Just saw that Pownce will be closing up on December 15th. Half-twitter half-file sharing, the service had high hopes when it first started. Then it went nowhere fast.
I guess it was a good decision for me not to renew my “Pro” account when it expired earlier in the year.
According to the Pownce Blog, Pownce will be merged into into the Six Apart family in some form. We’ll see what happens in 2009… if anyone really cares.
I’ve been using TiVo for about 5 years now, and I absolutely love it. It’s a fantastic service that has forever change the way I watch TV. It’s kind of like broadband internet, I cannot imagine going back to the way things were before.
One of the cool things I’ve enjoyed about my TiVo for the last year or so is the ability to rent movies from Amazon Video on Demand (formerly Amazon Unbox) and have the movies downloaded directly to my TiVo. Not only is it a easy to use service, but the cost of most rentals is around $3.99 a whole buck cheaper than what Comcast charges for their extremely slow OnDemand service. And just to throw it in there, renting movies from Apple via iTunes is about the same cost as TiVo-Amazon. 
That Amazon-TiVo service worked great until a few days ago when TiVo issues the Fall 2008 Update. The new update changes some of the menus, adds the ability to order pizza from Domino’s, download video on demand from other providers, and unintentionally bricks the Amazon VoD service.
It took me three days of contacting Amazon (email and phone) before I finally got someone on Sunday that actually identified the problem as the TiVo update. Right now when you rent a video, it’ll start to download, and then just vanish. If you check for an error, you get the extremely vague “an error occurred while downloading the video.”
Yesterday morning when I spoke to a rep, they were estimating it’d be ~20 hours before the service was restored. This afternoon when I spoke to someone, there was “no new information.” So Right now, all I can do is wait.
Today is the official release of Guns n’ Roses new album, Chinese Democracy. The album has been “in the works” for something like 15 years now, and everyone was beginning to suspect that it would be released sometime around Duke Nukem Forever.
The delay after delay for the new GNR album caused Dr. Pepper to state that “if Chinese Democracy is released anytime in 2008, everyone in the US would get a free Dr. Pepper.” Today, that comes true. For Sunday only you can go to drpepper.com and register to receive your free coupon.
There is one exception to that. If your name is Slash or Buckethead, you don’t get a free Dr. Pepper.
Over the past several months GMail users have seen new, experimental features rolled out to GMail via the GMail Labs. While some of these are nice, for the most part they are “meh” features, and with Google’srecord, they’ll probably stay beta for years to come. Heck, GMail is still labeled beta.
This week, GMail users were given a new, honest to goodness, true feature. Themes. Granted, it’s not really anything that will help you with your email, but it does give you something different to look at. The 32 available themes range from a basic color redesign to iGoogle-like location and time changing themes.
I’m currently using the planets theme, which happens to be the same theme I use on iGoogle. What are you using as your GMail and iGoogle themes?
Apple has released iTunes 8.0.2 which in addition to some fixes and enhancements brings along the iPhone and iPod Touch 2.2 update.
With the iPhone / iPod Touch (IPIPT?) 2.2 update comes with a number of enhancements to the Google Maps, including street view, walking locations, and the ability to share locations via email. Safari also gets the goofy update that changes the “search” icon next to the address bar to look more like a search box. Who cares?? Though the update does claim to improve stability and performance in Safari, now that’s what I want to hear!
For a complete list of what’s available in the 2.2 update, check out the Apple Support website.
Sanctuary has somehow managed to snag a 2nd season. SciFi Channel (owned by the NBC bastards) has given the ok for 13 new episodes.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Amanda Tapping, but her on-again, off-again awful British accent needs to die. And the green-screen sets need some more digital editing or something to get rid of the fuzzy look that you get in just about every episode.
It looks cheap, sounds cheap, but really isn’t bad if you can get past all of that. Will it make it to a 3rd season? Who knows… I was shocked that SG:A stayed around as long as it did.
NBC has done it again. They’ve killed another show that I enjoy.
According to SciFi Wire, My Own Worst Enemy will die after it’s 9th episode. I can’t say I’m surprised, as the show wasn’t anything great. However it is better than a lot of the crap that’s on the NBC networks (including SciFi).
I hate you NBC.
AppleInsider is reporting that Apple has released an update for the Apple TV. The new update allows streaming via AirTunes and the ability to learn and use other remotes. For more information on the changes, check out the release notes.
Yesterday afternoon Microsoft released the much discussed Xbox 360 fall update which contained a major overhaul to the Xbox 360 dashboard. Dubbed Xbox Experience (or NXE), the new dashboard operates much faster, but takes some adjusting as it is drastically different.
With the new update users now have the ability to create cartoony “avatars” (very similar to Miis on the Nintendo Mii). Hopefully they’ll be some more customization options added later on (and hopefully they wont cost MS points).
Probably the biggest thing is the addition of Netflix. That’s right, you can now stream movies from Netflix to your Xbox 360, provided of course that you have a Netflix membership. This might just cause me to renew my membership.
One last thing that I’m happy to see is that you can now “install” Xbox 360 games to the hard drive. I’ve not tried it out yet, but it’ll be nice to not have to swap out disk to play games.
On the downside, since updating to the NXE I’ve had some major problems with my system just freezing up. Granted, I did just get my system back from Microsoft after a RRoD so this may be pure concidence. However, some folks over at Neowin are also reporting freezing during games or while on the dashboard. Anyone else having problems?
Feel free to friend me on Xbox Live. As you’d probably expect, I use the gamertag “d3bruts1d“. 
There are a lot of things that I love about my Mac. It’s a whole new world, full of new software and applications. One of the apps that I absolutely love is Delicious Library. I don’t recall how I came to find out about this, but I’m glad that I did.
Delicious Library does two things, it keeps an inventory of everything you have and helps manage items that have been loaned out to someone. Before this I attempted to keep a list of DVD’s I owned in a spreadsheet. That didn’t exactly work to well. And last December when my home was broken into and most of my video games were stolen, I didn’t have a comprehensive list of what video games I had. That made it incredibly hard to provide a list to insurance or the police.
Another nice thing about DL is that it can even publish your library to an FTP site so you can show it off to your friends, or just have a backup copy in case something happens to your Mac. Check mine out, you know you want to. - I still need to add a number of books that Celtica and I own.
When you buy DL, you have the option to fork over $215 for (what I’m sure is a nice) bar code scanner or you can take a cheaper route and buy one off EBay. I got a USB Scanner for $30 or so, and another $20 for the USB cable. It works great. If you have an iMac or MacBook with a built in iSight, then no worries you can simply use that. Trust me, you’ll want a bar code reader if you have any kind of non-iTunes library. Yes, it’ll even track stuff you have in iTunes.
If you clicked the link earlier and saw my (well, mine and the wife’s) library then you see I’ve got movies (which is really DVD’s), video games, and books. That’s just what I selected to publish, you can also track just about anything else as well. Tools, toys, clothing, guns, gadgets, software, and more.
While the desktop portion of the app works fantastic, the export/publish leaves much to be desired. It’s very basic, and gives you two “themes” to select from when you publish. The published version has no search option, which sucks if you have a large library. It also has some problems from browser to browser, which hopefully will be fixed down the road. Sadly, there is also no method to customize the files, unless you chose to do it externally, which I’ve done a little bit to my published library.
For the desktop app, I’d have to give it a strong 10/10. For the publishing part, it wouldn’t score above a 5. I’d love to see some major work done the external part, maybe even a WordPress plugin. And I’ve already begun listing my ideas and feedback on GetSatisfaction.com.