Leap Motion begins shipping

In February I wrote about Leap Motion, a futuristic peripheral that allows you to control your computer with "air gestures," by moving your hands in the air. The Leap Motion controller began shipping this weekend and I received mine in the mail today. Although some people that place pre-orders got theirs over the weekend, Leap just posted the software today.

It was originally slated to begin shipping in Mid-May, but Leap ran into production problems and had to push back delivery two months to account for a larger and longer beta period.

The Leap Motion hardware C about the large USB flash drive C consists of two cameras, three infared LEDs, and a USB controller, but the secret sauce is in the software algorithm that tracks all 10 of your fingers as you wave them in the air above the device.

Many people have compared Leap Motion to the hand gestures used by Tom Cruise's character in the 2002 movie Minority Report, but it's more about finger finesse and subtle screen control than it is about swiping large halographic panels of information to and fro. After you install the Leap Motion software, it installs the Airspace Store (a repository of apps designed for the controller) and five demo apps to get you started with the device.

While using it definitely feels futuristic, Leap takes a fair amount of getting used to. I was able to fumble my way around the Shimsham and Molecules apps, but Cut The Rope was an unmitigated disaster on my first attempt but I'm willing to chalk that up to a totally new category of peripheral and less than an hour of actually using it. While the apps and UI are a little rough around the edges, Leap Motion shows a lot of potential and I can't help but root for a company placing such a big bet on a touchless, 3D interface for computers.

Leap Motion is novel in these early days but I can't wait to see what kind of innovative applications are developed to exploit its innovative sensors. Someday when motion sensors are built into every computer (Leap Motion has announced partnerships with HP and ASUS), it's conceivable that we won't touch our computers at all, but instead just point, swipe and gesture in the air in front of them.

This should mean less wear and tear on the printer and generally faster print speeds. We tested this on the mid-range Brother HL-3150CDW model.

The printer is a compact 410 x 465 x 240mm, although it still weighs a hefty 17.8 kg. Build quality feels solid. Styled in unassuming grey and black, it's designed to blend in well with other computer-related hardware without drawing attention to itself.

While you can admire the desire for ease and simplicity of operation, this has been taken too far with the control panel. Embedded into the left side of the top panel, the panel has no tilt facility and only a basic, non-backlit, 1-line, 16-character LCD display thats difficult to read at almost all angles. Scrolling through the menus is slow work with just a handful of buttons tackling all operations.

As Brother openly targets this printer at small workgroups, the storage capacity of a firmly constructed 250-sheet base paper tray C plus a single-sheet manual feed slot above C should serve about right. Bearing in mind the cost-cutting with the display, it's perhaps unsurprising that there's also no front USB or memory card slots for non-PC printing although auto duplex does come as standard.

Connectivity is more generous, though,Buy Silicone IPAD Case at wholesale prices from leading Chinese wholesalers, with ethernet, wireless 802.11b/g/n and USB 2.0 options as well as mobile linkage to Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print. We did note, however, that Brother's iPrint&Scan app had difficulty identifying the right device, while WPS recognition via the router was almost instant.

So how fast is this LED printer? Mixed A4 text and image documents were certainly emerging close to the claimed 18 ppm rate, with auto duplex text-only pages also matching the 7 sides per minute Brother claimed.

Black text quality is crisp and solid and web pages in particular appeared sharp and detailed even in small colour images. Brother has also maintained that LED printers are more economical in ink usage, and to reinforce that they have 2200-page high-yield toner cartridges for the cyan, magenta and yellow colours which work out at 3.4p each per page. A one-size 2500-page black cartridge means black-and-white printing should be around 2.2p per page.

Cincinnati Incorporated is making the productivity advantages of its latest touchscreen control and bend simulation software available to customers with popular vintage model press brakes. The control and advanced software, which enable 3D rotational viewing of part shape and gage fingers, can be retrofitted to the companys Autoform, Formaster, Formaster II, CB, CBII and AutoShape press brakes. The control aids operators with automatic bend simulations, graphic displays of parts before and after the bend, part orientation, setup notes and a tool library. It can access jobs from its high-capacity internal flash drive, USB or Ethernet. New part programs are easily created on the control or by using the optional offline Bend Simulation software. These press brakes are workhorses and are still very durable, very accurate and have many decades of use ahead of them, said Mike Seall, VP of Sales and Service for Cincinnati Incorporated.Winbo silicone braceletsOur top picks for the Winbo Iphone Headset and gear, Controls, like computers, get outdated quickly so this is an easy, affordable way to stay current and be more productive without having to purchase a new press brake.

The powerful, user-friendly control reduces programming and setup time through fast data entry via the touchscreen interface with large target buttons. Job setup pages display tool names and locations, segment lengths, and operator notes to further reduce setup time and ensure important instructions are displayed each time a job is recalled. After selecting the bend sequence and tools from the graphical tool library, part programs are created with one touch. Automatic Gage Allowance calculation reduces trial and error at the machine.
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Learn How To Budget On A Roller Coaster Income

My husband has two jobs — he is an artist and a salesman. He earns commissions from both jobs, so we never know what our income will be. I work part-time and am paid hourly. How can we possibly live on a budget? — Jenn P., Texas he mistake many people who live with an uncertain income (or what I call “mystery means”) make is they spend whatever amount of money they earn as it comes in.

They multiply a good month’s income by 12 and figure that’s about what their annual income should be and then set their lifestyles accordingly. Then they starve during the lean months, allowing all the bills to go past due hoping that a good month will follow soon.

The secret to living on an uncertain income is to determine the very minimum you need to live each month. What dollar figure must your husband’s commissioned jobs produce so that when added to your part-time paychecks will allow you to pay all of your bills? Whatever that number is, let that become his new salary.

Next, open another checking account and designate it as his holding account. Instead of putting his commission checks into your regular household account, from now deposit them to this holding account. Once a month, write out one check from this account to pay him his salary. This is going to require a great deal of discipline because some months he will bring in more than the amount you’ve determined to be his plastic card. That’s good because you will have lean months ahead. Allowing money to build up in that separate account will become the reserve you need to pay him even during those slow months.

Being self-employed (or commission-based, which to me is about the same thing) can be either rewarding or horribly debilitating. It all depends on your willingness to be disciplined and to exercise great restraint during that occasional month when it feels like your ship has come in. Don’t believe it. Next month could produce little, if any, income at all. You have to learn to handle both.I am opposed to any kind of plastic for kids of any age. Honestly, age 18 is about the right time to introduce credit and debit cards. Plastic is a privilege for financially mature adults.

Plastic confuses and skews children’s thinking processes. Cash, on the other hand, works like a dream. It’s real, and you cannot spend more than you have. Teach your kids how to earn, save, give and manage cash. Those are the skills they need to learn now so that they will be able to understand and manage plastic in the future.

I have written extensively about this in my book, “Raising Financially Confident Kids,” which also includes a foolproof, step-by-step plan that will help you to produce financially confident adults. I hope you will read it soon, before you hand your child an American Express card. Keep an eye on your mailbox. I’m sending you a copy of the book. Enjoy!

To that end, I usually head straight for the self-service checkouts. It is not perfect – “unexpected item in bagging area” has become a familiar element of the experience – but it is fast and I don’t have to worry about offending a checkout worker by talking on a mobile phone.

So I was excited to hear about a scheme in France where shoppers were able to pay for their goods with a flick of their finger.In a six-month trial, customers of supermarket chain Auchan and DIY store Leroy Merlin were able to pay for their goods by placing a fingertip on a scanner.The participants carried a payment card holding their biometric data and a case that allowed the card to communicate with the till. All the customer had to do was present a finger and the payment was processed.

The customers certainly seemed to like it. Around 900 people took part in the trial and 94pc said they would be willing to use fingerprint payment for all their in-store purchases.Mr Delaforge said the technology could also be developed to add loyalty points and discounts automatically when a customer scans their fingerprint, helping consumers save both time and money.

It could be the influence of Minority Report, but there seems to be an interest in biometric payments on this side of the Channel as well.A recent study of more than 2,000 shoppers by payment processing group WorldPay found 49pc would use biometric payments, such as fingerprint or iris scanners – far outweighing the popularity of smartphone payments, which won 30pc of the vote.

Ron Kalifa, deputy chairman of WorldPay, said: “It’s interesting to see the public considering biometric payments, a science that they may have seen in films or on television, which suggests familiarity and visibility of new payment technologies is crucial in moving usage from tech-savvy enthusiasts to the wider public.”Biometric payment might be a few years away from supermarkets in Britain. But in the meantime, a number of developments are under way to change the way we shop.

The idea was to take the self-scan checkouts and redesign them for bigger shop loads. A shopper places their items on a conveyor belt which passes through a 360-degree scanner, able to identify bar codes from every angle. There are two bagging areas so as soon as the first shopper’s goods have passed through the scanner, a second shopper can begin sending their items through.It is also a cashless process, as the system only accepts payment from a plastic card.

Sainsbury’s, meanwhile, is currently piloting a mobile app which allows customers to scan their shopping using their smartphone as they walk around the aisles. The app tracks their spending, so customers can pay for their shopping at the till without having to unload their goods. The service is currently available in three stores – Clerkenwell and Bethnal Green in London and Tadley in Hampshire – ahead of a wider rollout next year. A Sainsbury’s spokesman said in future the app could act as a mobile wallet, allowing customers to pay with their smartphone and avoid the till altogether. A slightly more Big Brother-esque possibility is that the app could remind customers if they forget to buy a regular item.

I hope that checkout staff remain part of the supermarket shop. It is helpful – sometimes essential – to have a human dispensing some common sense behind the till. But if anything can get me out of the door faster while keeping my personal data safe, I’m all for exploring the possibilities.

Read the full products at http://www.smartcardfactory.com/smart-card-IC-card_c504.

