Thanks to 4TV.com you can watch obscure TV programs and old old movies on your PC for free. There seem to be no limits to the B-grade and black and white offerings; dubbed, out-of-sync foreign films and programing that was probably a big hit on ex-pat TV in India in the 60's. But hey, beggars can't be choosers and at least 4TV have made it a lot easier to find material than Comcast ever could.

The content

I had a few minutes of fun this morning checking out the main menu on the left. Under Humor I had a drop-down (or was it drop dead) choice of related channels. I found the Three Stooges in glorious monochromatic technicolor. Don't you just love slapstick? No!

Ramping up the action a little bit, I tried to see how scared I could make myself. The above screenshot includes a still from a horror film where actors speak without opening their mouths. Clever fx, but horrific TV that makes you cringe not jump.

Obviously I was obliged to zoom in on the adult channel, but it wouldn't load. Maybe, like me, it was tired?

Feel the quality, check the bandwidth

In the early days of internet TV, I recall dropped programs, dodgy pixelated images and a scroll through every Quicktime hiccup known to man. Well, in the here and now of a high speed internet 24/7 service, nothing has changed.

To be fair, the pictures that I got were initially quite good quality in the default size. (I didn't like to push it with full screen, you never know what gremlins might have appeared and tainted this review!) But I don't know how many times the picture stalled or turned psychedlic on me. This is similar to satellite TV, so the cable guy without an agenda told me.

Navigation

The menus are great compared to real TV and there are 250 channels in easy-to-scan sub menus. They have definitely made it easier than ever to get Zapping Fever !

Cost

Did I mention it is FREE too. They make their money from Adsense, which is kind of unimaginative, but a start for the company who provide the service, and not too intrusive for us viewer..

Conconclusion

I think 4TV need to partner with Comcast or another provider on the delivery side and shame those robbing bastards into taking responsibility for the smooth delivery of content they carry over their tubes. Until then, this sketchy TV service will remain quirky. A shame because there was a lot of good/curiosity stuff to see, just not all the way through.

Overall it is worth checking out 4TV, and worth them staying the course and competing with Youtube for this niche of recycled oldies. Someone somewhere has not seen The Three Stooges, and 4TV could convert them to a friend for life.

If you ever want to spend a few minutes browsing through a tech-based comic with a bit of class, check out Ctrl-alt-del. According to Wikipedia (ie Tim Buckley, the author of the comic?) it has a gamer-based story-line which, like all good entities, has evolved over time. No longer reliant on one hit gags with a couple of characters, readers are now treated to longer story lines with a cast as well.

It isn't rocket science story-telling, but the strips I read appeal to my sense of humor, even though I have no interest in gaming! Call me an old fart, but I don't understand the gamer culture of staying up all night and eating chips and talking monosyllabically to co-gamers with my eyes glued to a screen. I already have a TV and family in place for that pleasure..

Although I say that I am not interested in gaming, my ears prick up when I hear the name EA and Nintendo bandied around by stock-pickers in pin-stripe suits. Their fascination for golf games has spilled over into the huge market potential for all things video game! Anyway, judging by the curves on the charts, the brokers and Ctrl-alt-del authors have their fingers on a strong and popular pulse.



I never heard Ctrl-alt-del referred to as 3-finger salute before, but I salute this comic, and if Nintendo shares continue to do well, some smart cookies will earn enough to buy a Wii, which in my opinion is the best hi-tech doorstop on the market .

Back in November I mentioned a few prolific forum contributors. Time marches on and the stats still prove that there are some really committed and knowledgeable folks out there, like below, on the Apple forum.

The prolific forum contributors rarely fail to help the real desperadoes whose bombproof Mac is dying, or more likely, crippled by hundreds of useless programs. ( The Windows switchers tend to download willy nilly once they realise they cant get a virus!)

The forum generates competition between helpers, and the good ones clock up lots of bonus points for Solved questions - as you can see above, the more they help, the more points they get... this is great for their kudos, and great when us saddoes are on our knees praying for assistance.

I know enough to be dangerous

At the time of writing the last article, the Apple forum was a playground for me, and I was happy to help the poor saps struggling with silly little niggles. 90% of computer issues are solved with tiny adjustments and as I am from the school where you learn by making every small mistake in the book, I had my uses dishing out glorified placebos.

