Perfect Sport wins Best Drama at WorldFest

I previously mentioned that Perfect Sport had been entered into the WorldFest Houston film festival. I'm happy to announce that the movie fought off some tough competition to win Best Dramatic Feature at the festival. Congratulations to all those involved, in particular Tony O'Brien, the writer-director-actor behind it.

I saw a great review on IMDb from someone who saw it at WorldFest that summarizes the movie far better than I ever could:


And finally, LA Times has a sneak preview.

The movie will be entered into other film festivals and I will let you know more about that when information becomes available. When it comes to your town, I definitely recommend checking it out.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Saturday April 26 2008 3:03 PM to Festivals and Awards, Off-Topic
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NewsFire now completely free

I just heard that the developer of NewsFire is now offering the popular Mac feed reader for free. I recommended this even when it cost money (I am a paid user) so I recommend it even more now that it is free.

So what is it and why do you need it? Well, those little orange buttons you see on web pages are links to RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a tiny file containing textual information such as posts from a blog or software updates. If you have a favorite site or blog, you can be notified of updates without having to visit the site every day. Obviously this saves a lot of time and bandwidth.

I didn't think I needed one until I tried it, and the time I saved was tremendous. If you see a new site you like the look of, put it in your feed reader and forget about it until the next update. Visiting a site to check for updates that don't exist is very inefficient.

NewsFire is a great program because, as the developer himself says: "Unlike other readers, NewsFire is designed with a deliberately minimal interface. The news is what matters and it takes center stage." And now it's free, so try it out.

We have several feeds on this site, listed here. We also have an appcast feed that tells you when one of our applications is updated.

[via TUAW]

Posted by Jon Chappell on Sunday March 2 2008 12:32 AM to Software, Utilities, Off-Topic
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iPhone storage bumped up to 16 GB, iPod Touch increased to 32 GB

Apple just increased the storage space on its iPhone and iPod Touch lines. Here are the new prices and specs:

iPhone 8 GB - $399
iPhone 16 GB - $499

iPod Touch 8 GB - $299
iPod Touch 16 GB - $399
iPod Touch 32 GB $499

I don't think there is anything right now preventing the iPhone from having 32 GB of storage, it's more of a case of Apple not wanting to cannibalize iPod Touch sales for those with larger music collections.

iTunes tells me I have 32.86 GB of music so I guess I will have to wait for the next two storage revisions of the iPhone before buying one (the next one presumably being 32 GB and the one after that being 48 or 64 GB, one would imagine).

Posted by Jon Chappell on Tuesday February 5 2008 10:53 AM to Apple, Off-Topic
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Bloody Omaha

For the BBC history show Timewatch, they did a reenactment of the Omaha Beach landings - using only three actors. They used all kinds of camera and post tricks and managed to pull it off believably. Here's the making of "Bloody Omaha":



[via ProLost]

Posted by Jon Chappell on Friday January 11 2008 3:52 PM to Indie, Off-Topic
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Opera sues Microsoft over Internet Explorer

Opera Software is suing Microsoft over Internet Explorer, claiming that it is anti-competitive to integrate the browser with the operating system. That claim has been made many a time. However, they are also claiming that Microsoft deliberately flouted web standards in order to discourage interoperability. I would agree with this. Firefox is my primary browser so I generally design for that, but the site is near-identical in standards-compliant browsers such as Safari. Try it in Internet Explorer and it looks completely different.

The access logs for the site say that the majority of visitors are on a Mac, so wouldn't be able to use IE anyway - no bad thing, and the majority of visits come from Safari, with Firefox at second place and IE at third. I don't feel that it is a worthwhile use of my time to create code that will detect IE and offer a site specifically tailored for only the third popular browser used to navigate to this site, especially as the incompatibilities are entirely Microsoft's fault.

Opera says that it would like the European Commission to force MS to comply with standards. I don't know if that is possible but then again, European courts takes a sterner stance on Microsoft than their US counterparts, so it is possible. Either way, I am hoping that this will generate negative press for IE and alert people to the fact that there are alternatives.

I would personally recommend Firefox for speed, stability, standards compliance, ease of use (I find IE7's interface really confusing) and above all, extensions. Extensions are small pieces of software that perform tasks. For example, I have extensions for removing ads, displaying page ranks and for counting words in text areas (very useful when filling data into forms with minimum or maximum character limits). There are extensions for pretty much anything.

I also recommend Safari. Safari is VERY fast. It doesn't support extensions unfortunately but it's an Apple product so there is a lot of attention to detail. It's mainly the small details that cause people to like it so much, like the fact that you can resize text boxes in forms so that you can see what you're typing, Snapback mode that lets you easily return to your search results, and an advanced RSS reader that lets you filter and re-order the posts in the list.

I have also heard good things about Camino but have never used it myself. Firefox and Safari are compatible with both Mac and Windows but Camino is Mac-only.

Internet Explorer users: you might think your current browser offers you everything you could want but give one of the browsers listed above a try and you will find a lot of things that you can't live without.

[via BBC News]

Posted by Jon Chappell on Monday December 17 2007 1:30 PM to Off-Topic
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Extras season finale this Sunday

HBO is showing the season finale of Extras on Sunday Dec 16th at 9pm. Extras follows the life of aspiring actor Andy Millman. The first series features him as an extra trying to make the jump into full-time acting. The second series features him as an actor who has "made it" to an extent - but he's still no better off.

It's a comedy by the people who brought you the British version of The Office. Whilst The Office was great ("oi, no professionals"), I believe that this show is superior. It's sad that it's coming to an end but I have a lot of respect for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant because they always end their TV shows before they get old. I can't wait to see what their next project is.

I wanted to make a post about it because despite being broadcast on HBO, a lot of people in this country still don't know about it. Every episode features them on the set of a production with a high-profile celebrity. They've had Ben Stiller, Daniel Radcliffe, Samuel L. Jackson, Kate Winslet, Orlando Bloom, Robert De Niro, Patrick Stewart, and many more. The humor is derived from the fact that they each play a slightly warped version of themselves. I think this is best illustrated by this clip of Patrick Stewart:



I would recommend checking out some of the episodes or clips on YouTube before watching the final episode as 1) you won't understand what's going on and 2) the final episodes are generally not as funny as the other ones as they mainly focus on tying up the story. I'm sure it will be good though.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Wednesday December 12 2007 4:30 AM to Off-Topic
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Scorsese creates "The Key to Reserva"

This is a really great Hitchcock tribute by Martin Scorsese. He supposedly found a 3 1/2 page lost script by Hitchcock with a page missing and wanted to create a movie from the script as a tribute. It's fake obviously - it's actually a wine commercial - but it's still a pretty good short film and very enjoyable to watch.

The Key to Reserva

[via HDForIndies]

Posted by Jon Chappell on Friday November 30 2007 1:01 AM to Off-Topic
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