Hulu

Ever missed an episode of Lost and forgot to tell you DVR to record it, how about started to watch The Office mid season and wanted to go back and catch up on previous episodes. Hulu is a great website that lets you stream these videos and more. Hulu also has a great selection of movies that you can watch on your computer right through a little thing I like to call "The Internet." The best thing about Hulu is that you can watch as many TV shows and movies that you like for the low low price of $0/mo. That's right, by using the invention of what's known as a tasteful 30 second commercial Hulu can provide content on demand for free. The future of TV is the internet baby. The advertising is tasteful and relevant. Plus the commercials are only 20-30 seconds long and you don't have to watch fifty of them, only three or four during an hour long show and less on half hour shows. Movies are good too, as the movie isn't chopped up into ten minute segments with long commercials between each like on TV. The commercials are conservatively spaced and are hardly noticeable, as the video is streaming and has to catch up with itself every once and a while anyway. My only problem is that when I try to watch a TV show or movie over the wireless connection at my house (54 mbps Wireless G with a great connection) the videos are a bit choppy, but when watching them in the standard flash player in the browser they look fine. Check out Hulu and let me know what you think about it. Anything free can't be that bad right?

iTunes Tip: Top 2Gb Most Played

So you've got an iPhone (or iPod Touch) and like me have well over 30Gb of media. I've been contemplating the possibility of getting an iPhone and was wondering, how am I going to manage to only carry 8Gb of media around with me. Here's the solution I came up with, create a playlist that will hold 2Gb of my most listened to songs, a playlist with 3Gb of the least often played movies, a playlist with 3Gb of the most recently added TV Shows, and a playlist that gets 25 of the most recently added songs that are not in the most played list (all of these are smart playlists btw). Then I made a playlist called Media that will randomly grab about 7.5Gb (7680Mb) of the playlists listed above. After that I plan to synch my unplayed podcast episodes and a static playlist called Misc that will hold anything that I put in it that I explicitly want to appear on my iPhone and the Media playlist. Since I usually don't have more than half of a gigabyte of unplayed podcasts this should work. You may need to adjust the numbers on some of the playlists according to your media tastes, if you don't watch TV on your iPhone then you can allocate those 3Gb to music or movies, I think you get the point. You can check my flickr page for screenshots of the playlists if you are unsure of what the settings should be. Leave a comment and let me know how your playlists worked and how the transition was to the iPhone/iPod Touch.

DIY iPod Charger (AKA MintyBoost)

A couple of weeks ago I saw the MintyBoost on the Make Blog. I have had some experience with electronics before. I ordered a DIY guitar pedal from Build Your Own Clone. When I ordered it, it came with a Confidence Booster Circuit, which is a very simple circuit which boosts a guitar signal, sort of like a volume switch. I did pretty well on that, but I could never get the real pedal, a Tube Screamer to clone the TS-808 to work correctly. Anyway, I ordered the MintyBoost last Monday and it arrived at my house on Thursday. Friday night My Fiancee and I put the thing together. If you’ve never done an electronics project and you are interested I would highly recommend starting here. There aren’t many parts and there are no switches or knobs to worry about mounting on the case. I haven’t finished mounting the whole project in the Altoids Tin, but other than that I’ve got it completed. All in all the project will take about thirty minutes to assemble and put in the case. The assembly was very simple and easy. The charger works perfectly and automatically started to charge my iPod. I’ve posted some pics of the final result. To see more about the product you can check out Lady Ada for more information.

Opera 9.5

Here's another short for this week. Opera released a new version of their great web browser. If you haven't downloaded it yet you should. It has all of the great features that I talked about before and some more. If you've already downloaded it or when you do download it let me know in the comments, I'd like to see what you think.

DRM Wars

So I've been downloading music from iTunes for about two years now. I love the iTunes interface and streamlined aproach. When I buy something it's there, I don't have to import it and worry about if all my songs are there or not. Alot of people complain about the DRM (Digital Rights Management) that iTunes has to offer to keep the record industry happy. It really doesn't bother me, I don't have more than 5 computers and I only put the music on two portable devices so I'm well within my parameters there. I did run into one thing that has bugged me before and ir rared its ugly head again the other day, I can't play the DRM music on my Xbox 360 or through TVersity (AGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRR!). Not such a big deal 'cause I mainly wanted to watch podcasts on my tv, so I calmed down and realized I could handle it. Then I found out about Amazon.com MP3 downloads. Amazon is able to offer DRM free MP3s of about the same selection as the entire iTunes store, not just iTunes Plus THE WHOLE STORE! Why won't the entertainment companies let iTunes offer DRM free content? I decided I wouldn't spend money at the Amazon store and I would stay faithful to my friend iTunes. I have heard Apple express their feelings about DRM and how it is a pain for them and the user, the only reason they have DRM protection is because the recording labels make them use DRM protection or they won't let iTunes provide the content. Then I started collecting Pepsi bottle caps, which let you acrue points and buy MP3s from Amazon for 5 points per song, and downloaded a song yesterday. Amazon provides a program to download the MP3 and will automatically add it to the iTunes library. Now I have a complex, do I continue to be faithful to iTunes who have to use the limiting protection on their music or do I switch to Amazon who can offer the media without protection. It's not like I want to share music through peer to peer services, I just want to use what I've bought on all my devices. What really intrigues me is how the music labels can demand that iTunes sell their music with copy protection and then turn around to let Amazon and other services sell the music with no protection at all. Let me know what you think in the comments section for this post.

