Category Archives: Tech!

Disney testing out free online streaming for movies you own

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I just got a link from Disney where you can view any movie you have purchased on Blu-Ray or DVD anytime online for free!

You can check out the preview page at the Disney Movie Rewards site here.

All you will need is the code in the brochure that is enclosed in each of the Disney Blu-Ray or DVDs you own.

Once you enter the code, the movie you own will be available for viewing!

Right now the movies available are Bedtime Stories, Bolt, Bedtime Stories, A Bug’s Life, G-Force, Hannah Montana – The Movie, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, Jonas Brothers 3D Concert, Monsters, Inc., The Nightmare Before Christmas, Race to Witch Mountain, The Tigger Movie and UP.

Disney says more movies will be available for free streaming soon, including The Narnia series, Cars, 101 Dalmations, Finding Nemo, Pirates of the Caribbean (all 3), Ratatouille, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and The Incredibles (one of my favorites!)

Having the ability to watch any movie my nephew wants to at any time and anywhere we are is a massive bonus. Now I’m probably going to buy more Blu-Rays for him since I know I will be able to watch them online for free. Smart move, Disney!

While you’re on the Disney site, if you haven’t already, take a minute and sign up for the Disney Movie Rewards and key in the same codes you used to view the movies online to get points for free stuff. I got a free “baby Kevin” stuffed toy for my nephew when I bought UP on blu-ray, and he loves it.

Did you know there’s a rusty 1958 quarter in the Star Trek Blu-Ray extras disc?

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Did you know there’s a rusty 1958 quarter in the Star Trek Blu-Ray extras disc? Seriously!

I got the Blu-Ray of the recent Star Trek movie and finally got around to copying the digital version from the “extras” DVD to my iPhone.

While I was waiting for the authorized download from iTunes, I did some poking around in the directory structure of the “extras” DVD.

Showing the package contents, there’s a NCFOM.icns in the resources directory.

Star Trek Quarter 1

Star Trek Quarter 1

Open that NCFOM.icns with the mac’s quick preview and you’ll see…

Star Trek Quarter 2

Star Trek Quarter 2

A rusty 1958 quarter!

Opening it in preview showed the same thing.

Star Trek Quarter 3

Star Trek Quarter 3

Now that’s an odd thing to put in there! Maybe a checksum of some kind?

Website Magazine’s big Google-goof in their February 2010 issue

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So there I was speed reading through this month’s pile of magazines when I got to the computer stack. Near the bottom of this pile was WEBSITE magazine. I’ve always been kind of “meh” about them, but every so often they have something interesting, so I’ve been re-subscribing so far.

On the last page, titled WEB COMMENTARY with Editor-in-Chief Peter Prestipino, is a one page article titled “A Day In the Life of a Google Junkie”. It’s a article that glorifies the daily pervasiveness of Google nowadays, but I noticed a really big goof in the article.

In the paragraph in the first column with the 5:30 AM indent, it ends with “…In fact, Gmail grew 43 percent in 2008 alone. Expect big growth in 2009 too.”

Wait. What?

This is the February 2010 issue. Even if this column was written last November or December in 2009 and used as a “plan B” column, the dates still don’t sync!

This “column” was originally written in 2008, since 2009 is referred to in the future tense.

Nice.

Either this was an old PR spam article from Google that they copied and pasted without attribution, or it was an article they copied and pasted from somewhere else without updating the dates. Either way, that’s enough for me not to take anything they print at face value. Especially since it came directly from the editor-in-chief’s page.

I bet if WEBSITE magazine actually catches this, they’re going to say it was just a typo and blame it on the copy editors.

Scratch one renewal!

You can see the page by clicking below…

Website Magazine Goof Feb 2010

UPDATE: Did a quick search on Google for “gmail grew 43 percent in” and found that Google’s Gmail services really did grow 43 percent in 2008. So it ain’t no typo!

EA shutting down some online games

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According to a news article on NEOWIN, EA games is planning on shutting down several online game servers in favor of focusing on newer games and services.

The list from Neowin has it as…

March 16, 2010 Online Service Shutdown
Def Jam for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Godfather for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Lord of the Rings: Conquest for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames for PC
Need for Speed: Carbon for PlayStation Portable
Need for Speed: ProStreet for PlayStation Portable
Simpsons for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360

April 15, 2010 Online Service Shutdown
Burnout 3: Takedown for PlayStation 2
Army of Two for PlayStation 3 (Asia only)
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for Xbox
Burnout 3: Takedown for Xbox
Madden NFL 09 for Xbox

Here’s the link to the NEOWIN article.

Bypass a website with a reading quota

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Have you ever been looking at a website and suddenly run into something like this?

Reading Quota 1

Reading Quota 1

Some websites like to set up a quota so you can only view their webpages a certain number of times before you have to sign up for an account or have to pay them a fee.

Most of the time, there’s a real easy way around this.

Just look at the URL of the blocked page in the top of your web browser. In the example above it was….

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9b8e66a6-1a3c-11df-b4ee-00144feab49a,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F9b8e66a6-1a3c-11df-b4ee-00144feab49a.html%3Fftcamp%3Drss%26nclick_check%3D1&_i_referer

Yuck. Looks pretty complex, right? Don’t worry. All we need to do it look for the word FALSE in the first part of that mess.

