Fortunately, there’s a workaround posted on the MacWorld forums: Listen to podcasts with Music app on iOS 6

Three (simple?) steps to get podcasts back in the Music app:

1. Delete the Podcasts app
2. Force quit the Music app
3. Open the Music app and you’ll find Podcasts under the More tab

Here’s how to delete an app and how to force quit an app if you don’t know how.

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• Buy a house using a loan – Don’t pay taxes on all your income like some kind of low-life renter; subtract the interest you are paying from your income as if you had never earned it.
• Get married – Only sinners pay full taxes on two incomes; legitimize your relationship and benefit!
• Have kids – Other people should not only see and hear your children, they should take on some of the tax burden, too.
• Get health insurance through your job – Only the foolish buy their own health insurance using after-tax dollars; be wise and get yours pre-tax through an employer.

There are other loopholes, I’m sure, but these are the big ones. Try these first and see if they work for you.

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Use Your Smart Phone

First of all, get a data roaming plan or SIM card for your smart phone to use. It’s expensive, but well worth it to be able to find a great restaurant a few blocks away, figure out which bus will take you back to your hotel, or just get you oriented.

Mobile System Maps and Trip Planning

In London, use the Transport for London site on your smart phone to find Tube and Overground maps, route trips, or even call a cab. Unfortunately there’s no official app, but a number of third party apps are available.

Source: ratp.fr

In Paris, use the official RATP app from the iTunes App Store or Google Play for Metro, RER, and bus system maps, route maps, and route planning.

Paying your Fare

In London, get a rechargeable Oyster card to take the Tube, Overground, and buses. Oyster users get a significant discount on bus fare over single ride tickets. Tube trips within a zone are around 2GBP, but more expensive multi-zone trips are fairly common. Bus trips are a little over a pound. Money stored on the card remains on the card (my card still had a few pounds on it from four years ago). If you ever plan to return to London, you can dump all your leftover coins onto your Oyster card instead of carrying them around.

Source: 20minutes.fr

In Paris, things are a little less straightforward. RATP offers single ride tickets and multiple-day Paris Visite passes for riding Metro, RER, and buses. Which you choose depends on your needs. The multi-day Paris Visite passes make sense when you intend to take 4 or more trips a day, but start by getting a 10 pack of single ride tickets. If you are getting in to Paris in the afternoon or evening, you don’t want to “waste” a day by buying a pass right away. If you think you’ll end up taking the bus more than the Metro, getting a pass will let you easily hop from one bus line to the next.

Mode of Transportation

In Paris, consider taking the bus instead of the Metro. I’m slightly biased in favor of riding trains, but in Paris the Metro stations are full of long corridors and stairways, which is painful when you’re lugging around a kid and kid accessories (like a stroller). The city’s buses can often take advantage of dedicated bus and taxi lanes to cut through the traffic effectively, and the view out the windows is often more interesting and pleasant than the dark Metro tunnels. Moreover, the greater frequency of stops can actually get you closer to where you need to go.

In London, the absence of an all you can ride option like the Paris Visite pass makes jumping bus lines impractical. The breadth of the city is also such that you’ll probably opt to take the Tube or Overground to get around more often than the bus. In the central parts of the city, congestion and the lack of bus lanes can slow traffic to a crawl, making the bus less desirable. That said, if you can figure out a single bus line that will take you to where you want to go, it’s probably more cost-effective than taking the Tube.

Express Trains

In Paris, use the RER to get to some of the farther-flung stations within and outside of the city. This system is separate from the Metro, but accessible through some of the same stations. Depending on where you want to go (Charles de Gaulle, Gare du Nord, Disneyland Paris), RER might be a viable or preferred option. The cost is slightly higher than the Metro if traveling to an outer zone, so be sure to get a special ticket for the RER. You’ll need it to exit the station.

In London, consider the Heathrow Express if you’ll be anywhere near Paddington Station, Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park and going to Heathrow. Trains depart every 15 minutes and only take 15 minutes to get from Paddington to Terminals 1 and 3, and Terminal 5. Tickets are pricy, but the time and aggravation savings may be worth it.

Source: wikipedia.org

Between London and Paris, the Eurostar gets you between St. Pancras station in London and Gare du Nord in Paris in just over 2 hours. Much better than schlepping it out to the airport, going through security, and paying too much for the pleasure of being a sardine in a can. Buy tickets in advance to get bigger savings.

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12 things to avoid:

1. Don’t take pictures of yourself naked.
2. Don’t take pictures of your reproductive organs while wearing something tight/revealing.
3. Don’t engage in sexually explicit conversations over the Internet or by text message.
4. Don’t do anything remotely sexual with an underage person.
5. Don’t have an affair in a foreign country and lie about it.
6. Don’t have a relationship with a call girl.
7. Don’t pay for a prostitute with a check.
8. Don’t have an affair with someone who works for you.
9. Don’t have an affair with someone who is married to someone who works for you.
10. Don’t solicit strangers for sex in airport bathrooms.
11. Don’t have illegitimate children and deny responsibility.
12. Don’t make advances on the children of your donors.

