Android store Google Play, probably in an effort to defend Adsense.

Reinvested Dividends: Growth of 8 Simple ETF Portfolios

Dividend reinvesting helps increase the total value of an investor's portfolio; here we look at the effect of dividend reinvesting on the total returns of eight simple exchange-traded fund (ETF) portfolios discussed in a previous post on portfolio diversification for lazy investing. These eight portfolios allow investors to be diversified, while keeping the number of necessary transactions low, as well as the overall expenses of the portfolio. 

Portfolio Diversification: Asset Correlations of 8 Simple ETF Portfolios

Portfolio diversification helps investors balance risk and reward in their portfolios. Here we look at the investment diversification of eight simple exchange-traded fund (ETF) portfolios. ETFs are gaining a growing following among young investors interested in portfolio diversification, but who often shun actively managed mutual funds. ETFs come with several benefits over mutual funds, such as lower costs; in fact, several brokerage firms offer commission-free ETF trading, like Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and E*Trade, which further adds to their benefits.

Watch a Random Episode for Any Show on Hulu

Sometimes you just want to watch a random episode of a show on Hulu. Select a show and a link to a random episode will appear; click "Get Random Episode" to get a different random episode.

Installing and Setting Up HaxeFlixel on Windows

HaxeFlixel is a Flixel port for Haxe the "universal" programming language and the NME application framework to support applications on iOS, Android, webOS, BlackBerry, Windows, Mac, Linux and Flash Player without requiring code changes for each target; Flixel is a popular library for developing 2D Flash games. This tutorial will teach you how to install Haxe, NME, HaxeFlixel, their dependencies, and try out one of the HaxeFlixel demos using Flash.

How to Install CWCheat for PSP and CWCheat Databases

What is CWCheat?

CWCheat for PSP is a cheat system like "Action Replay", "Game Genie", "GameShark", etc for gaming consoles. CWCheat allows gamers to search and edit cheats with an in-game menu.

Download CWCheat

To install CWCheat, download CWCheat and the CWCheat database.

• Download CWCheat for PSP
• Download CWCheat Database

How to Install CWCheat

Follow the steps below after connecting your hacked PSP to your computer via USB, if any of the instructions don't make sense, watch this "How To Install CWCheat On 6.60 PRO-B10" YouTube video.

1. Make an "SEPLUGINS" folder in the root directory of the memory stick
2. In the "SEPLUGINS" folder, create another new folder called "CWCHEAT"
3. Place the extracted cwceat prx file from the downloaded archive and move it to the “cwcheat” folder
4. In the "SEPLUGINS" folder, make 2 text files. One "GAME.txt" and "GAME150.txt"
5. Copy (without the quotes) and paste one of the following entries into the two text files depending on your PSP model. The 1 after the PRX file is to turn CWCheat on, 0 will turn CWCheat off.
• PSP 1000/2000/3000: "ms0:/seplugins/cwcheat/cwcheat.prx 1"
• PSP GO: "ef0:/seplugins/cwcheat/cwcheat.prx 1"
6. Download and extract the CWCheat database files into the CWCHEAT folder
7. On your device, hit Select choose "Reset Device" from the VSH menu
9. In a game, open the CWCheat menu by holding the Select button for more than 3 seconds
10. Once in the menu, change "[N] Enable Cheats" by hitting the X button
11. Then go to "Select Cheats" to enable specific cheats for the game

Cleaning Data with Google Refine and Visualization with Fusion Tables

Introduction
Google Refine is a powerful faceted browser for cleaning up data from large data sets that might contain errors and connecting that data to external databases (known as reconciliation). As an example this article will go through the steps of creating a data visualization using Google Maps to show the locations of universities for a list of graduate students, below is the final product. This process involves using many of the main data cleaning and mining features of Google Refine.

Data Clean Up
Once Google Refine is downloaded and unzipped, it runs in a browser at http://127.0.0.1:3333 and does not require installation. Google Refine can handle large data sets and the data can be imported into Google Refine using many common formats, like delimited data (e.g. comma or tab-delimited), Excel, JSON, and XML. To create the project, the list of students and their universities were imported as a tab-delimited file on the "Create Project" screen; Google Refine automatically determined that the data was tab-delimited, and it assumed that the first row included column names. Google Refine provides a preview window where users can change import settings, such as delimiters, selecting column headings, etc.You can also do some data clean up here by ignore comment rows that might be at the top of the data file.

Each column in Google Refine has a drop-down menu for filtering (known as faceting), sorting, and reconciling. It should be noted that during this entire process, it is easy to undo any changes using the "Undo / Redo" tab in the left hand sidebar. Options for reconciling are in the "Reconcile" menu shown below and the first step is to select "Start reconciling..." in the submenu.