After one episode, though, I accepted I am more artist than technician and would never progress much beyond enthusiast. Basically I had pointed someone in the right direction and to solve the issue he had to launch a utility and go through a few easy-to-follow stages, all prompted by the utility. It seemed obvious to me that if he had never used it before, he would read the warning text. Oops.

I was blown away when he wrote back calling me all sorts and for some reason, he must have called his friends and little old Ed was dragged over the coals for failing to point out in big bold letters that if the person I was helping did this one particular move, it would solve the issue but wipe the hard drive!

Thereafter I leave it to the big boys to cope with the cringing noobies.

To help or not to help

I don't know if it is healthy to spend 4 hours a day as a volunteer on a help forum, especially when it helps out the customers of a company that makes hundreds of millions selling reliable hardware and software, but each to their own. I rate the internet on what it has done for me and overall, it has been a great platform for the helpful out there.

So, to end on a helpful note, if you are like me and have copied files from one hard drive to another and need to change all permissions in a folder, I recommend BatCHmod! Yawn.

Some shock jocks are good, like Howard Stern. I have no gripe there, which is just as well as I am sure if I got in his line of fire I would end up divorced and picking colors for his wedding to my ex-wife. No, my mini rant is at lame-0's Anthony and Opie.

Anthony and Opie

(I thought that was Oprah Winfrey at first billing!) They have plenty of rude factor in their show, so no lame-o-ness there, but now they are back in their seats after a 30-day suspension, their response was, business as usual. Doh. If that is the case, get ready for another suspension, and another and another, until the show is so neutered it ends up like TV's Opie show minus mega audience giveaways.

Maybe the next potential suspension will be brushed under the carpet in a welter of sincere apologism, but surely, if the shock jocks fell into a sexual assault routine again and apologised as shock jocks should respond - with disdain - XM would have no other option but to take them off air again. (Disdainful response, yes, because it is only radio, and if you don't like them, then turn them off.)

Anyway, however they spin it, it isn't business as usual at all at the Anthony and Opie Show.

Shocking loss of freedom

In my humble opinion the main twist to this particular case is that more freedom of speech has disappeared into hyperspace!! As I said, censoring any radio is dumb, especially satellite radio but, the off button and commonsense self regulation on the part of the listener has been hijacked by knee jerk executive decisions. The independent, I mean partners (with Sirius) satellite radio company have taken shocking jocking into censorship territory after bowing so magnanimously to political, I mean merger correctness?

Instead of censoring, they could mute the transmission I guess. Silent shocking radio, that should bomb as well as Sirius share prices. Or do what the UK government did years ago and made the BBC etc substitute the Sinn Fein politicians' voices with an actor's voice, to somehow diminish the impact of the words!

And another thought. If these shock jocks already moved from terrestial to satellite for unacceptable behavior, where do they go next? Deep Space Radio? Thinking aloud, there are benefits to the new frontiers and, who knows how many gazillions of new listeners they could have? According to some science show I was watching, statistically there are 1 million lumps of rock with the same atmospheric conditions as our little earth, so there must be some alien political leaders out there who won't mind being violated on air.



Thanks to The Motley Fool for inspiring me this sticky Monday morning. They have a pretty neat beta site going on with lots of fun for wannabe stockpickers. Don't take any notice of me, though. I bought AAPL for $8.50 and sold at $20. Now they are $125 and still rising!

Anti-Matter Sputum From Beyond, the appropriately named, Cyber Tuberculoisis Pounder, or the Iron Turtle Blaster are just 3 of the Super hero names generated at random for your delight. And it is just one of many random generators from the site, Generator Land. It is a blast, especially when you get comments from people like The Nuclear Flatulence Bouncer!

Joke Opener generator

The Joke Opener Generator gives you a creative joke opener without the fuss of having to remember the punchline. That's right, you can't get these jokes wrong!

Check that out, cheesy jokers, and finish this opening line.

Eight drug-addled priests walk into a pizza hut...

Add in the Emo haiku generator, and the random excuse machine too, and before you know it, you will be ready for anything.

Thanks to Michael for sending me the details. If you have a joke site that I could bring to people's attention, email Ed.

