SvenOnTech informed you of one way to watch Flash-based movies from your Mac last week and this week we’ll show you another one entitled Democracy Player. As America spoke yesterday with swinging the House to the Democratic party, the Participatory Culture Foundation has cleared its throat and brought to the Mac, Windows, and Linux world an interesting player for us all to enjoy and love for free.
Democracy Player is an open-source player that brings all sorts of content to you. With over 700 channels to chose from, you could spend a lot of time with this nicely laid out player. If you find a channel that you really enjoy, you don’t have to even view the movie in a small window. With a flick of a few keys or a click of a mouse, you can delight it in full screen.
But what really is Democracy Player? Well, the authors themselves tell us that it is a player that lets you get, “the best internet TV shows in one powerful application: any video RSS feed, video podcast, video blog, or BitTorrent file. Fullscreen, high resolution, 100% free and open source. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide.”
In a nutshell, that’s it. Using the freeware Quicktime plug-in Perian, the Democracy Player will bring you hours and hours of fun to your Mac, PC, or Linux host for sure. Now go download it and waste esteem some time!
I knew this day was coming and like me, tons of other blogs are going to have broken images in their archives. flickr had this great set up that it would allow you to view as many pictures as you wanted for free. The only catch was that you could only upload 20 MB per month. No biggy…for the user. Yahoo, after it’s purchase of flickr, saw its bandwidth bill go sky high and after yesterdays disappointing earnings announcements, well, things had to change. The free account was one of those things.
Now the free account for flickr users can only display the 200 most current pictures. After that, it’s broken image time with a nice little message encouraging you to go Pro. Pro will cost ya $24.95. Yahoo is plastering, “Holy smokes! That’s cheap!” but truth is, the previous set up was cheaper.
Everyone knew this day was coming and I would have to say for SvenOnTech, it’s better than losing all of your images at once because Yahoo pulls the plug on flikr. So, things could be worse.
Guess I have to pull out my credit card now. Excuse us for a moment…
These three men think they’ve concocted a way to create energy that will never run out. Yes, create. Now calm down all you physics people, we know one of that the Principle of the Conservation of Energy says this ain’t so, but hey, these guys say it is. In fact, they took an ad out in The Economist challenging scientists around the world to look at this and prove ‘em wrong.
Steorn, the company these three are leading into the new realm of energy, says we won’t need batteries or gas or coal to produce energy for so many of the things we use today. Nope, the technology that Michael Moriarty, Michael Daly and Richard Walshe (left to right in the picture) along with CEO Sean McCarthy have invented are daring our thinking and saying that ships, buses, cameras, phones, farming equipment, autos, home appliances, and even industry as a whole will all run of this technology. No emissions and no need to renew the energy; it’s always there.
High claims that may even find these men dead. I mean, how will Al Qaeda fund its operation without the world buying oil? Iran and Saudi Arabia will be pretty much what it should have been decades ago, a desert. Dead. Oh ya, just like these guys may find themselves if this is true.
Many will find this claim just too hard to believe like cars running on water instead of gas, but hey, this may pan out this time. Or maybe not. But if it does, wow, what an amazing source of energy and what a change the world will see if this is the real deal. Here’s hoping as I pay of last months electric bill of $497!
We’re tired of saying Apple needs to bring wireless to the iPod as we’ve been saying it for over a year, but in light of the Microsoft iPod-killer rumors, we’ve got to say it again.
It now looks like that Redmond-based Microsoft will be trying its best shot against the mega-popular Apple iPod with its very own digital audio player (DAP) ready for this Christmas. It’s said it’ll have a bigger screen than the current iPod (how much you want to bet it’s like .2″ bigger?) as well as built-in wireless. For what you ask? Um, downloads direct from some new Microsoft music store. “Wow, isn’t that what SvenOnTech has been recommending Apple do?” Yup. Guess Bill Gates reads our page and took our advice.
Supposedly, the new device will allow users to purchase and download music directly to their new Microsoft DAP anywhere a Wi-Fi connection is. To further entice iPod defectors, Microsoft is going to buy you every iTunes Music Store purchased song from the Microsoft music store. For free. On Redmond. It’ll be interesting to see how it handles customers like SvenOnTech who did really well in the Pepsi cap “game” two years in a row (over 300 songs just from that) and whom liked using all those hundreds of dollars in gift certificates. I’d say we here at SvenOnTech easily have over a grand in music in our iTunes library.
Anyway, Microsoft is doing the right thing, it’s taking music lovers to the next level. For what ever reason Apple sits on its fanny on this, who knows. It is most likely that Apple is working on this and it’s that full-screen LCD that is slowing down the announcement of the next great iPod. Heck, we wouldn’t be surprised to see this out by Christmas from Apple, either, but man, Apple has had so much time and with its past releases being so quick, one has to wonder if Apple has become too comfortable in its supremacy.
We welcome Microsoft’s new wireless DAP. It’ll be nice to have duplicated iTMS music in WMA format…on Microsoft. 
Now we’re curious if the packaging will be anything like this.
