GemMan

You just have to believe there is a better way to do this. Thumbs up for Friday. If she were serious about hiding she would dye her hair. And you say the cat can’t get out of this thing? Monday…even the sunflower can’t get happy for a new week of work. No I am a turtle! He looks super! The Bro…..looks like some guys do need a little extra support. Gun safety people…its’ all about common sense. Hey now…oh I see what you did there.

Daily Cool Pics Everything can look different if you take time to see it differently.

10 Clever Ways People Make Money in Today's Economy Star registry Who owns the stars? Nobody, right? Therefore, you can put stars under your name and get certification for it! This, of course, comes with a price. International Star Registry (IRS),the original star registry that has been naming stars for people since 1979, allows you to do just that. Celebrities, dignitaries, and individuals all over the world have used its services to buy a star for friends and family. The IRS offers a gift package wherein a special star is selected in the sky and you get your Star Name and Star Date recorded along with it. The gift package includes a beautiful parchment certificate, a sky chart with your name and the star's coordinates, and an informative booklet on astronomy. All names in the astronomical compendium will be published in Your Place in the Cosmos©, which is registered in the U.S. Copyright Office. However, this is not recognized by the scientific community. Stars' names are only reserved in the International Star Registry. Friend rental service We all grew up being someone's friend, but we never got paid for it. Well, today is an entirely different era. You can now get paid for being a friend. All you have to do is create your profile in RentAFriend.com, set your hourly rate, and wait for somebody who is interested in hanging out with you. It's a win-win situation right there. Rent A Friend allows you to create a free friendship profile, where you can charge up to $50 an hour to be rented for social events and activities such as weddings, sporting events, concerts, movies, operas, hiking, biking and dining. Site owner Scott Rosenbaum got the idea from dating sites. He noticed that nobody was offering mere friendship and he wanted to "go a step back" from dating sites. Therefore, this is a strictly platonic website. Providing personal paparazzi Celebrities aren't the only ones that can have paparazzi all around them. Now, you can hire your personal paparazzi for a day! This is how Celeb4aday.com makes bucks—by giving you the ultimate celebrity experience. It can be for birthdays, gag gifts, parties, bachelor & bachelorette parties, or ANY other event that requires The Star Treatment. Celeb4aday.com believes that the everyday person deserves the attention as much, if not more, than the real celebrities. Face advertising By selling their faces as advertisement space in buymyface.com, Ed Moyes and Ross Harper were able to pay off their student debt, which was £50,000, and finish college. Harper and Moyse paint ads on their faces and then photographed or filmed themselves doing funny things. Advertisers can pay for them to do several stunts, such as skydiving or plunging into cold water. All this is put up on the website, along with the name of the day's advertiser. When the duo started off, their first ad went for exactly £1. The young entrepreneurs say that they made £3,500 in their first ten days of business. However, they've managed to sell their faces every single day. Tutorial marketplace Student of Fortune is an online tutorial marketplace for those who need or can offer help with homework. If you're an expert on a subject, then go write great tutorials to earn lots of money, even thousands of dollars... all for helping students learn! All you have to do is look through other user's questions and find one that you think you can answer. Then, write up a custom tutorial that teaches the student how to solve the problem and submit it. 20% of the material will be shown, and if they think it's a good tutorial, they'll pay you for it! Butterfly supplier Selling butterflies and making millions? It doesn't seem conceivable, but Jose Muniz has managed to pull it off. You can get your very own live butterfly from Jose, who started the business based on a bet. It all began when a friend bet him $100 that he could not sell butterflies for a living. Now, seven years later, the former business consultant and his wife, Karen, own Amazing Butterflies (amazingbutterflies.com), a live-butterfly distributor with offices in Tamarac, Fla. and San Jose, with a projected $1 million in revenue in 2006. Virtual real estate Anshe Chung, or rather her real-life counterpart, Ailin Graef, has gained attention as the first person to reportedly become a real-world millionaire from her virtual-world business. How'd she do it? She bought, developed and sold virtual real estate. While much of her wealth is still tied up in Second Life's currency, Linden dollars, those can be sold for genuine U.S. dollars. Graef