Coop Double Hitter - gaming goodness on mass

This little monkey has been a little slow with the posts the past couple of weeks, but it's good news for you my friends. 2 x Coop Eps back to back.

LittleBigPlanet (PSP), Mass Effect 2, Avatar (The Game)



Modern Warfare 2, Team Fortress 2, HALO & Many More…

2010 Movies - HOT TUB TIME MACHINE

At Work Over XMAS? ANNOY PEOPLE

DO THE DAFT!

Video Game Minimalism

There are more to see at My Modern Met, and yes, you can get them on a t-shirt.

I kind of like this one of Kratos from Gods of War

Zero Punctuation: Demon's Souls

Digg Dialogg - Peter Jackson Interview

Peter Jackson, the Academy Award winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the upcoming film, The Lovely Bones, talks to James Rocchi and answers a few Digg questions. District 9, Lord of the Rings and more....

Monkey's Christmas Wishlist

This silly season I find that I'm looking for the online bargains, trolling around the internets looking for some of the coolest things that I'd never buy myself. You know, some of that useless stuff that's great on Christmas Day then finds it way to the back of your wardrobe and some of the must haves for the debt inclined. So here we go...


USB Desktop Tanning Center

Ever been laughed at by your friends for looking nerdy? Ever thought that it could be due to you monitor-tan? Well this nifty little device plugs into your USB and pumps your face with luscious UV rays helping you to look active on the outside.



Livescribe -Pulse Smartpen


Ever wanted to get a soft copy of your minutes for work? Can be buggered re-typing it all over again? Well fret no longer... as well as having a little inferred camera in the nub to record your pen strokes there's a microphone so you can add notations which can also be converted into a txt document! Nice..





The New Tivo

With the new CASPA VOD service and unmetered downloads from a growing list of ISP's the new Tivo Dual HD Tuner PVR could be on top of any one's list. Currently it's around $2 - $4AU dollars to watch your favourite TV show using the service but coming April next year you'll have to option of watching the show with commercials for free. And it's not that bad as commercial content goes with 30 second breaks at the start, middle and end of your shows (more for movies) is a breeze compared to current scheduling practices. It's got one of the easiest user experiences of all other locally available PVR's and you can stream you're archived video's to the unit (Divx, Quicktime, MP4/H.264...) We'll see how the streaming goes, but for all the other features this is a total goer.

Darth Vader Unmasked - USB Stick

It's just cool.... in 2,4,8 and 16gb.

 

Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

There's something pretty sweet about waking up in the guts of one of your favourite fantastical creatures. I mean you even get a mini Light Saber on the zip as you slice her open and the head becomes a little pillow! For any Star Wars fan or any nerd at all... this will be hard to beat.

Kindle Wireless Reading Device

A virtual book. The digital ink simulates the look and feel of reading with no glare or refresh rate to strain your eyes. It looks real paper, and makes accessing the mass of features a cool and fairly painless experience.And there's no need for a PC as the build in Wi-fi and 3G lets you surf the net as well as access Amazons library of 360,000 books and 50,000 audio books. Other features like Read-to-Me Voice to text and wikipedia are cool too but need some work. For us Ozzies it gets a bit more difficult as only a fraction of the noted titles are available in Australia and but it can be made up for by the access to free out of copyright content from websites such as Gutenberg.org and the new ability to read PDF's. The high price tag is a total downer but this is a wish list I suppose....

Tarantino Mixtape

A nice like mixup of Quentin Tarantino's work....

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

sepukoo.com - the latest thing in social networking?

sepukoo - Social networking suicide. The virtual life gets yet another simulated kink, but what happens when somone 'seppukoos' online and tops themselves in real life? It also occurs to us that it's just a matter of time before some online feud leads to a murder/suicide sitation where accounts get hacked, or information 'borrowed' and rather than an indidual voluntarily opting out of their online presence (which is what the site seems to exist for), they will get 'offed' by their adversary or some jealous and resentful 'friend'.

