Author: Serkadis

One of the most overlooked announcements by Sony at CES 2010 was the new iPhone/iPod Touch application called “BD Remote” that will be compatible with all 2010 Sony Networked Blu-ray Players. Sony mixed things up by making their Blu-ray remotes Bluetooth, and Sony will also offer an additional Wi-Fi Blu-ray remote control application for iPhone and iPod Touch devices on the App Store. It should be available very soon – Sony wants the app to be available before the Blu-ray players so people who stumble upon it will be enticed to learn more. We’re very excited that Sony is going in this direction by offering consumers multiple choices for controlling their Blu-ray players. However, it seems that most of their 2010 Blu-ray players will not have a IR sensor for older multifunction remotes, which could be a big bummer for some home theater enthusiasts.

I inquired about the application receiving updates, and they said if the feedback was good enough that they would follow that path.

Let’s take a look at the interface:

Upon opening the application you’ll see Simple Remote, a new simplistic remote interface concept by Sony that allows you to quickly and easily move around in the menus and select options accordingly. Response was perfect. As you can see there are also dedicated options to Return, access the Options, or go Home. We were really impressed with this section of the application.

The Full Remote interface is just as advanced and feature-rich as the dedicated remotes that come with their 2010 Blu-ray players. As you can see in this one section, we have all of the normal video control options in one easy to use interface.

Another section of the Full Remote interface is multi-colored buttons, Eject, Subtitle, Favorites, and Audio options.

In this part of Full Remote, we can also see a more simple layout that is essentially the same as the Simple Remote tab – back, forward, up, down, select, Top Menu, Pop/Up Menu, Return, Home and Options.

Another great feature within the BD Remote application is the ability to see Disc Info, where it will pull up a great deal of information about the content you are watching, all figured out by Gracenote. The amount of information within somewhat reminds me of IMDB. Here’s what you’ll see first (If you were watching Surf’s Up Blu-ray, for example):

It also has a listing of the cast in the movie you are watching, and you can also learn more about each additional actor:

The settings are fairly basic, but we did notice that you can control multiple devices with this application:

There is also the whole registration process, which is extremely easy:

Another giveaway? Heck yes! Up for grabs this time is a Google Nexus One. We bought one directly from Google in addition to getting a review unit so we could see how their ordering process worked, so hey, why not? You might have read that I think there are some issues with Google’s mobile OS, but the Nexus One is hands down the best Android device to date — let’s get this party started, shall we? All you have to do to enter is simply drop in a comment and you’ll be automatically entered to win. Official rules are below!

• To enter, leave a comment below using the email address you’d like to be contacted at if you win. Also please don’t enter more than once, you’ll be automatically disqualified.
• The giveaway will run for one week until January 17th at 11:59PM
• The Nexus One is unlocked and was purchased unsubsidized. (T-Mobile USA 3G bands, European 2100MHz 3G band)
• This contest is open to anyone 18 years or older, worldwide. You’ll be responsible for any import tax/duties if you’re outside of the U.S. but we’ll cover shipping

That’s it, good luck!

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Article Tags: Headline Story, Met Office, Piers Corbyn, UK Winter Forecast 2009/10, Updated

Never mind the failed putsch against Gordon Brown and England’s Test match heroics, the matter of the moment is the white stuff. We haven’t had snow all over the country like this for decades. What’s changed and why?

The first part — what’s changed — is relatively straightforward: a freezing draught has started coming in through the UK’s door from the North Pole and Siberia.

As Robin Thwaites of the Met Office describes it: “We have a large area of high pressure sitting over Greenland and Iceland and that is a block of cold air. Cold air is very dense and doesn’t like to budge very quickly, so that is acting as a barrier to the normal westerly flow of [milder] weather that we get off the Atlantic.”

The block has forced our typical weather south: our rain has instead been falling in Spain, which is having an unusually wet winter. “They’ve had the rain and instead we’ve had winds either from the Arctic or from Siberia via Scandinavia,” said Thwaites.

Updated below with comments by Piers Corbyn

Source: timesonline.co.uk

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The Taser folks always show up at the Consumer Electronics Show with an interesting experiment. They ask for volunteers to experience the feeling of what it’s like to get tased, or electroshocked with a law enforcement restraining weapon.