reportedly makes upward of $150,000 annually. Anshe Chung's achievement is all the more remarkable because the fortune was developed over a period of two and a half years from an initial investment of $9.95 for a Second Life account by Anshe's creator, Ailin Graef. Anshe/Ailin achieved her fortune by beginning with small scale purchases of virtual real estate which she then subdivided and developed with landscaping and themed architectural builds for rental and resale. Her operations have since grown to include the development and sale of properties for large scale real world corporations, and have led to a real life “spin off” corporation called Anshe Chung Studios, which develops immersive 3D environments for applications ranging from education to business conferencing and product prototyping. Selling Irish dirt Alan Jenkins, a Belfast entrepreneur, and Pat Burke, an agricultural scientist from Tipperary, have already shifted around $1m (£512,000) of Irish muck to the United States. Their company, called Official Irish Dirt, has also received online contacts from Irish people all over the world who are keen to get their hands on dirt from back home. It was Jenkins who came up with the idea. During a visit to see friends in Florida he heard some Irish-Americans at a meeting of the Sons of Erin, a community organization for people with Irish ancestry, saying they would like to have some Irish sod placed on their funeral caskets. Soon afterward he met Burke, who worked at the Irish Department of Agriculture, at a dinner party and the business grew from there. Since Auld Sod's Web site, officialirishdirt.com, went online, Burke says he has shipped roughly $2 million worth to the United States, where about 40 million people claim Irish ancestry, and Enterprise Ireland estimates annual sales of Irish gifts at more than $200 million. Socks subscription An entrepreneur from Switzerland named Samuel Liechti had a crazy idea to start a company that would distribute socks to subscribers several times throughout the year. For nine pairs, each “sockscriber” pays a minimum of $89 annually to keep the socks rolling in. Surprisingly enough, there is an immense amount of people who are too lazy to grab a pair of calf-high socks at the store and subscribe to this silly service. Each new "sockscriber" receives a calculation of how much time he will save by not making sock purchases: about 12 hours every year, or three weeks in the lifetime of an average Swiss male, which is estimated at 82 years. Liechti brought his "sock-scription" service to the U.S. in 2005. Two years later BlackSocks began selling subscriptions for underwear. Liechti now boasts 60,000 active customers in 74 countries. BlackSocks opened a New York office last year. Geese police David Marcks discovered a lucrative business opportunity when he used his dog to solve a problem that he constantly faced while working at a golf course - the proliferation of geese. David started Geese Police in 1986 as the solution to driving away unwanted geese from town parks, corporate properties, golf courses, or even front lawns. Using trained border collies, they drive away the geese without harming them. Today, Geese Police has considerably grown and expanded, earning just under $2 million in 2000. David has also begun marketing his business to a highly selective group of individuals.

8 Embarrassing Photos of People Who Got Stuck Man who had to be rescued from a McDonald's high chair An unnamed man in Cork, Ireland stopped by a McDonald's outlet and, for some reason, he sat in a high chair designed for infants and toddlers. When he couldn't get out, police were called. They managed to free the man from the high chair and no charges were filed. However, witnesses, who say alcohol was involved, managed to snap a picture that went viral. A spokesman for McDonald's remarked that anyone using a high chair in their restaurants should always have adult supervision. Man stuck in a toilet bowl in Claremont An unnamed man was rescued from a toilet in Claremont, Cape Town in May 2013. The man had somehow gotten himself stuck in the bowl of a portable loo on a building site. He was so stuck, in fact, that only his legs, arms, and head were sticking out! According to Baydu Adams, a Cape Town blogger who witnessed the bizarre situation unfold, passers-by heard a panicked shouting coming from inside the toilet. Upon finding the man, it took about 40 minutes for security, police, and some helpful onlookers to find a way to rescue him. “The funny part was that while two or three people were trying to help, others were taking pictures and videos,” says Baydu. Baydu says that some of the gathering crowd commented that the man's eyes were red and he looked high. He couldn't have been homeless, Baydu adds, because he had an iPhone or iPod with him. Student who needed help from firefighters after getting his head stuck in a chair In 2005, Jimmy Skufka, a fourth grade student at Turtleville Elementary School, got his head stuck in a chair while "pretending to be Anakin Skywalker