Once you find it, just change the word false to true.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9b8e66a6-1a3c-11df-b4ee-00144feab49a,Authorised=true.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F9b8e66a6-1a3c-11df-b4ee-00144feab49a.html%3Fftcamp%3Drss%26nclick_check%3D1&_i_referer

Now press ENTER in your web browser!

Reading Quota 2

Reading Quota 2

You can also just type the headline of the blocked article into GOOGLE and most of the time they’ll give you a direct link to the same article.

I wonder how much these companies spent on some cyber consulting group for this high tech security setup?

Typealyzer.com will tell you a website author’s personality

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There’s a good analytic site I just found called Typealyzer.

You put in any blog’s website address and it quickly gives you a profile of the website’s author.

So of course, I did my own site first!

According to the site, my website personality is….

My Blog as a real person

My Blog as a real person

“ISTP – The Mechanics :

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment and are highly skilled at seeing and fixing what needs to be fixed. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.”

Not bad!

They even did a brain-pattern thing where it says I’m all about Thinking and Practical things and not so much about Feeling or Intuition.

I disagree with that last part, but it was nice to see what my blog looks like from a mechanical review. Now I see what I need to focus on to push it into a more balanced website.

I’m definitely bookmarking this site for future website construction projects to make sure I target the right demographic.

iPad? You’re kidding me.

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I got my hopes up too high last week. Way too high.

I made a post on how it seemed that the Verizon would take over as the tablet’s 3g new provider.

It just isn’t so.

Apple officially announced today that AT&T is the de-facto provider for the 3G service on the new tablet. Engadget has the proof…

Engadget Photo

Engadget Photo

Unfortunately, the iBad also has no multitasking, no camera, no SMS, and no flash support. Even jailbreaking won’t help this POS!

Of course, it will sell millions despite this.

Does AT&T have some incriminating pics of Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, and Steve Wozniak from the 80s? What do they have on Apple to stick around after all the horrible service they’ve pulled?

And for the record, I have (and still use!) a Compaq Tablet that does 3g (with a sprint add-on), WiFi, multitasking, SMS, flash support, full screen video, photo manipulation, and it plays games. It also has a detachable keyboard, a hardware VGA video out, a hardware Ethernet port for LAN connections, a modem port for sending and receiving faxes, customizable mini hardware control keys on the perimeter, an embedded stylus pen, and it reads every kind of electronic book you can put on a SD card… running on XP almost four years ago! It’s so old, it has been discontinued!

My Compaq

My Compaq

Tablet Specs 01

Tablet Specs 01

Tablet Specs 02

Tablet Specs 02

Tablet Specs 03

Tablet Specs 03

And finally, there’s a great writeup and review on Tech Republic on when the Compaq tablet first came out.

Welcome to the past! Uh, future!

Better. Bigger. Stronger.

It’s all about marketing! Welcome to the past future!

EDIT : More Compaq Tablet photos and technical info.

Free today only – AnyBizSoft PDF to Word Converter (retail $29.95)

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I almost missed this! Giveawayoftheday is giving away a copy of AnyBizSoft’s PDF to Word Converter today only.

It’s a good program that lets you convert PDFs to Word files offline. That’s handy for whevener you’re not online, have a lot of documents to convert, or just don’t trust that an online converter will erase your PDFs when they’re through converting them for you.

You’ll have to register on the manufacturer’s site for the serial number, but it’s still a good deal.

Here’s the link to the download page.

Verizon to be the carrier for the upcoming Apple Tablet

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Apple’s not-so-secret tablet is about to be unveiled next week. And from the looks of things, Apple has chosen Verizon to be the exclusive carrier for their new product!

Apple Tablet

Apple Tablet

Hey AT&T! Have you been paying attention? Do you see how things are about to get real ugly for your bottom line?

Instead of upgrading your rusty old network to keep iPhone customers happy, you decided to say things to your paying customers like “You don’t have enough towers to handle the phone”… and to do things like charge your unlimited customers for using the network in an unlimited manner… and even get nailed by Consumer Reports as “the worst carrier in the Unuted States.”

So now that you fumbled the ball for a relatively simple thing, you’re going to be benched for the upcoming big game.

Verizon is not only about to take a huge chunk of AT&Ts iPhone customers away, but is now going to be the only US company to carry Apple’s new tablet.

I can’t wait!

Here’s the exclusive article on The Street about the Verizon / Apple deal.

Free Software : AnySoft PDF Password Remover

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It looks like AnyBizSoft is giving away a copy of their PDF Password Remover software for free until February 24th!

According to the website,the software will… “remove password(s) from your encrypted PDF file(s)” one by one or in batch mode on the PC. It even works under Windows 7.

PDF Password Remover

PDF Password Remover

All I had to do was click to download the software, then click the GET KEY CODE button next to the download button. After I put in my email address, I got a license key a few seconds later.

Not bad! And free is always good.

I can see where this software could come in handy. There are plenty of online PDF converters, but if you don’t want to go to the trouble of going online to convert a series of locked PDFs, or if you don’t want someone else keeping a copy of your PDF documents, a local application would be much better to work with.

Here’s the link to the company’s giveaway website.