According to the rules of the game, you can have between 1 and 63 letters and/or digits in a domain name. Well, you never could have 1 number and now you can't have 1 letter either , because the rules have been evolving.

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I am all for web creativity and technology and all that wow factor flash stuff, but I can't recommend callling by Yugop if you just woke up on a Sunday morning. Monochrome, motion and nauseating dialling tones. Let me out of here.

This is clever. Is Beggr for real, at over £800-worth of donations?



There was once a radio station that collected £10k from listeners who responded to a plea, "Send in money to the station." No explanation was given as to what the money was to be used for! They returned every penny, after a good laugh.

WMDtalk may blow you away - metaphorically - but it isn't about Weapons of Mass Destruction and none of the chit- chatting is about where to get the best deal on a non-existent war head!! WMDtalk stands for webmasters manage domains.

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You may recall the heatmap statistical analysis tool called Crazy Egg. A graphical view of how visitors interact with a web page. ViewFinder is another GUI heatmap option that requires no installation on your server, just plonk it in Firefox or in this case, a blog post, and publish.

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Going viral is a fast way way to attain on-line riches. The creator of bla.st has a potential virus on his hands. Euhh.

Bla.st is a sophisticated webby 2 re-work of the simple business card idea and looks set to make web site owners the world over salivate with envy and think "If only I had thought of that!"

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...there was no sign of one single embed Youtube vid on our blog at 1.48 this morning. They were down. Let's hope their new concoctions are worth the wait.

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After subscribing to the Wondir directory, we received an alert about a question, "How do you get around Fluffy?" Google is our friend in such circumstances and I ended up on one of the whackiest websites ever.

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Firstly, congratulations to the Mac screensaver for capturing this pesky little scroll mid unfurl, or was it on its way back down? Either way, these are the words that Phrazr profess to immortalize for John Wilson from Washington for $5. My $5 says that everyone bar presidents will be forgotten within 3 generations. Thanks to Webby's world for the idea

I found a wierd link in Technorati related to our blog. After some digging, it appears that the content of one of our features about Jackass brain splats of the week was scraped up by some Bit Torrent software called, Snarf-It!

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The world record sale of a domain name to a Russian vodka conglomerate raised some eyebrows. Although the people currently owning beer.com, martini.org and whisky.jp were probably thinking big bucks lie ahead, the former vodka.com owner is hoping he doesn't go the way of others who have irked powerful Russians. He was last seen drinking heavily en route to Hamburg via London. (World record spotted on WallStreetFighter)

Dave Barnes has moved to another spot. Still the best ever website, just relocated for the New Year

Pre-selling is common practice nowadays, presumably so companies can guage demand ahead of time and produce accordingly. It sounds like the good folks at Agloco are doing the same, promoting a great new way to earn money: paid to surf via a View bar. It sounds interesting except:

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The controversial exposé of a dodgy navigation sidebar´video in a money-from-home website has moved to a new home

There is nothing wrong with being helpful, and nothing wrong with frequenting a forum, but do Apple, Digg and Wondir contributors have no life outside the computer room?

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There is an increasing number of people who visit this site at least once a week, so there is a suggestion that we are doing something at least half interesting.

As part of our general plan to do this properly and make the blog sustainable, we are in the process of cranking up the features on the website. Let us know what you think, and most importantly what doesn't work or do it for you.

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You spend days, weeks or months preparing content and uploading, tweaking, and loading some more. You rack up some financial costs too. Unless you are a pirate, the website software sets you back a few to a few hundred dollars, or if you are an incompetent like us, you stomp up the crown jewels for a developer's time and expertise.

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One of the many visitors to the Spreading santorum webpage - the one about all things wrong with the Republican congressman, have put out the word to get to number one in google.

Thanks for sharing, C.L. Spreadingsantorum.com is currently the second thing that comes up when you search "Rick Santorum," and that is simply unacceptable. So let's get to work people: Google "Rick Santorum," then click on this webpage. Let's get on top of Rick Santorum -- it's where we belong!

So that is how you do it?!!!

Ed the Editor, click, Ed the Editor, click, Ed the Editor, click,　Ed the Editor, click,　Ed the Editor, click, Oh well, still number 1,250,000!