The Hollywood, Florida,

"Lost all my money, man. She's gonna kill me," he said, shaking his head but also laughing. I chuckled back, not really knowing what else to do, curious as to where this conversation would lead. "Well, what are you going to tell her?" I responded, as we walked side by side.

Im'a tell her I got robbed. If I do that, she won't get mad, she'll say "What happened, baby?" and I'll say "No need to call the police, I was in the wrong place" and she's gonna say "Where'd you go?" and I'm gonna say "I was trying to buy some weed and they robbed the fucking weed man," because she knows I smoke weed.

It was 5:30 p.m. on a beautiful Friday afternoon, and this was my first introduction to the casinos of Hollywood, Florida. This conversation occurred only because I was walking back to my car to retrieve my ID. After a long week, all I wanted to do was withdraw a little money, play about 30 minutes of blackjack, and then be on my way. Walking into the Seminole Casino, that seemed like a realistic goal.

I was the youngest person in the casino by 30 years. Easily. Weaving through slot machines, I glared in wonderment — Why were these people here? — and those who looked up from their games reciprocated. How long had they been sitting in this cigarette-smoke fog machine of a room? And how long would they stay?

Finally reaching the $10 blackjack table, the lowest possible buy-in, I asked permission of the table's two participants if I could join. The older woman, a glamorously weathered Blanche Devereaux, nodded positively, just as a puff of smoke briefly made her face disappear. The man next to her didn't acknowledge my question, because he was staring at the televisions above.

All of the televisions were on Pacific Time. I couldn't help but laugh at that blatant act of disorientation and smart card. Regardless, as $70 in chips were pushed my way, I gave myself a time limit: 15 minutes. Once that TV said 3:00 p.m. PT, I was standing up, cashing out, and leaving.

Fifteen minutes later, I did just that. And after a chips-for-cash transaction, I walked out of the Seminole Casino toward my car, $100 richer. What a solid afternoon.

In my gambling history, which is not long but most certainly not positive, never had I shown anything resembling self-restraint. If I won, the assumption was that it was "my day," and if I lost, the assumption was that, eventually, on that day, it would become "mine." I'd thought this way because I tend to assume things will work out for me in the end.

I didn't know what to make of my cab driver's statement, but apparently he thought my target demographic was 75-year-old women. Maybe it was my Hawaiian shirt, an attempt to blend in with the older crowd. Regardless, through some combination of cabin fever and it being "my day," it was now 12:10 a.m. and I was getting a lift back to the casino.

This was Hollywood, Florida's night club. Most of those present were overdressed by way of being comically underdressed, the energy was high, the lights were bright, and "For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)" was blaring. Again, I felt out of place in a casino, but it wasn't age this time — now I was all alone. This was very much a couples scene or a breeding ground for large, rowdy groups celebrating some life event.

Not enjoying myself in the slightest, I wandered, aimlessly, looking for an open blackjack table. Nothing was available. I began to notice my movements had caught the attention of two employees. Assuming this would end with my getting thrown in a dumpster, never to be seen again, I spotted the exit and left.

In a matter of hours, the Seminole Casino had changed. Drastically. Yes, it looked the same on the outside and the crowd within still leaned older, but instead of quiet and borderline-depressing, it was now bustling.

A great deal of thanks for that change goes to the cover band loudly performing jams inside. As I walked in, it was "Too Close" by Next, which bled nicely into a string of Prince hits that got quite a few slot players out of their seats to dance.

I walked straight to my blackjack table with confidence and exchanged my previous winnings for chips. My tablemates this time were two brothers in their fifties, one who did not speak and the other a source of commentary on every single thing that was happening. Everything.

There was his disgust over not getting drinks comped, there was the time he almost got into a fight after hitting on 14 when the dealer had 13, and there was the time he came into a casino with $25 and left with a grand.

I said nothing to him, but my head was constantly nodding in approval of everything he said. When a man and woman walked over and joined us about 45 minutes in, the gentleman in the couple lost his first three hands. His response to his subpar gameplay: "I always bust when I sit over here."

Arrested Development Slow-Binge Recap

Of all the Bluth family members, Lindsay has the most fraught sense of self, the biggest questions about her role in the family. She grew up thinking she was Michael's twin (twinness itself a complication of identity, multiplying it), and then discovered at the end of Season 3 that she was adopted. In "Red Hairing," she approaches her literal identity crisis in a very literal manner: Changing her appearance, or, given the eerie manipulation her face seems to have undergone since 2007, it might be more accurate to say that she's changing it even more. "Who am I?" she frets throughout the episode, trying on different looks and different relationships until, like all Bluths must, she returns to the sea … Cinco de Cuatro, to be specific.

The episode picks up almost exactly where the first Lindsay episode began: at an ostrich farm run by Marky Bark, freegan activist son of Lindsay's one-time protest partner Johnny Bark. Lindsay and Marky met cute, as many couples do, dropping their original partners off at the methadone clinic. Now Lindsay has joined her face-blind, speedy lover at his desert ostrich farm and is experiencing a little sweat-and-squeeze herself. She's so hot she'd "give $20,000 for a lemonade," even as Marky's mother presses her into grimy service as Marky puts pressure onto the neighboring businessmen's retreat that's rubbing up against their property lines.

Yes, Marky is the Ostrich God that warns George Sr. and Oscar that "the weak will become the strong," a gambit to keep the corporate colony from taking over. Lindsay can't take the heat or the drugged wildlife ("Who keeps numbing these desert animals?"). When Marky's mom pipes up that Lucille has been "sent away," Lindsay leads the unusual family unit (her, Marky, and their ostrich, Cindy) to the empty condo and revels in the barely recollected smell of home: "not-urine."

Flash-forward a year and we see the condo in the state that it's in when Michael comes home from Phoenix and Tobias reconnoiters the place for things to steal to support himself and DeBrie: newspaper on the windows, stuffing torn out of the couches, but really, "the only thing they'd really changed was getting the not-urine smell out." Despite the continuous need for the two to reintroduce themselves to each other, the relationship has gone just as stale. Lindsay is understandably excited to come home from scrounging food and find Marky at work on a "love bomb." ("Let me just change out of these filthy clothes and into some filthy lingerie.") But Marky has a bigger, longer-lasting plan in mind: He wants to glitter-bomb Herbert Love.

He'll leap out of the lectern, he explains, and then Love and the audience will — Lindsay interrupts: "be blue in the face." Considers Mark: "That's better than mine, actually. I was going to say they'll be covered in ink and glitter."

Lindsay rolls her eyes at the plan, her impatience with their lifestyle having already reared its feathered head in Lindsay's furtive visits with Lucille Two across the hall. (Making Lucille three-for-three for Bluth sibling secret trysts.) Lucille Two is delighted in the company of Lucille Bluth's daughter; it's another notch in her ongoing battle for Lucille supremacy. She gifts Lindsay with sequined clothes and a darling red wig, previously used for nautical cosplay. (Lucille Two: "I used to wear that with the Captain, and I was …" Lindsay: "Tennille?" Lucille Two: "And not make eye contact, yes!")

Lindsay is happy with the arrangement as well: "You've been like a mother to me, except kind and loving and willing to let me eat." She has even made Lucille a banner. (Look at banner, Lucille!) Lindsay wants to support Lucille Two's run "4 Congres," drawing on her experience campaigning for student government against long-time nemesis Sally Sitwell, daughter of Bluth family rival Stan Sitwell.

She and Marky argue about the passion having gone out of their relationship ("It doesn't matter, but I'm really, really pretty!" "I'm the straightest guy you know!" "Why does every man have to say that to me?"), Marky storms out, and Lindsay discovers a check wedged in the pages of plastic card. It's for $50,000 and the memo indicates its intended recipient: "Gangie 4: Facelift." Using what could be called "banner logic," Lindsay interprets this to mean that the money is Lucille Bluth's gift to Maeby to pay for plastic surgery. Lindsay goes to the soft-time prison where her mother is serving time and tennis balls.

They argue, as usual. Lindsay defends Maeby's beauty but her emotional plea falls on two sets of dry eyes: "I'll be out on parole by the time you work up a tear," observes Lucille.

Lindsay rebelliously steals a jar of glitter and returns to the condo, ready to help Marky with his Love-bomb scheme by attending the candidate's fund-raiser incognito. She even offers to sign over the check for 50 grand, "It could buy a lot of leaflets … and Nature's Miracle." Marky insists Lindsay tear up the check.

Having donned the red wig (it's a better disguise than the original two-part horse costume), Lindsay runs into both her father, who asks for money, and her daughter, who asks what she's doing there. Lindsay's honest answer — "A random act of senseless non-violence" — provokes a like response from Maeby: She's there to pick up a lifetime achievement award for her work in the entertainment business. Lindsay sighs, "Tell your therapist I tried."

While dumping some vodka in her purse, Lindsay is chatted up by Love, who she doesn't recognize (face-blind Marky just showed her a picture of Nat King Cole): "The only phony I'm interested in is your phony number." She's too distracted to let Marky out of the lectern and thus when the glitter bomb explodes, he just blues himself. A déjà vu–despondent Lindsay brightens when Herbert Love presents his card and suggests "sexual congress."

Maeby lets her know who she's been schmoozing, which both further depresses and excites her. For a couple of days, Lindsay drinks her purse vodka and nurses her wounds, visiting Marky in prison ("They're dropping my charges from prank bomb to 'not Arab terrorism.'") and eventually attempting to reconcile with Maeby.

Maeby floats the idea that Lindsay could use her feminine wiles to get Love to let Marky out of jail. Lindsay jumps at the idea, eager to do right by Marky, but also intrigued by being with, as Maeby puts it, "one of those shallow guys only interested in looks." Sighs Lindsay, "I've missed that."

