Just a little over a month ago, a bit of controversy flared up as a result of Reddit's error message. They implied Amazon web services were to blame but the Amazon AWS status page didn't reflect the same problems. A nice, long article resulted from the incident to explain why Reddit was down for 6 hours out of 24. This morning, the popular site is down again and blaming Amazon … [Read more...]
HBO Go – Free and Legal HBO Streaming With Lots Of Fine Print
On May 2nd, HBO is introducing HBO Go, a program to introduce streaming to HBO content, for free to HBO subscribers. I recently joined that group because of the Game of Thrones series that started last Sunday. I know many cordcutters were hoping that HBO Go would be a means for viewing HBO content without having to have an HBO subscription or a cable/satellite provider. … [Read more...]
Google Map Maker Comes To The USA
It's time to brush up on those cartography skills. If you've ever relied on Google Maps to find some place and was met with the unfortunate surprise that the map was inaccurate, you can rejoice with the fact that Google Map Maker is now available for U.S. locations. Even if the map tells you to look on the wrong side of the street, although Google Street View has helped address … [Read more...]
Google Video Is Shutting Down and One Team’s Effort To Save the Content
Google had a period, and it still may, where it would try to build something internally to compete with a cool new project and then if it's product couldn't take the lead, it would acquire the competitor. That pretty much seems to be the story between Google Video (launched January 2005) and YouTube (acquired October 2006), respectively. Google Video never really had an … [Read more...]
Miro Video Player – VLC Meets iTunes For Internet Videos
Miro, the manager and player for internet videos, torrents, and podcasts, has been around for a while, formerly known as Democracy Player and DTV. Miro comes from the Participatory Culture Foundation which has had another one of its projects, Universal Subtitles, featured on 404 Tech Support before. Miro is a free video downloader, player, and organizer. In a nutshell, it just … [Read more...]