trying to battle Boba Fett." Skufka reportedly poked his head through a hole in a back support and wore the chair like a body shield, madly flailing the legs like a battery of 4 light sabers. It wasn't until study hall ended that Skufka discovered he was hopelessly jammed in the chair. Firefighters from the Turtleville Emergency Squad were called in with bolt cutters and hacksaws to free the boy, who was badly shaken but not harmed. Robber who got stuck in an air shaft In 2007, a man who was trying to rob a pharmacy wound up crying for help after becoming stuck in an air shaft for 10 hours. It took firefighters an hour and a half to free Jeffery Mumani, 25, from the metal air shaft at a CVS store. On a Monday night, Mumani removed an air conditioning cover and tried to enter the store via the shaft but became trapped. The man began calling for help at about 8 a.m. the next day. Mumani suffered only minor cuts and was in stable condition. He was charged with commercial burglary, among other charges. Prisoner who got stuck in a wall during an attempted escape A Brazilian prisoner's attempt to escape from jail ended in humiliating and amusing failure when the overweight criminal got stuck halfway. Amused guards snapped photos after discovering the portly prisoner wedged in his getaway hole. Using a metal pipe ripped from a shower, the prisoner and an accomplice had smashed a hole through a concrete wall at a jail in the Brazilian state of Goias. After the smaller man crawled through and escaped, our tubby hero made his bid for freedom. Unfortunately for him, despite the frantic efforts of fellow prisoners trapped behind him in the cell, he was wedged tightly. Guards called firefighters, who used a sledgehammer to free the unnamed prisoner. Teen who was stuck in a Chimney Here comes Santa Claus? Nope, it's actually a 17-year-old kid trying to come down the chimney. Instead, he ended up being stuck for almost 12 hours! Some might call it karma: The teen was actually trying to rob the house, police say. Georgia firefighters pulled soot-covered Renaldo Jack out of the chimney and promptly arrested him. His neighbor, Edyn Rodriguez, told the paper that he heard someone yelling for help, so he called 911. But wait, there's more! The owner of the home Jack tried to rob told the local TV station that she had no idea someone was stuck in her chimney for the entire night. Toddler who was trapped in a lolly machine An Australian toddler was so determined to help himself to sweets from a lolly machine that he climbed through the tiny dispensing hatch, ending up imprisoned inside four walls of glass. Cohen Stone, 2, climbed inside the claw grabber machine in an Italian restaurant, where his mother, Kyra, 24, had brought him to celebrate a friend's birthday. A local locksmith was called to Siena's restaurant to free the little boy, who was released 45 minutes later. Drunken Swedish moose stuck in an apple tree It's not a person, but it's equally bizarre. A moose is seen stuck in an apple tree in Gothenburg, Sweden on September 6, 2011. The moose was trying to eat apples from the tree and the police believe the animal became intoxicated by the fermented apples. The moose was freed by police officers and, after taking a nap on the lawn, he sobered up and returned to the woods.

12 Amazing Things Made With Cardboard Tubes Office Design The tubes create a wonderful cave-like design, allowing the office visitor to experience a feeling of being connected with the environment. It's stylish and eco-friendly. Pavilion A group of architecture students from the University of New South Wales constructed a temporary pavilion out of recycled cardboard tubes in front of the Sydney Customs House. The pavilion was one of several temporary structures constructed by architecture student groups from Australian universities as part of the CH4 Student Design Competition during the Sydney Architecture Festival. UNSW's Built Environment team was given 2,000 tubes from a company that manufacturers carpet. The goal for the competition was to make use of recycled materials and educate festival visitors on sustainability. Footbridge A temporary bridge incorporating 281 cardboard tubes has been erected over a river in Southern France. Weighing 7.5 tonnes, it can hold up to 20 people at a time. It is just half a mile from the Pont du Gard, an old Roman stone bridge, and was designed by Shigeru Ban, a Japanese architect known for his both grandiose and humble paper constructions, as you can see in the gallery. Pen Holder Here is a great way to sort pens and other writing implements in the family craft area while recycling plentiful cardboard tubes. Chairs and Table Hundreds of waste tubes were used to construct striking pieces of furniture. Although they may not be that comfortable, they certainly provide a talking point for the room. Shigeru Ban's Paper Tube School The most chilling images of the Wenchuan quake in central China's Sichuan province were the thousands of schools that flattened like pancakes, crushing scores of children. One