Cool. I still strongly recommend switching to one of the new plans (rather than staying grandfathered on your old one), unless it's far more expensive for you. Contracts suck.

Oh, no, I agree that the new plan is great. It seemed counterintuitive at first, but once I understood the implications, I loved it.

Also, make sure you play with a galaxy s4 before jumping in. Some people think they're too big. Not me, but some people. The HTC One has a lot of good buzz as a competitor for a reason.

It's about the same size as the S3, isn't it? My brother and sister have that, and it's bigger than my current phone, but it looks like that's the trend, so not much I can do there. I tend to stick with the same brand for phones (all my non-smartphones were Motorola) since I know how to use them. The HTC One does look pretty good, though.

P-C, the S4 will be expensive because it's new. You're not going to find much of a deal on it. I actually prefer my S3.

How come? It looks like the S4 is a more powerful phone, and given how quickly my Exhibit became shitty in comparison to the rest of the market, I'd rather go with the new phone that will remain useful for longer. It doesn't look like there's a reason to upgrade from an S3 to an S4, but since either one would be a huge upgrade for me, I'd prefer the latter.

I'm not sure you'll find the S4 version of Touchwiz (Samsung's custom overlay on Android) to be that similar to the Exhibit version. It will probably be about equally foreign to you as the Sense interface on the HTC one. And neither of them will be particularly confusing - I've used about 20 different android interfaces, including several versions of both Touchwiz and Sense, and they all feel basically like Android. Mainly, the widgets are different.

I'd probably get the Nexus 4 if I were getting a non-super-gigantic phone, because it's so cheap for its awesomeness, but the HTC One is NICE and would definitely tempt me.

I'm ready to upgrade per my contract, and since I'm on the fourth iteration of this Droid 3, I'm ready to move off that train, too. Which makes me sad because basically the Droid 4 is the only remaining current smartphone that still has a tactile keyboard. So I guess I'm giving that up.

I'm looking at the HTC One and the Sony Xperia Z. Anyone have any experience with the latter? It's supposed to be moisture and dust-proof, and given that I had so many failures with the earlier phone, I am thinking maybe my environmental conditions are just rougher than a normal phone can handle.

Or I could head to the Apple ecosystem, I suppose.

Hmm, looks like the HTC One is a "maybe later" for Verizon and the Z is a "no." I dunno.

I bought the Galaxy S4 yesterday, and I'm still getting used to it, but holy shit, is it ever an upgrade from my old phone. I think a lot of it is the Android OS, but still, damn.

I may have posted something like this in the past, so if so, please forgive the repost. Beau is involved in an online football league on the PS3 and needs a league management online software alternative. Do any of you know of such a thing? He used to use League Daddy, but it is now defunct.

I fucked up my chrome bookmarks but good and because they were being synced across 3 computers and 2 devices, this was becoming a BIG problem. But I wanted to tell you all Bookmark Sentry is a fabulous extension for finding dup bookmarks and deleting empty folders. You can have it work regularly, but I prefer manual scan.

Okey dokey. I don't understand how something can be so fundamentally wrong with my network when I've replaced the router, the switch and the NAS (both a replacement of the same model and another one from a different vendor).

Time Machine is Greek to me. What controls whether or not a volume appears to be selected? For the new NAS I chose the Documents share, which was unmounted at the time, but now it can't see it. I mounted it and tried again--still can't see it. I've rebooted both the laptop and the NAS. Can't see it.

Clearly the OS X laptop can see it just fine--but Time Machine doesn't give a flying fuck. I would attribute some of this to not having DNS in my home network, but most people don't, right? They rely on Bonjour and the like, right?

Time Machine needs to see the drive mounted as an afp:// device where the Mac will happily mount a device through smb://, I've see that as one issue with Time Machine. On my network I've also had some Time Machine devices only be discoverable by their IP address, not by their friendly name. This is the case with my Drobo. Works great with a Time Machine partition but the first time I mount it I have to mount it as afp://192.168.x.x for it to be mounted. Once this is done the first time then Time Machine doesn't have a problem mounting. As such the Drobo is on a static IP.

Thanks, ND. I dismounted all the shares just in case and remounted the share in question with afp, and voila! Is there a way to force that on reboot? And I can't work out how it seems to lose that during normal operation.