I guess it's one way to scare the crap out of your Mum (If she's the type to check your account several times daily, just to keep tabs), and you can always just reactivate your facbook account if you change your mind later (in fact, entirely getting rid of a facebook profile you have created is next to impossible), but what about all those cool buddies of yours who you only know through online chatting? that you have never actually met in person? Virtual grief is not something we've been planning on.

It's a viral newsbyte waiting to happen... and it could happen to you.

Supervillains in Love: The Monarchs

For fans of The Venture Brothers...

Zero Punctuation: Left 4 Dead 2 & New Super Mario Bros Wii

WTF!? with Quentin Taratino...

The world's first commercial spacecraft

Pictures released Monday which we saw on Boing Boing of 'Spaceship 2' from The Mojave desert, California, home to Virgin Galactic's research and development base (it's actually the craft in the middle, between the dual carriages of the catamarine-like aircraft that lauches it). $200,000 US will get you a ticket (assuming you pass the physical) on a flight to the upper limits of Earth's atmosphere to the edge of space, and approximately 5 or 6 minutes of true 'zero-g' wieghtlessness... not to metion the huge carbon footprint you will earn yourself at the same time.

Between Two Ferns - Strange Tonight Show

Zach Galifianakis from "Hangover" fame hosts this bizarre talk show "Between Two Ferns"... I think that it's funny, but then again it may just be odd.

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns

Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns

Movie News - New Avatar Featurette

A nice new twist on the current load of trailers that are floating around for James Cameron's Avatar. Sigourney Weaver voices a kind of Welcoming Guide to Pandora. Location, Inhabbitants, geographical makeup... it's all hear in a really slick and drool worthy piece of video. How long till it comes out? The 17th??? Ohhh... man :(


You have to click off site as there's no youtube copy of this treat...

Tech News - Turning your PS3 into a Personal Video Record

PlayTV AU Impressions

Annoyed that you missed Iron Chef last night? Disgruntled because you had to duck out to the bathroom during the *insert sporting code here* grand finals and you missed the most memorable moment of the game? Getting crabby because you're about to go on holidays for a week and you'll be out of touch with your friends in Summer Bay the entire time?

Well, turn that frown upside down. PlayTV is here to ensure you don't miss a second of oh-so-important television time. It comes along on the heels of set top boxes like Tivo, services like Foxtel iQ and hardware like PC TV tuner cards. It's not in any way new, in other words, but in this case it's affordable, convenient and – for the most part – pretty user friendly.

We've been testing PlayTV for a few days now, and it works very much as advertised. Plug the little black box containing the twin TV tuners into your PS3, plug an aerial into the black box, install the software to your PS3 and you're good to go. The tuners had no problems finding all the Australian free to air channels – including the weird community/parliament/teaching aides ones. Oh, and the one that seems to do nothing but play re-runs of The Jetsons, The Flintstones and Bewitched. Wow, it's like having cable. For free! 

We didn't really have any issues with reception either, which was gratifying given how awful the analogue reception is at our test location. One of the advantages of a digital signal is that you basically either get it, or you don't. I.e. you'll either see a clean, crisp, smooth signal, or it'll be frozen and only occasionally spit out another frame. So no fuzzy reception, no ghosting – it's either on or off.

Choose the Live TV option and you're watching tele as per normal. Only, because of the ability to buffer to the PS3's hard drive and the twin tuners, you have a number of cool features, such as pausing and rewinding live TV, and recording one channel while watching another. The Electronic Program Guide (EPG) integration also means it's a simple matter to browse through the TV guide and select a number of programs you want to record. Once you've set your schedule, the system gets pulled out of sleep mode to record each program, or can do it in the background while you're playing a game or watching a Blu-ray. We've tested recording a film while playing a game (Brutal Legend, if you must know), and experienced no issues whatsoever. full article here...

Tech News - Net piracy: The people vs the entertainment industry

"THIS is the kind of snooping you'd expect in China, not a modern western democracy. It raises huge questions over privacy invasion and freedom of expression." So says Andrew Heaney - who is not, as you might imagine, a civil liberties campaigner, but a senior executive at TalkTalk, one of the UK's largest internet service providers. Along with other ISPs, his company faces the prospect of being forced to spy on its customers' downloads for signs of potential copyright infringement.