of the more elegant and poignant design projects, led by prominent Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and a team of Chinese and Japanese students, erected temporary but resilient schools constructed from plywood and recycled cardboard tubes. Divan Tying tiles and cardboard tubes like a "popcorn string" provides stability and comfort. Lamp Design and build a fantastic lamp shade. For instance, this one conceals those fluorescent lights from view, which is a great idea. Wall Cardboard tubing makes a cheap and stylish wall, too. Bar Designed as a meeting point, as well as a show-stopping bar at the center of DesignEx, the Cardboard Bar served as a dramatic centerpiece and was constructed in less than one day. The untested concept design, with a structure made from raw cardboard tubes, demonstrated that good design and eco-friendly materials could coexist. The structure, bar, light fittings, signage and furniture were all made from a combination of cardboard, chipboard and Masonite, encouraging visitors to consider alternative materials for their projects. Shelving Simple, strong and effective shelf unit from a number of cardboard tubes. Art French painter and collage artist Anastassia Elias creates tiny scenes with paper inside cardboard toilet paper tubes. Anastassia uses paper the same color as the cardboard tubes to build up the intricate pictures of people, which gives the illusion that the scene taking place inside the walls are actually part of the roll itself. The models, which sell for £90 each, come alive when light is shined through the roll from one end. The details and depth of each piece is impressive

Photoshop Requsts and their funny Results Photoshop Request: “That kid walked into the shot. I don’t want any kids in this photo.” Photoshop Request: “Make me look like hot shit, please!” Photoshop Request: “I want to look more dangerous.” Photoshop Request: “I want to look like a hero with courage! ” Photoshop Request: “This is me celebrating my graduation. Can you make it look more like a celebration?” Photoshop Request: “Can you make me look less bored?” Photoshop Request: “I wanna look more like a hero. Maybe put a lady in there?” Photoshop Request: “Dear artisans, please make this background more powerful.”

How Computer Manufacturers Are Paid to Make Your Laptop Worse A laptop is a marvel of engineering. So much work goes into designing and manufacturing all the individual pieces of hardware before combining them with software that’s taken decades to build. After going through all this work, laptop manufacturers are paid to make their laptops slower and more frustrating to use. The PC ecosystem’s race to the bottom and cut-throat pricing means that many computer manufacturers aren’t focused on providing a good experience — they’re focused on releasing the cheapest laptops possible and making some additional money by loading the laptop with bloatware. The Bloatware Is There Because It Pays Your laptop’s manufacturer doesn’t really believe Norton antivirus is the best security solution, or that some obscure casual game portal has the best games available for Windows. Instead, they’re paid by software companies to preinstall this stuff. Instead, laptop manufacturers load their computers up with shovelware — so-named because it seems as if manufacturers just shovel a pile of software onto the computer without much thought given to is usefulness. This often-useless software slows a laptop down, making it take longer to boot, reducing available memory, and generally cluttering up the computer. Toolbars may insert themselves into browsers and pop-up messages may urge the user to upgrade to paid copies of trial software. Messages for trial antivirus programs can be particularly scary, warning users they may be at risk if they don’t open their wallets and pay additional money. These programs are generally trial versions that urge you to purchase paid software, links to places where you can purchase software, or browser toolbars that encourage you to use bad search engines. Software companies pay the manufacturers so inexperienced users will end up purchasing complete versions of the trial software, paying for bad casual games, and using less-useful search engines. How Much Does Bloatware Slow a Laptop Down, Really? Do we geeks exaggerate the significance of bloatware on a laptop? Benchmarks would help us understand just how significantly bloatware can drag down a new computer. Luckily, such benchmarks exist. They even come from an unlikely source — Microsoft. Microsoft sells “Microsoft signature” PCs in its Microsoft stores, which are laptops free of the usual manufacturer-installed crapware. Microsoft even offers to turn any laptop into a Signature laptop, getting rid of the bloatware for you –for only $99. Microsoft is making money coming and going here — you pay them for a Windows license that comes with your computer and then you pay them more than the cost of a Windows license so your new laptop will work like it should. Microsoft advertises their signature PCs by