Hasta La Gadget!

Consider: Sarah Palin and Dick Morris are out at Fox News, and Scott Brown, the Massachusetts moderate, may be in.

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For Bradley Cooper and David O. Russell, Oscar night may be the most important day of the year, but Feb. 7 might hit a close second. The “Silver Linings Playbook” actor and director met with Vice President Joe Biden at the White House on Thursday to discuss mental health issues.

Biden has led initiatives that focus on the issues surrounding mental health, especially in light of recent tragedies at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo. “Silver Linings Playbook” connects to mental health issues as well. The film profiles a man (Cooper) who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and recently released from a mental hospital. As The Los Angeles Times reports, Biden told Cooper and Russell that “sometimes movies do what governments can’t.”

Since the release of “Silver Linings Playbook” last November, Russell has been vocal about his own son’s diagnosis with bipolar disorder, crediting his close experience as his reason for doing the movie. Robert De Niro, who stars in the film as Cooper’s father, also recently spoke about his personal connection to bipolar disorder and the film; the Oscar-nominated star broke down on an episode of the Katie Couric talk show “Katie” when the issue was discussed. “Silver Linings Playbook” has largely been praised for its approach to mental health.

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DUMAS, Texas — A Baptist church in the Texas Panhandle plans to host concealed handgun training, saying it’s offering the class as a community service because there is so much interest in the area.

People wanting to get a concealed handgun license in Texas must take the class. The Rev. Brad Foster of Calvary Baptist Church in Dumas told the Amarillo Globe-News (http://bit.ly/11x96rw) for a story in Saturday’s editions that a state-certified instructor will teach the first 10-hour class in the fellowship hall March 2. It covers how to safely handle firearms.

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This week we’re hearing quite a few responses from the public on their surprise at the amount of actual usable hard drive space on the new Microsoft Surface Pro. While the standard ways to free up the space taken up by apps, photos, and videos that you don’t necessarily need, there’s also a slightly more dangerous route you might take. One of the largest space-users on the Microsoft Surface Pro (see our full review here) is the Windows 8 on-board recovery partition.

If you’re going to be wanting to delete this bit of code, you should know right away: if you do delete it and your computer crashes (in any of a variety of different ways), you could potentially have a completely bricked machine. The nice thing about Windows 8 is that you’re free to create a backup bootable USB stick with great ease. Once you’ve got a recovery USB stick, you’ve only to start your machine up holding down the volume button to boot into advanced options and recover from there.

Creating a bootable recovery USB stick is easy in Windows 8: you’ll first need a USB stick that’s at least 256 MB in size. After you’ve inserted that USB into your Surface Pro, you’ll want to press your Windows Key and your “R” key at the same time, then type RecoveryDrive.exe – you could also open your Control Panel and click or tap on the “Recovery” icon, from there you’ll see an option to Create a Recovery Drive. If at this point you’re prompted by UAC, you’ll want to click or tap on “Yes.”

From that point on, creating a USB recovery drive is self-explanatory : the guide screens will make it quite simple for you. The one other thing you’ll want to make sure you’ve done before a final push to the USB stick is to empty out the USB stick itself – if you’ve got anything on there you want to keep, of course.

The actual deleting of the partition that takes up a chunk of your internal storage for recovery is extremely similar to what you’d have done in previous versions of Windows. You’ll find Computer Management under settings, click or tap Control Panel, System and Security, Administrative Tools, and finally “Computer Management.” You may have to type in your administrator password at this point if you have one.

After that you’ll go to Storage (in the left pane) and click Disk Management. This screen is where you’ll be doing the most damage if you’ve not already created a USB recovery partition. If you delete the partition reserved for recovery at this point and lose your USB stick, you may very well be up a river without a paddle should your Surface Pro catch a bad bit of crash action.

Basically what we’re saying here is that you’re better off working with alternate storage options while this bit of space continues to be taken up by the Microsoft-added recovery. It’s there for a reason, and that reason is a good one. Stay safe!

PSA: How to free up space on your Microsoft Surface Pro is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Once a month when St. Francis Xavier church near Manhattan’s Union Square opens its food pantry in the basement, Mercedes Cruz takes a number and lines up outside with her cart.

Last summer, Cruz arrived at the church at 6 a.m. — four hours before the pantry opens — and there already were 18 people ahead of her. This Saturday though, after the area was hit by a blizzard that brought 12 inches of snow to some parts of the city, Cruz headed over to the church at 9:45 a.m. and still managed to be only the 35th person there.

Ahead of the snowfall that inundated the East Coast Friday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the city’s Department of Homeless Services to double efforts to connect the city’s unsheltered with a warm place to sleep. But for those needing help with other basics, like food, the snow seems to have complicated the quest for help.

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