(By Scott McLeod and Jeff Brenman)
Very cool, and very thought-provoking. The soundtrack’s pretty good, too.
October 22nd, 2008
The Spotless Mind Soon A Reality?
Scientists have discovered a molecular mechanism which, when activated, can erase specific memories in mice.
Perhaps the solution to forgetting the last 5 weeks of my life won’t be hard on my liver, after all.
August 25th, 2008
Audio and Video Conversion Made Simple
As much as I love the way technology’s making entertainment more portable, I can’t help getting frustrated that each provider seems to have a different file format and none of them play nicely with each other. My iPod won’t play music I copied from CD onto my hard drive using Windows format. Windows Media Center won’t play iTunes, either. My cell phone purportedly doubles as an a mp3 player, but it refuses to play music from iTunes or Windows, requiring me to instead purchase songs from Verizon that I’ve already paid for elsewhere. And don’t get me started on the whole frustration of trying to burn a kids show from cable TV — for which we pay an outrageous sum every month — so my son can watch it in the mini-van later that day.
Meanwhile, a quick call to my cell phone provider to ask why my phone won’t play my iTunes reveals that, as far as the phone company’s concerned, wanting to listen to my music on the multi-function phone they sold me means I’m a file-stealing felon. Say what? That’s right: they intentionally limit playing to their file format so they know I’ve paid for the file… or, more accurately, I’ve paid them for it.
Naturally, I’m a bit miffed over the whole thing. As a consumer, I didn’t fork over money just to play a song via iTunes or my iPod (for which I also paid): I wanted the right for me to play it any time, any where, on any device. Ditto for those CDs and DVDs I’ve bought as well as the shows I watch on cable. If I’m paying $50 per month to get cable into my home so I can watch reruns of “Absolutely Fabulous” then why shouldn’t I be the one to decide what device I’ll watch them on?
Faced with this annoyance — and an increasingly on-the-go lifestyle as VH and I travel to see our ailing parents — we’ve been looking into ways to liberate our favorite forms of entertainment. We aren’t interested in ripping off artists or violating laws against file-swapping. We just want our entertainment devices to do what they’d promised: play our stuff!
Until recently, making that happen was a nightmare in itself. The majority of conversion programs are limited to a mere handful of formats, and as we’ve discovered they lose a lot of quality in the process. There’s even more quality loss when trying to burn them to CD. Ditto for programs that claim to make transferring recorded shows from DVR to DVD easier: they results quite often look like those bootleg movies made in China by some guy holding up a camcorder in a theater. Awful.
This past weekend we learned about Blaze Media Pro which turns out to have a number of uses way beyond the standard convert DVD to AVI, MPG, WMV function. As an all-in-one audio and video converter, the program recognizes and handles dozens of formats and offers a solution on converting protected AAC (read: iTunes) files. Once converted, the program also includes CD burning software so you can back up all of your songs by an artist (regardless of format) for safekeeping.
The program’s advanced video features aren’t limited to DVD burning software: it also offers advanced video capture and editing. Although I’ve yet to figure out a one-step solution to converting shows captured on my DVR to a format that will play on my cell phone, the program’s intuitive enough that a little exploration and some inventiveness makes it happen. It’s a slick program that’s jam-packed with so many features it makes the other ones look weak in comparison.
Interested? Check out their free 15-day download. You’ll be hooked.
August 25th, 2008
Special Offer on Amazon’s Kindle
If you’ve been thinking about getting a Kindle — Amazon’s amazing wi-fi powered electronic book reader — now’s the time to act. Thanks to a special offer you can save $100 on the Kindle when you sign up for the Amazon Rewards Visa card.
August 18th, 2008
Netflix Outage Results In Customer Credit
Online DVD and on-demand video giant Netflix suffered a severe service disruption last week. This was only the second service interruption in the company’s nearly 10-year history.
Although the “mystery outage” didn’t affect on-line viewing or ordering of movies, it did prevent Netflix from shipping movies via U.S. mail for three days. But the company has no plans to leave consumers feeling the brunt of the problem.
Netflix customers whose movies were delayed will receive a 15% credit on their next billing cycle. New subscribers still using the free 2-week trial will receive an additional week without charge.
If you ask me, that’s some impressive customer service.
June 28th, 2008
What’s So Social About A Monologue?
My latest rant about social networking is up at Pajamas Media. But if you’re following me on Twitter, you already know that.
June 27th, 2008
Firefutz 3.0
So, I downloaded Firefox 3.0 yesterday, a week after their much-hyped download day since we were out of town and I didn’t trust the hotel’s LAN.
Now, everyone who anticipates I’m going to proclaim Firefox 3.0 the greatest thing since sliced bread (and TaB soda), and how using the internet will never be the same again, raise your hand.
Oh, stop it already, especially you over there with your finger in your nose. You know me better. You know I don’t like change, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m not terribly thrilled with Firefox 3.0.
I miss my cool themes, for one thing. I also miss about 60% of the add-ons I use on a daily basis. Oh, and I absolutely cannot stand that “Smart Locator Bar”. Fortunately, I figured out how to turn it off:
1. Type about:config into your address bar.
2. Assure Firefox you realize this might void your warranty.
3. Enter the following into the filter bar: browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
4. When that result comes up, right-click on it and select “Modify”.
5. Change the value from the default 12 to -1.
6. Close the window.
7. Close and restart Firefox.
Sure, you’ll probably still have to look at the ugly default theme and the browser’s usability will continue sucking until the add-on authors write updates, but at least you won’t have to put up with that annoying drop-down menu on every single search form you use.
UPDATE: Oh, and the way Firefutz just crashed on me reminds me of another annoyance: despite having the option selected to restore my previous session next time I start the browser it doesn’t. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’re in the habit of having, oh, forty-plus tabs open simultaneously it gets to be a big freaking pain in the ass. Fortunately, it’s Friday, and that means it’s almost martini o’clock, which even I know means that subsequent errors are most likely attributable to user stupidity.
June 24th, 2008
How Much Do You Trust Google?
A 2007 Harris Interactive Reputation study released today says that America’s most trusted company is Google, the ubiquitous search engine with the name that’s since become a verb (much to Google’s annoyance).
According to people who get paid to study this kind of stuff — which I don’t — that level of trust shows that U.S. consumers look beyond mere name-recognition when deciding whether a company is trustworthy.
“Google is the perfect example showing reputation does not correlate with ad spending,” said Robert Fronk, senior VP-senior consultant, reputation strategy, at Harris Interactive. “The positive perception of how you treat your employees, your corporate-social-responsibility efforts, and your products and services and the amount of media that can generate probably trumps any ad spend they would ever want to make.”
In other Google news:
• Today Google is expected to reveal a new method of tracking user clicks to help advertisers better target their ads to coincide with users’ interests.
• Also announced today, Google’s much-anticipated cell phone will be delayed for at least two quarters due to manufacturer’s difficulties programming in Android, the Google-created software the company hopes will revolutionize the cellular industry.
• Publicly available Google local search data is being used in a trial to define pornography, with an attorney arguing that frequent searches for sexually explicit material demonstrates a community’s obscenity standard.
With 81.85% of 27,000 respondents declaring Google as the most trustworthy company, it seems the real news here is how few people understand the word trustworthy.