Well…Friday I waited in line for over 2 hours to finally give ‘ol Steve some of my hard-earned dosh. I’ve bought Apple products before, but unless I’ve given them as gifts, never kept the fucking thing. This is the first Apple product that I bought for MJS exclusively… I’ll recount the experience before I weigh in on my first 72 hours with the product.

The cats in Cupertino decreed that the new 3G iPhone could only be bought in Apple and AT&T stores starting at 8a on Friday. Guaranteed lines of zealots at the Apple stores…prompting me to think that I’d be safe arriving an hour early to an AT&T store mere miles from an Apple store. Not so much. At 7a there were 35 people in front of me…and every single fuck around me had an EDGE iPhone. I’m not exaggerating. Every goddamn person had a 1-year old, perfect-working-condition iPhone.

Now…I’m moving up from a Samsung a900 on Sprint, so the iPhone is whole milk to me. But I’ve spent some time with the EDGE iPhone and don’t find it to be incredibly handicapped compared to the 3G. The web access is faster, but all iPhones will get the 2.0 software…so we’ll be on a nearly-level playing field from what I can see. The most obvious advantage being that my phone was “only” $199, whereas the earliest adopters got horn-fucked last year.

Back to the lines. AT&T had deployed some Zealot Wranglers to keep the natives in czech, trained in the fine art of counter-intel. The agent for our portion of line was particularly vicious…claiming illogically that she was incapable of counting how many iPhones were available for purchase and beckoning everyone to eschew their jobs and stay in line no matter what happened. Luckily I was able to forward the trouble phone to my cell and remain away from the office until I had blown my wad…others were not so lucky. Two seething and sweaty IT pro’s in line behind me couldn’t handle the pressure and rolled out of the firing line mere minutes before I secured my prize.

With regards to the process, Apple screwed the pooch in my opinion. Last year some anti-zealots hacked their phones and whatever…so this year’s plan was to activate at the store on purchase. That plan will probably be fine after a few weeks…no so much on Friday. The entire central time zone was struggling to activate through iTunes starting at 8a. Case in point, it took the first guy in line over 30 minutes to reemerge with his activated phone. Luckily for us, the AT&T order-takers quickly decided to dump the activate procedure and I got my phone activation-free. And thus the activation process took about 3 minutes later on in the day.

So…you’re saying “MJS, how’s the fuckin phone?”

Pretty goddamn swell. I tried to give it a well rounded rinse over the weekend: making some long-distance calls, listening to a podcast (thousand cuts, y’all), watching a trailer, downloading some free apps from the new apps store, using google maps to find a Panera Bread, etc. Good shit. About half of my interweb browsing was done via my home wifi, but I was most impressed by how quickly the phone hopped from wifi to 3G to Edge when the signal strength demanded it. Definitely some quality there.

I’m impressed so far, and I’m certainly finding every reason to use the thing. However, I vow not to become the asshat zealot that will whip out the phone to counter a pilot when he claims our plane is delayed due to weather. Fuck him.

Video tutorial: unlock iphone

Prologue: My Hate for Sony

It was March 24th 2005. PSP launch day. Initially, when the PSP had been announced I was fairly excited. Finally, it seemed, a company was bringing to market a handheld media/gaming device that was geared toward the more mature, adult, crowd. It was going to have built in Wi-Fi, which meant internet access, and a high resolution widescreen display for both gaming and video playback. It also helped that it looked fuckin’ sweet!

As time went on and more was revealed I found myself becoming more and more hopeful about the device. For some time I had been wanting a device small enough to fit in my pocket
but versatile enough to allow me to watch movies, play games, surf the net, e-mail, IM, blah, blah, blah. Basically the Holy Grail of personal media and communication devices. Over time, in my head, I began building up the PSP into this device.

The good news was I was able to catch myself doing this before it actually came out and as a result I was able to apply some reason and talk myself down to a point where I decided against purchasing it on initial release. The bad news was both MJS and JT decided to buy one at launch, and the temptation to take advantage of the Wi-Fi network play between devices became too much to overcome. Hence I found myself in line at Best Buy on launch day and presently thereafter the owner of a shiny new PSP.

To say I was disappointed would be putting it mildly. Of the games shipped at launch 95% where bullshit and the other 5% just couldn’t fill the gap. But what really pissed me off were the overpriced UMD movies, lack of web browser, difficulty in video playback, and Sony’s total lack of any kind of online infrastructure.