pointing out how much faster a signature PC is than a non-signature PC — these statistics really tell us how much faster a new laptop is once all the bloatware is removed. They’ve now removed the statistics from their latest Signature PC page — maybe they were a bit embarrassing to Microsoft’s hardware partners — but we can view them with archive.org. Based on Microsoft’s tests with six different Windows 7 laptops, removing bloatware made the laptops start up nearly 40% faster on average. That’s a significant improvement that shows us just how much bloatware can affect performance. Worse yet, a 2009 PC Pro study found that bloatware could add over a minute to boot-up times, with Acer’s laptops taking an additional two minutes to boot because of all the included bloatware. Banishing Bloatware If you have a new laptop packed full of bloatware but don’t want to pay Microsoft $99 for the privilege of getting rid of it, you have some options: Manually Uninstall Bloatware: You can uninstall bloatware that comes with your laptop from the standard Uninstall Programs pane in the Windows Control Panel. You’ll need to know the programs you should uninstall and the ones you should keep. Some utilities may help you take full advantage of your laptop’s hardware, while some are completely useless. Preinstalled bloatware will vary wildly from laptop to laptop — if you perform some Google searches, you should be able to find an explanation of what each program does. You may even find a a full, user-created guide to the bloatware that comes on your specific laptop, what it does, and which programs you should remove. Automatically Uninstall Bloatware: If you don’t want to do all of the grunt work yourself, try using the free PC Decrapifier program. It will scan your computer for known bloatware and automatically uninstall it. However, PC Decrapifier isn’t perfect and it won’t catch all the bloatware. Reinstall Windows: Many geeks prefer to install a clean copy of Windows on their new PCs, removing all the manufacturer software and starting with a clean slate. If you opt to do this, you’ll need a Windows disc. You’ll also need to download and install the appropriate drivers and hardware utilities for your laptop afterwards — you can generally find them on the manufacturer’s support site for your laptop. If you’ve ever purchased a new laptop and found yourself spending minutes watching the bloatware load every time you power on your laptop, you can probably understand why so many people buy Macs. We geeks may know how to deal with bloatware, but the average computer buyer is getting stuck with a laptop made worse by its manufacturer. 8 Ways Hardware Manufacturers Are Deceiving You Sure, everyone involved can come up with a variety of excuses — they aren’t technically misleading customers, it’s all in the fine print, and these are the standard ways the industry operates — but hardware has been advertised in many misleading ways. We’re not the only ones calling these marketing gimmicks misleading. Some of these tricks have even been the subject of class-action lawsuits for misleading consumers. Today we will look at 8 ways hardware manufacturers attempt to pull the metaphorical wool over the consumer’s eyes. Available Storage Space Isn’t Advertised Device manufacturers advertise their devices with phrases like the “64GB Surface Pro” and “16GB Galaxy S4.” A naïve consumer might assume that they have 64GB or 16GB of storage space available on these devices, or perhaps a bit less — but that’s often not true. According to Microsoft’s own estimates, only 28GB of space on the 64GB Surface Pro is available for use. Samsung’s 16GB Galaxy S4 only offers about 8GB of usable storage space. Hardware manufacturers label and advertise devices based on the amount of storage hardware they have inside them, not the usable space — which is a much more meaningful measurement to users. On Windows tablets and Samsung’s Galaxy S4, much of the space is used for the operating system and preinstalled software. However, this can be confusing when comparing different types of devices. For example, Apple’s 64GB iPad offers about 57GB of usable space — much more than the Surface Pro with the same included storage — but “64GB Surface Pro” and “64GB iPad” will be what customers see and compare. A more honest way of advertising storage space would be “28GB Surface Pro,” “8GB Galaxy S4,” and “57GB iPad.” Hard Drive Manufacturers and Windows Use Different Units of Measurement Hard drive capacity can also be misleading because hard drive manufacturers use different units than the one used in Windows. To put it simply, a hard drive advertised as 500GB will appear to have about 465GB in Windows — both hard drive manufacturers and Windows use the abbreviation “GB”, but hard drive manufacturers are using “gigabytes”while Windows is technically using “gibibytes.” This situation is a mess. It could be argued that hard drive manufacturers are using the correct measurements while Windows isn’t, but the end result is clear — if you buy a 500GB hard drive in a store and install it in your Windows computer, you’ll have 465GB available to you in Windows. For more in-depth information, read; HTG Explains: Why Do Hard Drives Show the Wrong Capacity in Windows? 