Heroes Con

Anybody interested in comics that will be near the Charlotte, NC, area from June 20 - 21, should check out Heroes Con. It will be at the Charlotte Convention Center. The schedule is as follows Friday the floor will be open to the public from 11:00am - 7:00pm, Saturday from 10:00am - 6:00pm, and Sunday from 11:00am - 6:00pm. Tickets will be $10 at the door for a one day ticket and $20 for a three day ticket. Three day tickets are available in advanced for $20 and will include some goodies. If your children are interested in comics you can take them and get in one day for $5 (plus $10 for child's ticket) or three days for $10 (plus $20 for child's ticket). Kids 12 and under will get in for free. I have never attended the Charlotte Comic Con before, but it looks like it will be a great event. Leave me a comment if you are going and maybe we can meet up while we're there. You can see more about the convention and read the Heroes Con blog.

Lego Indiana Jones DS

Alright, last week I talked about the demo of the Lego Indiana Jones game. I got the game (fiancee bought the game for me) for DS Tuesday when it came out and have since played it for about two hours since then. I definitely love this game.

The gameplay is very similar to Lego Star Wars. Instead of Force powers you get to use Indy's whip :). I can't directly relate this game to Lego Star Wars because I have Star Wars on Xbox 360 and got this on DS. The quality of the game is still just as good, and oh yeah you get to use the whip! The game has a lot of built in replayability like Star Wars does. If you haven't played Lego Star Wars each mission has to be played in story mode first and then can be played in freeplay. When you play in Story Mode the game automatically gives you the characters required to complete the mission, but when you play freeplay you can choose your own characters to play with you. There are certain areas built in that can only be accessed by characters in freeplay and some characters that you need won't be unlocked until you finish other missions later. Another big aspect of the game is the puzzle solving aspect. The puzzles aren't super hard, but they are fun. It's easy to relax while playing just running around smashing everything collecting coins and special items.

The two screens are handled very nicely. The main game goes on in the top screen and miscellaneous options are displayed on the bottom screen. The touch screen is used in a very natural way. For most of the things you use the touch screen for you could use a button to preform the same action. The things you use the touch screen for are when the whip could be used for special reasons (eg swing across gaps, hit special switches, climb, etc), when there are special items like cranks, digging when your character has a shovel, and special weapons. There is also a room that has special touch games that you have to unlock through the different missions. I haven't unlocked many of them, but it doesn't look like it's going to add a whole lot to the game. The microphone is also used in a very interesting way. The microphone is used to blow out torches which usually triggers something to happen, you can also blow on the microphone to activate fans that will elevate you, and do more stuff with blowing into the microphone.

There is a multiplayer option for either hosting the game from one cartridge or by having two cartridges. I haven't tried this out as I don't know anyone else that has a DS, but when I do I'll let you know.

I would definitely recomment this game to anyone. You don't have to be a hardcore gamer to enjoy this game or the star wars games. I am a big fan of the Lego games genre and hope that they continue to make them (Batman should be coming this Summer sometime). I really like the way you just play and play until you finish the level because you don't really die any time, you just lose some coins and reincarnate where you were last. This feature makes the games really fun to play with kids or just to play to relax, becuase you really can't get stressed out playing this.

TVersity

I downloaded TVersity saturday. I saw it featured in a Tekzilla episode. TVersity is a media server that can play your videos, music, and stream pictures. It also serves up your media to a variety of devices including the iPhone/iTouch, Xbox 360, PS3, other Computers, and the internet. Not only will it stream media from your PC, but it will stream media off the web. If you're not familiar with Revision3 it is a website that hosts shows that would be equivilent to a small broadcast television station. All the shows on Revision3 have feeds that will update you when new shows are out, like podcasts. You can subscribe to these feeds in TVersity and stream the media off the internet if you don't feel like waiting to download the whole High Definition video to your hardrive.
Right off the bat I thought it was going to be super easy to stream media to my Xbox 360. Not so, I did have to spend some time setting up my Xbox to notice the TVersity server as a media server. I googled my problem and found an answer from After Dawn Guides. After reading the entire After Dawn guide and setting up my Xbox 360 wireless connection again. I messed with my router to make sure all the ports were open, they were. After banging my head against the wall for about an hour I decided to turn off Windows Firewall. DING!!! Why didn't I think of that first. Windows Firewall is always the answer. After a few minutes the TVersity server was streaming media straight to my Xbox. You do have to mess with the settings to get the video to look better, the default resolution makes the videos kind of grainy. I double the resolution and the picture looked acceptable. I still need to play with the settings for a while, but I was tired of messing with it after all that.
TVersity does so much more than what I've discussed here. It can stream images from a flickr feed or your computer, and it can stream to a Wii or over the internet. If you get TVersity up and running in any way let me know in the comments and maybe add some screens shots or pictures of what you've done with it.