I just stumbled on this on You Tube. Hawkwind’s Assult & Battery/Golden Void as the backing to a Full Metal Alchemist video. Bizarre. Then again it should keep both me and Calvin happy for a while.
With two main characters in Full Metal Alchemist having a surname of Elric, a track from The Chronicle of the Black Sword might have been more appropriate. Any excuse to listen to Needle Gun again. Well Jerry Cornelius was an aspect of the eternal champion, as was Elric. A good enough connection for me.
RSS Feeds are a useful way of keeping tabs on changes to websites and getting information on a variety of topics of interest to your screen without the need for trawling through a myriad websites. A bit like the internet equivalent of fast food, without the fries. There are many ways of subscribing to and reading feeds. Some browsers, such as Firefox (or my browser of the moment Flock), have the ability built in. However by far and away the best way of accessing RSS Feeds is to use an aggregator (a.ka. RSS Reader or Feed Reader).
For the last couple of years my aggregator of choice has been FeedDemon. Easy to use it is widely held to be the best of breed when it comes to bringing you your daily fix of RSS Feeds. I just learned today that Newsgator who own FeedDemon are making it available as a free download. Bah humbug, if like me you already paid the piper to subscribe, whoopy doo for everyone else.
Give it a whirl. Now it’s free there’s no excuse not to.
Another interesting freebie from Newsgator is Newsgator Go!. This allows you to read your feeds on your mobile phone and is synchronised with the feeds you add to feed demon. This is available for Blackberry, Java Mobile Smartphone (including my Nokia N95, huzzah) and for Windows Mobile. Windows mobile phone owners can also get it to play streaming video and audio too. To get this go to http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NewsGatorGo/Default.aspx and click on the aproprate free download link. Sign in with an existing newsgator account, or create one if you’ve not already got one. You’ll eventually get asked to accept the software license agreement. Accept this and an e-mail will be sent to the e-mail address you registered. Open this mail and get a link you can type into your phones browser. Do this and you can install the application on your phone. Enter your Newsgator username and password when asked on your phone and as though by magic your feeds will appear before your eyes in miniature. Fantastic. So now not only have you got internet fast food, you’ve got it to go to.
Following on from Warner’s announcement of switching exclusively to Blue Ray, New Line Cinema, has announced an immediate switchover to the Blue Format. Not too surprising as it is owned by Time Warner, which is the parent company of Warner Brothers.
New Line Cinema have the Lord of The Rings and Austin Powers series in their portfolio. So that’s Austin, Dr Evil and Gandalf joining Bugs & Mickey in the blue corner.
The public alpha version of Wikipedia’s search engine Wikia Search became available today. Following the same philosophy as wikipedia, this search engine is community-driven and open-source.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has stated that Wikia search will attempt to transform internet search bringing transparency and openness to search results. Currently internet search is dominated by a few large companies operating under a cloak of secrecy with virtually no accountability for how results are served up or pages are ranked.
Note that at the moment Wikia Search didn’t manage to find any references to any of my blogs (The George Lite Zone, Greasy Truckers Party Food, Coded Languages or Stroll On) when searched for. Obviously they must be veiled by the cloak of secrecy. Still, it is only the alpha version of the engine, so I’ll give it a chance for now.
Tip: If you’re a Firefox user you can add Wikia Search to your list of search engines by going to the wikia main page then clicking on the dropdown list of search engines. You should then have an option to add wikia search to your list.
In a galxy not so far away, another blow was struck for the Sony Empire with Warner anouncing that they will be exclusively releasing their material on the Blue Ray format. They said that they would continue to release HD DVDs untill the end of May, with these releases following on from DVD and Blu-ray releases.
This is a massive blow in favour of the blue camp. Warners are Holywood’s biggest DVD seller, with a market share of 18 to 20 percent of US sales and are one of the few studios to back both formats. With both Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny batting for the blue ray team now, it will be difficult to see of a way back for HD DVD. Unless Bill Vader and his chums at Toshiba can complete work on that Death Star…
While surfing the net looking at alternate browsers, I found a couple of Firefox add-ons that someone had reccomended. Giving them a whirl I was suitably impressed. Cooliris Cooliris allows you to preview the web page behind a link by floating your mouse over the link. This gives you a mini-me style window that shows you the content without having to open a new window. Cool.
PicLens PicLens allows you to transform a web gallery into a full-screen slideshow. After installing, check it out by googling some images, positioning yuour mose cursor over one of them, then pressing the play icon. All of a sudden the images returned present themselves as a nifty little slideshow. Awesome !!! PicLens also works Internet Explorer.
