404 Tech Support » Entertainment

YouTube’s Life In A Day Project

Jason — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:11:54 +0000

Google has a huge project coming up on YouTube on July 24th that requires your involvement and the YouTube logo has been helpfully reminding us about.

From the YouTube Life In A Day site:

One world. 24 hours. 6 billion perspectives.

Life In A Day is a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film, shot in a single day, by you. On July 24, you have 24 hours to capture a glimpse of your life on camera. The most compelling and distinctive footage will be edited into an experimental documentary film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.

The film will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and will be available right here on YouTube. If your footage makes it into the finished film, you'll be credited as a co-director and you could be one of 20 contributors brought to Sundance to celebrate with Kevin Macdonald.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: YouTube’s Life In A Day Project

Avi2Dvd and DVD Flick – Converting Videos (.avi) to DVDs

Jason — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 02:59:31 +0000

At one end of the house, I have a Sony PS3 that can stream videos from my PC connected to a TV that can also play Divx and Xvid files from a USB drive. At the other end of the house, I have just a standard TV and a DVD player. Of course, since I can't do something in one place, that's where I want to do it. So, the task was to come up with a way to play .avi files on a standard TV with a DVD player.

I have a Wii connected to that TV so I can use Netflix Streaming and I've had Orb setup to stream before but it would slow my PC down to a crawl too frequently. I could hook a laptop up and I've even looked at the ASUS EeeKeyboard as a possible solution but those seemed either too much of a hassle or too expensive. That brought me to the cheap and wire-free solution of converting the video files to DVD format that I could just burn to disc. The proposed applications for that approach came in the form of Avi2Dvd or DVD Flick.

Read the full article for both titles in-depth reviews.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Avi2Dvd and DVD Flick – Converting Videos (.avi) to DVDs

Light-Bot 2.0 – A Game Teaching Programming

Jason — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:22:12 +0000

I enjoyed writing my last post that covered a tech-related Flash game, Manufactoria, and others seemed to enjoy it as well. So, I think this can be a welcome addition to the topics that 404 Tech Support writes about mostly because I've found and been enjoying another Flash game. This game is called Light-Bot 2.0 and requires the player to implement computer programming-like logic to complete the different puzzles.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Light-Bot 2.0 – A Game Teaching Programming

Google Gets Into the Spirit of the World Cup

Jason — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:04:49 +0000

With the World Cup kicking off in 3 days, Google is having a little fun of their own. You can find it for your self if you do a Google search for 'World Cup' and scroll down to the bottom. Otherwise, check after the jump for a screenshot.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Google Gets Into the Spirit of the World Cup

Product Review: Apple iPad

Jason — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:29:07 +0000

I had the opportunity this past week to check out an iPad and use it as my own for a few days. The conclusion I'm walking away with is that I'm underwhelmed and grateful that it wasn't my own money that I spent on the gadget. This may be one of the few critical iPad reviews out there but of course, it isn't all negatives. There are a number of positive features on the device but still the overall conclusion that I walked away with was that the device was rather frustrating and didn't quite have a fit in my habits. For the record, I'm testing the 16GB (no 3G) iPad.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Product Review: Apple iPad

‘Lost’ Series Finale Leaked! Download it here!

Jason — Sun, 23 May 2010 05:11:40 +0000

After bugging a friend of mine inside "the Industry" for the past couple of weeks, he has finally given in and sent me a copy of the Lost series finale. It's a long video at 2 and a half hours but it was great to see things wrapped up from the last six years. Lost changed TV forever and while it's sad to see it go, it's so relieving to finally have resolution. The last episode called "The End" in a spoiler-free description is momentous. My head is still spinning trying to unravel it all and make sure I caught all the easter eggs. In fact, I'm dying to discuss it with others so I've uploaded the video and made it available. It might be less than 24 hours at this point after being advertised all season, but it was still worth it.

You can find the link to the video in the full article.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: ‘Lost’ Series Finale Leaked! Download it here!

Manufactoria – Making Turing Machines Fun Again!

Jason — Sat, 22 May 2010 21:50:56 +0000

Ah, who am I kidding? Turing Machines have always been fun. Manufactoria is a Flash-based puzzle game for those of us that like a good brain-scratcher. In reality, we're making a finite state machine which simulates computer logic. We look at a sequence of inputs and react based on the state we're seeing. In the game, we're building test machines to run through some robots' programming to make sure it meets the conditionals for that level, won't go crazy and then - well!The game is probably best explained through a few examples.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Manufactoria – Making Turing Machines Fun Again!

SparkChess – Quality, Free Chess Online

Jason — Sun, 02 May 2010 11:51:01 +0000

SparkChess is a chess game perfect for the coffee break and for showing off the capabilities of Flash. You can play against the computer at different levels of difficulty while SparkChess looks impressive, including a simple animated slide of the pieces in its isometric 3-d view.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: SparkChess – Quality, Free Chess Online

ComicRack – An eComic Reader

Jason — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:52:21 +0000

To commemorate tomorrow being Free Comic Book Day I've reviewed ComicRack, software that manages your library of and lets you read eComics. eComics are digitial forms of traditional comics, typically scanned in by dedicated groups of fans or offered by creators who believe the Internet is the future of comic delivery, maybe even Marvel and DC will jump on-board someday. eComics are made by putting sequential jpeg files inside of a compression format like zip, rar, or 7zip. The extensions are then renamed .cbz, .cbr, or .cb7 respectively.

Back in the day, I would have recommended CDisplay as a simple, light-weight cbr/cbz reader but it hadn't seen updates in a while and when Yahoo! pulled the plug on Geocities CDisplay went down with it. Instead though, ComicRack has taken its place as the recommended comic book reader. It's being actively developed and offers a lot more features than CDisplay ever did.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: ComicRack – An eComic Reader

Exploring the AT&T U-Verse

Jason — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:17:09 +0000

At my current apartment I was able to get AT&T's U-Verse service with a fiber-to-the-premise connection. Before I signed up for the service, I did a quick search on the web and couldn't find much information out there about user's experiences, reviews, or anything beyond AT&T's domain. Here to amend that, I wrote this article to shed some details about the AT&T U-Verse connection from my perspective as an end-user. I decided to wait a few months until I got the TV service as well.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Exploring the AT&T U-Verse