Well, today I was trea­ted with the plea­sant sur­prise of goo­gle video adding fully func­tio­nal video pla­ying sup­port to their goo­gle video ser­vice. Peo­ple have gra­dually been uploa­ding their videos to goo­gle and various tele­vi­sion sta­tions have sub­mit­ted their shows with search able clo­sed cap­tions. Until now this was the extent of the video ser­vice, you could see when a show aired, search its script, seen when new shows were going to air and see a sim­ple screen shot taken so far in. All this being pretty use­less to someone living in the Uni­ted King­dom (although still very cool, I hope for some BBC inte­gra­tion soon). Now howe­ver, goo­gle video pro­vi­des video. Goo­gle results that have a pla­ya­ble video show up with a little play icon next to them. Upon ope­ning the page there are options to start the video from various 30 second inc­re­ments, upon clic­king, the video plays right there and then in the brow­ser. Now, most in brow­ser video pla­yers are fairly bulky, con­sume con­si­de­ra­ble resour­ces, load the brow­ser with unnee­ded hin­dran­ces, pro­vide anno­ying applet con­trols and require buf­fe­ring times. Howe­ver, goo­gle video is based upon the popu­lar and utterly fan­tas­tic open source “video­lan pla­yer” open source setup. VLC gene­rally plays all stan­dard codecs with ease and has highly func­tio­nal strea­ming options, sub­tit­les, mul­ti­ple video and audio stream capa­bi­li­ties and much much more (inc­lu­ding the option to view a video in ASCII). This goo­gle video vie­wer loads seam­lessly, has no nasty but­ton inter­fa­ces, does not load the brow­ser or cause over the top cpu usage and has a once click full-screen option (i.e. click the video for fullsc­reen). The video requi­res very little buf­fe­ring time and is of sui­ta­ble qua­lity and reso­lu­tion for fullsc­reen and tele­vi­sion play­back. I really do love it and I have been pla­ying for the last hour or so.

“The clips play right in the page using the brand new Goo­gle Video Vie­wer, which was crea­ted by our engi­neer Aaron Lee using code from the open source Video­lan pro­ject. It works great in both Fire­fox and IE, and we’ve desig­ned it not to fight with any other video plu­gins you might have. We’re relea­sing the Win­dows ver­sion first, with Mac coming soon.”

“A fea­ture we’re espe­cially plea­sed with is search within a video, which means you will get a result poin­ting to the pre­cise spot in the video that matches your query. Try loo­king for ser­gey brin and you’ll see what I mean. There are even more peo­ple get­ting crea­tive with video here. So have fun watching, or shoot your own videos — and keep sen­ding them in!”

MIT News Office: “CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — MIT scien­tists have brought a super­cool end to a hea­ted race among phy­si­cists: They have become the first to create a new type of mat­ter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity.”

“In super­fluids, as well as in super­con­duc­tors, par­tic­les move in locks­tep. They form one big quantum-mechanical wave,” explai­ned Ket­terle. “Such a move­ment allows super­con­duc­tors to carry elec­tri­cal currents without resistance.”

For those who know not of superfluidity:

Ans​wers​.com: Super­flui­dity is a phase of mat­ter cha­rac­te­ri­sed by the com­plete absence of vis­co­sity. Thus super­fluids, pla­ced in a clo­sed loop, can flow end­lessly without friction.

Mozi­lla Update :: Exten­sions — Remove It Per­ma­nently: “Per­ma­nently hide con­tent from web pages using the Con­text Menu. Simply, click and ‘Remove it Per­ma­nently’. Now inc­lu­des pre­vie­wing of items before remo­val, sup­port for IFrame as well as lots of advan­ced fea­tu­res to make it easy for anyone to remove anno­ying con­tent from web pages”
“This exten­sion lets you remove anno­ying ad links, ad tables, was­ted whi­tes­pace and other HTML “con­tent” that AdBlock doesn’t con­cern itself with.”

This is what I have been wai­ting for in terms of a fire­fox exten­sion. I no lon­ger have to put up with ANY ads, anno­ying tables of con­tent I never read, copy­right text, bloa­ted ima­ges, columns of empty­ness left over from an AdBloc­ked ban­ner, etc… . It has a high degree of con­trol too, you can block the ele­ment for one page only, one domain only, simi­lar pages only or just the web­site you are on. Adi­tio­nally there are “Undo Last RIP” options for mis­ta­kes in remo­ving things, “Disa­ble RIP” for current site/page/domain if things have been rede­sig­ned, etc… . No more bloa­ted web­si­tes for me EVER. A great exten­sion and another rea­son to use firefox.