Lindsay and Love meet at the Ealing Club (where everyone does!). He uses clever wordplay ("Your cheekbones are higher than my approval rating") to ease her into a hotel room. On the way she runs into Michael and becomes ensnared in the favor-chain begun when Michael asked his father for movie rights. At this point, Michael wants Lindsay to talk to turn Love "against the wall." She agrees to, if Michael will talk to Warden Gentles about letting Marky out. He figures why not — "I have a script notes call with him on Tuesday" — only to then forge another link in the exchange: Will Lindsay sign over her movie rights as well? She agrees.

Woods goes from red carpet to TPC Sawgrass

Woods said it took him a week to get over his tie for fourth at the Masters. Next up is The Players Championship, where he has won only once in 15 years and has just one top 10 since that victory in 2001.

"If you're not playing well, you're going to get exposed," Woods said.

Woods was at full exposure Monday night at the Met with girlfriend Lindsey Vonn. For someone who has demanded so much privacy off the golf course, he attended the Costume Institute Gala. Vonn was a guest of Vogue. He posed on the red carpet wearing a black suit, while the Olympic ski champion wore a long white dress with see-through slits. The theme of the gala was "PUNK: Chaos to Coutre."

"It was certainly different," Woods said. "Lindsey wanted to try and grow her brand. She's come out with a new perfume and makeup line, so that was a big thing for her and I'm supporting it. As you know, I'm not really big into fashion stuff. The theme was pretty interesting, because obviously I remember some of that stuff when I was a kid. But I certainly didn't wear that stuff."

Woods is used to the attention as the primary focus of golf since he won the 1997 Masters. He was reminded of how much fans pay attention to him at the Masters, where he was involved in an unusual rules situation that won't seem to go away.

It started with Woods' third shot hitting the flag on the 15th hole and bouncing back into the water on the opening hole. Woods unknowingly took an illegal drop, but he wasn't told about the possible infraction until after he signed his card. Augusta National took the blame, with competitions chairman Fred Ridley saying it didn't initially notice the violation and chose not to ask Woods about it before he signed his plastic card.

Eventually, he was given a two-shot penalty but allowed to stay in the tournament - instead of being disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard - under Rule 33-7 that gives a committee discretion to waive the disqualification penalty.

The U.S. Golf Association and Royal & Ancient last week said the Masters was within its right not to disqualify Woods. He wound up four shots out of the lead in a tie for fourth, his 15th consecutive major without winning.

Woods said he if saw a violation on television, he would not call it in. Television viewers - in the case of the Masters, it was David Eger, a respected rules expert - have been calling in what they think are rules violations for years.

"I don't ever see myself calling in and saying that Kobe (Bryant) traveled or things like that, or an offensive lineman held," he said. "But it's our sport. And that's what we've done and we've accepted. Certain groups are going to get more heat than others just because they're on TV. It is what it is."

Woods, who now has gone eight appearances without winning the Masters, said he didn't stop thinking about it until he resumed practice a week later. He reserved his comments to the shot where all the debate began - a wedge that turned out to be too good. Woods was tied for the lead on the 15th hole in the opening round, and if the ball did not hit the flag, he likely would have had no more than about 5 feet for birdie.

"Unfortunately, I hit a good shot and got a bad break," Woods said. "But I still had an opportunity over the next 36 holes to get it back ... and I just didn't do it."

He has failed to crack the top 20 eight times, the most of any tournament he has played. He is the No. 1 player in the year, and looks like it. In his last three events, he has won twice and tied for fourth. How that translates to the TPC Sawgrass is unpredictable.

Earl is an exceptional lyricist and more recently, a capable producer. He makes beats under the sobriquet RandomBlackDude and credits his Samoan sojourn with the decision to learn when he got back. “It was a confidence thing,” he says. He made one two days ago at his apartment, on Logic, on a laptop set up on a folding plastic card table. He listens to it constantly. The gestating track is referred to as “Fookie.” Until a song is complete, it carries a bullshit name that’s the first thing that Earl thinks of when he hears it. The melody is blue and the tempo unhurried. There’s distorted electric guitar, wobbly keyboard chords and snare drums that add an antsy military-funeral vibe. This song will likely be the finale on the album. “There was a moment a month ago when I was mentally 100 percent finished with the record,” he says. “I just wanted it out, like, hurry up.” A bum hard drive corrupted the sole copy of a different track, and Earl elected to scrap it instead of salvaging it.  “It’s not evolving,” he says of the album. “It’s writhing on the floor, and I’m in the house looking for something to bludgeon it.”

Completing “Fookie” is a priority with the album’s delivery date nearing, and to do that Earl needs studio time. On the poured-concrete back patio of Earl’s apartment, the rapper gets on the phone while pulling on a Camel. Wiry, college-aged kids in mirrored shades and microscopic swimsuits walk by towards the pool. Earl calls Mac Miller, the Pittsburgh rapper whose debut Blue Slide Park, topped the Billboard 200 album charts in late 2011. The two met through friends and work together frequently. “Scary Movie 5?” Earl says into the phone, laughing. “I don’t know if that’s cool.” Apparently, there’s a scheduling conflict, because Earl wanted to record at Mac’s, but Mac is filming a lampoon horror scene with Snoop Lion. You can hear Mac’s laughter through the phone. They agree to meet in an hour, and Earl offers to bring food.

Miller’s digs are considerably flashier than Earl’s. A stark, white Entourage McMansion in the Hollywood Hills, it features a pool, two recording studios and an automated gate. It can be seen with some frequency on MTV2 as a part of Mac’s reality television show which he jokingly drags into conversation every chance he gets. Miller meets us at the foot of his driveway, bows deeply as he introduces himself as Malcolm and then immediately backs into a parked car on the walk up.

The studio Earl uses is Mac’s converted pool house. It’s ensconced in ambient red light and features a gigantic Buddha head. There’s a large keyboard, a wall-mounted flatscreen TV and professional studio monitors. According to Forbes, Mac made $6.5 million last year. He released five mix tapes before his first studio album while grappling with a promethazine addiction that he’s since kicked. The trajectory makes you wonder what might have happened had Earl stayed his course—whether or not he would be a millionaire, if he’d have squandered his spoils succumbing to escalated drug use, or if by now he’d be a colorless rapper with a flabby viewpoint and nothing to prove. It also reminds you that despite Samoa, Earl is still young enough to be corruptible. There’s a moment when Earl and Mac rap silly jokes to each other in a huddle, whispering gleefully, and they look like college kids cutting class. They plow through styrofoam containers of Korean-Hawaiian grilled chicken and watch a rerun of Tyler’s recent appearance on Fallon, debuting “Treehome95.” Tyler’s grinning, sunglassed face moves across the screen from behind a shiny black piano that he plays beautifully. “We’ve been waiting so long for America to see this,” Earl says. “To see his appeal. Tyler’s so good I hate it.”

‘Dirty smart phones’ leave file traces

The consequence is that hackers could potentially access files stored in the cloud, or get access to cloud accounts, using leftover data stored on an Android device, iPhone or other smart phone.

"That smart phones can essentially remember deleted information poses a huge risk to organisations that issue smart phone s to employees and to organisations that don't explicitly disable the use of personal devices for work-related computing," says Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO of smart card, a maker of cloud encryption software.

The tracing of leftover data on smart phone s is not for the layperson, Kothari says, but could be looked at as the modern-day equivalent of Dumpster-diving for personal information.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow ran a variety of tests to come to their conclusions. Phones tested included the HTC Desire, running Android 2.1, and an iPhone 3S running iOS 3, and cloud-based file storage systems tested included Box, Dropbox and SugarSync.

A hard reset of the phones being tested was done before 20 files were created on each of the devices, including images, documents, PDFs and music files. Researchers then "manipulated" the phones, by either powering them off, caching the applications or both. As a control, some of the phones were left in active state without any caching. Researchers then did a "data dump" of the phones by copying the memory onto a flash drive, which they then analysed.

Researchers found a variety of metadata leftover after the files had been uploaded to the cloud services. Email addresses of users and transaction logs of which files were uploaded to the cloud were visible, for example. Researchers said they were even able to piece together various metadata to get a URL address of where a file was located in Box's cloud. Researchers also found that all files marked for "offline access" were able to be recovered from both the Android and iOS devices. Even some deleted files were still traceable on the SD card of the Android device.

Files were recovered from both the Android smart phone and its SD card, while the recovered data from the iOS device was recovered from the phone's internal memory (the iPhone 3S does not use an SD card).

In most circumstances, the researchers found that if the applications had been cached, then recovering the files was more difficult, except for when using Box on the iOS device, in which case the same number of files was able to be recovered even after caching.

"Smart phone devices which access cloud storage services can potentially contain a proxy view of the data stored in a cloud storage service," the research concludes. Accessing the proxy data can lead to further data being exposed, they add. Files that were not viewed on the smart phone, but were in the user's cloud storage account, could not be recovered, although in some cases a thumbnail of a JPEG that had not been viewed on the phone was able to be seen.

Researchers say a variety of tools can be used to extract data from a smart phone, including products from private company Cellebrite, which makes the Universal Forensics Extraction Device (UFED). Micro Systemation's XRY makes another tool for forensic detection of data.

In response, a spokesperson for Box pointed out that the researchers were using outdated versions of the company's mobile application (Android Version 1.6.7 and iOS Version 2.7.1), which are both almost a year old. Since then, Box has begun encrypting all files that are saved for offline use. The current Android app has automatic encryption and the Apple version has a feature to enable encryption. Previews of files are always encrypted, Box added.

Researchers admit further testing would be needed to determine how widespread of a vulnerability this is on newer devices, operating systems and cloud platforms.