This brings up a new window where pre-existing reconciliation services can be selected or new services can be added. Google Refine by default includes two Freebase-based services that are useful for more powerful data mining; these were used to get the latitude and longitude locations for the universities. Google Refine, again, tries to automatically determine what type of data is in the column; in this case it guessed correctly, and the first option is "College/University" with options like "Educational Institution", also, being in the list.

Once the reconciliation is done, several changes happened in the interface. Under the "Graduate University" column name, a green bar appeared to give a visual cue as to how many universities were matched. Within the column, universities that were correctly matched were highlighted in blue. Those that were not matched correctly had possible options below them with a check mark box to select the option; there was also a double check mark box that repeated the option for all identical entries.

Two new boxes then appeared in the sidebar; these are the facets (filters). The judgment box showed counts for the students who had blank entries, had their universities matched, or where there was no match. The second box was a histogram that visualizes the scores for the matching. Clicking on the "(blank)" entry in the judgment box causes only the rows with a blank entry to be shown; multiple selections can be made using the "include" option that appears on mouse over.

For the initial data cleanup, the students with blank entries were deleted by first clicking on the "(blank)" entry. Then the deleting was done in the data display window by clicking on the "Remove all matching rows" option in the "Edit rows" submenu of the "All" column drop-down menu. In the example case, this left about 30 rows not being reconciled because the university name contained a secondary affiliation acronym. These acronyms needed to be removed and reconciliation needed to be redone. There are two ways of editing the cell values: 1) Mousing over a cell in the data display brings up an edit menu to change the cell value (shown below); all cells with matching contents can be changed and 2) a transformation can be done on all the cells at once.

This example used the second option. The acronyms always appear in the form "acronym / university name", so a single transformation was done on the cells. In the "Graduate University" drop-down menu there is an the option to "Edit cells" with the submenu option "Transform..." that brings up the window shown below where the Google Refine Expression Language (GREL) is used to transform the cell values; Clojure and Jython-based expressions can also be used if you need to clean up data in a more advanced manner. The window has two main sections: 1) a text area to input an expression and 2) a preview section to see how the column will be transformed; this section also gives tabs to see past expressions.

By default, the expression is "value"; "value" is the current value of the cell, and expressions are applied to this value. To select out the university name, the "match" function was used. The match function works by using regular expressions to match some part of the string; all the accessible GREL functions can be found here. Below is the expression that will pull out just the university name.

value.match(/.*\/\s(.*)/)[0]

Parentheses surround the part of the cell value to be retrieved. Multiple selections can be made, which are returned as an array. Here, only one selection is made so it is array entry "0". After the transformation, the reconciliation was repeated, which brought down the unmatched count to 5. Another way to reconcile is to do a manual search; this is the option that appears below the check mark options and was used to eliminate the remaining few erroneous entries.

Retrieving Latitude and Longitude
With the universities cleaned up, the next step was to retrieve the latitudes and longitudes by adding columns with this information from Freebase.

Selecting the "Add columns from Freebase ..." option in the screenshot above brings up a window where various pieces of information can be pulled back; for this example, first, GeoLocation >> Longitude was selected, and then, this was repeated with Latitude. Some of the entries were missing, so, for simplicity, these rows were removed. To do this, the first step was to create facet to identify the blank entries. Facets are created from the column drop-down menu "Facet", then "Text Facet" for either the latitude or longitude columns (this assumes that the absence of one means the absence of the other). Creating this facet will create a new box in the sidebar. The last option is the "(blank)" option used to select only the blank entries and these rows were deleted using the option from the "All" column, as before. Lastly, at the top of the interface is an option to export the results into several formats; "Tab-separated value" was selected because it is easily imported into other software.

Generating a Google Map
Visual representation of data can be very useful when dealing with large data sets; here is a technique for visualizing data on Google Maps. The university locations were placed onto a Google Map using Google Fusion Tables; this is a beta feature of Google Docs. Creating a new table brings up an import dialog. Once the import is complete, Fusion Tables will have a Visualize menu at the top with a visualize as Map option; this is shown below. By selecting this option, Fusion Tables should then be able to automatically take the latitude and longitude columns and render them on a Google Map for a nice visualization; this is the first figure of the article. The map can then be exported as KML or embedded in another webpage.

Which Day Has Better Sales: Black Friday or After Christmas?

So which day has better sales: Black Friday or the day after Christmas? Here is a comparison using Fry's Electronics ad scans for the two sales events from 2010; the ad scans are from Fry's Black Friday. There wasn't a lot of overlap in the items in the ads, but the simple conclusion, at least just from looking at these ads, is that Black Friday has the better prices.

