How to get your Facebook Friends' birthdays into iCal

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1. Go to your Facebook Home page.

2. As in the photo above, click on Events on the top left.

3. Click on "Birthdays" in the middle of the page.

4. Scroll to the bottom of the next page to "Export Birthdays." Click on that.

5. In the box, click on the "webcal" link to add your Facebook Friends' birthdays to a separate calendar in iCal. (Events in Facebook can be exported the same way.)

 

Study: British Facebook users drunk in 76% of tagged photos - Holy Kaw!

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Booze in one hand, camera in the other--a common starting point for a night of photo documented debauchery that will inevitably end up plastered across Facebook. Drunken shenanigan pictures have become commonplace on the world’s most popular social network, but Brits take the cake (or cocktail?) when it comes to posting boozehound photos.

Researchers have found that average British Facebook user is intoxicated in 76 percent of the photographs tagged of them on the site. Despite the rampant boozey photo posting, 26 percent still allow all their pictures to be seen by anyone.

“We’re all guilty of going out and having a good time, but nowadays the photos inevitably catch up with us online, so we wanted to look at how much these photos dominate our presence on social media sites,” said Rebecca Huggler, co-founder of MyMemory, the site behind the study.

Other uncovered factoids worth toasting (or not) include:

  • 93% of respondents have untagged photographs they considered “too embarrassing”
  • 56% confessed to having drunk photos that they would not want coworkers to view
  • 8% had photographs tagged that they thought could cause “serious trouble at work”

Full story at Mashable.

Improve your sober Facebook-ing.

Photo credit: Fotolia

Beyond the Passé in Tech Gifts (see especially Griffin CinemaSeat 2 for just $11.50!)

That’s partly because you’re young, of course. But it’s also because you’re responsible only for opening the presents, not shopping for them.

This year, there will be a lot of the usual under the tree: iPod Touches, iPads, phones. Kindles and Nooks. Cameras.

But if you look hard enough, you can find less predictable tech gifts — things they certainly don’t own already. Here are some high-tech suggestions. Call it the 12 Gifts of Christmas.

AUDIOBULBS ($300 a pair). A home sound system can be a deeply satisfying luxury (some might say necessity). Installing it, though, is rarely as fulfilling.

These speakers, however, are as easy to install as screwing in a light bulb — because they are light bulbs. They’re compact fluorescents with built-in speakers. They turn any lamp or recessed lighting fixture into a speaker, without any new wires trailing across the floor. The power isn’t exactly, you know, Megadeth, but it’s distortion-free and clear.

You plug your sound source (CD player or TV, for example) into the wireless base; it even has an iPhone/iPod charging jack. All you need is a new set of jokes along the lines of, “How many politicians does it take to screw in a speaker?”

BEDOL WATER CLOCK ($19). These bedside alarm clocks (various colors and styles) are cheap, insubstantial, mass-produced and basic. They’re impressive, though, because of their power source: water.

No battery, no power cord. Each is a plastic reservoir with a big, clear LCD display on the front. Every few weeks, you pour in ordinary water. A tiny submerged panel creates a galvanic-battery effect, producing just enough electricity to power the clock.

Don’t count on seeing water-powered laptops, refrigerators and cars any time soon. But on its own small scale, the water clock is a marvel.

POWERTRIP ($109). At its core, the PowerTrip is just a rechargeable battery — an emergency power source for your other electronics. It holds enough power to charge an iPad once or a phone four times.

But there’s more to it than that. On one side is a standard plug to a wall power outlet for charging. On another side is a solar panel, so you can recharge it on a windowsill.

On the far end, a USB jack, just like the one on a computer. Any gadget that can charge from a computer can therefore charge from the PowerTrip. (It also comes with standard Apple, Mini USB and Micro USB jacks.)

It also doubles (or would that be triples?) as a flash drive with four gigabytes of storage (or eight, for $119), for your backing-up convenience.

CANON X MARK I MOUSE SLIM ($28). A comfortable, solid, wireless two-button mouse with a numeric keypad and calculator built-in. Sounds silly, maybe, but it’s actually rather great, especially if you crunch numbers for a living.

TRUCONNECT MI-FI ($90). The Mi-Fi looks like a fat metal credit card — but it’s a portable, personal, pocketable Wi-Fi hot spot. Up to five laptops or iPod Touches can get online anywhere you go. The trouble with the Mi-Fi has always been the fees — usually $60 a month. That’s fine if you’re some executive on an expense account, but steep if you only sometimes travel.

The TruConnect model is exactly the same as the Mi-Fi models sold through Sprint, Verizon, Virgin and others, but with pricing that’s far better suited to the occasional road warrior: $5 a month, plus 3.9 cents a megabyte.