Kothari, from CipherCloud, says there are steps IT managers can take to prevent corporate data used on smart phone s from being tracked by hackers. For one, encryption tools like CipherCloud's can be used in addition to or in replacement of whatever security measures cloud service providers offer. Data loss prevention (DLP) and audit monitoring services can also be used to ensure employees are not accessing sensitive information on their smart phone s, ensuring that it never gets on the smart phone in the first place and therefore cannot be recovered by a hacker later.

Blackberry stresses that it is not primarily a phone manufacturer - it offers network solutions and devices to attach to them. Naturally there's a problem when the main way of connecting to those networks are unpopular so the challenge has been to make a phone that people will not only use but mould their life around like they would with other RFID tag. Amazingly, to a significant extent, they have succeeded.

I've never really got on with Blackberry. Having something which prime function was to ensure that I couldn't escape from email, wherever I may be, was not something I wished to embrace. But I could see the value. I tried using the phones many times, but while I could see the benefit of secure messaging, I didn't need it and the operating environment felt dated, complex, unintuitive and clunky. It was primarily for IT departments to deploy business-level communication devices with proscriptive access to things like the internet and social media.

The keyboards were a boon, but many other pre-iPhone phones caught up quickly here. Post iPhone and Blackberry's are the main choice for those who still demand a keyboard and many people still swear by them - Angus, the editor at Lifehacker Australia can't be found without his, and that's a high endorsement from someone who goes through a lot of phones.

Basically, companies who still want to inflict phones upon their staff for security reasons have been waiting for a device that won't make employees feel like a cat on a leash. Existing Blackberry users who love the apps and environment, finally have a modern device that looks and operates more like an iPhone or decent Android device, so they'll be happy. Those who want a modern Blackberry with a keyboard only need to wait a little longer for the Q10 which will be out in April or May. All of these people were likely to buy a Blackberry so long as it wasn't terrible, and so they'll likely be happy. We'll be dealing with why, below.

But what about people like me? I've used, and lived with, just about every smartphone, that's appeared on the market, since before the first iPhone. Is the Z10 a genuine rival to the iPhone or a top Android device? That would be one helluva achievement if so - to effectively quit the market and come back with a cutting edge rival. I've been living with it for a while now. Here's my view.

Cramped Quarters Gardening

No matter how small your apartment or how limited your desk space at work, there’s always room for a little plant life. In fact, having plants around you at work can help with your psychological health as well your physical well being. According to a recent study conducted by the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Washington State University, placing potted plants in a windowless workplace was shown to help increase employee productivity and attentiveness while at the same time reducing stress. And having a home garden can not only provide you with a stress-reducing activity, it’s also an inexpensive way to keep healthy greens on hand year round.

Plants’ ability to fight indoor air pollution has been recognized by organizations such as the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), which conducted a two year study on the effect of potted plants on “sick building syndrome.” The study found that plants such as bamboo palm, ficus, peace lily, and Chinese evergreen were effective at purifying the air, and spider plants helped to reduce the amount of airborne formaldehyde. Chrysanthemums and gerbera daisy were also beneficial in scrubbing the air of benzene, a carcinogen mainly found in tobacco smoke, exhaust and industrial emissions.

Other plants that do well in low light and don’t mind a little neglect include philodendrons, spider plants and snake plants. Rubber plants are also good at removing air pollutants and English ivy has been known to help eliminate mold.

The first step is to determine how much sunlight your selected garden space gets every day. This could be a balcony or fire escape, a window sill, a window, a sun-lit handrail, or even an empty outdoor wall if your landlord grants you permission to use it.

Finding out the amount of sun exposure your garden space gets can be a tedious process. Some people choose to take hourly pictures of the space during the planting season (late spring to early fall) and others mark the sunny spots hourly with chalk. If you don’t have the time to hang out and take pictures on the hour, however, you could check out the sun’s movement around your neighborhood using the SunCalc app or leave your smartphone at home for the day and use a time lapse app to take pictures of your garden area during daylight hours.

If your garden space gets six or more hours of sunlight, you can plant it with full sun foliage. Four to five hours is considered partial sun and two to four hours is partial shade. Less than one hour of sunlight works best for shade plants.

Now the fun part—planting! Once you know how much sunlight your plants are going to receive, finding a place to grow them can lead to some creative innovating and repurposing. I’ve seen gardens grown in just about everything, from fragments of old tires to wine boxes and even old rubber boots. Following are a few ideas for planting in cramped spaces.

Take a plastic bottle and make sure the cap is screwed tightly on the top. Then turn the bottle upside down, cut off the bottom (now the top) and punch four holes equidistant from each other around the top of the perimeter. Run some strong wire, rope or twine through the holes to hang the bottle from and fill the bottle with gravel at the bottom and a mix of half potting soil, half mushroom compost. Plant your greenery, hang and you’re done! Water your plants as required and unscrew the cap on the bottom every once in a while to filter off the used water. You can also take it a step further and decorate the outside of the bottle by painting it, covering it in decorative cloth or even doing a creative decoupage.

If you have a little wall space, or can borrow some, you can create a quick vertical garden with several plastic plant pots and an old wooden palette. To make the garden, knock out every other slat in the palette and lean it against the wall where you want it to stay. Then wedge the plant pots in the space between the slats. Fill each pot with a small layer of gravel and then a mix of potting soil and mushroom compost, plant and you’re done.

With the floor space provided by an outdoor balcony or fire escape, consider planting some vertical and/or sprawling plants on lengths of chicken wire or even butcher’s twine spaced about one to one and a half inches apart and up to three feet high. Above the vine plants you can place hanging baskets and around them you can do layers of potted plants with plants that require more shade placed half under a small shelf and half sun plants above that. Consider doing some companion gardening as well in order to maximize your garden space. The three sisters—corn, beans and squash—grow well together, and flowers such as marigolds and mint help to keep insects away. Be careful with the mint, however, as it is invasive and can quickly overtake a potted plant. It might be wise to plant these separately and place them among your other pots.

Cape Charles home achieves highest LEED rating

Since he was a small boy, Luke Kellam has been swinging a hammer. But his building resum??, up until a few years ago, only included some tree forts and a house that he helped a contractor construct in Wyoming, where he once lived and worked as a wilderness instructor.

After the West, and a stint teaching in Northern Virginia, Kellam found himself back on Virginia's Eastern Shore, where he grew up in Belle Haven, itching to - again - pick up that hammer and build.

This time, though, Kellam dove into his new career by working alongside a master builder in Virginia Beach for a few years until he was ready to start his own company.

That road - and opening L.J. Kellam Construction in 2005 - has led Kellam to build a single-family home that has earned the Platinum Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification by the United States Green Building Council.

Not only is this house the Virginia Eastern Shore's first platinum-certified LEED single-family home, it's where his father and step-mother live.

The Platinum rating is the highest LEED rating a project can achieve.

To be LEED-certified, a home must be "designed and constructed in accordance with the rigorous guidelines of the LEED for Homes green-building certification program," according to the U.S. Green Building Council's website, USGBC.org. "LEED for Homes is a consensus-developed, third party-verified, voluntary rating system which promotes the design and construction of high-performance green homes."

Participation demonstrates leadership, innovation, environmental stewardship and social responsibility, plus, the certified buildings lower operating costs, reduce waste, conserve energy and water, reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions and provide a healthier environment for residents.

They also qualify for tax rebates, zoning allowances and other incentives in many cities across the country.

Understanding why Luke Kellam's father, Lucius J. Kellam III, decided to put the LEED stamp of approval on his and wife Tata Kellam's home is a history lesson of sorts.

Luke's grandfather, Lucius J. Kellam Jr., spearheaded and oversaw the construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, connecting South Hampton Roads with Virginia's Eastern Shore. He served as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission's first chairman until 1993; the bridge-tunnel was named for him in 1987.

Luke's grandmother, Dorothy Douglass Kellam, according to her 2006 obituary, had a passion for "gardening and the beautification of her surroundings."

Their son, Luke's dad, Lucius Kellam III, followed in his parents' footsteps, not only serving as chair of the Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission, he also became heavily involved in conservation efforts, serving as the first chair of the Virginia Eastern Shore Land Trust to help preserve the Shore's working farms, forests, resources and wildlife habitat, and as a longtime member of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

So when it came time to downsize, and build a new home on a 15-acre parcel on Old Plantation Creek just down the road from Cape Charles' historic town center, building an energy-efficient home fit the mindset.

This seemed like a "healthy way to downsize" and a way to serve as "an example of what could be done," Lucius said on a recent tour of his home.

According to Lucius Kellam III, the effort wasn't about being "altruistic,"... "it's just something we wanted to do."

And it's something son Luke Kellam, hammer in hand, fully jumped into.

The air feels like it changes is some inexplicable way after you walk from the outside into the Kellam home.

A lone log blazes away in the heat-efficient fireplace, placed in the center of a large, open room that melds with the kitchen. The oversized windows allow clear views of Old Plantation Creek, which is just stone's throw from where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean.

Luke Kellam is there to greet the visitors, shoes off and ready for the tour.

His father finishes some dishes in the kitchen, showing off the only item he said he requested for the house - a faucet that he taps off or on without raising or lowering a handle.

Some of the items that make this house platinum-LEED certified aren't obvious to the untrained eye.

Take the pergolas outside the home - a nice, aesthetic feature, but also a way to shade the house from the sun in the summer, and pick up the heat in the winter with angled blades of wood.

The process, Luke Kellam said, is not necessarily difficult. It's just time-consuming and precise, from making sure most of the building materials came from within a 500-miles radius of the house to hiring a third party to verify that jobs were done according to LEED standards.

Lucius Kellam III purchased the 15-acre property a few years ago with an existing house on the lot. The original plan was to refurbish and add onto that home, but unexpected circumstances called for tearing it down and replacing it.

By putting the new home, at about 4,000 square feet, on the old home's footprint, and by keeping the rustic, oyster-clam-shell-covered driveway, the house earned LEED points.