As time went on and things didn’t improve I grew more and more bitter. Finally they released the web browser and anyone who used it, instantly knew how big of a piece of shit it was. For me it was the final straw and I ended up selling the unit to a co-worker in disgust, cursing Sony and vowing to never fall into their vaporware trap again.

Fast-forward to the launch of the PS3. With the difficulties it suffered (news of developers not really liking it, disappointing initial sales, only one or two good games available at launch, and the reversal of the EMOTION engine in the 40GB version) it was easy for me to build it into the PSP all over again in my mind. I instantly saw it as more bullshit from Sony that could have been a good product but instead will get short-changed and mismanaged into hell.

Despite all this the PS3 did have one major, and possibly redeeming, factor however. It had a Blu-Ray player! Now this was before Sony had won the HD format war and HD-DVD was still a viable alternative so it wasn’t a 100% lock for the PS3 but in my mind it was the most compelling reason the console had at that point to buy it. Alas, however, I was stubborn as ever and vowed I wouldn’t buy one solely on the grounds it was a Sony product.

The format war ended (rather abruptly) and literally overnight HD-DVD was dead and Blu-Ray stood victorious on the field of battle. The die was cast and the decision on what type of HD player we’d all be buying had been made for us.

A short time later JT posted an article on this very site asking the following question; Now that the format war was over does it, in fact, make sense to buy a PS3 given that not only can it be used a Blu-Ray player but also play next-gen level games? My response was immediate: Don’t buy it! We sparred some and MJS stepped into the ring pointing out the simple logic in JT’s argument that if one was going to buy a Blu-Ray player a PS3 would make the most sense since its price was in line with stand-alone players and it had the added advantage of being a gaming console. But again I was stubborn and wouldn’t relent! It was a Sony product so it was the devil!!

So I began looking into Blu-Ray players and found that the majority of reviews did in fact confirm the PS3 was the best player currently on the market. No really a surprising bit of news I suppose since it is a Sony device after all. I found myself giving it more and more thought and before long I started questioning my real motives for hating it. Of course I knew it all came down to the sour taste the PSP had left in my mouth. I knew I was being unreasonable and operating off emotion more than anything.

So finally one night I just made the choice. I knew I was going to get a Blu-Ray player sooner or later. I had the HD television already and the Comcast HD service had, by now, spoiled me on the quality. So I was at a crossroads: I could either keep my unreasonable dislike toward Sony, buy a stand-alone player for the same price as the PS3 (screwing myself out of the value it offered), or I could drop the bullshit “hate act” and make my choice based on reason. So I got the PS3. Yes it made me nervous and yeah I feel like I’m going out on a limb but I’m hoping in the end I can find some happiness with the device and maybe even put some of my ill-will towards Sony to rest.

Part I: Un-boxing

I got home, picked up the package from the apt. office, got it inside and opened it up. Everything that I ordered is there, thank God! Good job Newegg! My order consisted of the 40GB PS3 unit, 6ft. HDMI cable, and the Sony Bluetooth Blu-Ray remote, all of which I unpacked carefully. Call of Duty 4 had already shown up a day earlier and on the way home I had stopped at the local Best Buy and picked up 300 and Burnout Paradise.

Upon opening the console box I was presently surprised to find I had gotten the Spiderman 3 version. I suppose it’s no biggie really but when I ordered it online it didn’t say anything about the movie coming with it so it was a nice bonus since I wasn’t expecting it.

Upon unpacking the cables I must say I was fairly disappointed to find only a composite video cable included. I was already aware that I would have to provide my own HDMI cable but for the $399 cost of the unit you would think Sony could, at the very least, include a component cable.

The actual unit itself is fairly large, heavy, and sports a glossy black finish that begs to be covered with dust and fingerprints. The form factor of the box doesn’t really lend itself to fitting into a home entertainment setup but for my needs it integrates itself into my simple TV stand just fine.

Part II: Hardware Setup

In terms of actual hardware setup the cable connections were easy to make, though I couldn’t help but think a longer USB cable for the controller would have been nice. The touch sensitive power button is slightly strange to use but works fairly well. All in all I was able to get the unit hooked up and turned on in less than 5 minutes.

I’ll also mention that during no time while I was performing the actions in this review did the console ever reach a heat level I was uncomfortable with. It seems pretty well ventilated and I checked it frequently while playing games and movies. Yes, it heats up, but as I said it feels like the right amount of heat given the components in the console.

