Classic MST3K on Netflix Watch It Now

It's about time. Classic 90's show (or movie) Mystery Science Theater 3000 now has about 8 episodes--including one of my favorites Laserblast--available to stream via Netflix on your Xbox 360, HTPC or regular old computer.



These search results have all the videos available, look for the blue "Play" button for streaming titles.

Xbox Cured

So the Xbox 360 is back and working a promised. Seems to be as good as ever.

Although, I loved the Hulu Desktop so much that I will put a small quiet desktop PC in my entertainment center for video streaming. More on that in another post...

Xbox Repair Completion Time Just 14 Days?

That's that. My Xbox Red Ring of Death has been repaired and the Console has been shipped back with a scheduled delivery date of 09/21/2009. I'll post to confirm that it's working, but if it delivers on time that would make the entire repair 10 business days or 14 calendar days--well under the original six week estimate on the site.

Under promise and over deliver I always say.

NFL Sunday Night Football Streaming via Web

Cable challenged Packer's fans and I will be able to watch Sunday Night Football tonight via an Web based HD stream on NBC...

Content for SNFExtra is presented in hi-definition through a technology called Smooth Streaming, part of Microsoft Silverlight. When watching a video with Smooth Streaming, the Bit Rate indicator (signal strength meter) on the right end of the control bar will indicate the quality. When the video is playing at optimal definition, the HD icon will appear.

Here's the link.

Xbox Repair, "In Proccess..."

No real additional information. Yesterday when I checked (a Friday) it was still being shipped, so it's progressed about half way through the repair process. I find now a days I don't play games on it as much as we watch movies, so the Hulu box from my last post is filling in just fine.

Hulu Desktop App is Pretty Darn Sweet

Since my XBOX 360 is being held in triage at XBOX's Texas Repair center, I was looking for a replacement for the Netflix On-Demand that we watched almost exclusively as TV since we moved.

Enter Hulu with a very cool Hulu Desktop application that did an amazing job of streaming content from my aging Sony VAIO laptop to my TV.

It could learn a little functionality from the open source projects XBMC and BOXEE, but let me tell you--this tiny program is a joy to use. A wireless mouse is all you need to control the programming and the minimalist commercial breaks during an episode of Late Night with Conan seem to take less time than skipping them with a Tivo.

Some functionality required a Hulu login and I haven't had time to figure out how the site and the app will work together, but my assumption is that I will be able to queue TV in Hulu just like I queued movives in Nexfilx.

You can get Hulu Desktop here, and my online profile is here.

My Xbox 360 countdown to repair!

Xbox Says: Your console should be returned to you within 2 - 3 weeks from the day you ship it.

Follow my Xbox 360 on it's happy journey!

Tell me how you eat your Pringles

The good people at Pringles are running a Pringles 100 Ways to Enjoy Sweepstakes




Evidently I like mine upside down.

Livio Radio Rocks The House

I was contemplating buying another Chumby for internet radio in my office. It's a great device, but for $200 you can buy a netbook and the speakers on the Chumby leave a little to be desired.

Enter Livio Radio. This is a (relatively) inexpensive internet stereo at $150 that has the Pandora thumbs up/thumbs down buttons built right in.

Here's the most unexcited guy in the world explaining how it works...



If I wasn't trying to by a house in NY, I'd be all over this. :)

Braving McKinley

Last week I wrapped another 48 Hour Film. This one is a mockumentary on a theater group that reenacts the assassination of President William McKinley.



By far, this is the tightest production I've ever done. The (digital) film looks great and was shot in full HD. The sound is good with little to no post production. What you see above is my cut with about 3 minutes of footage added in--the 48 hour film project requires films to be no more than 7 minutes.

Enjoy!

Canon T1i/500D Test Footage and Puppies

Here's a quick unfiltered look at the Canon T1i indoors at night with minimal lighting.



The pups are three lab boxer mix pups that we are boarding for the week--sleeping and being generally cute... Shot handheld with manual focus. No post processing, no color correction. Original file was about 150MB...

New Canon T1i Heading My Way

I hate buying electronics--not because I hate electronics, but because I obsess over reviews, consumer reviews, unboxings, sample videos and whatever other information I can find pre-purchase.

So, after about a three months of debating on what HD video camera I wanted to buy, I completely switched gears and bought a Digital SLR still camera. Why you ask? The Canon T1i is a hybrid DSLR that shoots HD video (720p at 30FPS, about what a movie downloaded on Xbox Live would look like) and 15 megapixel stills.

I know equipment that try to do too many things often fail, and I do think Canon failed at building a usable everyday video camera--it won't auto focus while recording, audio is poor and BlueRay quality HD mode (1080p at 20FPS) is too slow to be useful. However when I see clips like this, I get excited about shooting video with a real 35mm lens.



If you click through to YouTube you can watch it in HD, but even there it's still not the full resolution of the 720p mode of the camera. (BTW, the 500D is the European version of the T1i, so same everything.)

I've got lots of things to figure out like manual focus, camera support, power, etc, but I think that DSLRs that shoot video will be the wave of the future.

It arrives tomorrow, so I hope to shoot some test footage this weekend.

UPDATED: Best Google Ad Ever!!!

UPDATE: My best guess is someone was just banging on the keyboard to make a test ad and KLM are just so close to each other on the keyboard that that's what the URL ended up being.

