Category: Entertainment

More high-tech folk art, this of the possibly not work safe (for prude employers) variety. Do copulating components constitute pr0n? Will this get us banned from the U.A.E., via unSmart Filter? We can only hope.

People have been streaming DiVx movies from their Windows Media Center PCs to their Xbox 360s for a while now, but it’s a fairly involved hack. Jake Ludington of MediaBlab has found a much easier solution, an MCE add-in called MCE Video Encoder. He shows the simple steps involved on his site. It only works with the official DiVx player, so you’ll need to grab that, too.

We love the high-tech folk art here at the Labs — it is “street tech,” after all. And, we love the robots made from junk. These two interests get all origami on us in BoxBots, a wacky menagerie of cardboard robot models crafted by artist Jonathan Keller while he was bored and living in Antarctica.

Other people have gotten in on the act and started submitting their own BoxBots to the site. I love the idea of re-visioning trash, squinting to see if there’s a robot lurking in there. You’ll never look at your garbage the same way: “C3PO, is that you?”

[Via Make]

In response to my posting of the YouTube download tutorial, ST Patron Saint Alberto sent a link to this video download page which allows you to enter the URL for videos stored on YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, and elsewhere. You still need a Flash Video Player (FLV) or format converter to view the files.

If you’ve become as obsessed with surfing music videos (or other vid content) on YouTube as we have, you might have wondered how you can download content from the site. TubeRaider has a tutorial on doing just that.

Following on the heels of Apple’s rather disappointing press-haha on Tuesday, TiVo announced a press event for Thursday. As Engadget so succinctly put it:

“So, let the guessing game begin. TiVo Series 3? The subscription model? A partnership with NetFlix (could be; the invite promises appearances by CEO Tom Rogers and “other special guests”)? All we know is that if they end up showing off nothing but a speaker system and a leather carrying case for your DVR, we’re bailing.”

Update (3/2/06): It was even worse than anyone expected. None of the above speculated announcements. This “event” was to announce “KidZone,” a parental blocking and program recommendation service.

Whoopty-f’ing-Do. We feel sorry for the gadget press grunts that traipsed all the way out to this “event,” held this AM, at the Museum of Television and Radio, in the Big Applet.

I may be late to the party, but I haven’t spent much time on any of the video services that seem to be cropping up like mushrooms in fresh cow patties. This weekend, through a “serendipity search,” I ended up taking a link to a Kate Bush video on YouTube. Several days later, I peeled my eyeballs off of the monitor, having delved deeply into the thousands of music videos archived there. I went bananas. I tried searching on nearly every band/artist I’ve ever been in love with, and found something almost every time: music videos, snips from rockumentaries, concert footage, TV appearances, mash-ups, YouTube members croaking through their own covers, and on and on. It’s heaven in there! I’m sure a lot of this stuff has been available on P2P for a while now, but frequently, when I’ve done searches, I’ve ended up downloading crap and just given up after a while. This is a far more satisfying (and addictive) experience.

One of the cool things about putting Beyond Cyberpunk! on the Web has been that its content is now getting linked to far and wide. It has triggered fond memories of the bad ol’ days of early cyberculture for some, and its reviews and essays are being pointed to by others. Following these links back has led to some fun discoveries. One recent example is a LiveJournal entry where ComicBookLovers linked to my BCP! review of the comic book “The Blue Lily” and wondered whatever happened to books 3 and 4 (only 1 and 2 ever saw print). Author and artist of the book wrote the poster back and updates fans on Blue Lily’s possible-future. His email, after the jump.

[And yes, I know I misspelled “Lily” in the review. Hey, at least I was consistent. What can I say, we were young and stupid. Now we’re old and careful — and much less fun to be around at parties.]

If you didn’t get a chance to see Discovery’s “Before the Dinosaurs” broadcast this past week, you might want to add it to your TiVo WishList. It’s definitely worth the disc space.

Like “Walking with Dinosaurs,” this BBC-produced speculative doc uses state-of-the-art animation, animatronics, and other F/X, oh yeah, and some actual science, too, to paint a picture of what the world might have been like from the Cambrian period (530 million years ago) to the Permian (250 MYA). The production is just incredible, the content is like something from a very effective horror flick: sea scorpions as big as a man, giant spiders the size of bowling bowls, dragonflies the size of eagles, 10-feet long millipedes, lightening that literally makes the sky explode, drought that kills off 90% of all life on Earth, proto-dinosaurs the size of large insects, pre-mammalian beasts that digest vegetation by rolling river-rocks around in their guts. Crazy.

Like a lot of these BBC/Discovery “science” “documentaries,” this is more about the geeky thrill of generous extrapolations of real science and fossil record than it is sticking to known evidence, but keeping that in mind, it’s still a lot of fun and it certainly gets the point across that life had a weird and wondrous backstory before the dinos showed up and it was likely one inhospitable place to grow up. And you thought downtown Fallujah or a south Texas quail farm was a dangerous place to be!

I went with friends last night to catch the new IMAX film, “Roving Mars.” Wow, what a ride!

The film’s based on the book, “Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet,” by Steve Squyers, and presents the dual missions of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which were launched in June and July of 2003. It combines interviews with mission scientists, scenes from the the trip to Mars, and the fascinating discoveries that the rovers have been beaming back to us during their unexpectedly long lives.

From the triumphs and setbacks during the mission’s development, to launch and arrival, to sweeping Martian panoramas, to the incredible machinic origami of the rovers, there’s so much exquisite geekery to savor here!