Wednesday, September 13, 2006

iTV, new iPods and movies for iTunes Store

If you are a fan of those nifty little things called iPods as well as the great user interface that is iTunes store head over to Apple for the "It's Showtime" keynote. Included are many cool announcements and watching it is all part of the fun. You need Quicktime to play it as well.

The two big announcements of the keynote were iTV and the addition of movies to the iTunes store. The movies and television being sold are still very exclusive to the USA store but Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple will "hopefully be going international in 2007" so that is a glimmer of hope to say the least. iTunes 7 was also released today so head over to the Apple website to get the latest edition of iTunes. A really cool thing in the latest rendition of iTunes is the ability to retrive cover art for any album you have even if you haven't bought it from the store.

I'm pretty excited about all of this. On Thursday Nintendo will most likely be announcing the launch date, price and launch lineup for it's new console Wii so stay tuned as i will have all that info for you here as I find out about it.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

The Simpsons Best of Lists

This entry is for all you diehard Simpsons fans out there and i know there is plenty of you out there. Even if you are not into the latest Simpsons efforts the following lists of the best of The Simpsons are a fun read where you can reminisce on the days The Simpsons ruled the world even if you think they still do. So sit back relax and thank the wonderful people over at IGN for some lists and while you are at it check out the 7 minute exclusive clip of the first seven minutes of Season 18's first episode "The Mook, The Chef, The Wife and His Homer" as well as a short on how they get The Simpsons from sketch to the way we view it.

Top 25 Simpsons Peripheral Characters

Top 25 Simpsons Guest Appearances

17 Seasons, 17 Episodes

The First 7 Minutes of Season 18 plus from Sketch to Perfect

So enjoy. Also if you haven't yet heard of Spore check out this 15 minute video that gives you the lowdown on what it's all about. It's the new game from Will Wright creator of The Sims Series. It is a game of evolution and the customization of whatever you want your species to be. Basically it's endless gameplay for the creative minded person. Anyways you can't understand the scale of this game until you see this demo. It's also from IGN.

Spore Demonstration at Game Convention 2006

That's all for now.

Look What I Stumbled Upon

It would be great to say I stumbled upon the great tool that is StumbleUpon but it didn't happen that way. I found it when I was upgrading my Firefox to the latest beta and I thought I'd update my extensions. StumbleUpon is a toolbar, I know another toolbar but it is worth it believe me. You pick what sort of stuff you want to browse and there are heaps of topics and even if you can't find one you can search for anything. Videos, pictures and Wiki's are also all stumblable. It's a great way of discovering new sites in categories you like.

I've already found some great stuff from it. Here are some examples.

AllSP.com - A place with all the South Park episodes to watch online.

Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Links - A page with links to Google videos of Penn & Teller episodes.

So give it a go and report back to me when you are having fun stumbling.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Audioslave - Revelations

Being a dedicated fan of Rage Against the Machine and one eyed supporter of microphone fiend Zach de la Rocha it was going to take a long time for me to accept new vocalist Chris Cornell. Audioslave's first two albums went by and I never bought them from the CD store, while not thinking twice with RATM. Don't get me wrong I still loved such great songs as Like a Stone and Show Me How to Live and there are some others as well but 5 September came around and I was browsing the iTunes Music Store at 1am and noticed Revelations was out. Original Fire, their first single from the album was ok so I thought I'd give the full album a try and I haven't regreted it.

I'm not going to go giving it a review for at least a month though because I need to get an appreciation for the music and lyrics. Car stereo play, iPod airtime and the time I'm on the computer listening to it will where I place my judgement. First impressions are wonderful though. So far standouts for me are Revelations, Moth, Until we Fall and Shape of Things to Come. There's also a great live version of Show Me How to Live recorded at the Quartz Festival wherever that is that comes with the iTunes version. But really who can ignore the legendary guitar sounds of Tom Morello. Give it a go if you like alternative rock and want your ears drums to vibrate to a standout sound.