Where did my Netflix Queue go?

Not an invention but helpful trick for your missing Netflix / Qwikster Queue.

Did your Instant Queue or your DVD Queue go missing?
You know that Queue you have spent years building and trusting would be there for you.
Don't panic, they have not been permanently deleted.

With the changes made by Netflix from one company to two companies, one for streaming (Netflix) and one for DVD rentals by mail (Qwikster); you might find that when you came out of vacation mode and changed your plan or if you switched to only streaming or only DVD that the other Queue has disappeared.

One solution is to reactivate both services and the queue will return. But, if you don't want to pay for both services just to get your queue back then do the following:

1. using a web browser
2. login to your Netflix account.
3. bottom right of the screen under community click RSS feeds
4. And there they are under Personalized Feeds your (Queue and Queue to Watch Instantly)

You might want to print or save your feeds to a file just in case.

Custom ring tones share with friends

Do you enjoy having custom ring tones for each of your friends and family. You can currently download sounds, music, personally made recordings and use them as your default ring tone or assign that ring tone to a given caller or group of callers. But maybe what you really want is your contact to select their own ring tone. ex: in your mothers voice ... "pick up the phone, it's your mother, I know your avoiding me again" or your hipster friend ... "it's the dude, pick up the phone man" or your hippie friend might have meditative music. Well the wait is over.

You create as many ring tones as you want. They get stored in one of your social network sites or maybe a custom site app which is then added to your phone. Now when your friends look at your contact they see you have a selection of ring tones to choose from. They can keep the default or what they have already chosen for you or select to use one of your ring tones. Using Facebook, Google+, or your favorite site to share and connect with your peeps you can share your custom ring tones. On your Android / iPhone smart phone you might have noticed that you already get extra information about people in your address book that comes from Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google Voice, and other applications.This same interface is used to allow you to select that ring tone and have fun with every incoming call. Naturally you can select and save your choice or make a link so when your friend changes the ring tone you selected it changes automatically, that could be some dangerous politically incorrect fun the next time your phone rings.

Google Voice can also use this feature to select the announcement of a caller, how cool. Currently Google Voice reads the name to you as it appears your address book (can be funny) or when a caller is not in your address book the caller is asked to say there name and half the time they say "hi dude it" and they get cut off before they say there name and you have that one forever since they don't get a second chance.

Farmers Market fun, great meal, no cooking

Many people love going shopping at the farmers market. They meet their friends, make new friends, have samples, buy all those local yummy goodies. What a great day. The only issue is some people don't like cooking or have time or skill to make something happen with the great products they purchased.

You want the fun of your day at the farmers market and that great meal. You even found some cool recipes on-line (from home or via your smart phone while at the market). Here is how it works. You select your recipes or ask the chef to come up with a recipe based on the ingredients you bought and want to see in your meal. You check in with the chef stand at the farmers market. They take your goodies and a few hours later you pickup your meal (or it gets delivered).

All the fun, nutrition, and non of the cooking or cleaning.

Clothing/Stuff share co-op for your Stuff

Many of us having a clothing compulsion. We walk into a store and see so many great cloths we would love to have. So, we fill our closets with dozens, if not hundreds of dresses, shoes, shirts, etc. Life is great, ahhhh, we have all the great stuff until ... we go out again and see more great stuff that we don't have and so we buy more until we run out of money or space. George Carlin said it as only he can,  "Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff anymore." full text version and video.

We don't want to admit it but we soon figure out that we have more stuff then we can wear in a year and maybe a lifetime. I go back to my first sentence. Do we really see cloths that we have to have or are they cloths we want to wear. If you fall into the group that actually needs to have stuff and not the group that wants to wear it then this co-op is not for you. You should click on the direct marketed ads next to this post and buy more stuff. For the rest of you, you have found nirvana on par with a car share or ladder share that you only need once and a while.

Here is how it works:
The clothing co-op will store all your stuff and even catalog it for you with pictures.  Don't have time to clean it, they will do that for you as well. Sounds great but there is more. By joining the co-op and sharing your goodies you get access to a great collection of other peoples stuff as well. So maybe you no longer need to buy all the cloths you will only have time to wear once and instead you can wear other peoples great stuff too. Simply reserve your stuff and other peoples stuff you want to wear. The rest of the time others are welcome to wear them and you do the same with their clothing/stuff. This might remove some of the spontaneity of going into your closets and looking through the hundreds of dresses and deciding which one you want today but wait, you can go on-line or down to the co-op and look at racks and racks of stuff and decide what you want to wear.

Share stuff, get a small house, reduce environmental footprint, work less hours, be happy.

storing data securely in an insecure cloud

Simple way to have secure and efficient storage in an insecure cloud environment.

If your goal is to store data files or  backups of your data to the cloud and have the security that the data is private, what do you do. There is always the option to encrypt each file stored in the cloud and hope the cloud storage provider does not crack the encryption. Some countries have laws on what data can be stored within and outside of the country.

Here is a simple solution using existing RAID striping technology across multiple cloud providers:
Whether the data is in the cloud or lives on a client user machine the solution is the same.
When the files are saved they are stripped across multiple cloud services that might be operated my various providers. The files are parceled so as to be encrypted / useless to any one cloud host server. Just like RAID protocol you can decide how many servers could be down before the data was not recoverable. This solution not only allows your data to be secure while stored in an insecure environment, off-shored, etc, but having some cloud hosts go down would not effect your ability to access your data.

Last issue, storing the secure data / key to where the pieces of the data are stored and the key to reconstituting the data. This data is small could be stored at multiple secure locations which require security but very little storage space. The result is you can have large inexpensive storage facilities for the data and high security more expensive facilities to store the reconstitution data.