Part III: Online Setup and First Experience

First things first, get the controller connected and working. Even though the controller is wireless you have to use the USB cable to get things going initially. This involved nothing more than pressing the “PS” button on the controller and in a matter of seconds I was good to go.

After viewing the initial start-up screen the system began the auto detection of the HDMI input followed by the internet connection settings and I’m pleased to say both these stages completed without a hitch. A few brief seconds later I was asked to create a user profile and this is where I ran into my first annoyance, in the form of Sony’s decision to use the same telephone style keypad from the PSP for text entry. Yes, it’s functional, and for the PSP it’s fine, but c’mon guys this is a $400 dollar “complete home entertainment system” as you tout it. You can take the time to come up with a full-size onscreen keyboard.

A few steps later and the XMB dashboard loads smoothly while playing a nice clip of soothing classical music. XMB looks nice and runs smooth! There’s a SHITLOAD of options available. It’s going to take some time to go through them all so I decided to press on with other things.

I decided to load a custom background for XMB. To this end I copied a few images from my PC into a USB flash drive and plugged it into the PS3. While the flash drive itself blinked with activity, there was no action on the PS3 to indicate it had detected the drive. Finally I decided to navigate to the Photo section and was relieved to find the flash drive listed there. Still it would be nice if upon connecting a drive the system could give some indication of detection and perhaps prompt to display the contents of the device. Upon accessing the drive I discovered another little quirk when the system performed an “auto-scan” yet failed to find any pictures. To first get around this I moved the images out of the directory they were in to the root of the drive. Despite this change a second scan still came up empty. The final solution was to access the advanced options for the drive and choose the “view all” option which finally got the contents of the drive to load. After that it correctly picked up the images and I was able to view them and use the options to set the one I wanted as the XMB background pretty easily.

On a whim I decided to pop in a CD-R disc that contained some MPEG-4 encoded video clips. I was pleased to find that in this case I simply had to access the disc and it immediately displayed the clips. I was able to playback each one easily and they looked pretty good. I tried a few other clips that were encoded in MPEG-2 and was pleased to find the system played them fine. I’ll have to test more codec’s in the future (Divx) but my initial reaction thus far is thumbs up.

I decided to get some online action going next. First, things first, had to perform a software update. The update was largely automated once I chose it from the XMB menu and took about 5 minutes to download on my cable broadband connection. Another 5 minutes for the system to install it and I was good to go. Creating an online profile was pretty smooth and I was able to breathe a slight sigh of relief as here a full-size onscreen keyboard it used. This makes the frequent text entry go MUCH faster. The biggest gripe I had with the online sign-up option was the lack of graphic avatars to choose from. There’s a total of 22 pages with something like 8 avatars per page, which sounds like a good amount but most of them are fruity, bubbly things that won’t appeal to you unless you’re either a.) a 15yr. old girl or b.) a Japanese male. In the end I wound up choosing an 8 ball. Meh. All-in-all the online sign-up process took around 7-8 minutes.

After signing up I was unceremoniously dumped back to the XMB menu. It wasn’t really clear what had changed, if anything, now that I logged online. Some sort of dialogue box giving a brief run down of online options would have been nice here.

Presently I made my way to the Playstation online store. I had read previously that the entire store was getting an overhaul soon and it’s apparent from the moment the main screen loads it’s MUCH needed. The store is basically a quick and dirty adaptation of the Playstation website and as such doesn’t really suit itself to navigation using the PS3 gaming controller. The main problem is the navigation, specifically the annoying fact that the standard buttons you use to navigate XMB, and thus become familiar with, work with unintended results inside the store. For example normally the “O” button would take you back a step when navigating XMB. However pressing “O” while inside the store prompts you to exit the store entirely instead of taking you back a page as you might expect. Bleh!

My first download was the GTA IV trailer. When choosing a video to download it’s nice that it shows you how much free space you have on your hard drive, but it doesn’t show you the actual size of the video itself until AFTER the download starts! It would be nice if it showed that info before the download begins! Another gripe is the fact the trailer was only available in 720p. Maybe I’m nitpicking but one of the big draws of the PS3 is its ability to do 1080p. In my opinion all downloadable video content should be available in this format.
After the download was completed I found myself once again confused and disappointed as I wasn’t presented with any option to play the video! In fact, I had to exit the entire store and navigate to the video section in XMB to find the video. Another small inconvenience, yes, but an inconvenience nevertheless. The video itself ran smoothly and looked good. Can’t wait for the game! It looks like a shitload of fun!