PC users and IT administrators around the world know and love the software Symantec picked up a handful of years ago called Ghost. Ghost lets you take a complete “picture” of your hard drive and either duplicate for tons of other PCs in your shop (the IT crowd) or re-image your drive if Windows decided to die on your because of various reasons such as maybe spyware gone bad.
Ghost to many has been worth its weight in gold but today, it’s cost is light as air. With rebates and all, Ghost will cost you nothing. Not a cent. Even after shipping (when using Buy.com’s free shipping method.)
For any one running a PC, SvenOnTech highly recommends you jump on this offer!
We’ve been looking for a good, cheap (okay, free), clipboard manager for the Mac and we are now jumping in glee to find that our favorite one that we passed due to the $20 price tag is free! Today only.
Download iClip v3.0 for free from macZOT and you’ll have probably one of the best clipboard managers available. Why is Inventive letting macZOT give this out for free? ‘Cause 4.0 is just around the corner and it wants to attract attention to the upgraded version that will be sure to bring more customers. Me? I saw the screen captures and I’m not into that eye candy stuff, so I think v3.x looks better. But hey, 4.0 may be better. We’ll see.
For now, get your free-bee and enjoy!
So you and crew are hanging and it’s a Wednesday night and you know some new movie is about to premiere. Not knowing the area that you’re in too well, you don’t even know where the closest movie theater is, let alone what’s playing at it. You could call Moviefone and waste your minutes…if you knew the ZIP code you were in. Then maybe like 10 minutes later, you’d have an idea of what was playing were. Or, you can get your Palm or PocketPC out and tap open Movies on the Move.
Earthcomber’s new free software features show listings that cover nearly 5,400 theaters and 30,000 screens. With a Bluetooth GPS receiver near by, it’ll figure out where you are and tell you and the crew just what’s playing and where, all relative to where you be, homie!
“Real, up-to-date movie listings are one of the handiest things you can put on a PDA or your smart phone,” said Jim Brady, Earthcomber’s founder and president. “What makes Movies on the Move different is they all show up in order of how close to where you’re standing.”
With Movies on the Move, you can now be informed when you are nearing a theater by your PDA and stop in and take in a movie after reading the review on it. With its detailed listings of the movies, showtimes, and theaters, all slapped on a map on your screen, Movies on the Move may just be your new best tool on your PDA. At only at 1.5 to 3 MB, Movies on the Move won’t steal too much of your memory from your device or external card. Give it a try at Earthcomber’s site. Remember, it’s free!
If you’re looking to get in on the last oppurtunities to own your TiVo instead of “renting” it with your subscription, then head over to Buy.com. After rebates, you can score a TiVo Series 2 for nothing. Zippo. Nada.
You get an 80 GB TiVo, 2 USB ports, and a phone jack for updates. Subscription required and a phone line to update your TiVo guide.
It seems that $1.99 just isn’t cheap enough to entice the masses. When Steve Jobs nabbed Hollywood for some content, he was pushing for cheap downloads and thought he had that at the two dollar mark. However, ABC just completed testing free online viewing of its shows at abc.com and the results are staggering. In just its first month alone, 11 million people viewed ABC shows with commercials and all. And just to see if the sponsors made an impression, ABC exit polled the free-bee viewers. 87 percent could remember which brands where being pushed on the viewers of the low-resolution content without a single hitch. Mmm. On the other side of the Hollywood pond, Apple has only sold 8 million episodes of ABC content in eight months total. Does this mean that people would rather suffer through advertisement than pay money for a show? Looks to be the case.
Some have questioned the $2 price Apple has been charging its customers for TV shows. The compliant is that for a low-resolution program that airs on television, it should carry the same price tag as the music that resides on iTMS. At worst. But would 99 cents even do it? Maybe. Maybe not.
Knowing this, the rumored price that Steve Jobs is pushing for movies, $9.99, may not go over too well either. In fact, many comments around the Internet are already in on the price and it seems that it will bomb at this point. If Hollywood gets some bright ideas (don’t they always?) then maybe it’ll start streaming some of its flops movies to us with an ad here and there. For free, you know. And don’t under estimate Hollywood’s greed.
How this new data from ABC will effect future shows on iTunes is hard to say. Its doubtful that Apple will be able to get the shows any cheaper and most likely we’ll see more “free” shows on the networks web site. While this most likely won’t effect sales greatly on iTunes, it will certainly give Hollywood the idea that it now has an option and will use that against Apple in future dealings with computer-gone-multimedia company. Let the gloves come off.
For all you luck blocks in Germany watching some of the best football (soccer for my American brethern), UK fans are going to get a kick out of this offer. If you are a Virgin Mobile user and are hanging out at the England fans’ campsite in Achern, Germany, you’ll get a special SMS code when you send “kebab” to 26666 that will get you a free dinner. The offer is good as long as the Brits are in the Cup.
Steve Rogan, head of sponsorship, Virgin Mobile said, “We want England fans to be match fit and ready to give our boys all the support they can muster. The post match kebab has become a ritual in towns up and down the country so offering fans a taste of home while they are on foreign soil might help.”
For more details, check out the press release. And as far as we can tell, no Guinness will be included with this offer.