Hmmcast #161 mp4

Hmmcast #160 mp4

Last Thursday Sony released Piyotama the first puzzle game for the PS3 that’s available for download in the Playstation store. The price, a refreshing $2.99 rather than $4.99-$9.99 where most of the PS3 titles have been at to date. Piyotama has been added to the growing native 1080p PS3 games list.

Hmmcast #159 mp4

Since Google improved upon their Gmail spam filtering and auto-deletion, I haven’t had any problems with the 2.8 GB (and growing still, right?) storage space allotted, but that doesn’t stop the Google Giants from offering additional storage to others who might need or want it — at a fee.

Using Google Purchase Storage you can buy up to 250 GB of more storage for $500 a year. 6GB will set you back 20 bones a year.

Microsoft Live Skydrive
Microsoft has also released a beta of Live Skydrive which offers 500 MB of space for free to store and share files.

Pictured above, when I first logged in with my @live account it showed me as having “no name” and even after I updated the profile, I still had no name in Skydrive (bug?). So I switched to my established .NET account, the artist formerly known as Passport, navigated back to skydrive.live.com, accepted the terms and there I was, complete with my dusty Live Spaces profile.

Using Skydrive is straightforward. Just upload a document, picture or video from your hard drive. File size is limited to 50MB per file which could be a problem with videos. Today’s Hmmcast demonstrates how easy it is to upload a video and add it to your blog.

As Read Write Web notes, the online storage scene is a crowded field. I think Google and to a lesser extent Microsoft will be more successful than most the established smaller players simply because of who they are. People who already have an established Picasa photo account or Live Spaces blog will be more likely to want to acquire more storage in those applications than seek out a third party option.

500MB isn’t very much space for video which is currently the only thing I use for storage outside our web hosting and Libsyn gives me 250 MB of fresh space every 30 days to add new videos for $120 a year. Same deal on bandwidth (no additional bandwidth charges).

I can definitely see the advantage in something like Amazon’s S3 storage for sites and services that need to scale up to huge audiences and/or offer gigantic files and have been keeping that in mind as a way to minimize hosting costs.

But don’t forget your web host
If storage is all you need and not a bunch of bandwidth to burn, consider contacting your website hosting company. We added an extra 80GB drive to one of our dedicated servers a couple years ago and the hosting company just gave it to us — for free. Normally they would have made it a one time charge of 100 bucks which included mounting to the dedicated box. I’m guessing that same hundred bones would get more like 200 GB+ drive today. No additional monthly fee, no hassles, just extra storage added to your website.

You can have this storage space placed in non-public areas if you want private online storage space.

Hmmcast #158 mp4

Hmmcast #157 mp4

We saw these Oreo Cakesters at the store and picked up a box of them. They are good. Too good. Damn you, Nabisco!

Hmmcast #156 mp4

Since Microsoft announced the reduced price and Toshiba made the 5 HD-DVD videos for free offer, we’ve been waiting for the first retail store in our area to offer the deal. On the first of August we visited the local retailers and none of them knew about the deal. A week later and Best Buy had the HD-DVD drives along with paper copies of the mail-in offer from Toshiba.

Looking for a list of 15 HD-DVD movies you can choose from? They are separated by the following five different categories:

Category A
*Apollo 13
Seabiscuit
The Chronicles of Riddick

Category B
Casablanca
Constantine
*Dukes of Hazzard

Category C
Four Brothers
*Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
SKy Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Category D
The Rundown
*Blazing Saddles
US: Rattle and Hum

Category E
*U-571
The Perfect Storm
We Were Soldiers

How to get your 5 HD-DVDs
The movies with *asterisk are our pending choices (we haven’t mailed the offer back in yet, so let us know in the comments if you think we’re missing a better choice). In order to receive the HD-DVD movies you need to fill out your name, address, phone, email and choices along with the original UPC code located on the outside of the HD-DVD player box. The original or a copy of the cash register receipt for the player purchased between 3/107 and 9/30/07. The fine print says to allow 8-10 weeks for shipping (yowsa!). After that you can call 1-800-405-7520.

Toshiba reserves the right to substitute titles.

HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray
Since we now have both, I’ll soon be able to offer a customer opinion on which looks better on our Samsung HDTV at 1080p. Blu-Ray was first reviewed here back on Hmmcast #34, January 4th.

