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Staff BlogsOff-Topic Category
Baz Luhrmann offers free filmmaking course on iTunes It lasts until October and each podcast features a specific aspect of the filmmaking process (e.g. set design, cinematography, etc) on Baz's new feature film, Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. The first one, On Set Photography, is available now. Peter Jackson did something similar on King Kong which ended up being very successful. If you're a high school or college student, five of the podcasts come with a challenge at the end. Complete the challenge, post it to the Apple Student Gallery and you could be in for the chance of winning an iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod touch, or a MacBook Pro. A trip for two to Australia is also up for grabs, and the top prize in the final challenge is a trip to Australia with a chance to meet Baz and travel with him on the movie's promotional tour. Your project will also be featured on the movie's DVD release. For those who aren't students, I think the podcasts are still very interesting regardless. I have a lot of respect for Baz and his work so I will be subscribing to this for sure and no doubt hanging on his every word. [via CamcorderInfo] Categories: Off-Topic Perfect Sport wins Best Drama at WorldFest I saw a great review on IMDb from someone who saw it at WorldFest that summarizes the movie far better than I ever could: I loved this movie! Caught it at Houston Worldfest where it won for Best Drama. For those of you who haven't seen it yet (don't worry, no spoilers here) here's a mini-review: Building on a very creative script with an unexpected plot and believable, fully human characters, the actors make unusual choices that bring even more life to their roles. Your typical sports movie this ain't. Perfect Sport is also set against a beautiful score. I'd recommend this movie to anyone who wants to see something original and gripping. It's so nice to see a movie where you don't know everything that's going to happen in advance. Loved it! Hope it comes out in wider release soon. And finally, LA Times has a sneak preview. The movie will be entered into other film festivals and I will let you know more about that when information becomes available. When it comes to your town, I definitely recommend checking it out. Categories: Festivals and Awards, Off-Topic NewsFire now completely free So what is it and why do you need it? Well, those little orange buttons  you see on web pages are links to RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a tiny file containing textual information such as posts from a blog or software updates. If you have a favorite site or blog, you can be notified of updates without having to visit the site every day. Obviously this saves a lot of time and bandwidth.I didn't think I needed one until I tried it, and the time I saved was tremendous. If you see a new site you like the look of, put it in your feed reader and forget about it until the next update. Visiting a site to check for updates that don't exist is very inefficient. NewsFire is a great program because, as the developer himself says: "Unlike other readers, NewsFire is designed with a deliberately minimal interface. The news is what matters and it takes center stage." And now it's free, so try it out. We have several feeds on this site, listed here. We also have an appcast feed that tells you when one of our applications is updated. [via TUAW] Categories: Software, Utilities, Off-Topic iPhone storage bumped up to 16 GB, iPod Touch increased to 32 GB iPhone 8 GB - $399 iPhone 16 GB - $499 iPod Touch 8 GB - $299 iPod Touch 16 GB - $399 iPod Touch 32 GB $499 I don't think there is anything right now preventing the iPhone from having 32 GB of storage, it's more of a case of Apple not wanting to cannibalize iPod Touch sales for those with larger music collections. iTunes tells me I have 32.86 GB of music so I guess I will have to wait for the next two storage revisions of the iPhone before buying one (the next one presumably being 32 GB and the one after that being 48 or 64 GB, one would imagine). Categories: Apple, Off-Topic Bloody Omaha [via ProLost] Categories: Indie, Off-Topic Opera sues Microsoft over Internet Explorer The access logs for the site say that the majority of visitors are on a Mac, so wouldn't be able to use IE anyway - no bad thing, and the majority of visits come from Safari, with Firefox at second place and IE at third. I don't feel that it is a worthwhile use of my time to create code that will detect IE and offer a site specifically tailored for only the third popular browser used to navigate to this site, especially as the incompatibilities are entirely Microsoft's fault. Opera says that it would like the European Commission to force MS to comply with standards. I don't know if that is possible but then again, European courts takes a sterner stance on Microsoft than their US counterparts, so it is possible. Either way, I am hoping that this will generate negative press for IE and alert people to the fact that there are alternatives. I would personally recommend Firefox for speed, stability, standards compliance, ease of use (I find IE7's interface really confusing) and above all, extensions. Extensions are small pieces of software that perform tasks. For example, I have extensions for removing ads, displaying page ranks and for counting words in text areas (very useful when filling data into forms with minimum or maximum character limits). There are extensions for pretty much anything. I also recommend Safari. Safari is VERY fast. It doesn't support extensions unfortunately but it's an Apple product so there is a lot of attention to detail. It's mainly the small details that cause people to like it so much, like the fact that you can resize text boxes in forms so that you can see what you're typing, Snapback mode that lets you easily return to your search results, and an advanced RSS reader that lets you filter and re-order the posts in the list. I have also heard good things about Camino but have never used it myself. Firefox and Safari are compatible with both Mac and Windows but Camino is Mac-only. Internet Explorer users: you might think your current browser offers you everything you could want but give one of the browsers listed above a try and you will find a lot of things that you can't live without. [via BBC News] Categories: Off-Topic Extras season finale this Sunday It's a comedy by the people who brought you the British version of The Office. Whilst The Office was great ("oi, no professionals"), I believe that this show is superior. It's sad that it's coming to an end but I have a lot of respect for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant because they always end their TV shows before they get old. I can't wait to see what their next project is. I wanted to make a post about it because despite being broadcast on HBO, a lot of people in this country still don't know about it. Every episode features them on the set of a production with a high-profile celebrity. They've had Ben Stiller, Daniel Radcliffe, Samuel L. Jackson, Kate Winslet, Orlando Bloom, Robert De Niro, Patrick Stewart, and many more. The humor is derived from the fact that they each play a slightly warped version of themselves. I think this is best illustrated by this clip of Patrick Stewart: I would recommend checking out some of the episodes or clips on YouTube before watching the final episode as 1) you won't understand what's going on and 2) the final episodes are generally not as funny as the other ones as they mainly focus on tying up the story. I'm sure it will be good though. Categories: Off-Topic Scorsese creates "The Key to Reserva" The Key to Reserva [via HDForIndies] Categories: Off-Topic
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