Archive for September 28th, 2011
All Back to the Future episodes updated on iPad, on sale | Joystiq
It’s time to go back, Marty: Back to the Back to the Future. That is to say, if you were unsatisfied with how the time-traveling trilogy’s adventure game adaptation performed on your iPad, it’s time to give them a second shot. An update has launched for all five episodes of the game, improving performance, graphics and squashing a few bugs. Which is fortunate, because when traveling through time in a 30-year-old automobile, you want the experience to be as bug-free as possible.
Also, each episode of the series has been marked down to $2.99 until September 30, if, by chance, you’d like to dip your toes into the game’s recently updated waters. Of course, all the diehard fans will lord over you their war stories from the pre-patch days, when Doc Brown had three arms, and Marty spoke in backwards Esperanto.
via All Back to the Future episodes updated on iPad, on sale | Joystiq.
Spruce Up Your Spotify Player – Wired How-To Wiki
Spotify has finally made it to the US! But signing up for the wildly popular music-streaming service is only half the battle. Here’s how to spruce up Spotify’s generic desktop player with third party plugins.
Contents
* 1 Sign Up
* 2 Bring The Beat to the Browser
* 3 Change Your Pitch Up
* 4 Don’t Forget The Words
* 5 Control Remotely
Sign Up
Every journey starts somewhere, and this one starts with having Spotify. If you don’t already have the desktop streaming client, you can find it here. Getting started is relatively painless, easy, and requires little more than an email address.
If this is your first foray into the service, you’ll probably want to spend some time familiarizing yourself before venturing ahead. Feel free to get a feel for how to build/share playlists. Or better yet, check out Wired’s Spotify hands-on.
Mad Max Fans Hit the Desert for Apocalyptic Weekend | Underwire | Wired.com
CALIFORNIA CITY, Calif. — If life after the apocalypse will be anything like Wasteland Weekend — the Mad Max-inspired event in the California desert — then go ahead and push the red button.
Approximately 700 people outfitted with scrap armor, leather, and homemade machetes gathered in the scrubland to re-create a post-apocalyptic world for three days, beginning last Friday. Wasteland Weekend came complete with mock blood sports, grinding industrial music, plastic-and-cardboard shanties, and two (yes two!) 1973 Australian Ford Falcon XB GT “Interceptors” modeled after the cars in the first two Mad Max films.
The event is the brainchild of Mad Max fan Karol Bartoszynski, who after years of communicating with other fans of the film franchise on the internet organized a tanker-led highway cruise down Highway 101 in 2004 called Roadwar 101. The tricked-out convoy inspired similar events in Texas and Washington, and it eventually moved into the Southern California desert.
“That’s really where a Mad Max event belongs,” Bartoszynski, a former surgical technician and aspiring costume designer, told Wired.com. “People just really want to go out there and live it. You know, eat the dog food and everything.”
And while one vendor did have cans of Dinki-Di (the dog food from the movie) for sale among the handmade knives and other weapons, there were plenty of barbecues and decent liquor to be found.
via Mad Max Fans Hit the Desert for Apocalyptic Weekend | Underwire | Wired.com.
HuffPost TV: Howard Fineman Discusses HuffPost-Patch GOP Outsiders Poll With Lawrence O’Donnell (VIDEO)
HuffPost’s Howard Fineman appeared on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the results of the latest HuffPost-Patch GOP power outsiders poll.
The poll, a collaborative effort between HuffPost and Patch, showed that Rick Perry’s debate performance has seriously hurt his popularity in key primary battlegrounds.
Perry was “plummeting like a stone among the grassroots people, the local influentials in [Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina],” Fineman said.
The poll spells bad news for Perry, whose late entry into the GOP primary was expected to upset Mitt Romney’s lead.
“This isn’t the pundits talking, these are local main street Republicans in these 3 states,” he said. “That’s terrible news for Rick Perry.”
Canadian Government Says DRM Circumvention Not Related To Copyright – Slashdot
“Michael Geist has followed up a recent release of internal government talking points on copyright with the full, internal clause-by-clause analysis of Bill C-32. A new copyright bill is expected as soon as this week and the government document confirms there is no defense to violations of the digital lock rules, noting ‘a contravention of this prohibition is not an infringement of copyright and the defenses to infringement of copyright are not defenses to these prohibitions.’ The government’s own words on the digital lock provisions confirm that they may be unconstitutional since they fall outside the boundaries of copyright.” Basically, if you break DRM even without violating copyright in the process you can still be held liable, and from this any defense based on copyright law (fair use, etc.) is not valid in such cases. On the flipside, several legal experts think that makes those provisions of the law less likely to stand up in court.
via Canadian Government Says DRM Circumvention Not Related To Copyright – Slashdot.
THE BENNY HILL SHOW – The Museum of Broadcast Communications
Thanks to his work in television, especially The Benny Hill Show, Benny Hill is the most universally recognised of British comedians. However, what most audiences outside of the United Kingdom know as The Benny Hill Show, was in fact a compilation series of 111 half-hour episodes, composed of sketches and numbers drawn from his British ITV series produced over a 20 year period from 1969 to 1989, and syndicated on American television from 1979 onwards.
This series picked up a cult following, making Hill the most popular British comedian to appear on U.S. television. The compilation series was sold in over 90 other foreign language markets, including Russia and China, that normally did not buy British comedy. However so much of Hill’s series was based on sight gags and humour that audiences in many parts of the world came to appreciate the comedy. In point of fact, the early series of The Benny Hill Show appeared on the BBC. Hill’s television career was launched in 1955 and his show ran, off and on, on the BBC until 1968 with a brief season with ATV in 1967. In 1969 he moved to Thames Television and it was there that he was to make the programs on which most of his fame rests.
via THE BENNY HILL SHOW – The Museum of Broadcast Communications.