Other factors are less tangible and come together for the overall look and feel of the home, including a layer of 1-inch rigid foam for added insulation, shredded newspaper insulation in the walls, highly efficient windows, natural ventilation and the orientation of the house on the lot for shading and less direct sun - making for lower energy consumption.

A geo-thermal heat pump was installed to take advantage of the stable temperature of groundwater that is used to heat and cool the house.

In the summer, it uses water in the 50s - instead of air in the 80s - to cool the house, and the excess heat is reused to heat water for showers. Radiant floors allow the thermostat to be set at a lower temperature.

A majority of the lighting is energy-efficient, fluorescent, LED- or Energy Star-certified; the appliances are Energy Star rated. In addition, 24 photovoltaic panels atop the house produce solar energy.

Throughout the house, recycled materials hide in the form of counter tops, flooring and reconstituted roofing material made from steel.

In the master bath, Lucius Kellam III shows off a sparkling counter made of recycled mirrors and cabinets from recycled straw - yes, the kind that horses eat.

In the kitchen, the green-from-afar counter tops look more like shredded currency upon closer examination - but that's only because they are. In the laundry room, recycled drill bits emit a silver sheen from the counters. All earned the house LEED points.

On the floor there's bamboo, cork in the work-out room and a new type of linoleum in the laundry room, all of which provide another avenue to use recycled goods. The exterior is James Hardie siding, which is engineered to protect the house from harsh climate and moisture.

One of the region's leading green-design consultants, Janet Harrison with J. Harrison Architect in Annapolis, Md., designed the home with help from Cox Kliewer and Co. in Virginia Beach. The latter helped with the inside design.

Outside, because the existing footprint of the old home was used, little of the site was disturbed during construction. Where it was disturbed, the site was replanted with native grasses that need no watering.

The few plant beds close to the house are taken care of through a low-drip irrigation system supplied by rainwater - caught from the downspouts in transported to a 10,000-gallon cistern buried underground.

This reduces water use and runoff into the Chesapeake Bay, Luke Kellam said.

The overall impact has also reduced energy costs, according to father Lucius Kellam III. Since the couple moved in about 18 months ago, the cost for heating or air-conditioning and lights has been between $49 and $59 per month.

Although the Kellams would not disclose the cost of the project, "a lot of people assume that green building is prohibitively expensive," Luke Kellam said. "What we learned is that through careful planning and a very knowledgeable project team, it can be accomplished without pushing budgets beyond reach. Also, some of the energy-efficient systems qualify for tax credits."

Commitments and obligations

Conservatives have a legitimate gripe about America's excessive "commitments and obligations" to "unfunded liabilities" but their focus on Medicare and social security misses the larger point: our disastrous commitment to the current national lifestyle, in particular suburban sprawl and everything it entails.
This point came across vividly in a video recently released by the usually level-headed David McAlvaney titled "THE FUSE IS LIT PART 3 — AN AMERICAN RECKONING." In it, the smooth and articulate McAlvaney is shown behind the wheel of his SUV tooling across the picturesque small town in Colorado where he lives inveighing against the public that elects politicians who deliver the voters cash benefits. This dynamic is surely deadly, and implies Democracy's tragic self-limiting nature. But McAlvaney suggests if we could come to grips with the fiscal quandary of "entitlement" spending, American life would just rock on.

This is plainly not so, but it also reveals the tragic shortsightedness of even thoughtful conservatives - and there are some out there, indeed we need them, indeed one of the political tragedies of recent American history is the surrender of conservatism to religious hysterics, professional ignoramuses, military chauvinists, and flat-earthers. A true conservative would recognize the land development pattern of the millennial USA as a consequence of tragic collective choices, a living arrangement with no future, a trap every bit as lethal as Medicare and social security.

The catch is we're not going to unbuild suburbia and all its accessories. There's no way to legislate it away. We're stuck with it. The suburban entitlement will fail even more dramatically than the social entitlements that conservatives grouse about because there's no way to "print" cheap oil or well-paid livelihoods the way you can monetize public debt to support social spending. You can "print" mortgages, of course, for people with little chance of paying them down, but that only leads to the financial hostage racket called too-big-to-fail banking, and we know where that's gotten us.

Around the Internet, in the vale of financial podcasting, you can hear voices cheerleading the "return" of the house-building industry. Is it a good thing that real estate speculators are banging up yet more housing subdivisions in the hills around San Diego? I can tell you why they are doing it: because that is the only way they know how to build anything in California. They're stuck in the habits and practices of the 20th century, building more car dependent stuff for a society that is already dying a slow death from living that way.

In the collapse of all these rackets, bad habits, and brain-dead behaviors that are sure to come, historians will have a hard time sorting out what exactly brought down the empire. The big element that will not be so visible is the poverty of imagination that set the tone for it — especially among public figures and spokespeople who should have seen and articulated these relationships, and extra-especially among self-proclaimed conservatives.

Yesterday happened to be the day when the articulator-in-chief got his official new lease in office. Genial figure that he is, I don't think President Obama has a clue where all this is heading. He argued for stricter gun laws, but that horse is already so far out of the barn it's in the next county. We don't seem to realize that America is now fully armed. Additional firearms are just superfluous at this point. And to some degree the people armed themselves in direct consequence as their government tinkered with due process, and sent drone aircraft into the American skies, and commenced computer hacking operations over every business transaction in the system, and voided the rule-of-law against criminal uber-bankers who creamed off the nation's wealth while holding the economy hostage. Since the armed public is not ready to mount an insurrection against this impudence, the dangerous tension is expressed in morbid and tragic episodes of mass shootings by maniacs against the innocent. What I want to know: where is the lone swindled rancher who waits to bushwhack Jon Corzine of MF Global in the parking lots of Easthampton, since the law won't touch him?

I suppose we'll hear about immigration reform in the coming days. It will surely be some cockamamie proposal to legitimize the "undocumented" by shanghaiing them into the military (think: mercenaries), and otherwise keeping the welcome mat down for more newcomers waiting politely at the front door. This is insane, of course. The USA needs to reduce its population consistent with the tremendous economic contraction underway world-wide. There are too many people for the world to support and shifting them into this country from regions more rapidly affected by contraction is just dumb — but we have our cultural myths to defend ... and voting blocs to appease.

It seems obvious to me that in the, say, four years ahead (one presidential term), we will not come to grips with any of the forces of reality bearing down on us. We will lose control of the money system; we'll go broke trying to keep up our oil supplies; the American public will get more economically desperate and angry; and pretty soon the practical matters of daily life will become rather harsh. And at that point faith in the system finally evaporates and people fight over the table scraps of a failed polity.

Certwood, based in Luton, is a busy trade moulder producing 500,000 components per month for three core sectors; automotive – a tier one supplier of technically complex interior mouldings, stadium seating and its own storage tray system used by schools and laboratories.

All 20 moulding machines at Certwood are equipped with robots to unload mouldings so process automation is second nature to the organisation.  The new FANUC M-10iA robots are six axes arms providing increased flexibility over conventional ‘Beam’ three axis robots commonly used by the plastics industry.

Steve Dennis, Managing Director of Certwood, explains, “An automotive customer asked us to look at a process improvement on a current product with a view to introducing it later into a proposed new product.  The original process involved manually applying a label to a moulding which we first had to cool down to allow gases to fully disperse.  Time taken to accurately position the label and the risk of it bubbling were two key areas to address.

“We worked with plastics automation specialists Hi-Tech Automation to identify solutions and focused on In Mould Labelling (IML) which is more common in the food packaging sector.  The process offers a neat solution as the label is positioned in the mould tool and the part is moulded around it making it non removable, an essential requirement for a safety critical component, and the need to cool down the moulding is eliminated.”  

The six axes FANUC robot is equipped with end of arm tooling to handle a label, a moulding and a static discharge device.  The robot vacuum grips a label from a dispenser cassette and waits for the mould tool to open.  When it opens the robot tooling grips the ejected product and moves the label to within 5.0mm of its position on the tool.  A static charge is then applied which allows the label to be held accurately in place once the robot has positioned it.  The robot moves out of the mould tool and the moulding cycle continues. 

Automating the process has provided an aesthetically improved moulding with a more accurately positioned label that cannot be peeled away.  Production time has been reduced and storage issues removed with the elimination of the need to cool prior to labelling.

“We met our customer’s request to research improvements in this labelling process delivering both quality and economic advantage,” continued Steve Dennis, “IML is now an established part of our service offering, it illustrates that manufacturing innovation gives added value to our customers and also gives Certwood a process that takes it up a level and supports customer retention.”

Taking Inventory Management And Asset Tracking To The Cloud

By moving inventory management and asset tracking (IMAT) to a web-based platform, manufacturing companies realize major cost savings as well as increased operational efficiency from general time saved in deployment and overall maintenance of the system to increased real-time collaboration within the team.

Cloud-based IMAT applications are faster to deploy and involve lower IT infrastructure costs than a traditional, client/server based product.  Additionally, any updates or enhancements to the IMAT software are supplied automatically to the user; companies do not have to purchase and individually install software updates to every individual server and/or desktop computer within the organization — as they would need to with a client/server solution.

Using a cloud-based application with barcode or RFID hardware allows manufacturers to automate the IMAT process as well as gain access to critical data anytime, anywhere—in the warehouse, plant, stockroom, back office and even in the field.  With ASAP BarCloud, for example, employees simply scan an item’s barcode (or RFID tag) on their mobile device, and the data is synced to a centralized server, making it quick and easy for them to share real-time updates, reports and more with management.

In terms of development and deployment, IT infrastructure costs are much lower with a cloud-based platform — the web-based application effectively allows the company to do more with less time and money spent on hardware, software, and development.

