Bitwarden for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Android is a cross-platform password management solution. Bitwarden is intended to be the easiest and safest way of storing your logins and passwords and keeping them synced between your devices. Your data is fully encrypted before it ever leaves your device, ensuring that you are the only one to have access. The stored data is protected with AES-256 bit encryption, salted hashing, as well as PBKDF2 SHA-256. [License: Open Source / Freemium | Requires: 11|10|8|7|Android|Linux|macOS | Size: Size Varies ]

The Spybot Search and Destroy Update is intended for updating your detections without the need for the included WebUpdate. To update you need to download and double-click spybotsd_includes.exe, choose the folder that Spybot is installed to, click OK and close when completed. [License: Freeware | Requires: 11|10|8|7 | Size: 8 MB ]

Google Chrome Portable is a web browser that runs web pages and applications with lightning speed. It's designed to be simple and stylish. It's packaged as a portable app, so you can take yo... [License: Freeware | Requires: 11|10 | Size: 2 MB ]

The latest version of the official YouTube app, now with in-page playback! Experience the latest and best version of the official YouTube app.... [License: Ad-Supported | Requires: Android | Size: Size Varies ]

Mozilla Firefox Portable is the portable version of Mozilla Firefox so you can take your Firefox anywhere you go preserving all your settings, add-ons and more. [License: Freeware | Requires: 11|10 | Size: 138 MB ]

Posted without comment for your consternation:

On Labor Day, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release whose title summarizes its contents all too neatly: Bush Declares Eco-Whistleblower Law Void for EPA Employees. Here's some of it:

Washington, DC - The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower protections for federal workers under the Clean Water Act, according to legal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result of an opinion issued by a unit within the Office of the Attorney General, federal workers will have little protection from official retaliation for reporting water pollution enforcement breakdowns, manipulations of science or cleanup failures.

In a follow up to his story on the 2004 election, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen," Robert Kennedy brings us, in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, specific details on how Diebold has rigged voting in Georgia, with the confessions of a Diebold employee, Chris Hood. "Will The Next Election Be Hacked," is a frightening article that shows exactly how far some corrupt politicians are willing to go to insure that they keep control of our government out of the hands of the people. Folks, our democracy is in danger.

CITIStandard CharteredHSBCAmerican Express

HDFCICICIAXISINDUS INDKotak MahindraIDBI

SBICanara BankVijaya Bank

1. Open a new file and set your font; Verdana; 18pt
2. File > Templates > Save as Template
3. Select > My Templates then tick the "Set as default template" box
4. Enter a name at the top then save and close the file.

The next time you open Writer, the settings should be in place.

If your chapter titles are using the "Heading 2" Style:

1. View > Styles (F11)
2. In the sidebar, Right-Click > Modify on the "Heading 2" Style.
3. Go to the "Text Flow" tab.
4. On the right side:
5. Check the box for "Breaks > Insert".

This should automatically add a page break before every chapter.

You can goto View - Styles and change "All Styles" to "Applied Styles" in the drop-down option.You can Select everything (Ctrl+A) and then use Format > Clear Direct Formatting (Ctrl+M). That would wipe away all the styles, and would start you from a clean slate.

Turn Off Grid LinesIf you want to turn off grid lines in LO Calc:Tools > Options > LibreOffice Calc > View > Visual Aids > Grid Lines > Hide

Get the distinct values in calc

1. Select the column (or the list of data) that you want to process
2. Data > More Filters > Standard Filter
3. From Options choose "No duplications".

The settings for Tools > Options > Language Settings > Writing Aids > Options > Minimal number of characters for hyphenation. These settings are over-ridden by any formatting in the document itself.

The line divisions can be improved by running Tools > Language > Hyphenation as a final touch on the document. This tool not only works interactively, giving you more control, but also generally does a better job than the on-the-fly hyphenation, if run when the document is complete.

The Characters at line end and Characters at line begin fields can sometimes be manipulated to improve hyphenation by playing one off against the other. Working by itself, the Maximum consecutive hyphenated lines field can also make a difference. adjusting the settings on the Text Flow tab. The number of letters at the end and start of the line should be 1–4. The typographical convention is not to allow more than two lines in a row to end with a hyphen.

If you use a font that the recipient is unlike to have, select Files > Proprties > Font > Embed fonts in the document before exporting to PDF. Note that embedding will vastly increase the file size if you you have a large number of fonts.

It's true. Barak Obama is a terrorist and a muslim. That's what the faith healer told us. He also told us George Bush was ordained by God. With his credentials...read more...

