Star Wars Begins, A Fantastic Fan-Made Documentary for Ep.IV

I have just finished watching this full-length youtube video and it is fantastic. Any Star Wars fan should watch it. This documentary was made by a fan and not by Lucas or one of his lackies and , probably, that is why it is so good.

This is actually the film-makers third feature-length documentary and commentary about Star Wars and it’s called “Star Wars Begins“ so it is actually about the first Star Wars that was made in 1977. This is an unofficial look at the movie and has heaps of original set audio recordings, alternate takes, deleted scenes, bloopers  and different angles and an even bigger amount of comments and explainations from cast and crew that he must have pulled out form every documentary, interview and commentary track that has ever been made about Star Wars.

What makes this, for me, probably the best documentary I have seen for Star Wars is that it is played following the original movie itself. So that means when he has a deleted  or alternative scene it is added where they would have been, the interviews with cast and crew are placed over the top of the action they’re describing. The overall outcome is much more riveting than any old commentary track you get on a DVD or BluRay and so much better than what is on the new BluRay set that has just been released – if only the Star Wars Company did the extras in this style rather than just re-releasing the same bits over and over.

Anyway, have a look for yourself and see what I mean. I actually watched it in HD streamed to my TV via my Sony PS3, it looked great. I will post the video about Star Wars Episodes V and VI later after I have watched them.

Jobs to leave Apple immediately – must be very sick.

So today Steve Jobs has resigned from Apple immediately – this only means that he is critically sick I would think – poor bugger, cancer is a mongrel disease isn’t it?

His place at the top running the company will be filled by Tim Cook, who was Apple’s chief operating officer.

Steve Jobs has had a lot of health problems over the last few years that made him to take leave from the company. As recent as January he was taking an indefinite medical leave from Apple , that was the third time in recent years.

In August 2004, Jobs underwent surgery to treat a rare form of pancreatic cancer, in January 2009, Jobs said that he was suffering from a hormone imbalance that was stopping his body’s to be able to absorb certain proteins and in April 2009 he had liver transplant surgery.

It seems that maybe he isn’t well enough to stay on the job at Apple, he did look very, very frail and weak when he was doing the announcement of the new Apple headquarters.

Here is a little time line of Steve Jobs work-

• 1976 Co-founds Apple with Steve Wozniak.
• 1984 Apple introduces the MacIntosh computer.
• 1985 Jobs’ leaves Apple (pushed byCEO John Sculley.
• 1985 Founds Next Computer / Next Software.
• 1986 Buys computer graphics division of LucasFilm, and renamed Pixar.
• 1996 Returns to Apple as adviser when Apple buys Next Software.
• 1997 Named interim CEO of Apple.
• 2001 Apple introduces iTunes software and the iPod; the iTunes store follows in 2003.
  

PS3 update 3.70 for Australia – ABC iView problems

Well today I turn on the PS3 to watch a little ABC on iView and it pops up that there was a system update downloaded and ready to install. I go to install it – weary that an update might not be an actual improvement – and the agreement mentions that the TV tab will be changed to TV/Video Services.

Well, that seemed to be OK to me – maybe we will have a little more than ABC iView (a fantastic TV service – not just catch up TV but some shows are on iView before live TV), Seven Plus (which is really poor so I never use it) and Mubi (arty movies you need to pay for) . I installed the system update and it then auto-rebooted.

Now to check the cool new TV/Video Services. – what!!! nothing is there – iView on the PS3 is gone – iView is missing. Now I am cranky. The item I use most on the PS3 is not there. reboot, still not there. Start a game up and close it down then magically the new TV/Video Services is there!!!

how many articles you need to write for platinum level expert author at ezinearticles

I am not sure how many articles you need to write to get to be a platinum level expert author at ezinearticles but I have written only 11 articles and made that level. I have read that it takes at least 50 but that is not the case for me. Maybe I wrote better articles than most, maybe I was lucky – I don’t know.