The company was there to introduce its Protector family safety product that allows parents to monitor the whereabouts of children at all times. But the crowd gathered today to watch people like Garrett Fridline, a cadet in the Army Academy, voluntarily get tased. Judging from the crowd reaction, it’s a pretty effective way to get noticed among the 2,500 exhibitors at the Las Vegas trade show. This fellow can clearly take the pain. I’m glad that he has answered the call of duty. As for me, I hightailed it out of there before they could volunteer me.

Please tase me, bro from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

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Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg has opened up to our buddies over at Joystiq about the future direction of Projection Natal, and the big takeaway from their chat is that Redmond intends to use the new hardware primarily for “brand new experiences” designed specifically for it. Essentially, this means the majority of Natal-enabled games will be Wii-like in their focus and promotion of motion as the control scheme, but before you dive into a vortex of panic, there were also reassurances that “developers will have that out there at their fingertips if they want to enable those features.” We now know that 10 to 15 percent of the Xbox 360’s processing power will be sucked down by Natal, which may or may not be a reason for this shift away from what was expected — layering Natal on top of games as an alternative control scheme — to this shpiel about “unique” experiences. Either way, so long as we get to play Burnout on this thing, we could care less what others do with it.

Project Natal to focus on custom-made ‘experiences,’ will tolerate conventional games too originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Unfortunately, the most telling element of this Blu-ray news is that it didn’t merit a mention during Sony’s CES keynote, but a new BD-Live feature will be included on This is It. movieIQ Sync updates the original by allowing users to pull up additional movie info on a PC or iPhone synchronized with the movie — we’re guessing the recently released FBI files won’t be included — without it popping up on the television. The other new feature is the ability to create & share customized playlists of the songs featured in the flick. We’ve been waiting for an event that would change both the reality and perception of internet connected features on Blu-ray — and there’s still some hope — but this probably isn’t it.

This is It Blu-ray release debuts movieIQ Sync, brings more Michael Jackson info to your iPhone or PC originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Article Tags: Climate Protest

If your going to make a protest please take care!

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Article Tags: Fred Singer, Kenneth Haapala

SEPP SCIENCE EDITORIAL #2-2010 (Jan 9, 2010)

By S. Fred Singer, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

[Note: This is the fourth of a series of mini-editorials on the “junk science” influencing the global warming issue. Other topics will include the IPCC’s Assessment Report 4, the UN Environmental Program, and some individuals heavily involved in these matters.]

Junk Science #4: IPCC’s Third Assessment Report [IPCC-TAR, 2001]

In line with what seems to be an IPCC plan of claiming increasing confidence in AGW (anthropogenic global warming) with each successive report, the Summary of IPCC Third Assessment Report [IPCC-TAR, 2001] promised new information to support a conclusion of AGW. This new information turned out to be the “Hockeystick,” a dramatic graph that showed temperatures since 1000 AD steadily decreasing – until, suddenly, here was a huge warming in the 20th century. No trace of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA), so clearly shown in earlier IPCC reports and supported by both physical and historic data. [See figure in the pdf version]

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File attachment: The Week That Was January 9 2010.pdf
  

You pay good money for your DVDs, but they’re hardly the only format you need these days. These five ripping tools ensure you can back them up, keep them on your media server, and load them on your favorite portable player.

Photo by jonasj.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite DVD-ripping tool. We tallied up the votes, and now we’re back to highlight the five most popular tools used by Lifehacker readers to rip, backup, and encode their DVD collections.

DVD Shrink (Windows, Free)

DVD Shrink is a free and capable ripping tool that excels at, as the name would imply, shrinking DVDs. DVDs come in two common formats: DVD-5 (4.7GB) and DVD-9 (8.5GB); the Reauthor mode in DVD Shrink helps you to ditch disc extras and strip most larger DVDs down to fit into a standard (and less expensive) DVD-5 disc. DVD Shrink does a good job handling many protection schemes, but hasn’t been updated to remove some of the newest schemes.

DVD Fab (Windows, $50)

DVD Fab is a commercial DVD ripper that supports the removal of all current DVD copy protections. In addition to being current on protection schemes, it boasts a large array of options for stripping and repacking your DVDs once the copy protection is removed. You can rip the entire disc, rip only the main movie, or split it into pieces—among other options. Like DVD Shrink, DVD Fab also supports compressing DVD-9 discs to fit on DVD-5 discs.

