UKMac.net » Entertainment

Steve Jobs On Robot Chicken

Scott — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:29:33 +0000

Steve Jobs is once again featured in the latest satirical cartoon from Robot Chicken. In this episode Steve is attacked by Compact Disc Man and Zune Man but turns the tide when he draws his gun and shoots Compact Disc Man. Fortunately Steve saves Zune Man who lives to fight another day, but only because he would rather not waste his bullets ! Hilarious.

BBC iPlayer App to Land This Thursday

Scott — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 08:21:27 +0000

The long awaited iPlayer app for iPad is officially landing in the app store ( presumably UK only ? ) this Thursday 10th Feb. In this tweet Geoff Marshall, Interactive Operations Engineer for the BBC, confirms the date of arrival and states that the service will be WiFi only ( no playback over 3G ).

Damn You Auto Correct !

Scott — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 22:57:23 +0000

I remember years ago reading a book my Uncle had bought called something like “101 Uses for a Dead Cat” and falling about laughing with tears rolling from my eyes. Now, don’t get me wrong I am not a cat hater, I have two siamese cats, but something about reading this book, which had a picture on each page showing some strange sick use for a dead cat hit my funny bone. In isolation each joke was mildly funny, but read page after page the effect was cumulative leaving you rolling about in stitches…

Anyway, getting to the point, Damn You Auto Correct ! is a web site that had much the same effect when I found it a couple of nights ago. Someone on Twitter posted this link to a compilation of the best posts from January. The posts are comprised of screen shots submitted by users of their iPhone text conversations where the iPhones attempts to auto correct their messages have come out not quite how the sender intended…. Suffice to say many are of an adult theme so you have been warned….

The Complete Get a Mac Ad Series collection

Scott — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:20:26 +0000

There can be no denying that the Get A Mac ads were hugely successful and influential despite what side of the camp you sit on ( Mac or PC ). Of course the series has now been retired but the ads will live on through sites such as YouTube for years to come.

Adweek has compiled the entire series in a single page for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Spotify – Streaming Audio Done Right

Scott — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:25:51 +0000

Spotify is a new audio streaming service that is unlike most of those that have gone before it. Once you have downloaded the app ( Windows and http://www.spotify.com/en/download/mac/ versions available ) you have a world of music available to listen to with no downloading required. Unlike other streaming services Spotify streams are high quality 160 kb/s Ogg files and begin playing the instant you click on a track with no signs of buffering or delays in startup.

Spotify has signed a number of deals with record labels and distributers who provide the content for the service which is currently only available in a free advertising supported version in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain with other countries coming soon.

Spotify has also provided a feature to enable sharing of playlists with friends by creating unique URL’s for each list which can then be shared via email, IM and on web sites. There are already a large number of web sites popping up that provide Spotify users with a way of publishing their playlists to the wider Spotify community. Amongst the better ones of these are SpotifyList, Spotify Playlists and SpotyShare

Additionally Spotify is Last.fm aware and will scrobble your played tracks to your Last.fm profile so fans of this service can keep track of the music they have been playing.

Overall Spotify is a stunning service which is highly rated by all who have tried it ( just try searchin

Spotify – Streaming Audio Done Right

Scott — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:43:33 +0000

Spotify is a new audio streaming service that is unlike most of those that have gone before it. Once you have downloaded the app ( Windows and Mac versions available ) you have a world of music available to listen to with no downloading required. Unlike other streaming services Spotify streams are high quality 160 kb/s Ogg files and begin playing the instant you click on a track with no signs of buffering or delays in startup.

Spotify has signed a number of deals with record labels and distributers who provide the content for the service. Currently the free services is only available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain with other countries coming soon.

The free service provides unlimited music access with only occasional ads dropped in between tracks and displayed in the Spotify application. The inconvenience is certainly very minor considering the amount of content that is available for free. Day passes and monthly subscription schemes are also available for those who would rather not be bothered by sponsors ads.

Additionally Spotify is Last.fm aware and will scrobble your played tracks to your Last.fm profile so fans of this service can keep track of the music they have been playing.

Overall Spotify is a stunning service which is highly rated by all who have tried it ( just try searching Twitter for comments to see evidence of this ). I for one hope it continues to develop and doesn’t lose any of the current features along the way.

Recommended.

Gates Vs Jobs – Funny Video

Scott — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:24:09 +0000

Hot on the heals of Melinda Gates Dirty Secret Video comes this hilarious spoof cartoon video of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs doing battle. Excellent stuff.

Gates Vs. Jobs Very Funny – More amazing videos are a click away

Melinda Gates Spoof Video – Dirty Secrets

Scott — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:28:48 +0000

This video from Funny or Die is hilarious, very well thought out.

Bill Gate’s wife Melinda has a dirty little secret – watch more funny videos

BBC iPlayer Comes To iPhone and iPod Touch

Scott — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:22:27 +0000

The BBC have today launched availability of iPlayer content on iPhone and iPod Touch, making the Apple hardware the first mobile devices to support the streaming TV service. The content is encoded as a 516Kbps stream so it will only play via WiFi on both devices as the EDGE connection of the iPhone is not fast enough to operate effectively.

The Web site access has not been optimised for the iPhone interface so to actually select the programme you require involves a fair amount of zooming and panning of the page. Hopefully this is a short term thing and the Beeb will improve the front end for easier navigation. What I can say though is that the video actually looks superb on with not stuttering or pixellation what so ever.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch head straight over to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer for preview. If you are interested in the technology behind this new service there is a blog article at the BBC Internet Blog that explains the approach being taken to encode and produce the iPlayer versions of BBC programmes that is also worth read.

Download TV From BBC iPlayer On Your Mac

Scott — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:22:36 +0000

So far the BBC have failed to deliver on their promise to produce an OSX and Linux application for downloading content from their online TV site ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer ), so non-Windows users have to settle for live streaming in a web browser. Whilst this works fine it does mean that you need to have a reasonable broadband link AND be restricted to watching the limited amount of content that is available through the site ( shows are automatically removed after a few days ).

One developer, Paul Battley from London, has come up with a neat solution to this problem though. When the BBC launched the iPlayer for iPhone site they had to provide a way of displaying videos on a device that did not have Adobes Flash Player, and so re-encoded the videos into MP4 files for display on the Jesus Phone. Paul used this site to create a small Ruby script that allows you to download the iPod playable videos and save them to your computer.

To use the script you first download and extract the tarball, then run two commands to install the libraries and command line script

ruby setup.rb config sudo ruby setup.rb install

Once you have done this a script called iplayer-dl will be created in the bin directory. To run this you just enter the command :-

ruby iplayer-dl programcode

Where programcode is the last portion of the URL of the program you wish to download. To find this code go to the BBC iPlayer site and click on the program you wish to download. The url will be something like :-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dyhs1/Jack_A_Soldiers_Story/

The programcode you require in the example above is the portion b00dyhs1. Once you have entered the command line the script will go away and download the file and by default save it in the same directory as the script. There are a number of commandline options you can use to download multiple files, specify the destination filename and directory and more. To find out more about the options available type :-

ruby iplayer-dl -help

The downloaded files are un-DRM’d and can be played and stored indefinately, which at the end of the day is what the Beeb should have allowed us ( BBC Licence payers ) to do in the first place. After all if I wanted to I could record the program onto my video/DVD recorder and keep that forever couldn’t I ?

Enjoy.