2008 was the rare year in which I missed every Oscar Best Picture nominee. Pretty depressing for a (former?) film buff. Fortunately, AMC’s hooked me up with a ticket to their all-day Best Picture Showcase being held Saturday (2/21). I may have neglected to mention to their rep that I’d planned to attend anyhow - $30 for five quality flicks (and unlimited pop […]
In the strange-but-true category of thriftiness: it's quite possible your local TV station is sitting on a pile of restaurant gift-certificates that could be yours for a steal You can buy heavily discounted restaurant gift-certificates from your local TV station to restaurants in your area.. Cheap meals courtesy of Channel 5 News? What? Paul Michael fro […]
Are My Sites Up? is a web-based application for tracking the up time of web sites and sending notifications when they are down. If you need to know immediately if a site is down completely or just unavailable to you, a service like Down For Everyone Or Just Me? is a great tool. If you'd like to monitor a site more consistently and get notifications when […]
Skype Lite, a pared-down version of the popular, cheap VoIP calling software, is expected to be made available on Android-powered phones today (i.e. the T-Mobile G1). Skype Lite has been available in beta form for select LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Ericsson phones for a while now, letting users trade instant messages and place calls over cellular netwo […]
Windows only: Downloadr is a small application that allows you to completely back up the photos from your Flickr account. You can grab everything in one bulk swoop or use a series of filters to drill down to just the photos you want to grab. It automatically grabs the highest quality image and preserves the EXIF and IPTC data. In addition to searching grabbi […]
Canonical's Rick Clark has announced today that the server build of Ubuntu is now available through Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. Canonical has optimized a build of the Ubuntu Server edition for the EC2 environment and it's currently in a open beta program...
A month ago NVIDIA had introduced the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) that brought PureVideo-like features to Linux. Our initial benchmarks of this video decoding API within NVIDIA's binary driver were quite favorable as it was able to dramatically cut down on the CPU usage when playing H.264 video files. To see how well NVIDIA's […]
Back on November 14, NVIDIA had unveiled their 180.06 Linux driver as a major update that brought forth VDPAU, an advanced video acceleration API, and a horde of other features. Four days after that, NVIDIA then pushed out the 180.08 Linux driver that delivered OpenGL 3.0 support...
YouTube has updated their standard web player from the 4:3 aspect ratio to a widescreen format. (All 4:3 videos display vertical black bars on the sides.) YouTube moving this direction is notable since it is the best known and most popular of the online video sites. And along with YouTube’s move towards full-length films (so far, just from MGM), this will al […]
Handbrake, my favorite media converter, has just been updated. Version 0.9.3 includes some significant improvements and features that make this a must-download, free application - for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Handbrake 0.9.3 changes include: Convert from all video types (not just DVDs) Improved video quality - uses latest H.264 encoding library improvements […]