From the Hulu press release: Today Hulu is offering a commercial-free option to subscribers. Viewers now have the choice to watch Hulu commercial free for $11.99 per month or with limited commercials for $7.99 per month The primary reason I don’t like Hulu is that their commercials are far too repetitive and there were too many of them for what it cost. At $12 per month, this could be an excellent supplement to HBO Now and cutting premium channels on cable TV.

I scan A LOT. Everything. It’s part of my routine to archive everything and get rid of paper. I use a ScanSnap for most of my scanning but I’m also a die hard Scanbot user when I’m not at my desk. Version 4 of Scanbot adds new “workflow” options that make dealing with OCR documents even better. Rather than just offering a single default location for document uploads, you can now specify a variety of locations (across many different online services).

Crystal is an upcoming ad blocker for iOS 9. Even early results are staggering. On average, pages loaded 3.9x faster with Crystal and used 53% less bandwidth. Just by having Crystal installed, I saved a total of 70 seconds and 35MB of data on these 10 pages. This is a big deal and it’s difficult to ignore the huge benefit to mobile users.

I have minimal experience with ImageMagick but the new version 7 seems like a big upgrade. In particular, it now supports reading from many RAW image formats such as NEF, ORF and ARW. Maybe this is old news, but I just discovered it, so it’s new to me. Here’s the complete list of supported formats Now, if only I could figure out how to get it installed on the El Capitan beta.

From Wired: Like a jealous ex, Spotify wants to see (and collect) your photos and see who you’re talking to. What kind of media files Spotify will collect from you is vague, and why the company needs it is unclear, but it’s doing it regardless. Also, the fact that Spotify expects you to go through your contact list and ask everyone for their consent in sharing their data with Spotify is–what’s the word?

From Consumer Reports: Car insurers didn’t use credit scores until the mid 1990s. That’s when several of them, working with the company that created the FICO score, started testing the theory that the scores might help to predict claim losses. They kept what they were doing hush-hush. By 2006, almost every insurer was using credit scores to set prices. But two-thirds of consumers surveyed by the Government Accountability Office at about the same time said they had no idea that their credit could affect what they paid for insurance.

I’m not a designer or artist, but I know what a good app does. It should make it easy for a non-expert to do something great. Acorn does that for me. It’s the application I turn to on my Mac when I need to fuss with images. It’s also incredibly powerful. It probably has everything you think you need in Photoshop but it’s easy to use and has terrific support (where you actually get a response from a real person with a real answer).

Amazon has long been derided for employment practices governing blue-collar workers in their warehouses but now The NYT takes a look at their management of information workers. A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery.

This site uses affiliate links to help cover the cost of the hosting and design. It’s a nice compromise between keeping myself motivated and not puking advertising all of the page. But more recently, I’ve found myself using affiliate links out of convenience instead of compulsion. The ways I generate affiliate links are sometimes easier than generating standard links. Blink for iOS is so good, that I go there first when I’m looking for a link to an iOS app, often even when I’m sitting at my computer.

When I travel I use a VPN. It’s a nice little bit of security when on a strange WiFi network. It’s not bullet proof but it’s a minimal layer between me and a coffee shop or hotel. If you’re unfamiliar with VPN, it’s a private tunnel between your machine and another machine on the Internet. You connect to the VPN host and the VPN host handles all of your requests out to the Internet.