tombrennan.org

I’m not into this stuff at all, but this is friggin cool…

If you’re interested in getting HD television signals and don’t want to make your cable or satellite bill any more have no fear.  You can get a far better signal on your $1500 TV by picking up a $50 antenna.

Rabbit ears are coming back into fashion.  An 80 year-old technology is getting back up to speed.  Over-the-air TV broadcasts are getting a boost due to audiences who want to watch HDTV channels and not want to pay for it.  And no, it’s not stealing.
Your local TV stations (for better or for worse) are being forced into sending HD signals out over the air.  Like the analog signals of old, these are free.  People are using the rabbit ears not just because of price either.  It has also been said that these over-the-air signals offer far superior quality than you would get from your cable or satellite provider.  Usually those companies will compress those signals because they want to offer more channels at a lesser quality.  Oh yeah, and it’s free.

You can check out the Consumer Electronics Association’s site: antennaweb.org for more details.

Well, at least people who want to loose weight.  It’s called fatsecret.com and by the looks of it, it’s a virtual support group.

Check out Danny Elfman on the trumpet.

It’s now been 4 days since my account has been deleted.  I sent the support team an e-mail that day when I couldn’t get in.  Now I get this reply…

There was a time when we played music off of big round black discs.  There was a time when they played in mono.  There was a time when stereo was a big friggin deal.  Here’s proof:

If you think you’ll be left out in VoIP wilderness by yourself if or when Vonage goes belly up here is a list of 250 alternative companies with pricing.

A few years ago some folks at MIT started a project called One Laptop Per Child.  The end result of the project was to create a laptop that would cheap enough that countries could buy them for child in their schools.  The long-term goal of the project was to make the laptop cost $100.  One of the major cost-savings in the design would be to run open-source programs on the computer, which cost nothing.

It seems that in the short-term the team at OLPC has decided to run a version of Windows on the computer.  The Windows XP Starter Edition will tack on $3 to the cost of the laptop.  That’s a lot considering that the laptop is supposed to be $100.  The laptop will run XP and the Red Hat distribution of Linux.

Now the group is waiting for 3 million units to be ordered.  That is the amount it needs to make the launch a success.  As of now Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya have all expressed interest.  No word on who will be the first customer.

If you plan on getting one, you’re out of luck.  Since the inception of the project it was stated that these units would not be for sale to individuals, only to countries.

Here’s an article (with video) of a Microsoft employee demonstrating Apple’s iPhoto and calling it a product in Vista.

Here’s a video of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith that was translated to Chinese then with English subtitles.  The whole movie isn’t there, but the scree-shots are priceless.