My friend Daniel tweeted this link to me this morning about Pley, the “Netflix of LEGO” where you can borrow and return LEGO sets. Â My first reaction was “That is Brilliant”, my second reaction was “until I have to return a set and spend hours searching the house to figure out where the kids lost all the pieces”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOh1-Oq9se8
The Superbowl will be played in my backyard this year, today the NFL was nice enough to send me an email letting me know that tickets are now available.
Out of curiosity I clicked, the cheapest tickets
and the most expensive tickets
I guess I will be watching it the comfort of my den 🙂
On December 24, 1968 one of NASA’s most famous pictures “Earthrise” was taken during the Apollo 8 Mission. Â NASA recreated how the photo was taken in this video
It’s no secret one of my favorite movies is Top Gun, here it is in GIF Format
via The Creators Project  where you can also watch Avatar, Up and The Shining as GIFs
I enjoyed this video on the Internet Archive Project  it is well worth 12 minutes to watch it.
Internet Archive from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.
via Mental Floss
If you are looking to understand what Bitcoin is I though this video was a good explanation.
Everyone loves Free products, but just look at the last few weeks/months  here is a list of services or apps I use(d) that are going away
Tweetdeck (Air version)
There are others like Otixo which I used which transitioned from Freemium to paid, at which point I made a value judgement that it was not worth it to me to pay for that service.  Ultimately you get what you pay for, and when you are not paying, you are simply hoping the free service you are using continues to be there or can even financially remain viable.
Google Reader is obviously the one that hurts I have been using it since its inception back on 2005, and it us a big part of my daily workflow. Â I get a lot of information in Google Reader, and its ability to sync with mobile clients for reading on the go is valuable. Â Rather than dwell on this I am sure a suitable replacement will appear, there is clearly a need for a quality RSS reader with all the syncing, and someone will fill the void.
The bigger lesson here is I am going to have to take a look at the services/apps I use and assign them value, which are nice to have and if they go away so be it, which are important and if I am paying for or willing to pay for? Â I think of things like the Free edition of Google Apps which Google no longer offers. Â How long will it be before Google pulls the plug on that and tells me to pay or get out?
So over the next month or so I will try to better catalog what I use, and what value they have, and determine if my data or apps are right for me. Â That is the real lesson here you should do the same.
I have had my Roku box for a little over a year now, I mainly use it to connect to Amazon Prime Instant Video, Netflix, and occasionally Pandora. Â I have always known there is more to do with a Roku but never took the time to explore.
Over the holiday season I was reading many of the “Got a new_____ Here are some tips” posts and found this one on Roku, which introduced me to the Plex Media Server.
Plex took 5 minutes to install on a machine at home, and less time to configure and point to my media library. Â For the most part Plex figured out what was what and displayed the right metadata, on a few items I had to perform some file name cleanup to get them to display properly.
Next up install the iPad app (or Android), and the Plex Channel on the Roku box and like magic I can access my library from anywhere.  The performance on both the TV and the iPad has been excellent so far.
Plex also offers Premium features, which I have not tried, though the upcoming Dropbox integration  looks interesting.
Plex Media Server (Available for Windows, Mac and Linux)
See the famous Turkey Drop clip here, not surprisingly I got 100% on this one.
Score: 100% (9 out of 9)
The Mental Floss “As God is My Witness I Thought Turkeys Could Fly” lunchtime quiz