The sad part is it's probably one of the few ads I've clicked on in my Gmail, so this tactic may be surprisingly effective. :)

We've got a KLM person in the comments who may be able to verify. Kudos to them for following up.


Keep up the good work www.KLM.com!

Tech humor not worth it...

An oddball conversation yesterday reminded me of this web comic...

More System Backup

Now that I have GoodSync running (see my last post) I was looking for cheap local storage. What I found at the local Best Buy was close out 320GB USB drives--good, small, cheap.

Now I wish I would have done my homework, because I found 320GB of firewire storage for $80 shipped at Amazon.

No doubt I will be using these as video editing drives.

GoodSync + Amazon S3 = Sweetness

I've been struggling with my home network all day. I had a 250GB drive in my FreeNAS server fail and it's made my whole Easter Sunday very depressing. Lucky for me I had dual drive setup that mirrored all my important data, but I hadn't been good at keeping it all that up to date.

I was a big fan of Microsoft SyncToy for backing files to my home network, but it's failed me in the past, and the new Sync 2.0 framework that seems to run constantly system is bothersome, so I ventured out for a new solution.

I've been using Siber System's RoboForm for years and I knew they had a sync solution, but I hadn't investigated. Oh, what I've been missing out on is file-syncing sweetness...



This bad boy will sync files between networks, FTP sites and (the kicker for me) my Amazon S3 storage account. Now I can have automated local backup to cheap USB drives or my FreeNAS (if I ever get it working again...) *and* I can backup to the Amazon cloud storage for mission critical files I can't afford to lose.

April is a good month to cracking, GoodSync is $19.55 until 4/15 (down form 30 bucks with coupon code 1040G) and “data transfer in” to Amazon S3 is only $0.03 per GB (vs. the standard $0.10) for 3 months, April through June.

Enjoy!

I’m going to post to my blog more!

April Fools!

Seriously, April 1st is a big day for me. It means 90 days in a new city, 60 days in a new house and the 30 day anniversary of discovering the location of my iron.

All in all, the move was quite a bit more intense that I ever would have imagined and the New York City pace is everything people say. I find that my days are a good two hours longer in Manhattan then they were in Cincinnati and the risk of being unproductive is much higher. I really have to focus on the task at hand to keep the day from slipping away.

I am enjoying the train commute (half of my Facebook updates originate there) and I’m getting back into listening to Podcasts and really using mobile internet sites. I can see how anyone who commutes into the city needs an iPhone or SmartPhone.

I am not enjoying the red tape that moving to a new city entails. My wife and I have made a collective five trips to the BMV to get the cars registered, countless reams of new job and insurance paperwork, and all new banking and utilities to deal with. You know you have to update the Netflix account or they’ll stop sending you movies :)

That leads me to an April Fools challenge for those of you who still bother to read this drivel. Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the low budget indie film April’s Fool?

This little gem of a film was released in 2001 and I was lucky enough to stumble upon one of the few theatrical showings at the Esquire Theater. It was shot mostly in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky and unlike Airborne I remember it being somewhat good. I’d love to rent it again to see if it has a shelf life.

Happy April’s Fool day!

Rebuilding my Home Server

I have a million pressing things to do this weekend, but I'm pushing it all aside to rebuild my home file server. I debated shelling out $500 for one of those fancy Drobo drives, but I thought I would update/upgrade my FreeNAS.

FreeNAS is a free NAS server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI protocols, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 32MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key.

When I get finished I should have a mirrored 250GB of space with 2GB of Flash memory for various server plugins. I hope to get it configured as a media server to play my musice over the XBOX 360, but we'll see.

Wilson tweets SXSW

Quick update from my mobile. You can follow me at SXSW on Twitter @stopwilson.

Have you met TED?

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration, and this year I was lucky enough to get the nod from my good friends at GREYnyc.

There will be so many people blogging and twitting about TED that you won't see any of that on this site, but I have been ask to shoot video of the event. So I will post that here after TED wraps.

Stay tuned.

Train Blogging

So this post is being written on the 6:42pm New Haven express train from Grand Central to South Norwalk, CT. Usually I keep my blog postings to techie things I find/make/covet, but I felt like posting on something the usefullness of those gadets.

I'm currently in the middle of moving with my company to the New York City area, and now I'm finding that all my tech toys are really more suited to the commuting life style I have now than the one I had in Cincinnati. (This post is a testament to what a free hour on the train and a bag full of gadgets will force you to do.)

So I'm sitting here, shoulder to shoulder with other commuters with my Acer Aspire One netbook in my lap. It's teathered to a Sprint Centro phone via a USB cable and I'm surfing the internets at oldskool dial-up speeds. It's enough to check email and write blog posts, so who knows--maybe I'll be a blogger again someday soon.

I'm also liking Pocket Tunes on my Palm based phone. I just found out that it not only will pause the music when an incoming call comes in, but it will play the callers audio over the ear buds and still let you speak into the phone like in hands-free mode. Of course I look like an idiot talking into my music player, but the sound on both ends is good.

Of course I've been loving GoogleMaps Mobile and 1-800-GOOG-411, they've both been a big help finding my way around a new city.

So from gadget collector to gadget user in only a few days. Who knew?