If you haven't heard of Hulu, it's a website where you can watch TV and movies for free online, legitimately. From their media info page, "Hulu was founded in March 2007 by NBC Universal and News Corp and is operated independently by a dedicated management team".



They are supported by advertising. During a typical TV show you will see 3-4 ads, 15-30 seconds in length. Considering that regular TV gives you 2-4 chunks of ads, each containing 3-5 ads of 30-60 second length, you can see that this is much better.

You can watch the shows in 360p or 480p and can watch in full screen with good quality. Their selection is top-notch; they have hundreds of series online, some which have a few episodes, others with a few seasons, and some with the full series available. Here are some of the highlights (read: shows I like):

24 (10 episodes)
Arrested Development (full series)
Burn Notice (full series)
Chuck (3 episodes)
The Colbert Report (12 episodes)
The Daily Show (12 episodes)
Dilbert (14 episodes)
Family Guy (5 episodes)
Firefly (full series)
Heroes (5 episodes)
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (full series)
Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1 episode)
NewsRadio (3 seasons)
Prison Break (5 episodes)
Psych (4 episodes)
Rescue Me (9 episodes)
The Simpsons (5 episodes)
Sliders (9 episodes)



Not to mention, they have exclusive web content. As far as I know the only example of this is Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, but you really must see this. It's quite amazing; created by Joss Whedon.

And it's not just TV shows! They also have movies! Some highlights:

28 Days Later
Bring It On (I don't wanna hear it)
Broken Arrow
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Fifth Element
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters 2
Groundhog Day
Karate Kid
Karate Kid 2
Karate Kid 3
Men in Black
Titan AE

After all of this, why do you really need your TV?



Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.
[Comments: 2] [Tags: movies, technology]

Through Wii Fanboy, I found out they had finally nailed DVD playback for the Wii. My normal DVD player is my Xbox 360, but that's been acting up recently, so this was just in time.



The first step was to install the Homebrew Channel for the Wii. That can be done through the Twilight Hack, which requires a copy of Zelda: Twilight Princess; a title you should own anyway. Make sure you've finished the game, or backup the file, because you're going to have to delete it and insert a custom save file. Once you have all that taken care of, you can install the DVD Player itself. The process took me about 20 minutes, and it was only that long because I wasn't reading the directions in full.

Success!



Now to test it out. I pulled out a DVD, Warren Miller's Cold Fusion. I was only going to be testing it out, so I shouldn't have put in a snowboarding movie; those will suck me in, as I ended up watching the whole thing. Very good times. I took down a couple great quotes from Warren Miller as he was narrating:

"When I was 25, I thought I was going to live forever. Now that I'm 75, I'm pretty sure I have." - Warren Miller

"If anyone tells you have that you haven't changed in the last 50 years, keep some photos around of the good old days, so you'll know they're lying to you." - Warren Miller



Wikipedia has some of his famous, recurring quotes. If are a skier or snowboarder, and haven't seen any Warren Miller films, get off your ass. If you happen to be lucky enough to know me in real life, let me know and I'll lend you one or two.

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.
[Comments: 0] [Tags: movies, technology, video games]

I'll get right to the point, if you couldn't tell from the title alone, just don't bother with this movie. I didn't go in with my expectations high, all I wanted was entertainment, I didn't want or need a good movie.



How did they mess this up? The other two Mummy movies were great fun. (I'm not counting Scorpion King since that's not really in the trilogy, and I didn't see it.) There were even more mummies than before, there was Jet Li, and Michelle Yeoh. What are they missing here? The dialog was always super-cheesy, but this time they went overboard and made it just intolerably bad. The action scenes were unexciting. I realize it's hard to top the coolness factor of the windy sands turning into the face of a mummy, who tries to eat your plane, but you can try still!

Normally, what you see in the trailers is usually the better scenes of the movie, but in this case, they were the only good scenes in the movies, and even then they weren't that great. The one saving grace that it had was when the Chinese soldiers were speaking in Chinese, Dianna would translate what they were saying, and it was funny; but unless you have a Chinese translator with you, it's not that funny!

Why this movie blew:
Stephen Sommers wrote and directed the first two, but this one was directed by Rob Cohen. From his IMDb profile, it looks like Cohen's directoral skills peaked with Dragonheart, and went down, plummeting at The Skulls, xXx, and Stealth. It was written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who write Smallville. I enjoy Smallville, but the writing is pretty awful.
[Comments: 0] [Tags: movies]