Category Archives: Entertainment

Apple’s new product – iTV

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iTVSo if you’re a Apple fanboy you’ve probably already heard about there cool new piece of hardware coming to a TV near you… sometime in the not too distant future…
What is this new device? oooh well it’s kinda like a mini MacMini… you plug it into the network or let it join your wireless one and then it’ll stream music/video/photo’s from iTunes…

I currently use my MacMini for this, it’s plugged into my LCD TV and acts as a sort of “entertainment PC” and plays all the stuff I have on my desktop Linux machine. But this new little box is smaller than a MacMini, doesn’t need a keyboard, mouse or anything and will have things like component video out.

So as you can tell I want one.. and I want one bad… the bad news is they’ll only be coming out sometime next year and they not going to be extremely cheap but probably less than a MacMini.

You can read more about it here and here

Last.Fm is really cool…

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I love all the new sites that are coming out… one that a friend recently introduced me to is called Last.Fm.

Now last.fm is very hard to describe but basically through special plugins in media players your computer sends them information on what music you listen to all this is then stripped of any “private” information and then grouped together with a the information gathered from thousands of other people. They then do lots of fancy stuff on all the data and finally come out with info that says “People who like Katie Melua will also like KT Tunstall”. By signing up for your own account at last.fm you can tell them what you like which means that they’ll then be able to give you better more accurate information on other artists you may like.

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viZoo – Free Format – holographic projection.

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I spotted this site along time ago but I keep getting asked about it. viZoo is a advertising company that according to their site “Are an advertising film company, developing and producing new media with “edge”. Something that has never been seen before. For window shopping, events and outdoor.”

So what makes them so interesting then? Well they’ve come up with something called Free Format that is sort of a cheap version of a holographic projection system. What they do is project using standard digital projectors onto an invisible screen the effect is that it looks like the items they are showing are really there in the showroom. Of course because they using Digital Projectors they can make the displays interactive too. If you watch the video clips on there site (under the Show Reel section) you’ll see that most of these displays attract a large crowd, in one the police step in to get the people to move on.
If you check out the site you’ll see they got a few demo clips on the system in action, best ones is the girl who walks around a clothing store at night and keeps changing into clothing (this one isn’t so much “technically” impressive but who cares… it’s a sexy girl removing her clothes…) the others are ones of various cars and other things.

I do wonder how easy it would be to homebrew a similar setup, projectors aren’t that expensive anymore… the problem is find something that allows you to create a screen that from a few meters away you can’t see.

Books, DVD’s, CD’s

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You’ll see that there’s a new link on the header of this site labelled “Books, DVD’s, CD’s”. This is a list of items that I currently own, I’ll update the list as often as possible and hopefully in the future I’ll write a few reviews about some of the items on the list.

I’m hoping that this will help you my loyal readers get to know me a little better and it helps my friends and family buy me gifts *hint* *hint*.

The all important “Writing about writing” post…

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Every online writer eventually has to write something about writing… it’s a sort of right of passage or something. If you spend any time reading blogs, journals or other similiar written works on the web you’ll see that eventually the author writes about writing. So that I don’t feel left out here is my post of “writing about writing” or should that be “writing about writing about writing” ? …

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