I briefly poked around the options for the video itself and discovered it allows you to add some meta-data to the file in order to group it into an album. Probably an option I personally won’t use much but it’s a nice thing to have for those that may have lots of files.
Back in the online store I decided to check out the free wallpapers and was disappointed to find only 3 pages of content, all of which, had to do with games. Bah! Good thing you can make your own wallpaper! The video trailer section is equally shallow (3 pages) and doesn’t even have the latest trailers. Its possible what’s here are trailers for only Sony movies, which wouldn’t surprise me. On the plus side the trailers do offer a choice between 720 and 1080 video resolutions. There is also a section for Blu-Ray movie trailers (trailers of movies already on Blu-Ray disc) but in all honesty I have NO desire to watch any these videos.

Rounding out the store is the Game Demo section which from my brief foray into it looking promising. As I was anxious to move on to other things, I didn’t hang around here long and download any demos, but once I do I’ll post an update with my thoughts.

Part IV: Games

I purchased Call of Duty 4 to go with the console and later, once it arrived, picked up Burnout Paradise. One of the things I noticed about the games was not all of them support 1080p. On the back of the each game case you can find a list of what resolutions are supported. For CoD 4 both 720p and 1080p are listed with Burnout only supporting 720p.

I decided to try CoD first and after sliding in the disc I was presented with a message informing me the game had to be updated! Bah! The good news is the update only took about a minute to download and install so I wasn’t that bad. After the update the game loaded and here were I began to scratch my head. As I mentioned earlier the game says it supports 1080p on the box and the Activision and copyright screens are, in fact, displayed in 1080p. However when the opening cut scenes and game menu load they are only at 720p. Firing up the actual game itself also shows it’s only running at 720p. There’s no option in the game menu pertaining to resolution so I’m a bit confused as to exactly what’s going on. Not really wanting to spend the time to figure it out just then I decided to put the issue aside and simply get some game play in.

The game itself looks beautiful and runs very well! Without going into excessive detail concerning the actual game content (I hope to do a full CoD 4 review in the near future) I will say the game is pretty KICK ASS! I’ve only played the first 5 or 6 missions but already it’s been the most engaging game play I’ve enjoyed since the Half-Life franchise and on some levels surpasses it! Anyone who’s a fan of FPS games and hasn’t played this game is really missing out! It’s available for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 so pick it up if you haven’t already!

Next I popped in Burnout which loaded right up without requiring any sort of update. As I stated above Burnout runs at 720p and looks really good! Even though this version doesn’t have the “Crash Breaker” mode, found in previous games of the franchise, the city is now completely open ended (similar to Need for Speed: Most Wanted) and very big! The makers of the game have preserved all the fun and high speed action in the actual races and the graphics look better than ever!

So other than the quandary with the display resolutions (which hopefully I can figure out) I was overall pleased with the look and feel of the games.

Part V: Blu-Ray Movies

As I mentioned earlier the console came with Spiderman 3 and I picked up 300 separately once everything arrived. I also ordered the Sony Bluetooth Remote to hopefully help ease playback operations.

I decided to try out 300 first and after sliding in the disc it only took a few seconds to load up and begin playing. I have to say I wasn’t particularly blown away with the video quality and in some spots I could actually see some graininess. Don’t get me wrong it looked HD quality but I suppose I was expecting a somewhat better look from a movie like 300 in full HD. Despite this I ended up watching half the film and still enjoyed it. For comparison I tried Spiderman 3 next which, indeed, looked better than 300 and much closer to what I expect from a Blu-Ray movie.

For its part, the Bluetooth remote works very well and is pretty snappy in terms of response time. The setup of the remote was also pretty easy with the only step involving registering it with the console. This is accomplished via a wizard in the XMB options that makes connecting and managing Bluetooth devices a breeze.

Overall so far Blu-Ray to me seems like just another format. Granted it looks much better but I think I’ll need to watch some more movies and explore some disc features before I begin to really appreciate it. The good news is, though, I’ll now be able to provide reviews of Blu-Ray movies!