Handbrake (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

Handbrake is a DVD-ripping tool with a strong emphasis on not just ripping media but recoding it for playback on computers, portable devices, and other non-disc based systems. Handbrake can help you convert DVDs and other MPEG-based video into MP4 and MKV files. You can tweak settings like video frame rate and audio codec playback to your heart’s content with Handbrake, and even batch encode all your media at one time to make filling up your iPod or other device relatively painless. The one major shortcoming of Handbrake is that it doesn’t have any copy protection removal tools built in, which means you may occasionally need to use a 3rd-party stripping tool to prepare your DVD for conversion.

AnyDVD (Windows, $60 per year)

AnyDVD is another commercial entry in this week’s Hive Five. It’s not cheap, with a one year license running $60—although the multi-year discounts quickly stack up—but it can boast that it stays on top of current protection and encryption schemes to makes sure you’re never locked out of your own discs. In addition to stripping protections from the disc, it also has the ability to control DVD playback speed so that DVDs played on media center computers will play slower and quieter, and it allows you to remove things like forced subtitles, warning screens, and disc material you don’t want.

DVD Decrypter (Windows, Free)

Although DVD Decrypter hasn’t been updated since 2005, it still works on a significant number of DVDs and has a strong following resulting from both its original user base and new users who find it cuts through the copy protection on their current DVDs protected with CSS, Macrovision content protection, region codes, and other hindrances.

Now that you’ve had a chance to look over the five most popular DVD-ripping tools as nominated by Lifehacker readers, it’s time to cast your vote for the tool you like best:

Which DVD-Ripping Tool Is Best?(trends)

Have a favorite that wasn’t featured or a tip for ripping DVDs? Let’s hear about it in the comments. If you have an idea for a future Hive Five send us an email at tips @ lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line.

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This Is It was a planned series of fifty concerts by Michael Jackson to be held at The O2 arena in London. They were scheduled to begin in July 2009 and continue through March 2010. Less than three weeks before the first concert date, and with all concerts sold out, Jackson died after suffering cardiac arrest. During CES 2010, Sony had a special glass booth that showed off Michael Jackson’s Thriller Costume (designed by Zaldy) for the “This Is It” Tour. It also had a shirt worn by Michael Jackson in rehearsals, courtesy of the Michael Jackson Estate.

Michael Jackson’s “This Is It” will be available on Blu-ray January 26th.

Cephalosporins with activity against MRSA are out there, but we don’t have them yet.  Just recently, the leader of the pack, ceftobiprole, hit another roadblock:

The FDA has indicated in its Complete Response Letter to Johnson & Johnson PRD that it has completed the review of the application and has determined that it cannot approve the application in its present form … The Agency determined that data from Studies BAP00154 and BAP00414 cannot be relied upon because inspections and audits of approximately one-third of the clinical trial sites for these studies found the data from a large proportion of these sites to be unreliable or unverifiable, raising concerns regarding the overall data integrity for both studies

The recommendation from the FDA?  Do more studies.  (Which means more delay, more $$$.)

One of the great frustrations of antibiotic development is that there’s clearly a need for better drugs for MRSA — unlike, say, a new PPI — yet this pipeline has been pretty dry.

In fact, I bet not a day goes by in medical centers that this need is not readily apparent to ID doctors, surgeons, intensivists, pulmonologists, nephrologists (don’t dialysis patients seem to have the hardest time with MRSA?), endocrinologists (except maybe for people with diabetes), transplant specialists.  Pretty much everyone knows this bug is common and hard to treat.

If we start with the premise that vancomycin is the gold standard — and a fairly tarnished one at that — what are our alternatives?  Linezolid was a big advance (especially because it can be given orally), but it was approved ten years ago, is bacteriostatic, has certain unavoidable toxicity issues, and is costly, especially compared to other oral antibiotics.  Daptomycin was a somewhat smaller step forward, and I confess I still haven’t had the occasion to use telavancin.  Trimethoprim-sulfa and tetracyclines are active, but likely less so than vancomycin.

And ceftobiprole?  The initial application to the FDA was submitted in 2007; it is already approved in several other countries.  And while I have no idea whether the efficacy and safety of the drug will be preferable to what we have now — perhaps someone from Canada or Hong Kong or Europe can clue me in — just having more options for MRSA seems like a very good thing.

Ceftaroline/NXL104, anyone?