Month: June 2006

Skype and PayPal are working on the integration bit that couldn’t have sounded more logical. You can read more about it and even see the screenshot of the upcoming Skype release at this Gizmodo post.

I came across this post in Life Hacker, which talks about new blogging service – Vox. Life Hacker article calls Vox “LiveJournal for grownups”.

I’ve looked around the Vox website and I think that “MySpace for grownups” is a somewhat closer definition.

Vox provides a nice interface, functionality for blogging text, images, audio, and video, and integration with a whole bunch of existing services – Flickr and YouTube most notably.

It looks like it’s exactly what the World Wide Web needed.

Once again I’m going to link to Scott Adams’ blog. This time though, it’s not about humor. He has this nice entry about television. Here’s the relevant quote:

When people tell me that they enjoy movies, but they don’t watch television, I generally assume one or more of these things to be true:

1. They don’t have a DVR (poor backwards bastards)
2. They haven’t sampled any of the good shows.
3. They are lying.

I am one of those people who claim not to watch television. I guess you can call me a lier. Or maybe not. It’s just that there are different ways to define “watching television”.

When I say, that I don’t watch television, I don’t mean that I never switch on the TV set. I do. But when I do, I do so purposefully. I choose when and what to watch. I don’t just switch on the TV whenever I am in the room, and let it be a background noise.

If I know that a good movie or a BBC documentary will be on, I try to catch it. More so, I don’t limit my television experience to the TV broadcast that we have here in Cyprus. I get my share from the web. For example, I am watching “The Daily Show” fanatically. I only wish I could see full programs on TV.

And here is another point about television. Scott Adams talks about US television. It’s a totally different thing from Cyprus television, which sucks so much that not all grandma’s can stand it. If I had access to American cable, I guess, I’d be glued to the screen half the time. But I don’t. So I can pretty much go around and say that I don’t watch television.

Things might change pretty soon though, with PrimeTel pushing out it’s Triple Play service, which will include a 100+ channels. Most of those will probably suck too, but I know for sure that there are some good ones.

I should have Triple Play installed within the next month, so I’ll let you know how good it is and how my television watching will change.

I’ve been a YouTube addict for some time now. But I think I am getting over it now. With popularity, the quality of content started to degrade. Too many amateurs, too much of boring stuff.

Thankfully, there is an alternative. MetaCafe is some sort of (I guess) pre-moderated site, that features only the cool stuff. It has a similar recommendation interface, but the player doesn’t always work as seemlessly as YouTube’s. Overall though, it’s one cool resource to fight the boredom.