Aronofsky Drafting Noah Epic

Wow, now this should be interesting….

Scifi Wire:

“The British Guardian newspaper revealed that The Fountain director Darren Aronofsky’s contemplated biblical epic
film will be a version of the story of Noah and the flood. The
newspaper reported that Aronofsky is several drafts into a screenplay
about Noah.

When the writer-director was 13, he won a United Nations
competition at his school in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn; it was for his
first poem, a little effort about the end of the world as seen through
Noah’s eyes, the newspaper reported. “That story has interested me ever
since,” Aronofsky told the paper.

The script won’t be a conventional biblical epic. “Noah was
the first person to plant vineyards and drink wine and get drunk,”
Aronofsky said. “It’s there in the Bible. It was one of the first
things he did when he reached land. There was some real survivor’s
guilt going on there. He’s a dark, complicated character.”

Nine Inch Nails Releases Tracks on The Pirate Bay

They’ve done some very cool things with the new album, like releasing the source files via Apple’s Garage Band so peeps can see how the songs were made and remix them. And now this. Very cool!

Digg: “Going with the grain, Trent Reznor and crew willingly upload torrent files to The Pirate Bay.”

Slyck: “Releasing Nine Inch Nail material online is an avenue the industrial
rock band has been familiar with some time. Many tracks are readily
available one the NIN.com website, downloadable via the traditional
client/server method. However in a brief announcement
made yesterday, a surprising element appeared. Not that new material
was available for download, but that it was available via the
BitTorrent protocol. Even more surprisingly, the torrents were uploaded
to The Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay has been a quandary for the
entertainment industry, as it has defiantly remained one of the largest
- if not most popular - BitTorrent trackers/indexers. Despite a brief
shut down in May of 2006, The Pirate Bay continues to remain a symbol
of the P2P and BitTorrent community.

Although it has earned the scorn of the US entertainment industry, it
appears that not all entertainers feel hostile towards the Swedish
BitTorrent site - particularly Trent Reznor. Three audio tracks are
currently being indexed by The Pirate Bay, “Capital G”, “My Violent
Heart”, and “Me, I’m Not.” This is an interesting move by NIN, and one
that lends a hand of legitimacy to The Pirate Bay - as it shows that
entertainers realize the importance of reaching out to their target
audience.”

Apple Battery Update 1.2 issued

Engadget: “Just a quick note from Sonny the Explody Battery: those with Apple
laptops should take care to download the Battery Update 1.2 released by
Apple today. We don’t know for sure it alleviates any of the wierd
issues people have been having with bloated, hazardous cells, but it’s
hard to imagine an update like this wouldn’t be beneficial to the battery safety of each and every MacBook and MacBook Pro user. And, duh, make sure you’ve checked your serials against the battery recall — don’t be like Sonny.

[Via TUAW]“

Download Of The Day: iPodifier video converter (Windows)

Lifehacker:

Windows only: Freeware application iPodifier monitors user-defined folders for videos, automatically transcodes them to an iPod-compatible format, adds them to iTunes, and then syncs them with your iPod.

Awesome, right? There are a lot of to-iPod transcoding tools out there, but iPodifier has clearly had a lot of thought put into set-up-and-leave-it automation. iPodifier can watch any folder for new video, so that means you can keep an eye on your bittorrent directory, your DVR TV shows, etc. In fact, if you’re a Windows MCE user, Rick has already detailed how to copy MCE-recorded shows to your iPod with iPodifier. If you do any transcoding to get videos on your iPod, you can’t do any better than iPodifier. — Adam Pash

iPodifier [via FreewareGenius]

FoxTorrent 1.0 - a Firefox BitTorrent Add-on!

Don’t download illegal goodz, kiddies

It’s about time someone did this…

TechCrunch: “Red Swoosh (acquired by Akamai for $15 million earlier this month) released v1.0 of FoxTorrent today. This is a fully functional BitTorrent client for Firefox that works cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and has a very cool additional feature - the ability to stream files as they are downloading.