Heaney's disquiet is shared by web campaigners worldwide, as the measures contained in a controversial international copyright treaty (New Scientist, 5 July 2008, p 24) are slowly being translated into national laws variously tipped to bridge, distract from or widen the gulf between the entertainment industry's desires and those of the millions who share copyrighted material over the internet.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), suggested by the US administration in 2007, aims to redefine global trade rules. The intention is to stem losses from counterfeiting and internet-mediated piracy of content like music and movies.

It will do that by penalising internet service providers and websites that carry, or help people to find, pirated content. ACTA has quickly proved a hit with G8 nations, the European Union, South Korea and Australia, who are all using it as a basis for future national laws.........

........ACTA is still being worked up in secret by trade delegations from the many nations involved. But a series of leaks to the Wikileaks website reveal that it will require ISPs to become technological sleuths who monitor their customers' internet use to "deter unauthorised storage and transmission of infringing content". Infringers will face a "graduated response", with disconnection as the ultimate sanction. "Monitoring every single packet going across our network for the fingerprints of hundreds of copyrighted files will require tens of millions of pounds' worth of computer systems," Heaney warns. Without that extra computing power, internet access will slow to a crawl.

ISPs would have to scan the contents of every chunk of data, using what is known as "deep packet inspection" technology, which is used by China and Iran to monitor and censor internet communications. But even if ISPs install such technology, identifying infringers will be far from straightforward. The EU has ruled that before anyone can be sent a warning letter, rights holders must take an ISP to court to get the name and address of an alleged culprit.more...

More info about the ACTA

Tech News - Solar Power from Space

A new develpoment from the worlds largest economy, California has just approved a new kind of energy system, and it's based in space!

Energy beamed down from space is one step closer to reality, now that California has given the green light to a deal involving its sale. But some major challenges will have to be overcome if the technology is to be used widely.

On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission gave its blessing to an agreement that would see the Pacific Gas and Electric Company buy 200 megawatts of power beamed down from solar-power satellites beginning in 2016.

A start-up company called Solaren is designing the satellites, which it says will use radio waves to beam energy down to a receiving station on Earth.

The attraction of collecting solar power in space is the virtually uninterrupted sunshine available in geosynchronous orbit. Earth-based solar cells, by contrast, can only collect sunlight during daytime and when skies are clear. more...

Zero Punctuation: Assassin's Creed 2

Panic Attack!

So here's the scenario - guy makes short film, does a few screenings and posts it on the internet. Film gets seen by Legendary genre director who finds guy and helps him get a major deal with a Hollywood cinema. Guy gets associated with a coupleof geektastic projects which don't come to fruition, then makes something wonderful.
Sound Familiar? it's approximately what has happened with Neill Blomkamp being 'discovered' by Peter Jackson a few years back and ending producing 'District 9' this year, on of the most innovative, engaging and exciting works in Science Fiction for a long time.
Now it might be happening again, if we're lucky. THose of us who saw Blomkamp's Halo 3 shorts or the short that District 9 is based upon, Alive in Joburg



might have had a similar feeling watching the film at the top of this post; Panic Attack by Fede Alvarez. Sam Raimi sure did, and has signed the Uruguayan film maker to 'develop and direct an original genre project'.

This MTV Movie Blogs points out that this is happening the same year that Oren Peli has had 'unparalleled success' with his ultra low budget suspense flick "Paranormal Activity" - produced for a variously reported 10-15 thousand dollars in 2007, Peli's film came to the attention of Steven Spielberg after some festival Screenings and has bee a sleeper hit that led to a dealwith Peli at Dreamworks. Peli's story might remind some of the way that 'The Blair Witch Project'exploited the internet to market itself in a way that hadn't been tried before.
This trend must be inspiring to any would-be film makers, and it sure is exciting for Science Fiction and Horror fans. I think the kind of patronage that Spielberg, Jackson and now Raimi has shown is laudable, and I hope it keeps happening for more low-budget projects.

Fede Alvarez made 'Panic Attack' for a reported 'few hundred dollars' - it sure doesn't look like it!