4G Cellular Networks Are Really 3G 4G was once a term that referred to next-generation cellular networks, but over the years it has been redefined to include upgraded networks based on 3G technologies. Nowhere is this more (un)clear than with the iOS 5.1 update to the iPhone. This update changed the network indicator on AT&T networks from “3G” to “4G.” Nothing actually changed — the iPhone didn’t immediately start connecting to AT&T’s new LTE network, although the latest iPhones do — but Apple gave in and accepted that AT&T wanted to call its network a 4G network. iPhone users were upgraded from 3G to 4G overnight, but all that really changed was the label. The term “4G” has gradually become more and more meaningless over time, and technologies that were once advertised as 3G are now being advertised as 4G. The official definition of 4G has been loosened further and further to allow more and more cellular carriers to claim they offer 4G networks. Retina, Reality Engine, and Other Display Buzzwords Look at the specifications list for any device with a screen — especially smartphones — and you’ll find a long list of buzzwords that purport to be specifications. Sony has “TruBlack” and “X-Reality Picture Engine,” Toshiba has “TruBrite,” Nokia has “ClearBlack” and “PureMotion HD+” — the buzzwords go on and on. It’s misleading marketing to parade these technologies as specifications — “X-Reality Picture Engine, only on Sony devices!” — when they’re trademarked marketing terms that can only apply to a single manufacturer’s products. For example, Apple touts that their devices as the only ones with the “Retina display” — which is true, as Apple has trademarked the term “Retina display” and it can only be used to describe Apple devices. Although other devices have screens with higher pixel-density, they can’t be referred to as Retina displays. “Wi-Fi Ready” Devices Don’t Have Wi-Fi Some Blu-Ray players and smart TVs are advertised as “Wi-Fi Ready.” You might assume that this means the device is ready and able to connect to your Wi-Fi network, but you would be wrong. “Wi-Fi Ready” means that the device requires a special dongle that you have to purchase so it can actually connect to a Wi-Fi network. Wi-Fi ready just means that it’s ready for you to purchase another product — it has a USB port so you can buy an expensive dongle and plug it in. Monitors Not Advertised With Viewable Size If you were around before LCD monitors and remember CRT monitors, you’ll remember that there was much controversy about how monitors were advertised. For example, you might assume that a “17-inch monitor” had a viewable screen of 17″, but you’d be wrong. A 17″ CRT monitor is actually 17″ large, including the fairly large border around the screen. A 17″ CRT monitor might have a viewable area of about 15 inches. Thankfully, LCD monitor manufacturers generally measure their screen sizes in terms of viewable image area. However, if you look closely, you still might find LCD monitors advertised with a separate “viewable size” or “display area.” Expensive Digital Cables Aren’t Better Companies like Monster, makers of the hugely overpriced Monster Cable, would have you believe that you need super-expensive digital cables to get the best out of your home theater setup. This isn’t true at all. If it’s a digital cable — like an HDMI cable — you won’t see any benefit from buying an expensive cable versus a cheaper one. A digital cable is just transmitting bits — 1s and 0s — and the data is either transmitted or it isn’t. This can be a bit misleading, because higher-quality cables can make a difference when they’re analog cables — traditional stereo cables, for example. For more a more in-depth explanation, read; HTG Explains: Do You Really Need Expensive Cables? Battery Life Estimates Are Overly Generous This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it’s very important to keep in mind when shopping for a new device. Don’t just read the battery life specification on the manufacturers’ website — look for trustworthy battery-life tests done by third parties who aren’t trying to sell you anything. Battery life specifications are advertised as “up to x hours” or a “maximum of x hours,” but even these measurements are often more optimistic than anything you could ever see in real-world use. Images Credit:Seth Anderson on Flickr Thanks to How To Geeks

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Kinetic Walking Sculptures Dutch artist Theo Jansen creates kinetic sculptures from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles that seem to be living creatures from another planet. His creature sculptures are kinetic. They are designed to move, and even survive, on their own. When the wind blows, it pushes the creatures forward and their legs move as if they were walking. http://www.youtube.com/embed/pCtA5kX-Ktg

Water heater