This is no Azureus (my BitTorrent client of choice), but it does the job and saves time by allowing you to manage torrents directly from the browser. I tested it on a few (non-copyright infringing, of course) files and it worked great on the standard BitTorrent functionality. Streaming just didn’t work, although with the way the BitTorrent protocol breaks files into pieces and reconstructs them in a non linear way means you may have to wait until the file is mostly complete to even begin streaming. I’ll try it again once the files are nearly complete.

A good early review is here.”

First production photo of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in IRON MAN!

OK, Downey is looking badarse as Stark…

AICN: Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I love this picture. In fact, I’ve loved everything I’ve seen out of this production so far. USA Today got the first official still of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. Check it out!!!

I love the device in his chest, keeping his heart pumping… I was wondering how they were going to handle this… I’m a little rusty (heh) on my IRON MAN… I think he has been able to live without his suit for a while, some sort of operation that dug out that piece of shrapnel next to his heart, but in the classic comics I always loved that the IRON MAN armor wasn’t just something badass and cool to kick evil’s ass with, but it was also what was keeping Stark alive. Even when he was out of the costume in the old books, he still had to wear the chest piece… Which can work on the page, but how the hell would they make that work in real life?

I like the solution. Don’t know about you, but I’m getting very excited for this flick.”

How the CIA used a fake sci-fi flick to rescue Americans from Tehran

Very interesting read…

Boing Boing: “Mark Frauenfelder:

Joshuah Bearman wrote a great story for Wired. He summarized it for me thusly:

The story is a CIA rescue mission during the Iran
Hostage Crisis, when six American embassy staff escaped the compound and
were on the lam in Tehran for months — until the CIA rescued them by
creating a fake Hollywood production company and pretended to be in Iran
location scouting for a big-budget sci-fi epic. I swear, it’s all true. The
CIA even got an office for their fake production company at Sunset/Gower
studios, had a script and concept art, and took out ads in Variety. There
are many more strange digressions in detail, but I’ll let you find out about
them in the story.

Link

Google Earth adds architecture layers

Lifehacker:

Google Earth,
the endlessly popular 3D mapping tool, has added two new layers
focusing on American architecture and the Blueprint for America project.

The America’s Favorite Architecture layer features 150 of the
country’s most popular structures (as determined through a national
poll), including many 3-D models of buildings, ballparks, bridges, and
memorials. Great stuff for students, researchers and even potential
sightseers.

The Blueprint for America layer highlights the
eponymous project’s initiatives around the country, in which members of
the American Institute of Architects work with local leaders and
citizens to improve their communities.

To access the new layers, run Google Earth and head to the Featured
Content section in the Layers window. While you’re there, check out the
recently added hiking trails layer and other awesome Google Earth stuff.—Rick Broida

New 3-D Layers from AIA on Google Earth [Official Google Blog]

Firefox Tip: Open search results in a new tab

Lifehacker:

When you Ctrl+K to the Google search box in Firefox,
type your terms and hit Enter, the results appear in your current tab -
but it’s easy to make ‘em open a whole new tab so you don’t lose your
current page. The How-To Geek explains:

Type about:config into the address bar, and then put the following into the filter box: browser.search.openintab. Double-click the value to change it to true.

You can also use Alt-Enter when you search to open a new tab optionally. Want more Firefox about:config magic? Check out our previously-posted top Firefox 2 tweaks. —Gina Trapani

Quick Tip: Open Firefox Searches in New Tab [The How-To Geek]

Geek to Live: Build an internet jukebox with Jinzora

Lifehacker:

by Gina Trapani

Just because you’re away from your home computer - and all the beloved gigabytes of music you’ve collected over the years - doesn’t mean you can’t listen to your tunes.

You already know how to set up a home web server
to get to your files from anywhere, but when it comes to music, a pure
web server’s not the best interface. Free, open source software called Jinzora puts a slick, web-based media player frontend on that web server. With Jinzora installed on your home server,
you can browse your music library, create playlists on the fly and
stream your music from home over the internet to another computer or
handheld anywhere.

Here’s how to set up Jinzora on your computer.

Obligatory warning:
Running a web server on your home computer is a risky undertaking. This
tutorial is for advanced users who feel comfortable editing textual
configuration files and exposing port 80 on their home computer to the
internet. As always, a strong firewall with explicit user-set rules is
recommended. Still game? Carry on…”

READ MORE