By using a web-based platform like ASAP BarCloud, the manufacturer has eliminated the need to integrate with current IT infrastructure because the software vendor has already put together all the necessary components of the IMAT solution and made it easily accessible online.  The actual time saved will vary depending on the manufacturer’s needs — for example, how much configuration with things like feature additions is desired.  However, in general, with companies like ASAP Systems, installation, training and implementation can be done in less than a week because the software does not need to be installed and it’s easy to learn.  In addition, companies can configure the software to their specific needs by “turning on” enhanced features and functionality and customizing data field names specific to the organization.  These customizations can also be changed or adapted to suit the growing needs of the company.

First, there is of course the savings from a reduced need for resources in development and IT personnel.  Another important factor in using a solution like ASAP BarCloud with barcode (or RFID) technology is that the manufacturer will benefit from reduced labor costs for performing physical inventory counts.  In the case of having IMAT in the cloud, operations personnel on the warehouse floor can perform inventory counts right away when the product comes in using a mobile scanner.  That data is then uploaded to the cloud, reducing the need to delay data entry until an employee in the back office receives it.  Essentially, the process by which the floor staff in the warehouse/ operations center shares IMAT information with the back office (e.g. accounting and management) becomes automated, creating additional savings in staffing.

Because IMAT solutions like ASAP BarCloud operate in the cloud, there is less of a need for a manufacturer to invest in IT infrastructure such as hardware, servers, software and storage.  This also reduces recurring IT management and servicing costs within the company.  In some cases, employees can use their existing smart phones and tablets as a mobile scanner or, in the case of manufacturers that deal with a higher volume of inventory, the organization can purchase hardware that is integrated with the IMAT system, such as a Motorola mobile barcode scanner.  While it may become necessary at a future date to purchase upgrades for the operating systems on these hardware devices, the actual IMAT software will automatically upgrade through the cloud-based platform, reducing IT management costs overall.

There are several key benefits for manufacturers that take their IMAT in the cloud— all of which contribute to improved profitability.  First, manufacturers who use web-based solutions like ASAP BarCloud will spend significantly less money on development, deployment and maintenance.  Secondly, using web-based applications save time because they are faster to deploy than those of the traditional client/server model — small– to medium–sized manufacturers can be up and running in less than a week.  Moreover, the sharing of real-time data between personnel in the warehouse/operations center and executives/management is automated with a cloud-computing application, increasing supply chain efficiencies by providing manufacturers access to information they need to make better, more informed forecasting.

The only limitation with using a cloud-based platform is that the client must always have access to the Internet in order to access data.  However, we have hit critical mass with regard to access to the Internet in all markets, and so this is no longer an issue.  Small to mid-sized manufacturers may need to increase their wireless access points within the warehouse/operations center, but this is an inexpensive fix that can be done quickly and easily.

Providers of cloud-based IMAT services such as ASAP Systems use encrypted security so no, it is not a concern.  A client’s data can be automatically backed up with customized data backup plans that include regular downloads of the data to a local hard drive or server.  This safeguards organizational data and other vital information against disasters, equipment failure and simple human error.

We recommend that a manufacturer first make an internal assessment of current processes and IMAT needs including what inventory/assets they are tracking, how they need to track them, how many locations are involved, naming conventions, etc.  Once this is complete, the company should research and compare vendors.  It is a good idea to demo any solution the company is considering purchasing.  Regarding pricing, manufacturers should be sure to get quoted fees based on their specific needs so that they do not pay for unnecessary features.   They should also take advantage of a free trial if it is available (ASAP Systems offers this).  Another important step is to make sure the warehouse/operations center has enough wireless access points.  Once this has been completed, the company is ready to buy the solution, train staff, implement the system and test for and resolve any bugs before moving forward.

Bengals look to reshuffle Wild Card

This is a fun defensive battle that comes down to which offense can make a play. To me, Zimmer's defense is playing at a high level. I love watching them on tape. It's a combination of great coaching and really good plays. I think you can say the same thing about Houston. They do it differently. We're going to see three of the best tackles in the league with Geno Atkins for the Bengals and J.J. Watt and Antonio Smith for the Texans. Those three guys are special.

If you're a Cincinnati fan, you're trying to hope to stop their run game a little bit and force Matt Schaub into the shotgun. They are nowhere near as good a team. They're an under-center-run-the-football-play-action team. If you can force them out of it … and that's what has happened the last four weeks. They've gotten behind, they've been behind in down and distance. Schaub's not that kind of guy.

The Texans have a run game that's more explosive. The Bengals have a solid run game. The Texans have a veteran quarterback, but he's not going to beat you just sitting in shotgun. And the Bengals have a young quarterback trying to figure it out a little bit, but he's a smart, talented kid.

I think the Bengals offensive struggles come down to two things. They need to run it efficiently. They don't need to run it 30 times a game, but if you're running it only 15 or 16 times, you better be averaging four or 4.5 per carry. And you can't get your quarterback sacked 46 times, and I'm a big believer in the pass protection starts with the quarterback. Andy Dalton's been at fault for some of it. The offensive line has been beaten cleanly on some one-on-one situations, and there are a few times the receivers haven't protected him.

Any team that doesn't double J.J. Watt is asking for trouble. When they go to sub-packages, Watt and Smith are inside. If you think you're going to get away with not doubling Watt and/or Antonio Smith, you're going to have a problem. I would think Cincinnati is going into this game with some idea of helping their guards.

The Texans could always count on their offense and now they can't. With Schaub at quarterback they've scored three offensive touchdowns in the last four and a half games. Schaub has one touchdown pass in the last four games. Against Minnesota in Week 15, I was never more sure about the Texans beating a team and they must have felt the same way because they got their butts kicked, 23-6. It's the first time since 2006 when David Carr was their quarterback that they didn't score an offensive touchdown. They've got three offensive linemen in the Pro Bowl, but their line has been a problem. Schaub got sacked 15 times in the first 12 games and 12 in the last four.

They've had a revolving door at both right guard and right tackle. And you know what they say, if you have four you have none. When they let right tackle Eric Winston go in free agency, the guy that was going to replace him, Rashad Butler, blew out his shoulder in camp and never played and Derek Newton, a seventh-rounder from last year, has played most of the time there. They're rotating two rookies at right guard in Ben Jones and Brandon Brooks, so I would expect Atkins to have a big day.

Their pass defense has hurt them and it hasn't been their cornerbacks, it's been their safeties. Former Bengals cornerback Johnathan Joseph had a great year last year, but he hasn't been as good this year because of injuries. He's got a pulled groin and hamstring and he's still been good and he can turn and run for 20 yards, but he can't turn and run for 50. The other corner, Kareem Jackson, has been almost as good.

But they have trouble in their two-deep coverage, when they put safety Glover Quin in the box and bring Quintin Demps off the bench to put him back there with Danieal Manning. Against the Colts twice in the last month Demps made a mental error on the 61-yard TD to T.Y. Hilton and last week's 70-yarder. I would think the Bengals would be crazy if they don't keep sending A.J. Green deep as much as they can.

Last year they gave up 18 TD passes. This year it's 29. And of the 54 passes of at least 20 yards they've allowed, 13 have gone for TDs for an average of 33.5 yards, second-worst in the league next to Detroit.

These are two teams on offense that haven't done much lately, which makes you think a defensive play will be the difference. We know what kind of defensive play the Texans got last year that propelled J.J. Watt into this season doing what he's done. Somebody who gets in the quarterback's face and catches a point-blank interception and returns it for a touchdown, I expect that would win it.

Matt Schaub is a good guy. The dude has done a a lot of work. He's been waiting for this opportunity. Last year he missed out on the playoffs and I believe it means the world to him. I've talked to him this week. He's trying to stay level, keep the same approach.

I don't mean it in an offensive way, but he's a system quarterback. He needs not only to play well, but he needs things around him to go well. If they can't run play-action that sets him up for the bootleg and be in down and distances equally believable they'll be running or passing, he's not going to fare as well. It's more like the offense has to keep him up and boost him up to play well. I don’t think he picks up the offense and makes them play well.

I will be surprised if the winner scores more than 23 and there's not a defensive play that figures in a large way. If I'm the Texans I wouldn't want it to come down to a big kick from Shayne Graham from a great distance. He missed one last week from 52.I don’t know if he's gotten any better under pressure. I don't like the idea.

Most everyone seems to think it's going to be a one-play game and it does have all the feel of the march into Pittsburgh that got the Bengals into the playoffs with a 13-10 win two weeks ago. The game-changer that day didn't show until 59:46 had been played and Bengals safety Reggie Nelson picked off Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

Then, as now, the sense is that defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer and his guys are going to pitch another eminently winnable game and it is up the offense to get something like the 21.8 points it averaged in December for a defense that has been smoking in the last eight games of the season in allowing just 12 points per game.

But the offense can't play like it did in December. A total of 61 yards rushing in the last two games isn’t going to cut it. People are getting on Schaub in Houston for the Texans first offense scoring just six TDs in December. But the Bengals also scored only six. That won’t cut it in January.

Yet this is a favorable matchup for the Bengals. Zimmer, in the Belichick mold, is brilliant at making offenses one-dimensional and if the Bengals take away the run and Schaub's ability to play-action, the Texans are in trouble. Although Schaub's passer rating is still a solid 84 when he's not in play-action, it's still not triple digits, which Pro Football Focus says he is throwing after faking a run.

'Zero Dark Thirty's' compound challenges

First-time feature production designer Jeremy Hindle admits to some dicey feelings while taking director Kathryn Bigelow on an initial walk-through of "Zero Dark Thirty's" key set. But they weren't rookie jitters.

"I remember telling her, 'You're going to feel insanely creepy. You're going to feel like he lived here,'" Hindle says.