Part VI: Conclusion

Keeping in mind these are only my initial impressions of the console I will say, so far, I’m fairly pleased with it. While there’s some software quirks and functionality I’d like to see worked out and improved and the online store needs a MAJOR overhaul (which as I mentioned will be happening soon) and I still have a concern over whether or not it’s worth the price I paid I’m going to try and remain hopeful (if slightly cautious) for the PS3’s future.

I plan on providing more updates and insights as time goes on and I use the system more and learn it’s “in’s and out’s”. Stay tuned!

I’ve finally decided to beat Mass Effect. “Decide?”, you may ask. Yes, decide. I almost didn’t want to complete the game because I wanted to see and do everything the game offered. I was truly, and am still quite addicted to this game universe. Bioware as done such an exemplary job at story telling, character development, and visual creation you really want the story to continue well after the main objectives have been met.

Story

Since the game will be coming to PC, eventually, I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone, but I will confirm that it is worth waiting and playing for. Everything you do in game, from talking to people, killing them, or helping them affects the story and the world around you. And Yes, there is some alien pussy to shoot for as well.

Control

On top of a great story and convincing universe there’s also the gameplay, which successfully merges a number of game styles very well. For the FPS (or in this case TPS) fan there’s guns, grenades, and a crosshair. For the strategy fans there’s a time-freezing abilities selection screen and group tactics. For the RPG fan, you can kill, loot, skill, and level your customizable character. As you play through the game the controls begin to make a frightening amount of sense. Your decision making skills will really get a boost after a couple of hectic fire-fights. Yes, you are controlling, at times, 3 characters, about 16 abilities, 4 weapons per character, and worrying about health as well as shields, but Bioware made the steps between actions as short as possible. It starts to be second nature, moving your team into position, switching their weapons out if they get overheated, or using their abilities to free up time so you can deliver the fatal blow. Top notch.

Sound and Music

The music and the action are enveloping. I played through the ending twice and each time the stirring themes and great acting gave me goosebumps. As stupid as it sounds you actually feel a sense of real accomplishment at the end. I don’t think I really felt that before in a game…maybe shenmue.

Visuals

Jaw dropping. Though at times there may have been a framerate hiccup, most of the experience was smooth and seamless. They added a film grain and motion blur effect to the environment that really blurs the line between game and live action movie. Of course, when you’ve landed on your 100th planet or so, you’ll start to see some repetition or at least similarities in the terrain and colorscale, but you’re usually too busy on a mission or looking for mineral deposits to survey. (yes, there’s mining!).

Overal Score:

9.8

Now that I’ve taken the plunge on Fusion after using Parallels for about 1 year I feel that I can give a good review on the ups and downs of both packages. On the surface, it seems that both programs are too similar, in their looks and their feature set, to make a compelling argument for choosing one over the other. Parallels has had a head start in this niche. The options and integration features offered by Parallels Desktop reflect that. Even though VMWare is about 1 year behind, Fusion (despite some graphic flubbiness, which I’ll get to) takes said features and implements them the way they should have been in Parallels.

For those of you Parallels users out there (and I know “many” are reading this, ha) I’ll cut right to the chase. A dynamic disk image in Parallels takes quite a bit of time to compress, and most times doesn’t compress to the smallest size possible. In my experience, it took Parallels’ image tools, sometimes 10+ hours to full reduce the size of my dynamic virtual disk. As you all know, it will have to be compressed again because of Windows’ liberal use of disk geometry. This sucks for users, and is a colossal waste of time.

I just yesterday reduced the size of my Fusion image, converted from a Parallels image, and it took 25 minutes….from start to finish. It went from 28GB (max 30GB, with 13GB actual disk usage) to 13GB. All in a painless Fusion Tools process. I was up and running in no time. This is why you Parallels users should drop what you’re doing right now, and buy Fusion. Plain and simple. VMWare has a beta edition of their image conversion utility and worked flawlessly for me, which removes the concern that one would have when moving to a different application. Plus, Fusion starts and suspends faster, with less beachballing and system hiccups.

The only downside that I’ve noticed is that Fusion has an issue with Windows redraw when running Unity mode (called Convergence within Parallels) so that background Unity windows do not redraw their contents when dragged, until the mouse button is let go. This problem extends to the usage of Expose, so that the overlapped Unity windows have “impressions” of their counterpart windows when Expose is activated. I say, “Big Deal”. This will most likely be fixed in a patch, and besides being a little visually displeasing, it really doesn’t impact productivity to a great degree.

