Movie 2015.01.29 - Crazy, Stupid, Love

I have so many movies, my hard disk is starting to fill up. First movie I've decided to purge is Crazy, Stupid, Love. Nothing wrong with it - well-known cast, quirky plot, though nothing outstanding.

Couple of 25 years divorces because the wife slept with a colleague. Depressed husband meets womanizer in a bar, and takes lessons from him to get his mojo back. Meanwhile, his 13-year-old son is in love with the 17-year-old babysitter. The babysitter rejects him because she has a crush on the husband. To get the husband's attention, babysitter takes some nude photos of herself with the intent of giving them to him. Her parents, who are friends of the divorced couple, discovers the photos. Womanizer finally meets the girl of his dreams, and changes his womanizing ways. Girl turns out to be the daughter of the divorced couple. In the end, I believe the couple gets back together.

Plot twist: babysitter gives the nude photos to the lovestruck kid as a special gift to get him through high school.

Google Opinion Rewards Not Rewarding

For those who haven't heard of Google Opinion Rewards before, it's an app where you answer some quick anonymous surveys, and earn Google Play credits that you can use towards apps, music, movies, games, and books in the Google Play Store. Doesn't work for devices though.

Not sure when Google Opinion Rewards actually launched in Australia, but I believe I was an early adopter. I've been getting on average about 9 surveys per month, and the payout is not too bad, considering the amount of effort in answering the surveys. Lately, I've noticed that the surveys are becoming fewer and fewer. And with the few surveys that I'm getting, the app tells me that it has some trouble submitting my response, and will save the results and try later.

If you've been getting similar messages, this is most probably due to adblockers not allowing submissions to go through to Google's servers. If your custom ROM comes with built-in adblocking, disable it temporarily. I, for one, is using AdAway. After disabling adblocking and rebooting, I had 4 surveys sent through successfully.

If you don't want the hassle of disabling and enabling adblockers and rebooting every time, simply add survey.g.doubleclick.net and clients4.google.com to your whitelist.

Movie 2015.01.25 - Astro Boy

Simple movie with a moral lesson to impart without being too preachy. Didn't know the origins of Astro Boy before this, so it's all new (and interesting) to me.

Astro Boy is actually a boy robot created by Dr. Tenma to replace his son Toby, who passed away during an industrial accident at the Ministry of Science. Astro Boy is gentle, caring, and helpful because he's being powered by a blue core. On the other hand, we have the red core, which is unstable and represents negative energy. It's election year, and President Stone of Metro City has this bright idea of declaring war on the Surface to boost his popularity. Dr. Tenma refuses to give up Astro Boy's blue core, so President Stone uses the red core to power up The Peacekeeper. It somehow absorbs President Stone and seeks to destroy Astro Boy. The two are evenly matched. Metro City is so heavily damaged that it dropped out of the sky and landed on the Surface. To prevent further destruction, Astro Boy flies into the Peacekeeper, and they both explode. President Stone is removed from the Peacekeeper unharmed, and is promptly arrested. Meanwhile, Astro Boy is deactivated, as the blue core has been drained after it bumped with the red core.

There's no chance of having a sad ending as this is a kids' movie. Zog, a robot whom Astro Boy revived before using a dose of blue core, gives back some of the energy, and reactivates him. Yay!

Cloud Storage Manager

With so many cloud storage providers offering free storage, you're bound to have signed up for a few of them. Question now is, how do you keep track and manage all your files scattered out there? With online cloud storage managers, of course. Basically, you sign up for an account with the service. You register all your cloud storage providers with that service. Then, you can start managing your all your files from the different providers using one single interface.

When it comes to cloud storage managers, these are the more popular ones:

• Primadesk aims to be the one-stop-shop for all your online services. Aside from cloud storage, it can also manage your social, photo, and email accounts. It also supports cross-service file transfers. The only downside is the lack of OAuth support. This means that you have to provide Primadesk with login information for all registered services. Primadesk is from the guys who created ZoneAlarm. Give that I don't use ZoneAlarm, I've decided not to use this, too.
• JoliCloud has been around for a while. It first started out as an Ubuntu distribution for netbooks with strong emphasis on cloud integration/services - pretty much like ChromeOS. Their cloud storage manager is called Drive. The UI looks pretty neat and slick. It supports OAuth, . It can handle your social accounts in a unified feed. It supports file previews and built-in MP3 player. Does not support cross-service file transfers. There's only a limited number of services you can register. If you want more, you have to do some social media shares promoting the service.
• Otixo is pretty much the same as JoliCloud's Drive. Supports OAuth AND cross-service drag-and-drop file transfers. At the moment, it only allows for 5 file transfer at a time between services for the free account.

For now, I'm trying out both JoliCloud Drive and Otixo. In terms of UI and features, I'm leaning more towards Drive.