The verisimilitude Bigelow demanded for all aspects of the film was particularly important to the re-creation of the compound in which Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs last year. "We walked through, and the detail … it felt like someone had lived there; six years of never leaving," Hindle says. "We knew what his bed looked like from photographs. We knew he had an AK-47 hanging over it. We knew he was a pack rat. The hallway was just jammed full of every newspaper he could get his hands on."

Using primarily open-source intelligence from news reports and the like, and enhanced by Oscar-winning writer-producer and military journalist Mark Boal's research, the production constructed a full-scale, fully operational replica of Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.

"You can scale quite a lot off photographs," Hindle says. "We had a company called Frame Store in London model it in 3-D for us. Once you have the photographs and video, it's all a big math equation. It was a couple weeks of math, really.

"We built it for real out of stone and steel. We flew real Black Hawks in; there was a Black Hawk 50 feet over that set with Kathryn and every actor inside it. So the compound was 21/2 times over-engineered," he says, noting the set had to withstand the crash of one of the helicopters [hanging by a crane]. "There were 9-foot caissons underground, steel, cinder blocks; it was a bunker. It would be hard to blow that place up."

Hindle made the jump to feature film work from commercials — on which he had worked with such directors as Spike Jonze, Nicolas Winding Refn and Alejandro González I?árritu — in part due to the recommendation of "Zero Dark's" cinematographer, Greig Fraser.

"Kathryn hates wild walls [which can be removed for ease of filming]. Because [our] walls don't move, some cinematographers would have had a heart attack. Greig's not like that. We've worked together before; I've boxed him into places before. He loves that kind of style. He knows it creates a certain energy. It's difficult to shoot in when it's 120 degrees, but I said, 'I'm not going to make it easy for you to shoot; I'm going to make it great so you can shoot it.'

"You're cramming everyone in the room; it makes it so real. It's not a way that anyone else [but Bigelow] would make this film. [Normally,] you'd just say, 'Let's go to a stage … break it down, each floor.' But it's real. It was engineered, architecturally drawn up, and we built the thing in 10 weeks."

Scouting and construction of meticulously authentic locations on several continents and the design and assembly of approximations of stealth Black Hawk helicopters happened very quickly.

"I got hired the 25th of November, and we started shooting Feb. 28. It was mind-blowingly fast," Hindle says. "Every one of those military bases [seen in the film] didn't exist. We built all those. The Islamabad embassy, that's an engineering school in India. That was after scouting in Jordan for months."

But Hindle had concerns beyond making his timeline. Safety became an issue as the replica of Bin Laden's compound was built and shot in Jordan.

"It was haunting, for sure," Hindle says. "There were bomb-sniffing dogs checking the set before you walked on. There was a lot of security. We were 30 miles from Syria and three miles from Israel. For the first half of [building] the structure, nobody knew what it was. And then the helicopters came in, hanging from cranes … it was like, 'Huh. We're about a mile from the Dead Sea.'"

Like the hundreds of windows that make up its shiny facade, Carleton University’s new River Building is the result of many smaller victories, says university president Roseann Runte.

Opened this fall, the $55-million building is symbolic of how committed the federal and provincial governments, as well as individual donors, are to funding higher education, she says.

The reliance on sustainable construction practices — the building has a bio-wall and green roof — and its location near the Rideau River signify Carleton’s connection to the community and its concern for the natural environment.

But Runte says its greatest symbol is inside the building, in the form of a giant sculpture carved from the wood of an oak tree that stood in Old Ottawa South for more than 200 years.

The impressive sculpture, called Sailing Through Time, shows a tree upside down, its branches pointing toward the ground and its roots in the sky.

“To me, that is a symbol of what happens at university — that people learn new ways of thinking, new ways of opening their eyes to the world,” Runte said in selecting the River Building’s opening as the single most important achievement at Carleton in 2012.

With baccalaureates largely seen now as only the first step toward entering the workforce, Runte says, Carleton must make getting such a degree as enriching as possible.

A few years ago, the school started giving students a co-curricular record upon graduation, which is essentially a transcript of all the volunteer work, internships and international work they did outside of class during their time at Carleton.

Co-op placements are also a big deal, Runte says, adding they’re not just for science and engineering students any more. All arts departments at Carleton offer co-ops now.

In terms of reforming the post-secondary sector as a whole, Runte said stable government funding and a greater adoption of technology on campuses provincewide are key.

It might soon become commonplace to have some courses taught on campus and others offered strictly online, for example. “I think that will become the norm,” she said. “There will be a greater mixture of how that is done, and that will bring greater collaboration among institutions.”

Collaboration is something else she’d also like to see more of.

Runte used the example of a unique joint program it offers in conjunction with Algonquin College called the Bachelor of Information Technology. Students attend both schools concurrently, getting both the theory and the practical, and graduate in four years with both a degree and a diploma.

That means entering the workforce two years earlier and saving thousands of dollars on tuition.

Runte said the two schools are currently looking at other programs to do this with, and added that other Ontario campuses appear interested in doing the same.

Although calm has been restored now, this year’s Quebec student protests and ongoing concerns about rising tuitions have put the issue of access and affordability front and centre.

Runte says the current model requires a balance to be struck between what proportion government and individuals each contribute, though there is not currently a formula to set these amounts.

Woman becomes advocate for husband's return

Before they were to be separated by thousands of miles, the last words her husband said to her were, "I love you. Have faith in God."

Linda Cedillos had turned the corner on her way home from dropping off her daughter, Victoria Morales, from school on Jan. 26. She hit the brakes when she saw black cars with ICE written on the side parked outside her house. Three agents wearing bullet-proof vests had positioned themselves around her property where her husband, Roberto Cedillos, lay sleeping.

When Linda read the letters branded across the black cars, her heart dropped. She knew the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE, agents had come to deport her husband back to Honduras. The next moments with Roberto would be her last.

According to Linda, the agents followed her up to the bedroom as she awoke her husband and watched him get dressed. After wondering whether they should post outside the back door in case Roberto tried to escape, the agents were surprised at the couple's cooperation.

"My husband is a Christian. He is not going out the window. He's going out the front door," Linda told the agents.

When Roberto arrived in the United States in 2005, he turned himself into ICE agents at the Dallas airport, seeking temporary protective status. Such status is granted to some immigrants who are unable to safely return to their homes. Though Roberto was not granted protective status, he was given permission to stay in the country on the condition that he would appear in court six months later.

"The court notice to appear gives you the opportunity to explain why you are here without inspection," said Dean Wanderer, Linda's immigration lawyer.

Roberto's failure to appear in court because he lost his court documents triggered his removal orders. Roberto moved to Virginia in 2006 and met Linda in 2007 when he worked at a restaurant in Dinwiddie County. After the couple was married in 2008, Linda paid $1,495 in fees to file paperwork in a bid to keep her husband in the country as a lawful permanent resident. Yet she did not know that those forms were useless because Roberto's removal orders remained. Instead, filing the forms in 2011 would have made ICE aware of his location, according to an ICE official.

Roberto was deported back to Honduras in March, two months after being detained in several ICE holding facilities.

Deported immigrants are typically given a five-year ban before they can attempt to re-enter the country. Roberto's ban was extended to 20 years after he was caught trying to re-enter the country illegally in July. Linda said that Roberto slept on trains and walked through the desert for five weeks to get back to her when she needed him.

"He's my life, and I'm his," Linda said. "I was having a partial hysterectomy at the time, and no woman wants to go through that without her husband."

Even though Roberto's successful return to Colonial Heights would have meant the family would go into hiding, Linda said she was glad he tried to get back to her.

Roberto, 31, now lives with his mother in Honduras in a one-room tin-roof house. He works as an industrial mechanic in a nearby factory, earning $2.30 per hour.

The majority of Linda's income from Right at Home, where she cares for the elderly, goes towards supporting Roberto and his mother, who both suffer from medical problems. Linda also helps support Roberto's daughter, who lives in Honduras, to go to private school.

But Linda does not think twice before she signs the checks and mails them to Honduras. For her, Roberto was a gift from God.

"Everybody that met him loves him. No one can believe that he was deported ... especially when there has been people here that have gotten DUIs, and they have been allowed to stay," she said.

Roberto's lack of a criminal record made Wanderer wonder why ICE was so intent to deport him.

"Normally, people that get in removal proceedings are those that are picked up for a crime. Roberto's case is remarkable in that he has no criminal record, he came to improve his lot in life, and Linda has been desperate to get him back," Wanderer said. "He is different in that I don't have to deal with traffic violations or alcohol-related offenses."

ICE officials did not respond to requests for information about this specific case.

ICE statistics indicate that Roberto was one of 174,880 non-criminal immigrant violators to be removed from the country by August 2012. Nearly 191,400 convicted criminal immigration violators were deported by ICE by August 2012.

Most days, Roberto, Linda and Victoria would attend Victoria's soccer games or go fishing at Lakeview Park. Roberto would take bag lunches to the homeless with Linda when she worked for the state health department and comfort 13-year-old Victoria, his stepdaughter, on nights that she would have nightmares.

In the four years that they were married, Linda drove her husband wherever he needed to go because he was not allowed to obtain a license.

"[The ICE agent] asked me why my husband and me never drove. And I told him because my husband didn't have a license. We were trying to do things the legal way, the right way," Linda said.

Her husband's deportation despite his lack of a criminal record, the fact that he turned himself in, and filing the appropriate forms has made Linda believe there is something wrong with the system.

"When you try to do the right thing then you are punished by your own government," she said. "The government has separated us, and it's not fair."

Roberto's failure to appear in court coupled with his attempt to re-enter the country illegally has made his chances of obtaining an immigrant visa slim. An immigrant visa would allow Roberto to travel to the United States and apply for permanent residency.

Because her husband's immigrant visa application will most likely be denied, Linda and her lawyer are submitting waivers to rescind Roberto's 20-year ban on the grounds that his removal has caused extreme hardship on an American citizen.