I’m totally happy with my switch to VMWare and I won’t be looking back to Parallels Desktop. I wish VMWare would post the differences in performance and the ease (and more importantly, speed) of virtual disk compression. These are vital metrics when making the leap. Too bad Sinbad didn’t chime in sooner about how much he loves Fusion on his Mac, because I would have taken the dive long before now.

Ya Boi Redscape here with a new edition of Shotgun Theatre for our loyal and devoted masses (all 3 of you). I’m firing both barrels this time around with two reviews: There Will Be Blood and Awake. So without further ado…

There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Andersons “There Will Be Blood” is at its heart a character study. And oh what a character it gives us in Daniel Day Lewis’s portrayal of Daniel Plainview, a pioneering oil driller and eventual tycoon. Anyone familiar with Lewis’s work behind the camera knows that his performances instantly command respect. His Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York still gives me shivers when I watch it. To say his performance this time around was astonishing would be downplaying it. I honestly can’t think of any other actor in today’s Hollywood that could have pulled it off. After seeing the film I can honestly say I’m in full support of his recent Oscar win.
One of the things I liked most about the movie was how it effectively captured the look and feel of the time. Rarely have I found myself so drawn in and transfixed by the settings of a film. The bulk of the action takes place in the American southwest during the early 20th century and Anderson effectively uses the quiet and desolate nature of the land to accentuate and lend power to the characters performances. The brutal nature and hardships of the mining and drilling are also captured and conveyed very well.
While we’re on the subject of Anderson it should be said his directing here is superb. He moves the film at a slow pace which allows the viewer to become fully engrossed in the richness and complexities of the characters. The first few minutes of the movie, during which there is no dialogue just action underscored by tense chords of music, are a perfect example of how well Anderson is in control of his craft.
Kudos also to the supporting cast, especially relative newcomer Paul Dano who turns in a particularly noteworthy performance as a corrupt and attention seeking preacher.
Overall I give the film top marks in nearly every category. A definite must see as well as must have for anyone’s collection.
Arousal Scale - Redscape for There Will Be Blood: Platinum Dipped and Diamond Tipped

Awake

I have to say I didn’t like Awake at first and it wasn’t until about half an hour into the film that I really began to get into it. Looking back on it now I realize I was trying to make the movie, in my mind, into something it is not. I was looking for the film to be fairly black and white in it’s portrayal of events and wasn’t expecting the moral complexities it presented me with instead. With that said, let me also state if metaphysics isn’t you particular cup of tea it may be best if you stay away from this one.
On the surface the film is about a young man who has inherited both his late fathers vast wealth and responsibility. The rub is he’s got a bum ticker that could go at any moment. Add to this a sexy fiancé, a disapproving and controlling mother, and a heart surgeon who’s up to his elbows in malpractice suits and you have the makings of a fairly cleaver thriller. On a deeper level the movie deals with issues of betrayal, morality, and second chances.
The twist in the plot is provided by a phenomenon known as Anesthesia Awareness. As you can probably guess the net result of this experience is being fully conscience, yet paralyzed during surgery. In this case heart transplant surgery. Not a fun time. The scenes involving the surgery were particularly terrifying. The rest of the movie involves a literal out of body experience as our protagonist races around the hospital and city trying to piece together clues and uncover an apparent plot against his life.
Now a few words on acting. Hayden Christensen, a.k.a. “Mannequin Skywalker”, turns in a fairly well performance, but he’s still plagued by a “woodenness” in his delivery at times. I still think he has what it takes to become a high caliber actor; I just think his technique needs some refining. Jessica Alba character was functional at best and it honestly felt like she phoned it in. Terrence Howard I’m convinced at this point could effortlessly play any role.
The real surprise for me however was how tender and touching the film turned out to be. It was almost as if midway through it transformed into a totally different movie.
Bottom line: Rent this movie or catch it on cable, not worth buying.
Arousal Scale - Redscape for Awake: Steamed Asparagus

From the great development company TastyApps comes a little gem that really streamlines the process of “online video acquisition” (aka, youtube ripping, aka, “That guy got popped in the balls!! *huh huh* I think I want me a piece of that there Flash video for my digital versatile disc player.”)

Anyway, here’s a little screencast, created for your viewing pleasure, showing off some of the more impressive features of this inexpensive and flexible little app.