And He Blogs

In honor of Microsoft Windows Vista being released today (and all the hype that goes along with it), I wanted to show everyone a feature that really works spectacularly well - the voice recognition system. I don’t see many places talking up this feature, and I DO have to give it further testing, but so far it really works!

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OK. So Jim Scooped me again . . . but Word Tube has some exciting potential. I re-purposed the famous reaction shot.

WordTube Info here.

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I’ll reserve judgment until I actually experience it, but this announcement by Netflix has me pretty excited. It basically allows you to download stream a movie “instantly” from the Netflix website, and watch it on your computer. In my case it can be my Media Center computer. It looks like it’s Internet Explorer only, which I guess means “sorry Macintosh people”. According to the press release you’ll need to download a small browser applet and the video will appear very quickly. Quality will depend on your Internet connection speed, so this is variable bit rate and hence not a download-able file.

You will get a certain number of hours per month based on your subscription rate. For example, if you rent at the $17.99 level, you will get 18 hours of movie watching time. If you pay at the $5.99 level you’ll get 6 hours of viewing time. That time is a free add-on. You pay nothing extra for the ability to watch movies this way. Netflix will be rolling this out over the next few months, and everyone will have the service by June. I watch videos and TV shows in iTunes this way, so I am excited to see what the experience will be with this new service from Netflix.

UPDATE: Hacking Netflix has the screencast.

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So it turns out that Demetri Martin, who I know from The Daily Show and who appeared in Microsoft’s Soapbox video sharing site, is doing a whole series of videos for Microsoft called Clearification. You can tell after a few videos where this thing is going - how Windows Vista is going to change your life - to “clearify” things (will clearify be the word of 2007 like truthiness was for ‘06?). Martin is one of those “observational” comics, you know, like “what’s with those airlines peanuts anyway?” I find his observations quite funny and it’s all part of Microsoft creating a good vibe for their new OS. With these videos, I’ve got one!

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Kodak - “They’re going to turn the schmaltz back up to 11″ How’s that for a tag line. This is one of those internal company videos that got released to the public, ala the “Microsoft Designs the iPod Package” and it’s gone viral. You know what they say, you can’t fix the problem until you acknowledge that there is a problem. Well, Kodak has done it big! 2007 is going to be an interesting year. Booyah!

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Happy 2007! To celebrate, I did an HD screen grab of the Tournament of Roses Parade on the Discovery HD channel. Live HD parade coverage on the Pioneer PDP5070HD Plasma, and what is my son doing? Playing video games. Well, Happy New Year to all.

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