AppleTV is no longer the only player in the streaming movies to your TV game. Netflix has teamed up with Roku to create a $99 box that allows you to play any Netflix Instant content you wish. The good news is that it is also HD ready. I’m going to order one for myself today!
Check it out at http://www.roku.com/netflixplayer/
What started as a continent-spanning online fling in WoW has ended with child abduction charges for 31-year-old Tamara Broome of Australia. She came all the way to South Carolina to be united with her underage virtual lover. It sounds like police are still investigated and there could be a bit more to the story…like maybe the boy’s parents were on to the whole thing and they set her up.
Now it’s being reported that YouTube is Rickrolling all its users…at least in Australia and UK. For April fools of course. However, I suppose the article itself could be an April fools joke…let’s see…yep, au.youtube.com does in fact redirect you to that infamous video from all the featured video links.
We were fooled…and now they admit it was a hoax. Somehow I find this pretty funny - high-brow newspaper Rickrolls the entire world.
You know a net fad has gone mainstream when the NY Times picks up on it. Speaking of internet memes, check this out.
We’ve seen some pretty geeky marriage proposals - but so far, this takes the cake! This guy actually wrote a complete homebrew Nintendo DS game to propose to his GF after she reached a certain score. Very clever…I wonder how hard he made it to attain the correct score? Perhaps it was also a test to see if she was worthy.
Before his WoW addiction, he was happily married and employed as an IT specialist at a leading bank. Now he’s divorced and working in a fast food restaurant. The movie Second Skin takes a look at stories like this, which are becoming all too common. This article has some more information - apparently the film was well received at the SXSW festival.
What should you do if your mom or dad asks to be your friend? And should parents be using sites like Facebook to track their kids? Washington Post has an interesting article tackling these tough questions. I should think parents would create a fake profile (maybe posing as a hot member of the opposite sex of the same age but in a different town) before friending their kids - you would get much more useful information that way! My favorite quote: “I am excited to make a new friend so I click on the link. I could not believe what I saw. My father! This is an outrage!”
Frustrated by the lack of police patrols, Atlanta bar owner Rufus Terrill through together his own robotic security guard - using an old BBQ smoker. It’s remote controlled, has night vision, and a water cannon and loudspeaker to annoy drug dealers, hookers, bums and other neighborhood pests. Too bad it’s not autonomous…maybe he’s working on that.
The same blog has an update on this story…Bungie Studios sent the unlucky kid an amazing array of signed and limited edition Halo 3 gear. I think that more than makes up for MS cleaning off his signed case (if indeed that is what happened to it). Internet wields its awesome power to make things right again…now redditors and diggers can go back to posting lolcats, taser stories, and anti-Hillary articles.