While at Northern Voice this year, one thing that was brought up was the quality of online video. I mentioned how I thought Stage6 with their online version of DivX was the best, and unfortunately, it seems I promoted it too late. Stage6 is set to be shut down at the end of this month. The reason they published on their press release was that the site was using up too many resources and that they couldn’t find a suitable buyer. I would be surprised if that’s the full story, as Stage6 has also become a success in the copyrighted video world, and I am sure that those that have Read more »

Over on GadgeTell there is a great post about the format wars, and how the winner, Blu-ray, came out on top, not from the consumer side, but instead from the industry side. According to an analyst at ABI research the end of the format war was not the true measure of consumer demand when it came to the choice of HD format. The true decision was made by Warner brothers decision to jump ship to Blu-ray. The decision to switch may have been principally decided not by which format the consumers of Warner’s preferred, but by a nearly $120 million payoff from Sony. While I am happy that the format Read more »

Wired’s How-to Wiki has a post up that talks about converting your HD DVD’s from their quickly dying format over to the “new hotness” of Blu-ray. In case you didn’t hear, HD DVD is going the way of Betamax, and so it is time to embrace Sony’s Blu-ray format. All of you PS3 owners out there are laughing at us Xbox 360 users with our HD DVD attachment drive, I’m sure. While it seems like it would be a major pain to move your content over to the format that will become the standard for high definition DVD watching, it might just save you money, so that you don’t have Read more »

If you are interested in technology, the web, and the businesses associated with each, you’ll most likely enjoy the TechCanuck podcast, of which I am a co-host. James Cogan of Dailypixel and I try to come together on Skype every two-ish weeks to record. The latest episode, episode 16, covers Automattic (the company that runs WordPress), the likely recession in North America and how it will effect online advertising rates, and our thoughts on the Apple MacBook Air. Check it out on Dailypixel.ca. Read more »

By now, I am sure everyone has heard of the Asus Eee, a brand that has been selling a fair number of small, portable laptops for the company. I have been eyeing a their Eee line in hopes of having a really great blogging machine on the go. Something light, and reasonable for typing up stories no matter where I am travelling. Next, it seems like they will be creating a desktop computer, all-in-one monitor and a large LCD TV. They will all follow under the simple, basic and really cheap strategy that has been working out really well for their sub-notebooks. The E-DT will include an Intel Celeron processor Read more »

A classic from the archives….. A man by the name of Fabricio Zuardi has created an easy way to play MP3s on a site using a simple flash interface and Actionscript 2. His invention is called the XSPF Web Music Player, and what it does is it reads in a XSPF file to play the MP3s listed in the file. XSPF stands for XML Shareable Playlist Format. Fabricio Zuardi created three different kinds of players: the Extended version, which has the player’s controls, the list of songs, the album cover, and current track; the Slim version, which just has the player’s controls and the current track; and finally the Button Read more »

So, you think someone has it rough when they lose both their legs from the knee down? Well, in the eyes of the International Association of Athletics Federations, Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee, was found to have a leg up on his competition. Oscar is a sprinter that has been denied a shot at running in the Olympics because he is too fast. His carbon-fiber prosthetic feet were found to give too much of an advantage to the runner. The IAAF report states that the “mechanical advantage of the blade in relation to the healthy ankle joint of an able bodied athlete is higher than 30-percent.” Also, a secondary advantage Read more »

In what I see as a very strange change, Sun Microsystems now owns the open source database system MySQL. They were sold to Sun for one billion dollars, which isn’t the IPO that many people were expecting from the company. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote about the purchase on his blog. MySQL is by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services. From Facebook, Google and Sina.com to banks and telecommunications companies, architects looking for performance, productivity and innovation have turned to MySQL. In high schools and college campuses, at startups, at high performance computing labs and in the Global 2000. The adoption of MySQL Read more »

I have never watched an iFanboy episode before, and I don’t know any of the hosts of the show. I know it is a video podcast about comic books, and while I enjoy the sessions that The Totally Rad Show does for comic books, I don’t know how much I can take from a whole show dedicated to the medium. The hosts of the show are Ron, Josh and Conor. None of them immediately come off as guys I would like to hang out with, but again, first impressions can always be misleading. I have a huge fascination with super heroes, and love the idea of comic books, but can’t Read more »

I used to be a huge fan of Kevin Rose, but the more I watch his shows, the less I like him. I haven’t watched Diggnation for a long while, so watching episode 133, the first in the new year, I had high hopes. The guys, unlike normal, were sipping tea and whatnot, rather then the normal beers. This hopefully made them a little less buzzed, and silly, as they sometimes get later into their episodes. The show has a simple format. Alex and Kevin cover their “top stories” from Digg.com. Some of them are interesting, most are kind of stupid. Alex saves the show for me, with his wit Read more »