Well, it’s E3 this week, and like many
other gamers I have been kee­ping up to date with the buzz of the industry. I’m
not going to post facts about new con­so­les or anything, I mean, who wants to
come here for a news source!? Suf­fice to say, I will post my opi­nions on the
upco­ming enter­tain­ment mammoths.

Xbox
360 was the first of the three con­so­les to be
revea­led, albeit on the shitty MTV extra­va­ganza. The 30min advert pac­ked show pro­vi­ded
us with a brief glimpse of the con­sole shell, 10 seconds of game play foo­tage
and some happy hob­bits tal­king to pro­fes­sio­nal no life gamers and the
inva­lua­ble opi­nions of the all kno­wing pimp my ride team. Fan­tas­tic, luc­kily I
down­loa­ded this mons­tro­sity and could skip all the shit, such as the Killers
per­for­mance. Of inte­rest was Per­fect Dark Zero. Of what I could glimpse I was
exci­ted, things loo­ked nice and really I was just happy to see that the game
phy­si­cally exis­ted. Upon reflec­tion, the graphics weren’t ama­zing and at no
point did I feel myself saying ‘wow’. Moving on to the Our​Co​lony​.net video, “a
flip­ped and goo­sed” ver­sion of the MTV show that gave a little more
infor­ma­tion; I began being exci­ted about the pros­pects of the new live
fea­tu­res, the video inte­rac­tions, the new con­tro­llers, the wire­less fea­tu­res,
the three core pro­ces­sing power and the USB device out­look. Howe­ver, being a
gamer, the prin­ci­ple error in the unvei­ling of the Xbox 360 sys­tem cove­rage was
the dis­tinct lack of GAMES. Nowhere to be seen were game trai­lers, game
foo­tage, game announ­ce­ments, game deve­lop­ment. Aside from the EA deve­lop­ments
(tweaks) and PDZ, I’ve seen nothing. If I am buying a game con­sole, the most
impor­tant thing to show me are the games, who cares about Xbox live if the only
game to sup­port it will be Mic­ro­soft Soli­taire 3D. So, while in the few days
run­ning up to E3 I was exci­ted… the thun­der has since been sto­len, by Sony.

lang=EN-GB>Playstation lang=EN-GB> 3, wel­come chang3. I was awake in the
early hours of the Bri­tish mor­ning to lis­ten to the Sony con­fe­rence and the unvei­ling
of their new sys­tem. I watched the two hour con­ven­tion with awe. I’m not a
par­ti­cu­lar Plays­ta­tion fan boy, yes I own a ps2 but
my favou­rite con­sole of the current gene­ra­tion is easily the Xbox. I wasn’t too
sto­ked about the ps3, I had sub­cons­ciously igno­red the
hype asso­cia­ted with it. In watching the con­fe­rence I had no real expec­ta­tions,
I’d heard of the cell pro­ces­sor but nothing of its capa­bi­li­ties. When the 2
tera­flop per­for­mance power of the cell, the graphics pro­ces­sing of the class=SpellE>nvidia RSX, the high band­width ram and bus, the 7 wire­less
con­tro­ller capa­bi­lity, the 1080p sup­port and the back­wards com­pa­ti­bi­lity were
announ­ced there was a glea­ming grin across my face. Then I saw Vision class=SpellE>Gran Turismo, Motorc­ross

and Kill­zone trai­lers, I saw the real time Unreal Tour­na­ment
pro­ces­sing power and I was astoun­ded. This is a con­sole I so dearly want. I have
abso­lu­tely no care for the Xbox 360, des­pite their release of the sequel to my
favou­rite game, Per­fect Dark. I honestly can’t wait to get my hands on the raw
power of this machine, wha­te­ver the price. And I may just have to get a PSP to
com­ple­ment it.

Nin­tendo
Revo­lu­tion. Not much on this yet but I’m hea­ring
some sig­ni­fi­cant buzz con­cer­ning “touch” patents, a revo­lu­tio­nary con­tro­ller
and back­wards com­pa­ti­bi­lity. I have faith in the inno­va­tion that is Nin­tendo
and I look for­ward to their future announ­ce­ments (Mario 128? Please).

Labour –20
Con­ser­va­tive –21
	Libe­ral Democ­rat 40
	UK Inde­pen­dence Party 17
	Green 38

You should vote: Libe­ral Democ­rat

The Lib­Dems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public ser­vi­ces: they would make long-term resi­den­tial care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap uni­ver­sity tui­tion fees. They are in favour of a ban on smo­king in public pla­ces, but would relax laws on can­na­bis. They pro­pose to change vehicle taxa­tion to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For