What a name.

Cally Davis and Catrin Rees called él Records home and its proprietor, UK indie-pop patron saint Mike Alway, their lodestar. Though they didn't make what you'd expect, exactly, if you're familiar with the él catalog, both before and after it was absorbed into the Cherry Red empire. Sure, it's jangly guitar pop with a twee twinkle and primitive production qualities, but these two women had a deranged Rezillos bite and a whimsical songwriting style that's more Todd Rundgren than Morrissey. 

Always a sucker for late-80s pogo-stick guitar pop from Scotland, I cannot resist the Groovy Little Numbers, yet another late-80s pogo-stick guitar-pop outfit from Scotland.

They're noteworthy—or at least more of a curiosity than others—and differentiated from contemporaries in a few ways, however. Lead vocals were often shared by Catherine Steven and Joe McAlinden, who started the band and seem to be considered the only core members, and this boy-girl tag-team adds a twist the Pooh Sticks, Close Lobsters, the Soup Dragons, the Hepburns, and most the rest in the scene didn't have.

Additionally, while trumpets were certainly a feature of the post-Postcard Scotish sound, the way these guys laid it in was gentler, sweeter. Generally, they were gentler, sweeter, more reserved Burt Bacharach than twitchy Violent Femmes.

As you might expect, this two-singles group was a sort of power-pop incubator for at least a couple of those involved: McAlinden started Superstar and was in BMX Bandits; Gerard Love got in with Teenage Fanclub at the onset.

Robert Wratten was a heartbroken guy.

For a few years, in the late 80s, early 90s, he was in the Field Mice, the beloved jangle-pop outfit signed to Sarah Records. When they fell apart, Wratten and his girlfriend and bandmate, Annemari Davies, formed Northern Picture Library, and continued to write rather melancholic songs, but with a certain duskiness and lonely chill rather than the peppy twitchiness and innocent twinkle from before. (Their first LP, Alaska, is very good.)

Northern Picture Library ended when Wratten and Davies split, and thus Trembling Blue Stars was born. (I see your breakup album and raise you a breakup band!)

"How does it feel? / The way I feel / Doesn't feel quite real"

With lyrics like those (not to mention a name like theirs and a debut album titled  Against Perfection, a perfect encapsulation of melancholic Gen X irony), why Adorable posters aren't plastered on dorm walls and their songs on all high school first-love and breakup mixtapes out there is... baffling. 

Formed in Coventry, England, and fronted by Piotr Fijalkowski, the band was around at the apex of the shoegaze scene, but they perhaps slid left, right, up, down a little much—too melodious in their waves of distortion, too jangly to be grunge, too poppy to be punks, too pretty and straight to be Madchester ravers. Too often, it's a group's hard-to-place-ness that prevents them from turning a passing sizzle into something sustainable.

A reputation for cockiness and label pressures and spats certainly didn't help. Sometimes, though, a perfect moment is meant to only last for that perfect moment, and it's wonders like this record, so assured and contained, that remind me that the "what if?" question we often find ourselves confronting is a distraction, a red herring, an impulse to fan the flames of infatuation not with deeper connection to that subject of interest but with, well, more shit. 

In the case of Adorable, that desire led to the recording of Fake, a modest LP that tilts towards a flat, less complicated dourness and downcast spirit, one the debut wasn't informed by. Against was a gleaming gem of Echo & the Bunnymen's arena-filling, heartswelling post-punk anthems crossed with the warm fragility of the Jesus and Mary Chain and the fried, blown, tattered brawn of Ride. Often, it's one-and-done series that are the most meaningful. A sense of an ending is a precious gift.

In the 90s, Mark Pritchard was best known for his work in ambient house, IDM, downtempo, primarily through the duo Global Communication, who always managed to be unusually patient, supple, loving, elegant.

When that union dissolved, he pushed ahead in the same direction but with a shift in contextual foundation; he left the cerebral chill of Northern Europe and let his mind and ear drift across the Atlantic to the unhurried and free-spirited coastal enclaves of Brazil for a bossa nova and samba record under the alias Troubleman.

Time Out of Mind is a tranquil and warm album that seems built around the possibility of making electro-bossa music, very much in vogue in the post-Theivery Corporation and MPB-revival era, with white privilege and collector culture not at the epicenter. It's a sincere record, one that compassionately seeks to not only reference but build upon and expand another culture's sound through thoughtful, meditative reverence.

