All good things come to an end

Martin has closed doors of his DVD club. It wasn’t a surprise as things were slowing down a lot lately.

People’s perspective on movies has changed a lot. With all the piracy going on, people want to rent DVDs at the same time as movies are in the cinema. This alone pretty much means that you can’t be legid. You either have to cheat. Or break the though. Or both. Or you have to work really really hard (like finding new angles on the whole entertainment thing), which arent’ worth it anyway.

DVD prices are outragous. Check Amazon, for example. The DVDs are $15 USD on average. That’s about 6 CYP. With regular DVD rental prices at 1 CYP, it meas that each DVD has to be rented at least to 6 people to cover its own cost. Then some more to pay the office bills and then some to earn something for the owner.

But DVDs are also an extremely fragile media. After 6 people have watched the disk, it is all scratched and bent, so it needs to be replaced. Which is how much? Oh, yeah, right…

As much as I am saddenned by the news, I do understand the reasons behind the decision.

Cyprus Scout beta announce

I have been thinking a lot about my blog and ways to improve it. I was talking with some of you guys. And some of you were talking to me. I’ve got a few ideas in the process and I am going to try one of the big ones now.

While the site started mainly for myself (and it still is), it becomes more and more difficult to ignore the rest of you. And when I think about the rest of you, I get really confused as to what brings you back every time to read my blog. Some of you come here for the personal stuff. Some of you seek technical help. Some of you respect my opinion on the movies. Some of you are parents. Some of you like photography. Some of you are looking for more information about Cyprus. Some of you just like the way I write. That last one is probably the smallest group though which doesn’t even include me. Anyway, all these looks like a lot of sides to a single site. So, I decided to try a little separation.

There is plenty of choice. What should I move away? There are plenty of photoblogs on the web. Yet another one will just get lost among them. Movie review blogs are numerous aswell. As are technical blogs. As are parenting. As are personal. But there is a definite lack of Cyprus blogs. So I decided to try it out.

Cyprus Scout is a blog about Cyprus. There won’t be any politics. There won’t be any real estates. There won’t be any crap that half a million spammers are trying to promote. There will events coverage. There will be discussions about culture, history, and traditions. There might even be some humor.

I am also planning to expand it beyond personal. At the moment I am the only writer, photographer, and editor in chief for that site. But I will get more people to contribute. I even already know a few who will. It’s just that they don’t. Yet.

Anyway, the site is currently in beta. It needs a lot of work. And it undergoes a lot. It can break or misbehave. But I wanted to let you all know that it is there and that you can start using it. Register, comment, suggest, submit drafts, correct. In a week or so when the dust will settle, I will make an announcement for the wider audience – Cyprus forums, other blogs, and a couple of portals. Until them – report bugs and help me out.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Some random stuff for today.

These were shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-08-26.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

For today you’ll get only a couple of Cyprus bookmarks.

These were shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-08-11

Fedora Linux Core 4 is out!

I know that everyone is waiting for it, so I’ll break out the good news – Fedora Linux Core 4 is out. I am currently downloading it from one of the mirrors, but the speed is dicreasing. Hopefully I’ll have it before everything stops completely. I will upload all 4 CDs to Thunderworx FTP as soon as I have them. Meanwhile, you can read the Release Notes.

Update: Fedora Linux Core 4 is available via bittorrent.

Update: Official announcement.

Update: Fedora Linux Core 4 ISOs are uploaded to Thunderworx FTP. You can get them from here.