Item	Black Friday	After Christmas
LG 20" LCD Monitor	$89.99	$129.99
Lenovo Computer	$299.98*	$279
Blue Ray Boxsets	$19.99	$24.99
"Major Brand" 32" Plasma HDTV	$197	$299
Samsung Washer and Dryer Pair	$579.98	$949.99
Sony W370 Digital Camera	$129	$149
JVC Everio 16GB Camcorder	$199	$199

* Computer bundled with a Viewsonic monitor

Fry's Electronics 2010 After Christmas Sale Ad Scan
Fry's Electronics 2010 Black Friday Ad Scan

Run Tiddlywiki on Android Using Firefox

Firefox for Android is capable of saving Tiddlywiki files stored locally on an Android phone. To access the wiki just point to the wiki file on the phone in the address bar. For instance, if the Tiddlywiki file is called wiki.html and stored on your SD card, the URL would be "file:///mnt/sdcard/wiki.html" without the quotes.

Scientific Bonus Points for Database Contributions

Measuring scientific productivity is a concern at many different levels especially in terms for promotions and the competition brought on by limited funding sources. The area of life sciences is no exception to this; the National Institutes of Health (NIH) saw a flat budget between 2003-08. And even though the NIH will enjoy a temporary budget increase thanks to the Recovery Act and with President Barack Obama's 2011 budget request, there are no guarantees for what the future holds.

The most common method for assessing the performance of researchers is by looking at a researcher's publication record and the journal impact factor of those the publications. A more recent development in quantifying research output is the h-index by Jorge Hirsch in 2005 that looks at scientific output also as a measure of publication citations. Bornmann and Daniel outline the methodology of the h-index and various concerns about using the metric in their 2008 publication. For those curious about their own h-index value, here is an h-index calculator built using Google Scholar. But what else do researchers do that could be seen as "scientific output" and how could these activities be measured? As a computational biologist, I have a specific interest in online databases, which often serve as the main sources of data for projects in my field, and ways that researchers could be encouraged to contribute to them.

Jesse Schell, a Carnegie Mellon professor who teaches Game Design, recently gave a presentation at the Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (DICE) 2010 summit where he speaks about recent successes in game design in which games break into reality, drawing on ones' real social networks or achievement metrics that transcend individual games. Towards the end of the presentation, he imagines a world where one day we might earn bonus points simply by brushing our teeth or high-fiving friends. The video clip below shows the relevant segment and the full video can be found at G4TV.



So what about the life sciences? Where are the scientific bonus points? One idea proposed by Martijn Van Iersel, a developer for Pathvisio and WikiPathways, as a Google Summer of Code project is the development of a Scientific Karma website. The proposal calls for some standardized and automated way for contributions to various online communities to be scored. The website would display a list of wikis and communities that researchers have contributed to and a contributor's score for that site. Active contribution to online databases is important as it enhances all of our understandings and access to larger datasets helps research projects draw better conclusions about increasingly complex biological systems.

Bornmann, L., & Daniel, H. (2008). The state of h index research. Is the h index the ideal way to measure research performance? EMBO reports, 10 (1), 2-6 DOI: 10.1038/embor.2008.233

Google and Microsoft Sued by Mini Music Label

Blue Destiny Records has sued both Google and Microsoft for allegedly "facilitating and enabling" distribution of copyrighted songs, illegally. The suit alleges that RapidShare runs "a distribution center for unlawful copies of copyrighted works." RapidShare is helped by Google and Microsoft, which benefit from the ad relationships, according to the suit. Blue Destiny has attempted to links to pages with RapidShare links to their music via DMCA takedown notices, and Google has, apparently, not complied, while Microsoft's Bing site has removed the links. RapidShare for its part is based outside of the US and does not accept DMCA notices.

Funny Google Street View Images 7

A collection of the funny Google Street View images taken from a variety of websites. More funny Google Street View images: 

• Medieval warriors, thong showing, girl flashing, ... 
• Girl in bikini, man with blow-up doll, van on fire, ... 
• Google kills donkey, mooning, giving birth, ... 
• Gangster with shotgun, girls in bikinis, cadavers, ... 
• Girls showering, pet penguin, hot babes, werewolf, ... 
• Skeletor, giant chickens, rednecks, Russian gangsters, ... 

School girl wipes out on Google Street View

Close of sea gull

Sea gull portrait

Attack of the sea gulls

Spiderman practicing

Corpse in the middle of the street

Street lugers 

Not quite Speed Racer

Guy walks out of strip club

Guy tries to commit suicide by napping in street

Girls sunbathing on Google Street View

SUV crashes 

Person takes dump 

SWAT teams greets Google Street View

Tiger runs loose

Guy stuffed into trash can

Sad UK guy

Wayne and Garth out for a walk

BUS STOP NOT IN USE, yet they wait

Popping wheelies for Google Street View