That’s a hard-to-gauge statistic, of course — how many megabytes does it cost to check your e-mail or call up a Web site? But the per-megabyte price is roughly what you’d pay for “tethering” on a cellphone (where your cellphone acts as the hot spot) — and with the TruConnect, you pay only for what you actually use.

LOOXCIE 2 ($150). Goofy name, cool idea: a wearable Bluetooth camcorder (it goes over your ear) that’s always rolling. If something worthwhile happens, you tap a button to retain the last 30 seconds, and even post it online.

You can also start and stop manually, as with a camcorder. The clever part is that you review the footage on your phone. Why pay for a screen and storage on the Looxcie itself, when you have one already in your pocket?

GRIFFIN CINEMASEAT 2 ( $11.50). You sling this leatherette iPod frame over the front headrest of your car, for the entertainment pleasure of those in the back seats. That’s it. Great idea, nicely executed — there’s even a mesh pocket for earbuds — and it’s about $1,000 less expensive than a DVD screen installed by the factory.

PRANKPACK ($20 for three). Your lucky recipient tears off the wrapping paper to reveal — the Bathe & Brew (“Shower Coffee Maker + Soap Dispenser”) or the iDrive (steering-wheel mount for your iPad).

The products are fake, of course, but the boxes look authentic — hilariously so. You can stuff a real gift inside, if you must. But the real point is the hysterical moments as your recipients slowly realize they’ve been pranked.

IWATCHZ ($21 to $90). The touch-screen iPod Nano can show you the time using any of 16 handsome watch-face designs. It’d make a gorgeous wristwatch — if it had a band.

That’s the point of the iWatchz watchbands — from silicone rubber to leather to handsome stainless steel — for the Nano. Clipping the Nano to the band is easy, once you figure out how it’s supposed to go.

WITHINGS WI-FI BODY SCALE ($160). Yes, kids, the Internet has finally come to the humble bathroom scale. Every time you step on this one with bare feet, it calculates your weight and body-mass statistics, and then transmits them to a password-protected Web site and your app phone so you can track your progress (or lack thereof). The amount of data can be overwhelming. But for the modern self-aware obsessive, there’s nothing else like it.

ROKU LT ($50). It’s no secret that more and more people are getting their TV and movies from the Internet instead of (or in addition to) the cable company. But there’s never been a simpler, less expensive way to do it than this tiny box. It hops onto your home’s Wi-Fi network and plugs into your hi-def TV set. Its simple, attractive system lets you navigate its streaming offerings: pay movie and TV services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu Plus and HBO GO, plus free Internet channels like Facebook, CNET, Pandora radio, and 300 you’ve never heard of. To be clear: the source is the Internet, the screen is the TV you already own. To be clearer: 50 bucks.

PARROT AR.DRONE QUADRICOPTER ($300). In desperate economic times, a $300 toy may not scream “buy me.” But if your special someone was extra nice, here’s an unforgettable gift.

It’s a remote-control flying machine — possibly the world’s first that you can fly successfully the very first time. It’s a big, flat, four-propeller craft that you control by tipping your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android phone in the direction you want to fly. You can execute a perfect takeoff or landing with one tap of the phone’s screen. Two cameras let you see, on your phone, what the Quadricopter is seeing.

This thing is so controlled and maneuverable, you can even fly it around indoors. The battery lasts only 12 minutes on a charge, so consider a second battery ($30) as a stocking stuffer.

And there you have it: 12 gift ideas for 12 kinds of people. They may not all hit the bull’s-eye, but one thing’s for sure: they will be appreciated a lot more than some pear tree with a bird in it.

The Real War on Christmas...by Fox News (an excellent piece on the meaning of Christmas)

Each Advent in recent years, around the time when those prefab, do-it-yourself gingerbread house kits appear on supermarket shelves, Fox News launches its (allegedly) defensive campaign commonly known as the “War on Christmas.”

Fox News’ “war” is designed to criticize the “secularization” of our culture wrought by atheists, agnostics, liberals, leftists, progressives, and separation of church and state zealots— i.e. Democrats. This irreligious coalition force is allegedly waging a strategic offensive on Christmas, trying to banish the sacred symbols of the season, denying our religious heritage, and even undermining the spiritual rubrics upon which our great nation is built.

Fox News positions itself as the defender of the faith and all things sacred. And Bill O’Reilly fancies himself the “watchdog” of Christmas.

Fox News’ usual targets include shopping malls and stores that replace their “Merry Christmas” greetings with “Happy Holidays,” and state governments that no longer call their official "Christmas" trees by their rightful name, or municipalities that ban any depictions of, or references to, the Christmas season in public places. Those who are attacked defend themselves, often claim that they are really religious too, and the perennial war is on.

