This is a band I just heard today; they are pretty good.  I imagine you'll hear them on the radio before long if you haven't already.

The guy has a pretty uniquely harsh voice - sort of Tom Waits like.  The lady's soft voice seems to be a pretty good counter to his harsh aggressiveness.

One of the biggest issues I've had with my new motorcycling experience has been the wind noise.  It's been really really loud - even at moderate speeds like 30mph.  The wind just whips off the windscreen and straight to my head.  Here is a photo of the windscreen.

You can see it just barely extends higher than the handlebars.  It does deflect some of the wind but a lot of it is deflected into my face.  Not so good.  Thus, yesterday I installed a new Givi D260ST Windscreen.   Here is it from the same profile view:

As you can see this one is much much taller. I got to ride with it for the first time this morning and the ride was much quieter.

I was a little concerned about putting such a tall shield on though - in the warmer months I like having some wind hit my torso - it's precisely why I wear a mesh jacket - yet I didn't want to have to switch between the screens based on season if I could help it.  My concerns were unfounded though.  I still get plenty of air( but not too much) passing through the jacket while I'm moving.

So far I'm happy with the upgrade. Plus it was the easiest thing I have ever installed.  Remove six total screws to take off the old screen, add the six screws back to put on the new one.  If you have a bike and are concerned with buffeting and wind noise adding an improved shield is a no-brainer.

At my job we are preparing to switch to a soft-phone only. That means no more handsets on our desks. Instead everything will be voice over ip (VOIP) via our computers. I have [a decent pair of headphones](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005N8W214/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&a...) I use for listening to music and I didn't want to give them up in order to wear an uncomfortable headset with mic and I didn't want to have two headsets on my desk.

Fortunately, I found a product called the [Antlion Modmic](http://www.modmic.com/). It basically has a little magnet you stick to the side of your headphones and then, when you want the microphone attached it just clicks in thanks to the magnet.

The first question everyone at the office had was if the little magnet messed with the audio in my headset at all. The short answer to that is no. While it has a great hold on the mic it doesn't seem to be nearly strong enough to affect the speakers.

It's really a clever little thing. The mic can rotate up or down to get out of your way and it feels like it is swiveling on a dial - but in truth the magnet and some nifty little teeth are keeping it in place. The only real negative is that it is another wire running around my desk.

So far everyone I've spoken to over Google Hangouts (our new soft phone system isn't active yet) has had no problem hearing or understanding me. In fact I don't think they even realize I'm using my computer and not my cellphone.

I've just had them for today but so far I feel like I picked a winner.


I'm assuming that both both apache2 and php5 are installed on your server (Ubuntu 14) already.  But that you've done nothing more than get those two things setup using the very simple instructions at the ubuntu documentation.  In setting mine up I only ran the following commands:

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Next up I used the basic list of system requirements at the known site to start getting the other stuff that isn't installed by default with php.

Before you can install the various extensions you're going to need PEAR which is a package manager for

sudo apt-get install php-pear

I am using mongodb as my backend for Known so next up I have to install mongo and the mongo extension for PHP:

sudo apt-get install mongodb
apt-get install php5-dev
sudo pecl install mongo

extension=mongo.so

sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev

sudo pecl install oauth

sudo service apache2 restart

dbstring=mongodb://localhost
dbname=Known

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo service apache2 restart

This strikes me as a guaranteed way to destroy my knees; but damn it also looks like fun.

source: reddit post

Ever since the announcment that Google was combining Voice with Hangouts I've had an odd influx of calls from people I don't know.  A lot of them are scammers trying to provide me with "Operating Support" while others are mysteries to me.   I also get a lot of calls for the person who had my main phone number before me.  I don't get many calls from people I actually know (maybe 2 in a day) so getting between 4 to 10 bullshit calls in a day was kind of annoying.  I realize these are small numbers but relative to each other the bullshit calls are a huge percentage of my daily phone answering.

I looked around for an app that would let me block calls from numbers I don't know but I couldn't find any that seemed consistently good.  I also poked around in the dialer app and in google voice but on my initial pass through I didn't see anything that would help me.  Fortunately, I revisited both and found a solution that I think is going to work.

Blocking Unknown Calls in the Dialer

In the Samsung stock dialer on my phone, in settings, under the call section, there is an option for "Call Rejection" - it's right at the top so I'm not sure how I ever missed it - there is an option of "Auto reject list".  

This is the secret setting.  The textual description didn't actually give me much hope though.

Manage auto reject numbers.

I didn't think there would be an option to manage anything but specific phone numbers. However, if you go in to that option the first choice is "Unknown" - it was unchecked by default. I checked it and now I'm hopeful that numbers that aren't in my contacts won't get through.

There is a real risk here of course - someone I know might call me from a number I don't know.  I'll cross that bridge when I get there.  At the moment the risk is worth the reward.  I might change my mind later.

Blocking in Google Voice

To block calls in a similar fashion with Google Voice I couldn't do anything within the app.  Instead I had to go to the Google Voice website.  The calls setting section here didn't offer me anything but the "Groups & Circles" tab has an interesting group called "Anonymous Callers" - I'm guessing this is anyone who isn't a contact of mine.  

Perfect (I hope).  Basically for each group you can define what voice mail greeting they get and you can define what phones the calls are forwarded to.  I simply set it so "Anonymous Callers" are sent to no phone and set a pretty generic voice mail greeting.

Google Voice Spam Filtering

Finally I want to make sure all of the calls that are rejected to go my Google Voice voice mail so that I can take advantage of the built in spam filtering.  Oddly, on my phone when I picked the voice mail provider it acts like it fails to set it as Google Voice yet, when I call my phone directly and then end up at voice mail I end up leaving the message with Google Voice.  I suppose this is some kind of weird AT&T edition Samsung S5 bug.  While the voicemail works as expected the phone itself shows a voice mail icon that serves no purpose because it takes you to the phone's dialer and AT&T has no copy of the voicemail.