Most the elements are live, a celebration of organic sound and meandering arrangement, influenced by Brazil's storied musical tradition and yet so very imbued with Pritchard's precise and club-oriented, Western electronic wizardry.

Highlights are "Toda Hora," a collaboration with Brazil-born Smoke City vocalist Nina Miranda, and the pair that is "Paz" and "Zap," the latter song being not much more than the former in reverse. Eerie and sensual.

I did want to post the playlists I've been maintaining for this year, however. While I'm not writing about music at the moment, I am, as always, collecting, collating, curating these.

For 2023, I'm breaking things down a little more granularly, with two new playlists, "Clurb" and "Calm," being added to the regular offerings of "Classic" (at least ten-ish years old) and "Current (mostly from this calendar year, but maybe some 2022 material makes it past the censors).

A full archive of all these can be found on the Playlists subpage.

Nearly twelve months have passed without a peep from me, and I think—think!—that's going to change in short order.

I've new, albeit modest, things coming via Nilo soon (a sequel to the "Please Honk" bumper sticker), and I'm contemplating ways to more efficiently and quickly publish and distribute all the gobbledygook that is suffocating in my mind and crammed into my notebooks. I am certain some or all of it will live on or be connected to BBBD, though whether this twenty-year-old blog is a hub or spoke remains to be seen.

At any rate, I'll start jottings things down here again, in more typical journal format. In the meantime, follow the four playlists I'll be maintaining as per usual (they're embedded below) and behold my latest "product," a song-a-day experiment. There's an RSS feed for it if that's your jam. (There's something intoxicating about rejiggering a Spotify playlist into, essentially, a microblogging platform, and I'm happy I finally hacked it. This is something I've been wanting to make for ages.)

Rent It

Highly Recommended

The Show:

Back when I was half joking about the acumen with which Better Call Saul was going in its second season, you knew that it would head down a sad yet inevitable road, right? Jimmy (its second season) would become Saul eventually, despite his best efforts otherwise.

There are two big changes that have occurred since I wrote a lot of words down about the show; one being the death of Jimmy's brother Chuck (Michael McKean, This is Spinal Tap) and the introduction or reacquainting if you will of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito, Breaking Bad), both of which occur in Seaso...Read the entire review

Recommended

The Show:

As my two-year old goes from infant to toddler and is more of a sponge soaking up data and information I try to keep his media above board with things on education, and having Sesame Street as your driver in the club bag is a clutch one I have to say. He can watch Elmo, or Kermit or Bert and Ernie with content while I get his meals ready, and he gets the chance to learn something in the process. So yeah, damn right I grabbed Awesome Alphabet Collection as a surrogate parent!

The disc is less a series of show episodes and more focused on segments, all of which surround a particular letter of the alphabet, that the Sesame Street puppets and humans talk through in a means of education and illustration. Occasionally a celebrity will pop by, whether its singers like Norah Jones, Pharrell Williams or Smokey Robinson, or actors like Ricky Gervais (Read the entire review

Rent It

The Show:

Not going to lie, think I'm a touch melancholy when it comes to this installment of Peppa Pig. I've reviewed several of these titles for "The Talk" already, largely because my son has liked seeing them and has a little bit of the merchandise from the show. However, I think we may have moved on a little? Someone has started taking note of different shows on Nick Jr., and I'm not sure how to handle it.

Anyway, Peppa Pig The Easter Bunny is a collection of self-explanatory episodes around Easter and the Easter bunny. The web shorts run about 5-6 minutes each and don't overstay their welcome, running just over one hour in total. Ranging from Series 3-5, they get into all of the members of Peppa's family (Daddy and Mommy Pig and Peppa's little brother ...Read the entire review

Recommended

Gather round, kiddos, for this review of The Brady-est Brady Bunch TV & Movie Collection will, as never before, attempt to make sense of this unkillable piece of pop culture iconography. Your humble reviewer was in the thick of things when The Brady Bunch, the 1969-74 family sitcom, staked its claim onto the American consciousness, and can offer a bit perspective those generations, just before and since, can't quite reconcile.

But before we do that, let's first point out that this compact if unruly boxed DVD set, with a total running time of around 75 hours (!) of material includes with one notable exception just about everything Brady-related one might possibly ever want: the original series; The Brady Kids animated spin-off; The Brady Girls Get Married TV movie and its short-lived sitcom follow-up, The Brady Brides; A Very Brady Christmas, a later TV ...Read the entire review

DVD Talk Collector Series

The Specials:

The title of this DVD goldmine for fans of Robin Williams' stand-up and improv work can be described with a word that Williams used frequently in his acts over the decades: Redundant. After his singular success in stand-up, film, and TV, everyone should know at this point that the Comic Genius description comes prepackaged with the name. It was for me when I first came to San Francisco for grad school in late 2002, but I mostly knew of Williams' genius through his film roles, a cornucopia of comedic and dramatic work that showcased his immensely versatile talent.

