A young O’Reilly Loses it

Someone put together a hilarious music video set to a recent video that surfaced…

Jackson, Del Toro Host Hobbit Chat

Scifi Wire:

“Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro are inviting fans to a live Internet chat about the upcoming film The Hobbit,
which Jackson is producing and del Toro is directing. During the chat,
billed as “An Unexpected Party,” Jackson and del Toro will answer
questions from participants and listen to comments about the film.

Based on the book by J. R. R. Tolkein, The Hobbit is a prequel to the Lord of the Rings and centers on the adventures of hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Del Toro has signed on to direct two separate installments.

The chat is being hosted by Weta, the special effects house currently working on The Hobbit. Fans can register for the “Unexpected Party” at the company’s official Web site.”

You Are Already in a Game. Right Now. [PMOG]

i09:

“My favorite new mind-bending idea is an extension for Firefox
released today by brainy game designers Merci Grace and Justin Hall.
It’s called PMOG, for passively multiplayer online game, and it turns
the entire web into a fantasy world where you can go on quests. Like
all cool art, PMOG makes apparent something that you knew unconsciously
for a long time. Browsing the web is just a game. Gathering knowledge
is a game. Finding cool new pieces of information by reading is a game.
PMOG just makes those games literal, by letting you earn points for web
surfing — erm, questing. And io9 is part of that quest!

PMOG was launched by GameLayers, who said in a statement this morning:

So
many of us spend hours each day on the web. What do we have to show for
our time? PMOG gives players points for surfing with the PMOG Firefox
extension. Those points can be used to leave traps or treasure on any
web site, for other players to find. Suddenly, surfing the web is a
casual multiplayer online game.

PMOG provides a web-wide platform for people to poke, gift or share
links. “PMOG is arms dealer to the web,” quips Merci Victoria Grace,
GameLayers Chief Creative Officer and co-founder. PMOG game events are
created by other players, and layered over the web that we all share.
Players see PMOG “Mines” “Crates” or “Portals” affixed to CNN, Facebook
or Google. Players can unlock badges based on their web surfing on
sites like BoingBoing, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. The entire
internet now offers a chance to play. The coolest part for yours truly,
aside from getting rewarded for compulsively reading BoingBoing and
Hackaday, is that io9 is part of a quest called “Take Me to Your
Readers.” There’s even a badge (pictured) for io9.

You know what that means, don’t you? You are all part of a game,
right now. You can feel it when you go to work. When you pay your
taxes. When you quote that cool speech in the Matrix for the fiftieth time. So make your web surfing count by checking out PMOG and going on a quest.”

PMOG [official site]

YouTube Comment Snob Filters Stupid Comments

Lifehacker:

“Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension YouTube Comment
Snob filters comments on YouTube videos that don’t meet your snobbish
standards. It does so using a combination of criteria, like a
user-defined threshold of spelling errors (using Firefox’s
spell-checker), excessive punctuation, and excessive capitalization.
You can enable or disable any of the filter options if you don’t mind
no capital letters, for example, and you can view any hidden comment by
simply clicking Show. It’s a pretty saucy little extension, but now
it’s hard not to want a full-on Internet Comment Snob.”

YouTube Comment Snob [Firefox Add-ons]

Hands On: NBC streams 30 Rock and The Office over iPhone

DVICE:

“Looks like our parent company NBC has brushed aside iTunes for its
online iPhone viewing, and gone directly to the people. If you navigate
to NBC.com on your iPhone’s Safari browser, you can now watch full episodes of 30 Rock and The Office using the iPhone’s QuickTime player. How does it look? We tested it over Wi-Fi and the dog-slow EDGE network on our iPhone.”

LINK

Wikipedia is Accurate (Citation needed) T-Shirt

Tcritic:

“I love this new shirt from Busted Tees, delicious irony.”

Drop.io Adds Free, Simple Faxing

Lifehacker:

“Innovative file sharing service
Drop.io now sends and receives faxes for free. To send a fax, just
upload a document to Drop.io, enter the fax number, and click Fax. To
receive a fax, Drop.io generates a cover sheet you email to the sender;
as long as they use your cover page on the fax, it will end up in your
Drop.io account as a PDF. Like most of Drop.io, faxing services are
free and require no registration to use.

Drop.io Fax [via Digital Inspiration]

Create or Browse Timelines at Dipity

Lifehacker:

“Create
or browse interactive timelines with webapp Dipity. The service can
create any sort of timeline you want, but it really shines when
creating a personal timeline; that’s because Dipity integrates with
tons of popular webapps, like Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, or any RSS
feed, so that all you have to do is provide Dipity with a few usernames
or URLs and it’ll automatically build your beginning timeline for you.
After items are added, click on any item on your timeline or zoom in
for a closer look. If you’re using it in the personal timeline manner,
Dipity is essentially another lifestreaming app along the lines of previously mentioned FriendFeed—it
just has a different way of presenting your stream. Dipity also
supports manually creating timelines on any subject, but if you want
total control over your timeline, check out how to roll your own hosted timeline.”

DIPITY

Xbox Live up and running, but still having “difficulties”

Engadget:

“As you may have noticed, Xbox Live has been a little
wonky as of late and, according to Microsoft’s latest status update, it
looks like it could stay that way for at least a little while longer.
While the service itself is apparently “up and running,” it seems that
anyone matchmaking or using client voice communication may “experience
difficulties,” which is just a little bit more than a minor issue. No
word on a full return to form just yet, but it seems that the folks in
Redmond are on the case.”

Charlie Rose interviews himself about technology in edited video

I don’t know why I thought this was so funny, but I was rolling…

Boing Boing:
“Filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. edited an episode of Charlie Rose to make it look like he’s interviewing himself.

Something has happened to PBS favorite “Charlie Rose.” The
erudite conversations and sober intellectualism have been replaced by
an absurd world where illogic, inane dialogues, and open hostility
rule. The one-on-one interview between Charlie and his guest begins as
usual but quickly goes awry, so much so that Charlie is warned that,
somewhere, a man named “Steve” is “not happy.” Though this seemingly
random statement might confuse us, Charlie understands it for what it
is — a threat. But who is “Steve” and why is he angry? And why does
the mere mention of his name stop Charlie cold? Using appropriated
footage from a single episode of “Charlie Rose,” filmmaker Andrew
Filippone Jr. creates something both disturbing and farcical in
“‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett.”