Amazon increased the minimum price for free shipping

Amazon.com is now requiring a minimum purchase price of $35 for free shipping. The minimum for years used to be $25.

According this, the reason is as follows:

Amazon's minimum order size for free shipping has changed to $35. This is the first time in more than a decade that Amazon has altered the minimum order for free shipping in the US. During that time, we have expanded free shipping selection by millions of items across all 40 product categories. Look for "FREE Shipping" on product pages to discover eligible items.

Millions of Amazon customers have already made the choice of faster shipping by becoming Amazon Prime members. Prime includes unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping, with no minimum order size, on more than 15 million items, as well as unlimited streaming of over 41,000 movies and TV episodes through Prime Instant Video and access to over 350,000 books to borrow through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. The service is so popular that more than a year ago we began shipping more items with Prime than with free shipping. Start your 30-day free trial today.

Whichever shipping speed you choose, thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

Though that's really not much of a reason. It seems more like just advertising for their Prime membership.

Don't waste your time making a bootable USB key for Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks

If you're planning on putting OS X Mavericks on a USB key for the purpose of being able to install on multiple computers without having to download multiple times, don't bother. Mavericks will still contact the Apple servers to download "additional components" – and what's worse – this install takes LONGER than installing the "normal" way. People that were hoping to do a "clean install" using this method, will find out they have to wait several hours in doing so!

New stuff from Apple

Today Apple held a keynote to talk about more stuff being released. To kick things off, OS X Mavericks is available today and for free! I suggested such a thing two weeks ago and was mocked for it, but it seems I was correct after all. Here are some quick highlights from the event.

The new line of iPads were announced:

iWork and iLife for iOS was updated with a new look for iOS 7.

Before:


After:

Supposedly iWork and iLife for OS X was also updated, however I have yet to see the updates myself.

Also the new Mac Pro now has a price, its $2,999.

Update: iWork and iLife finally had the updates show up about two hours after I posted this. Everything was automatically detected and asked to update, except for GarageBand which seems to be a manual update. That's probably a good idea, since the new version of GB has some features removed. I'm keepng the older version for this reason. That being said, it is free in the Mac App Store if you decide to get it.

Batman and Hamlet

There are several key elements that connect Batman to the Shakespearean story of hamlet. I will outline three of them below.

Both have had a parent murdered

• The father of Hamlet was murdered by his uncle, who then married his mother to become the new king.
• Joe Chill murdered both parents of Batman, as they were leaving a movie house in which they were watching The Mark of Zorro (1940) starring Tyrone Power.

Both have a dark and tortured soul

• When Hamlet first enters the stage in Act 3 Scene 1, he starts contemplating suicide. The death of his father drives him mad and brings his to debating if he should take his revenge or just end his own life.
• The death of his parents causes Batman to have a split personality. His psychosis causes him to reverse his roles, turning Bruce Wayne into the alter ego and making Batman is his "real" self.

Both are obsessed with avenging his parents death.

• Hamlet waits for the right time to kill his uncle. He could have done it in Act 2 but waits three more acts until everything is "just right" for his plans of revenge.
• Batman has multiple origin stories, in some he kills Joe Chill and in others he doesn't. In either case, he deals with his vengeance by fighting crime and putting as many criminals as possible in jail.

Peanuts (Charlie Brown) and the way iCloud screws it up!

Since Apple first introduced iTunes in the Cloud for TV Shows and later Movies, it had it's "windowing" problems. Originally only a handful of videos showed up in iCloud due to deals HBO had with the various studios to not allow streaming during certain times of the year. HBO eventually allowed for streaming at any time of the year, and thus we now have the massive iCloud libraries that we have (since not just purchased videos, but free ones you got with the purchase of a Blu-ray Disc or DVD are also available in iCloud.)

However one thing has always remained screwed up since Day 1, and it has been the way Peanuts is handled in iTunes. First of all, I've never been able to stream the Easter special, as you can see below:

As you can see, it doesn't even show up in the cloud, I still have to stream it from my computer to my Apple TV. But more annoying than that is how certain episodes are being grouped together.

This causes headaches when trying to view the Halloween, Valentine, & Election Day specials on the Apple TV. If one doesn't realize he/she needs to dig down into other shows, he/she may miss it entirely.

I don't know why Apple has so many issues with Peanuts, but I hope someday they work it out with the studio that publishes these shows to gets them fixed (though it's been a couple of years with no results, so I doubt it).

Update: Arter sending an email to iTunes support, I received a canned response. The support representative didn't even take the time to replace "_customer_" with my name when he pasted in the pre-approvd canned reply.