Bonne Année !

Je vous souhaite à tous une bonne année et le meilleurs pour 2009. On en aura bien besoin.

I wish you all a happy new year and the best for 2009. We will certainly need it.

Take care.

Cute cat animation

Lame Duck?

Bush may be lame but he still can duck!


And now there's people brandishing shoes in the streets of Bagdad!
Is this the beginning of a new cult? “The shoe! The shoe!”
They want the shoe-thrower, Muntadhar “Brian” al-Zeidi, to be freed.
You really couldn't have a more Pythonesque moment than that!

Images © Associated Press and Ahmad Al-Rubaye / AFP / Getty Images.

Slippery

Apparently the guy managing the city's blue collars made the mistake of putting the people who used to take care of the ice rinks in charge of cleaning the sidewalks. Now they are extremely slippery. I know that City Hall talked about cutting cost by stopping cleaning sidewalks, but there's a limit! If I hurt my back once more by slipping I think I'll sue them!

On top of that the landlord didn't repair the front-door stairs and they keep getting dangerously icy and slippery. I am spending a fortune in salt just to increase the chances of NOT breaking my neck each time I'm going out.

Image © Acreage Living.

ANN will stream two anime TV series

Anime News Networks has announced on 2008-12-10 that it will stream two more anime, Girl's High and Ramen Fighter Miki. Starting December 15, both series will be available as free, ad-supported VOD streams, with one new episode being posted every Monday for 12 weeks. The series were licensed from North American anime publisher Media Blasters, and as such will only be available to viewers in North America (US & Canada). Justin Sevakis, ANN director of New Media, has stated that “There's more coming”.

ANN is already streaming the OVA Kite Liberator.

(Source: ANN).

ANN launches its streaming anime service

Anime News Networks has launched its streaming anime service on Tuesday 2008/12/09 with Kite: Liberator. The OVA, released on DVD by Media Blasters, is streamed (in six parts) in both subbed and dubbed versions, but only for North American viewers (US & Canada).

Give it a look!

(Source: ANN).

Boxee etc

I have previously mentioned that we now can easily hack the Apple TV with atvusb-creator which install both XMBC and Boxee. Now that Boxee has been updated and that I have finally received an invite for the testing, I would like to talk a little more about it.

Boxee is a social media center based on the popular XBMC. It allows you to play videos, music and pictures from your own computer or from the internet (streaming content from websites like Hulu, CBS, BBC, Comedy Central, Last.fm and flickr). Its “social” aspect means that you can share with your “friends” whatever media you're listening to or watching and send them your recommandations. So, basically, it is exactly the same type of media entertainment center than XBMC, but with a fancier interface and the social twist.


I like the general look of Boxee, particularly the way you can browse through your media library, but I prefer the XMBC video player which is simpler and seems to provide a better picture. Like XMBC, it is controled through the ATV remote which is too simple to offer a comfortable experience (but apparently you can pair it with a different remote). I particularly like the fact that Boxee offer much more streaming websites and a much easier interface to browse them, but unfortunately many of those websites (like Hulu) have geofilters and can be watched only from the USA. All in all, I prefer XMBC. I don't feel I have any use for Boxee, but I'll continue to play with it once in a while (after all atvusb-creator install both Boxee and XMBC) and it might grow on me. In any cases, I recommand you to try it.

Apple recently updated the AppleTV operating system to version 2.3, which forced me to use the Terminal application for the first time (to send to the ATV commands in Unix source code) in order to prevent my ATV to auto-update until a newer version of atvusb-creator was created. Then I had to send the code to force the ATV to update its OS, before finally installing the new version of atvusb-creator compatible with the new OS. Complicated for someone who's not used to deal with those command codes. But I survived and the ATV is now working again (with XMBC).

I also discovered that atvusb-creator now also install SofwareMenu, an application that facilitate the installation and update of plugins like ATVfiles (a file browser), CouchSurfer (a web browser) and nitoTV (a video player, which would allow to play video without the need of XMBC). Unfortunately, most of those plugins are still not compatible with the ATV OS 2.3 and their installation made the ATV crashed, so I had to use Terminal again to remove them (not without difficulty, but I finally succeeded thanks to the help from atvusb-creator's developpers). Once this problem is fixed, those plugins will be quite useful for sure, but for now I'll be more prudent and avoid install new stuff.