But I didn't know much about his stand-up work, coming from a country where his HBO specials weren't available. A San Francisco native who became a beloved figure of the city as his fame rose; he represented the perfect welcome for me as I bought his 2002 Live on Broadway special on DVD on my first day in th...Read the entire review

Recommended

This second DVD release from Shout Factory Kids celebrating Sesame Street's 50th anniversary consists of a special made this year for prime time on both HBO (where the show has moved for its first run episodes) and PBS (which still presents the show delayed after the HBO showings, and with an annoying "E/I" symbol at the top of the screen to count towards the FCC's required hours of "educational programming" each week- in that regard it's likely for the better that its new primary home is HBO.) Like the 25th anniversary special, which was one of the very first DVD releases back in 1997, this focuses mostly on songs from the show but most of them are new performances, done on the show's set, rather than archival clips. There's a number of celebrity appearances but for some reason Joseph Gordon-Levitt, born after I had already outgrown the show on TV, was chosen to be the main "star". He takes a cab t...Read the entire review

Recommended

I can never get enough of old musical and comedy variety shows these days. I remember them being rather cheesy from what I can remember of their original airings, but they are yet another thing that gets better with age. There were many of these throughout the 1960s and 70s, anchored by star hosts with a never-ending parade of different guest stars every week to do their own musical numbers and join in the comedy sketches. Sonny and Cher were two of the biggest stars in this genre- in 1971 they were set to take up residency for a live show in Las Vegas when they had to cancel because CBS offered them a weekly TV show, five episodes of which are featured here.

Recommended

Back in DVD's glory days, when stores were overflowing with them, you would often have to watch out for so-called "music" discs that were actually not authorized by the artists and didn't include any music from them- instead just containing interviews of anyone remotely associated that they could find. Many of these discs were about the Beatles- in fact some of the very first budget titles out were "Alf Bicknell's Beatles Diary" and "Beatles Celebration". Today the supply of discs in stores is not as plentiful, but a few of these titles still make it out. Checking out "Made on Merseyside" I was expecting it to be that sort of disc, but I've had enough long-time interest in the Beatles that it might still be worth watching.

This focuses on the very early years of the grou...Read the entire review

Recommended

The Movie:

Beyond The Door

Directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis (as O. Hellman) and released in 1974, a year after The Exorcist proved to be box office gold, Beyond The Door introduces us to Jessica Barrett (Juliet Mills), her husband Robert (Gabriele Lavia) and their two kids, smart-mouthed Gail (Barbara Fiorini) and pea soup loving Ken (Davd Colin Jr.). They live a good life and seem quite happy together, but when it turns out that Jessica is pregnant, things get a little tense. Regardless, they decide they'll make the best of the situation but after a visit to Dr. George Staton (Nino Segurini), a man who also happens to be their best friend, Jessica realizes that something is odd: she figures she can't be more than a few weeks into her pregnancy, while he insists she has to be at least three months.

From there, things start to get strange in the Barrett ho...Read the entire review

As Christians we must be aware that we are in a battle of epic proportions, and therefore we MUST 'Stand Firm In The Battle'. To do this, we must have a working knowledge of what plain this battle is fought on, what weapons are at our disposal and the source of our victory. Only then will we know how to stand firm when so much is coming against us from the enemy's ranks. This message was originally aimed at a men's conference, hence the application to men - but, of course, the truths here apply to both genders! This message is available now from https://www.preachtheword.com in MP3 audio and on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord) in HD video...

In Part 8 of our series on 'The Holy Spirit' we begin looking at the 'Symbols Of The Holy Spirit'. In the Bible, God uses various instructive symbols for the Holy Spirit. What are the lessons we can learn about Him from these? Today we look at the first incredible image which is one of these symbols - 'The Dove'. This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

We have been looking at some of the several 'Symbols of the Holy Spirit' described for us in Scripture. Last time in our series on 'The Holy Spirit' we looked at 'The Dove', but this time we will focus primarily on the 'Fire' of the Spirit and what we can learn from this image and reality. How might we quench the Spirit's flame and how can the fire be caught? This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...