If you do decide to ignore my advice and go ahead with any of these activities, then please pay attention to the following tips.

6 things that will make it worse:

1. Campaign based on your squeaky clean image.
2. Championing family values.
3. Public and loud criticism of other people’s indiscretions.
4. Anti-homosexual rhetoric, especially if you’re closeted.
5. Covering up with hush money.
6. Firing or threatening people who are involved.

And finally, when you are caught (and you will be), come clean as quickly and openly as possible. Learn how to shed a tear in public, but try not bawl. Look and sound sincere. Keep a low profile. Work hard. And then maybe, if your constituents feel like they have a connection with you, they’ll let you keep your job.

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Facebook: Friends are bi-directional relationships in which both sides have to agree to the relationship. In general, the things you post are viewable by all your friends, and show up in the News Feed if Facebook chooses to show it.

Twitter: Following is a unidirectional relationship in which only the follower needs to agree to the relationship (mostly). In general, the things you post are viewable by everyone, and show up on the Home page of your followers.

Google+: Circles are a unidirectional relationship in which the circle owner defines the relationship. The things you post publicly are viewable by everyone on the Internet, but show up on the Home page of people who put you in a circle. The things you post to one or more circles are viewable only by people in those circles, but again only show up on the Home page of people who put you in a circle. To further complicate things, you can add people to circles who are not Google+ users and opt to share things via email with them. Unlike Google+ users, they don’t have to opt in to get your posts.

So while Google+ superficially seems like a social network site akin to Facebook (it has profiles, friends, photos, sharing links/photos/whatever into the stream), the relationship model is much closer to Twitter’s. The question is whether real people will adopt Google+ with its targeted broadcasting model and full set of features over Twitter with its simple broadcasting model and lack of “clutter.”

All that said, it’s a little misguided to compare Google+ directly with Facebook or Twitter. A ubiquitous Google bar with notifications on Google, YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, Maps, News, Android, Chrome, etc. should go a long way toward increasing unique visitors and time spent across all Google properties.

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Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Don’t “tilt” the game. You’ll figure out what this means.
• For every 100 coins you collect, you’ll get 10 MP which you can spend on stuff in the store.
• Characters don’t have any special powers, so don’t buy them expecting any.
• Power-up upgrades change the power-ups you find in the game, they’re not weapons you can activate from your inventory.
• Upgrade the magnet power-ups first. They’ll help you get coins faster, which means you’ll be able to upgrade the other power-ups faster.
• Enter my mega code 6vgk7 to get 500 MP right from the start. Full disclosure: I’ll get 500 MP, too.

What are you waiting for? Download it now from the iPhone App Store and Android Market.

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In the current political climate, with all the emphasis on having less government intervention, lower government spending, and lower deficits, we could see big reductions in, or the elimination of:

• The secondary mortgage market as defined by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
• The mortgage interest tax deduction

If this happens, there will be big drops in housing prices. I don’t see a free market coming up with the 30-year fixed-rate no-prepayment-penalty loan. Instead we’ll see shorter terms, higher rates, or much greater fees, which will in turn reduce the number of potential buyers. Especially when borrowers can no longer pretend that the interest rate deduction somehow makes the monthly payment “not much more than rent.”

So what do you think? Will Congress actually man up and kill Fannie, Freddie, and the interest deduction in the name of free markets and responsible governance, or will they continue to pander to the home-owning public and bolster the status quo?

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From February 2010 to March 2011, the Blackberry went from 42.1% market share to 27.1% market share. But when you look at the chart, it’s clear that this is mostly due to new smart phone users opting to go for Android and iPhone. Those devices grew by 28m users combined while the overall smart phone market grew by 27.1m users. Still, the fact that RIM can’t get any new Blackberry users is a clear sign that they’re in trouble.

comScore press releases

Update 7/5/2011:

Here’s a Google Chart with some updated numbers.

Click through to view the full-size version.

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From a practical standpoint, it sucks. I can’t count the number of times I’ve placed the phone on a flat surface only to have it slide off. The thing is like an air hockey puck. Fortunately it’s usually only fallen a few inches, so no harm done.

But it’s also slipped out of my hand a couple times when I’m pulling it out of my pocket. One time I had my earphones plugged into it, which basically slowed it down enough so that when it hit the ground it only chipped one corner of the back glass.

On Sunday I wasn’t so lucky:

Yep. There’s a crack running from one corner of the back glass all the way up to the camera.

I have the Apple iPhone 4 bumper, and I do use it, but normal 2.5mm jacks and the older 30 pin connectors don’t fit, so I’m constantly forced to take it off if I’m not using the supplied earbuds or 30 pin connector. In this case, I took it off on Saturday to play podcasts in the car through the auxiliary input and dropped it Sunday at the Brentwood Country Mart.

Fortunately for me, I was able to schedule a Monday morning appointment at the Genius Bar, where the nice Apple Store Repair guy replaced the back glass for free (normally $29). I also bought a new case from Amazon, which shouldn’t have the same issues as the Apple bumper.

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