My early opinion? I like how the PS3 upscales the DVD and allows stretching to fit the full screen. The PS3 seems to do a little better job upscaling existing DVDs. Does the Xbox 360 allow you to stretch the DVDs? The manual doesn’t say anything, but a Google search led me to this May 2007 post:

There are 5 display modes: auto, letterbox, fullscreen, stretch, and native. You can access these modes while watching a video by pressing Display on your remote or A on your controller.

I just tried that and the letterbox mode worked the best. The stretch mode didn’t look right, leaving some of the text along the bottom of the screen cut off. Points to the PS3 for what appears to my naked eye anyway as better upscaling.

More review time needed to compare HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray.

We’ve watched more movies in Blu-Ray format than HD-DVD and while both are clearly an improvement over DVD, is it that much better that it warrants all the extra money required? You need a 1080p TV, HDMI cord and PS3 or HD-DVD player. Seems like an individual decision as to whether it’s worth it or not financially but readers on a budget (and who isn’t on a budget?) should be cautioned not to run out and buy into either technology yet.

So why did we do it? We’re still exploring the many wonders of 1080p, trying to see if it’s all it’s cracked up to be. So far I’ve been more impressed with the PS3 and the highest resolution which appears to be what Sony wanted everybody to go out and do: purchase a bunch of expensive hardware. That’s not a very family friendly promotion strategy which sales of their consoles seem to be showing.

The biggest problem with both next generation movie format remains selection.

We can’t get anywhere remotely close to the title selection, especially TV shows, that we can get with DVDs. It’s a catch-22 as more titles won’t be coming until there is enough adoption. I heard something about the complete first season of Heroes being available on HD-DVD but haven’t seen that in any retail store locally yet.

The HD-DVD combo option is somewhat attractive. For a few bucks more you can get both a normal DVD version of the movie and HD-DVD on the same disc. There are relatively few movies that are worth watching repeatedly and thus buying and taking home. We tend to treat these few titles like we’ll just buy as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray instead of spending the money to see them in the theater. Two theater tickets plus gas to/from the theater, popcorn and snacks costs between $40-50. Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are less expensive and you can watch them as many times as you want. You lose the social activity points of the movie theater experience for whatever it’s worth.

Gaming seems to be the best practical use of 1080p at the present time, but as noted recently there is a limited number of native 1080p games. Games like Dragon’s Lair are coming out in HD-DVD — already available in Blu Ray for $49.95 — and these are all new transfers from the original film include the original game sounds and no pauses according to the FAQ.

We already have Dragon’s Lair, Dragon’s Lair II and Space Ace in DVD format (the 20th Anniversary edition). Love the original Dragon’s Lair. Think we paid like $20 for all three of them in a 20th Anniversary Special Edition at Best Buy. Will the HD-DVD version of one of the three games be worth over twice the price? Probably not unless you are a diehard fan.

That’s what all this next generation video and high resolution television stuff seems like: made for hardcore fans. Those wanting the highest quality video and gaming experience possible. I’m sold on the gaming part but will need more time to see how important it is with the video. Perhaps sacrilege to nextgen movie fans but Movies in DVD format still look good enough to me.

Hmmcast #155 mp4

One of the first things we noticed about the PT Cruiser was the sound of the trunk opening.

Hmmcast #154 mp4

Hmmcast #153 mp4

Hmmcast #152 mp4

I’m not allergic to many things, but very allergic to bee stings. Doesn’t help that bees love it under the eaves in our house. We knock down the hives, but they keep coming back.

This morning I counted eight developing bee hives around the house (see video). In the past, the hives haven’t bothered me that much because we haven’t done a huge amount of outdoor stuff, but this year with the new barbecue and pool, we’re outside more at home and these bees need to go. A lot of the bees are landing in the pool and dying too making it one more thing to strain out of the pool. I know all the good things that bees do for mankind, so it’s nice to see them buzzing around, but they need to build their homes elsewhere.

As you might expect, it doesn’t make the bees too happy when we knock their homes out of the eaves.

Been thinking about using something like Demon WP, but curious if there are any other good home remedies for keeping bees from building hives under the eaves? Something you spray on? Perhaps something that’s environmentally friendly?

What do you use under your eaves to keep the bee hives at bay?