But what we actually have here is a theological problem, where cultural and commercial symbols are confused with truly Christian ones, and the meaning of the holy season is missed all together.

The war on Christmas is really about what brand of “civil religion” America should have. The particular (read: biblical) meaning of Christmas, for Christians, has almost nothing to do with the media war.

What a surprise.

What is Christmas? It is the celebration of the Incarnation, God’s becoming flesh — human — and entering into history in the form of a vulnerable baby born to a poor, teenage mother in a dirty animal stall. Simply amazing. That Mary was homeless at the time,a member of a people oppressed by the imperial power of an occupied country whose local political leader, Herod, was so threatened by the baby’s birth that he killed countless children in a vain attempt to destroy the Christ child, all adds compelling historical and political context to the Advent season.

The theological claim that sets Christianity apart from any other faith tradition is the Incarnation. God has come into the world to save us. God became like us to bring us back to God and show us what it means to be truly human.

That is the meaning of the Incarnation. That is the reason for the season.

In Jesus Christ, God hits the streets.

It is theologically and spiritually significant that the Incarnation came to our poorest streets. That Jesus was born poor, later announces his mission at Nazareth as “bringing good news to the poor,” and finally tells us that how we treat “the least of these” is his measure of how we treat him and how he will judge us as the Son of God, radically defines the social context and meaning of the Incarnation of God in Christ. And it clearly reveals the real meaning of Christmas.

The other explicit message of the Incarnation is that Jesus the Christ’s arrival will mean “peace on earth, good will toward men.” He is “the mighty God, the everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace.” Jesus later calls on his disciples to turn the other cheek, practice humility, walk the extra mile, put away their swords, love their neighbors — and even their enemies — and says that in his kingdom, it is the peacemakers who will be called the children of God. Christ will end our warring ways, bringing reconciliation to God and to one another.

None of that has anything to do with the Fox News Christmas. In fact, quite the opposite.

Making sure that shopping malls and stores greet their customers with “Merry Christmas” is entirely irrelevant to the meaning of the Incarnation. In reality it is the consumer frenzy of Christmas shopping that is the real affront and threat to the season.

Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet, would cost about $20 billion. Let’s just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season.

Imagine Jesus walking into the mall, seeing the Merry Christmas signs, and expressing his humble thanks for how the pre- and post-Christmas sales are honoring to him. How about credit cards for Christ?

While we’re at it, here’s another point of clarification: The arrival of the Christ child has nothing to do with trees or what we call them.

Evergreens and wreaths, holly and ivy, and even mistletoe turn out to be customs borrowed from ancient Roman and Germanic winter solstice celebrations, assimilated and co-opted by the church after Constantine made peace between his empire and the Christians.

Now, my family loves our Christmas tree, but its bright lights and wonderful ornaments don’t teach my children much about why Jesus came into the world. We do that in other ways, such as giving needed gifts — goats, sheep, and chickens and the like — to the poorest children and families of the world though the World Vision web site on Christmas Day. The goal is to make our sons more excited about the gifts they give than the ones they get, and it usually works. Last year, my boys sponsored a child in Ghana.

I have no problem with the public viewing of symbols from all of the world’s religions at appropriate times in their religious calendars (which can actually be educational for all of our children) and believe that doing so is consistent with our democratic and cultural pluralism.

But I don’t believe that respectfuly and publicly honoring those many religious symbols has changed many lives, for better or for worse. Much more important than symbols and symbolism is how we live the faith that we espouse. And here is where Fox News’s war on Christmas is most patently unjust.

The real Christmas announces the birth of Jesus to a world of poverty, pain, and sin, and offers the hope of salvation and justice.

The Fox News Christmas heralds the steady promotion of consumerism, the defense of wealth and power, the adulation of money and markets, and the regular belittling or attacking of efforts to overcome poverty.

The real Christmas offers the joyful promise of peace and the hope of reconciliation with God and between humankind.

The Fox News Christmas proffers the constant drumbeat of war, the reliance on military solutions to every conflict, the demonizing of our enemies, and the gospel of American dominance.

The real Christmas lifts up the Virgin Mary’s song of praise for her baby boy: “He has brought the mighty down from their thrones, and lifted the lowly, he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.”

The Fox News Christmas would label Mary’s Magnificat as “class warfare.”

So if there is a war on Christmas it's the one being waged by Fox News.

Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: A Guide for Economic and Moral Recovery, and CEO of Sojourners. He blogs at www.godspolitics.com. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.