What I do know is I got a little Christmas present from them. It was waiting for me when we got back back from a break at Noosa Heads. Gee, the postage would have cost them a bit to get to me in Australia. I got a little note saying Congrats, a notepad, a mouse mat (does anyone use them anymore?) and a stainless steel ballpoint pen. The pen is actually pretty nice – it’s light and writes really well, smooth like a rollerball pen.

If you want read this post on the top 20 article directories you should write for – ezinearticle is number one.

 

Great Windows Weather Gadget

I still have Vista on my notebook PC, it works fine for what I want and I liked the weather gadget that was in the side bar. If you dragged the gadget out of the sidbar it grew bigger and and gave you a forecast for 5 days. This weather gadget worked well I thought and I had no need to update it.

We recently got a HTC Desire mobile phone and the sense interface is great. The front scree with the clock and weather looks fantastic. I have found a Windows version of this Clock/Weather gadget. It is called HTC Home. It workd well, doesn’t slow my PC and looks just as good as on our HTC Desire. The animations look pretty but I wish they didn’t animate quite so long, 5 seconds would be plenty.

I did find that although you have a choice of two places it can get it’s weather information from – Accuweather and MSN –  one was not very accurate, strangely it’s name suggests it is accurate. Remember I am in Australia so maybe they are better in the US, MSN seems fine. Give it a try and see what you think www.htchome.org/en/

Australian PS3 October Playstation Plus

I have just checked what I get as part of my Australian Playstation Plus subscription for October. Not mentioning the items like games and themes that you get a discount, just the free stuff as that’s all I am interested in.

I have a trial of the new Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (2.3GB)

Beta access to the multi-player version of Assassins Creed Brotherhood Multiplayer (3GB) , not sure if I will bother with that.

A PS3 full game Street Fighter 2 Turbo – HD Remix – great classic bash’em up re-done with better graphics.

Another trial PS3 game – Ferrari The Race Experience – but this trial only works for 60 minutes even if you quit the game after 1 minute and want to return later – I am not bothering to download this poor effort – give us a proper trial or don’t bother. I hope no-one downloads this and then the games company might learn to do it properly.

Two mini-games – Yeti Sports and Aero Racer. Both seem OK, I really like these mini games on the PS3 (love last months VectorTD)

A Playstation One game Kula World

A couple of Dynamic Themes, Start The Party and Halloween – they say they are exclusive for Playstion Plus members, who knows.

Four avatars, I don’t bother downloading these either.

All in all , not bad. I am sure I am getting my subscription price covered with the freebies offered this and last month. Do others think they will get $70 of entertainment a year? That’s how I see it – To go and see a movie costs around $15 plus your popcorn so $70 for hours of entertainment seems good to me.

Assassins Creed Brotherhood multiplayer beta for PS3 Australia - GoldCoaster

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light for PS3 Australia - GoldCoaster

Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix for PS3 Australia - GoldCoaster

PDF to Word conversion, restrictions removal for free

I had a PDF file that I wanted to copy a little information from but it had PDF restrictions to stop you printing and copying any text. Well that was no good, there must be some way of copying that PDF text. I searched around and found a few programs that could take the restrictions off but then I found an ideal one – PDF to Word Converter 3 by anybizsoftware .

All the ones I looked at weren’t free and normally this one isn’t either but on there web page they have a link that takes you to there Facebook page – become a fan and they will email a registration key  – so you end up with a $30 program for free! Seems like they have apple mac and windows versions.

I tried the program out and it works just as they say – just run the program and it makes a fully editable word document – no restrictions and all formatting is is perfect. The PDF I used had tables, graphics, logos, all sizes of text and layouts and it worked perfectly. the word document is a perfect copy the PDF.
Is it worth $30? I don’t know, I guess so if you need it often. But a full legal copy for Free – what a bargain. Get it now while you can.

how to get free pdf restriction removal to word doc

Australian PS3 now has Plus7 TV channels

Our family has a slimline Ps3. I don’t play games much on it but my son does – what I mostly use it for is watching videos that are on the external USB hard drive (it’s great that you can plug in any old USB drive), watch videos streamed from my laptop (it sees it as a media centre or via Vuze),  and watch catch-up TV with the great ABC iView PS3 application. The Ps3 and iView team up nicely and it’s great to be able to watch a whole range of TV shows when I want to. It is simple to use and works well – not like the god awful Vidzone application.

