» Posts Tagged ‘internet’
Too often have I experienced the doubled-edged nature of the internet: it’s a great tool, but also a great distraction. We all need to buckle down sometimes and get to work, and the insta-grat (yes) of the internet can be crippling. In comes SelfControl, a free and open-source application that blocks your own access to chosen websites for a designated amount of time. Hit the jump for the details. More »
Internet Piracy vs. Copyright Law: Watch 'The Pirate Bay - Away From Keyboard'
We recently mentioned the documentary TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay — Away From Keyboard as part of VHX’s drive to make strong independent work available direct-to-audience. TPB AFK is a documentary that follows three Pirate Bay co-founders as they face prosecution for aiding piracy on a massive scale (or, in other words, founding The Pirate Bay). Released for free on BitTorrent as well as on YouTube, the film raises powerful questions about piracy, intellectual property law, and an ungoverned internet, and gives us a glimpse into the lives of a few individuals who created a web portal that is still going strong even today. Given that law is so much slower to change than the internet, is the problem with the pirates, or with anti-piracy laws that may need some updating? Watch the entire 82 minute film below. More »
Is 'House of Cards' the Future of Television, or Simply a Forgettable Netflix Experiment?
On February 1st, Netflix released the first 13 episodes of the first season of House of Cards, marking a potentially monumental shift in the way we watch content. By now it’s very likely a number of you have seen the entirety of the series starring Kevin Spacey. While it’s not the first original series for Netflix (that would be Lilyhammer), House of Cards is one of the most (if not the most) expensive television shows in history, and has attracted some of the biggest names in Hollywood — like director David Fincher. But will the experiment work, or will binge-viewing ultimately hurt those who produce content? More »
Technology’s progression sometimes moves with consistent momentum, and sometime comes in spurts. For instance, processors of mobile devices regularly decrease in size and price with relation to power — while, at the same time, the speed of your internet connection may not change much at all for several years, and make a great leap whenever it does. Both of these tendencies of advancement seem to inform High Efficiency Video Coding, A.K.A. H.265 — the successor to that other codec with which we’re all quite familiar (H.264). Improving efficiency by around double, H.265 aims to set the standard for the next decade in video streaming and encoding — and it’s going to ease mobile data congestion and likely make 4K a reality much sooner than many would have anticipated. More »
There’s no doubt that things can get a bit confusing regarding non-integer frame rates — a decimal-specific frames-per-second count isn’t exactly an intuitive aspect of video. Of course, beginners can’t learn such distinctions if they’re going unspecified — a fact Vimeo has recently (and finally) addressed in updating their compression guidelines. Even more importantly, Vimeo is slowly but surely raising the quality ceiling in its encoding of your media — albeit in audio-only, in this case. More »
Community-based website Reddit has an ask reddit section wherein users can pose questions for other users (aka “redditors”). Redditor The.Quiet.Earth posed the question, “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?” In response, Prufrock451 (real name James Erwin) began writing a serialized story of this exact scenario. Madhouse Entertainment’s Adam Kolbrenner caught wind of the story after it hit the reddit front page, helped develop the story further, and sold the idea to Warner Brothers. Now called Rome, Sweet Rome, here is an excerpt from the short story as it first appeared on reddit: More »
Since launching my effort to make my first feature film, I started running a thin horizontal banner at the top of the site to let visitors know that my campaign is ongoing. A lot of filmmakers have blogs these days (present company included, obviously), and so I thought I might post about how to add an announcement bar to your own website. Typically you’ll want to run an announcement bar when something special is happening for a limited time: you might be doing a fundraising campaign of your own, you might have a newly released DVD, or you might be running a discount on a product you’re selling. If you’re curious about how to add a similar bar to your own blog, website, or portfolio, here are a couple of good ways of doing so. More »
Here are some quotes from an all-day Writers Guild seminar earlier in the year, wherein industry veterans talk about screenwriters using the internet to break into the industry. Another tip comes from John August, though you may not agree: use an email address from Gmail or your own domain. John’s one of the panelists here: More »
In Kate Ray’s 14-minute film Web 3.0 (embedded below), Clay Shirky asks, “does the world make sense, or do we make sense of the world?” In other words, does the infographic of web links at left resemble the universe because a natural relationship exists between all things, or does the infographic resemble the universe because whoever graphed the visualization made it look like the universe? Watching the short, I kept thinking: these charts are cool and all, but what does Web 3.0 actually mean for you and me? One guess: much better automatic filters; that is, Netflix‘s movie recommendation engine times a thousand (for a lot more than just movies). Here’s the video: More »
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