Every night, Linda holds Roberto's iPod up to her ear. She listens to a recording of him singing in Spanish to God to drown out the numbers in her head. In addition to the $10,000 in lawyer fees, Linda faces nearly $2,000 in waiver fees and thousands in doctor bills. Linda said that now that her daughter's stepfather is gone, Victoria suffers from migraines brought on by stress. Linda, 42, has moved back into her parent's house, and her things are packed away in a storage facility.

"People talk about how immigrants go on welfare and Medicaid. We weren't on Medicaid before, and we paid taxes," Linda said. "Now, I'm on Medicaid, I'm on food stamps."

And every day her husband lives in Honduras is another day Linda doesn't know if he will survive.

"Everybody says, at least he's not dead. But with death, you have closure. With my husband deported, I don't know what the future is going to hold," Linda said. "God didn't mean for it to be that way."

Linda said that even if she had the money to visit her husband in Honduras, she would not go because it is too dangerous. A week after Roberto returned to his mother's home, Linda said his friend was shot for refusing to join a gang. Gang violence and political turmoil caused the 158 Peace Corps volunteers to evacuate Honduras within weeks of Roberto returning to his home country.

Generations Fall of Cybertron - Deluxe Figure

In 2006 Classics Starscream was released, to the immediate delight of many. Problem is, the mold's engineering was outdated even when the toy was brand new. And then the mold kept getting released every year since. Spread among Hasbro, Takara, and Fun Publications, it has been redecoed and/or remolded at least two dozen times in six years. That has got to put it in the running for most reused mold-family. And I may still be missing an instance or two!

A new Classics-friendly Starscream has been on my wishlist for a long time. What's more, I really wanted something based on the Cybertron toy's design, but with better poseability. It took a few years, but it seems like thanks to Fall of Cybertron, I may have gotten exactly what I wished for. ...and in doing probably consigned myself to gradually amassing a whole new seeker collection. Aw, cripes, this really was a monkey's paw...

By this point, making a toy to look like Starscream should be no big deal. And here that's quite true, where the toy hits the basic familiar elements. Intakes rising out above the shoulders, wings flared upward from the back, torso dominated by the cockpit canopy, itself flanked by the square chest vents, and engines forming the "boot heels". The big missing element from most classic iterations of Starscream is the null rays, with this Starscream left bare-armed. But even so, in these colors you just can't look at this toy and not recognize it as Starscream. The visible sculpted detail is on the simplistic side, largely just representing basic panel lines. The shoulder, elbow, and hip joints have some extra added to give a stronger impression of being mechanical elements, but Starscream is for the large part just smooth and clean looking. One noteworthy exception can be found within the torso, where one of the structural pieces has much more complicated detail sculpting implying parts of Starscream's internal structure. In execution it even feels like these components are being safely hidden by the outer armor. A similar case is found with the forearms, where simple mechanisms peek out between two "armor" surfaces. Small touches like that help to build the thought that the low detail surfaces visible are just armor panels hiding the vital working components of the body. This again uses small, simple steps to build the idea that this is a (model of a) living, working thing.

I really like the sculpt work on Starscream's head. The helmet has all the typical elements, but the "ear vents" are slimmed down and kept closer to the helmet, so the head ends up looking more tall than wide. This trait carries in the face, which tapers from filling the front of the helmet around the eyes, down to a point at the chin. A little unusual, but it feels really right for a Starscream, much the way that Transformers: Prime Starscream's face is designed. I like that visual trait carrying over a little in to an otherwise unrelated Starscream's toy. Starscream is one of what seems like an increasingly few toys designed with light-piping eyes that actually keeps them all the way to final production. And the amber color of the clear plastic does an absolutely beautiful job of capturing the light. The yellow-orange glow is very powerful under just semi-direct light, and the eyes will still appear to be illuminated even with completely indirect room lighting. Very, very nice. By the way, thanks to not having a jet's nosecone hanging off the back, this Starscream's head has an unrestricted range in which it can swivel. A ball joint actually would have been a little nicer, provided it would have had range enough to let Starscream look downward, but that's a mildly specific request.

Starscream's articulation is on the high side relative to how the FOC Generations have been going, much like the Optimus/Magnus mold. And in comparison to the Classics seeker, it's a huge leap forward. Some of the more advanced aspects like the double-hinge elbows are just as much for transformation necessity as poseability, but it does the job just as well. Without arm-mounted weapons, the wings don't hinder the articulation much at all, and if they should, they're able to angle back a little bit to allow extra clearance. Of course, the shoulders and the wings share a common hinge so you may find the two moving around the hinges together. But the arms have a fantastic overall range of movement with very little restriction. The legs aren't as unusual, and with their basic 90-degree single hinge knees they're actually pretty square in the average category. But The hips move freely which is a definite plus, and there's an ankle tilt for the sake of having an ankle tilt. They put a good, solid hinge joint in there to serve that function, and the ankles rock smoothly a few degrees to either side of center. As many figures just have the tilt of the ankle predetermined, it's nice to see one get a joint that does nothing but that. Starscream may not do anything amazing or different in poseability, but it's really just nice to get one in this style that's even able to get a solid range of basic poses.

Starscream ends up using quite a bit of paint. All of the blue on the figure is a product of paint applications, there's no blue plastic at all. Most blue surfaces look like they've had full spray coverage, where looking up the bottom of the feet it's easy to see where the spray didn't quite reach and the coverage fades inside. It's a really good job, managing to get the right amount of blue in the colorscheme while relying on paint to fill it all in and still not seem to have anything really obviously missing from the deco elsewhere. The only spot I'd have asked for paint to be added is the intake posts on the shoulders, which for Starscream should be red. Still, it's not a big deal as it sits, and they did a heck of a job with a limited array of plastic colors.

Changing Starscream to vehicle mode is kind of like anti-challenge. The arms fold under the body and the legs peg in pointed backward and that's about it. You need to remember to turn the head backward or else Starscream's face will be looking up in jet mode, but there's not enough going on in the process to really say there's any sort of tricks between modes. But then, I like simple transformations I can pull off in a matter of seconds rather than knowing I need to block out several minutes to unorigami something between modes.

It's not exactly the Cybertron Starscream lookalike I would have asked for, but the themes are similar enough I'm really satisfied with this style of Cybertronian aircraft. The design works out such that the undercarriage actually raises in the middle instead of being a solid block of folded robot bits under a jet "skin". The variations kind of make it look like the legs are oversized engines mostly integrated in to a more full jet body. It would still make an absolutely terrible aircraft, but it's a nice change of pace from how so many Deluxe size jets turn out. Part of the benefit afforded by an aircraft body plan is to exaggerate the size of the vehicle somewhat. Deluxe cars these days tend to be miserably small since they represent the most compact rectangular form the parts can collapse in to. But Starscream looks and feels a lot bigger than a current standard Deluxe vehicle since the wings increase the visible surface area, and the nose and cockpit extend beyond the core structure of the vehicle.

The color layout of the vehicle mode is pretty good, though I think it uses red too much as a primary color as the front half feels pretty dominated by it. Though I'm sure the amount of blue paint already present was pushing things, I'd have liked to see the tip of the nose done in blue, to help balance the appearance. With the nose red, it looks less like a grey fuselage with red elements than it does a red fuselage with the canopy trimmed grey. The Decepticon symbols on the wings really could have used either outlining, or to be done in a different paint color entirely, like silver. The contrast is rather poor between the red plastic of the wings and what I'm pretty sure is the same pink used for glow effects elsewhere (it's hard to tell the exact color against that red, which probably proves my point right there), and it needs something to be different to stand out better.

Through the amber canopy, you can see a pilot's seat inside the cockpit. Odd, given this is a Cybertronian vehicle form. Starscream doesn't have any kind of landing gear, because in practice it wouldn't be necessary anyway. But the toy will sit stably and level thanks to part of the robot's structural support that creates a base along with the flat side of the legs. Finally, if such things amuse you, you can flip up the robot head behind the cockpit and Starscream can look around in vehicle mode. Gives me happy memories of Beast Machines Vehicons!

Starscream comes with a pair of mirrored triple-barrel cannons. The barrels rotate, albeit stiffly by using a ridged thumb wheel at the base of the barrels. Each gun has two 5mm pegs, so you can choose which orientation Starscream holds them. Starscream does have a range of 5mm ports, including on the forearms, but I definitely recommend against using those. I tried attaching the guns on the arms once and both peg holes stressed, and one actually cracked from having the peg inserted. Even if that wouldn't be a problem, the guns sit very low down the length of the arms and it looks pretty awkward. There's hardpoints under the wings and along the robot legs, to allow attachment for vehicle mode. These will stress too, but in my experience the leg ports do so worse than the wings, so you'll probably want to stick with keeping the guns directly under the wings in vehicle mode. It's also the method that looks the best overall.

The two cannons can be tabbed together to make a double triple barrel cannon. When combined, the ridges on the thumb wheels interlock and both sets of barrels will rotate as gears. Again, this would be more fun if the movement was a little less stiff. Like this, Starscream basically has to hold the weapon from either side or just carry it sideways. There's no centered peg to use in the combined form, although combining them does produce a new 5mm port on the top if you want to add another weapon on. The combined form can't mount to the vehicle, either.

They're a nice design, based on the Neutron Assault Rifle from Fall of Cybertron. As executed here, it's easy to imagine them as a dual-function system. Individually they're the triple barrel cannon, but combined, the space between the individual barrels looks more like big gun barrels themselves, so your hand-carried vulcan cannons turn in to one double barrel energy cannon. Sounds like a perfectly sensible upgrade progression to me! One really nice design touch was including false gear elements below the base of the barrels, so when the barrels are rotated, it turns as well. One more bit of making these things look more like functioning machinery.