One thing I would added would be more catch-up TV channels – I know I can always go to them via the internet browser in the PS3 but that is too awkward – I want a nice neat app like iView.

Well yesterday I noticed that in the TV tab under the iView logo was Plus7 – the catch-up TV channel from channel7 and yahoo. Excellent, one more channel to choose, although I would rather the Ten network if I could choose one. I clicked it and it seemed to work well using it’s menu. I did notice that it had only 18 videos in total and nearly all were shows that really failed in the ratings (like the magician show), so not really catch-up TV but showing mainly TV shows that are not good enough for prime time Seven. Some of their 7Two shows would be good – 007, the UK mystery shows and home shows. A pretty poor effort and I don’t really expect much from the seven network as they are the ones trying to push Freeview (which has in it’s specs all types of things to restrict viewing and force advertising – no skipping ads). And they were the ones that tampered with a car crash site to make the photos for the news better looking.

I clicked on one of shows and it just waited and waited until I left, did  not work. Later in the day I tried again and I notice the layout was a little different, it still would not play any shows though. So I left it as a bad joke thinking the 7 network still needs to fix it at their end – probably to figure how they can add 15 minutes of adverts into every 30 minute show (because I know it will be that bad).

Apple PDF Exploit in iPhone, Ipad, iPod Patched

At the moment there is a bug in the Apple iOS that is when you go to a web page and load a PDF file a hacker can get full control of your iPAD, iPOD Touch or the iPHONE. Basically that means all you have to do is visit a web site using the built in Safari browser, the baddy website will load a PDF document which contains a font that hides a hacker program. When your iPAD/iPHONE tries to display the PDF fileit run that program and the hacker gains complete control of your device. And I mean complete control – delete files, transmit files, install programs that can monitor things like online banking…

Well, Apple has finally got around to an update that fixes this exploit. iOS 4.0.2 for the iPHONE and iPOD Touch and iOS 3.2.2 for the iPAD. It patches the PDF exploit but, of course, if you have a jailbreak device, clears that as well. The patch doesn’t fix anything else except the PDF problem so if you don’t care about being susceptible or you want to keep the iPHONE jailbroken you could skip it until the jailbreak is updated.

The top 20 article directories that you should use

The top 20 article directories that you should use.

I know a few people that write articles and post them at Article Directories. The reasons they do this is they say it helps their websites get more exposure and power in ranking in the search engines. Of course not all article directories are the same, some are better than others.

I will start with what an Article directory actually is but you can probably tell just by the name. An Article  Directory is simply a website that has, or will have, a huge list of articles that are about all types of things. They get these articles from people writing them and submitting them in the hope that other people will find them and use them on their own websites.

So why use article directories? Well these articles will in turn bring added traffic to you website, a must if you want to make your site a success.  Article directories are growing rapidly, more and more are starting up every day. Because of this you must make sure to submit your articles to a directory that will make a difference. Think about these two points when choosing – what is the sites Alexa page rank as this shows how popular the directory is and what is the Google page rank because this give you an idea of the quality of links.
Anyway, after all this here is a great list of the top 20 Article Directories.

	URL	Alexa	Pagerank
1	ezinearticles.com	130	6
2	suite101.com	650	7
3	buzzle.com	878	5
4	helium.com	1733	6
5	goarticles.com	1856	6
6	articledashboard.com	2740	5
7	ideamarketers.com	3299	3
8	selfgrowth.com/articles.html	3958	6
9	amazines.com	4442	2
10	articlerich.com	5480	3
11	sooperarticles.com	5876	5
12	articlecity.com	5991	5
13	isnare.com	6507	6
14	submityourarticle.com/articles/	9046	4
15	articlecompilation.com	9732	3
16	web-source.net	10067	3
17	infobarrel.com	10279	4
18	site-reference.com	10436	5
19	abcarticledirectory.com	11228	3
20	articlestars.com	11265	2