Guest Blogger, Author at Zatz Not Funny!

Oscar Screeners & P2P Sharing

Every year Andy Baio does a very cool thing, he tracks how quickly Oscar-nominated films are leaked online to P2P networks. It’s interesting for a number of reasons, but primarily for demonstrating how unreliable the actual Academy members themselves are in keeping Hollywood’s goods off the Internet. The annual results are relatively similar: usually within … Read more

New Codec Support in Windows 7

An interesting bit of news from the doom9 forums. As anyone who is testing the Windows 7 beta has discovered, and as the above screengrab shows, Microsoft is breaking with tradition and including more codec support in the upcoming Windows bundle. Previous Windows versions did not even include MPEG-2 decoding, which proved to be quite … Read more

The New Adventures of Old Joost

This post’s author, The Media Patriot, is a fellow consumer who enjoys music and television but condemns DRM. His pseudonym pays homage to the original participants of the Boston Tea Party. Remember back in the Autumn of 2006 when the hotly anticipated “Venice Project” promised all that it’d do for television, what ebay and Skype … Read more

Sports, myp2p.eu and the VideoLAN Media Player

This post’s author, The Media Patriot, is a fellow consumer who enjoys music and television but condemns DRM. His pseudonym pays homage to the original participants of the Boston Tea Party. Are you getting all the sports coverage you want from your cable or satellite provider? Ever wonder if that UEFA Euro 2008 soccer match … Read more

OTTO Wireless MP3 Player Reviewed

Guest blogger Kevin Groppe is a digital media enthusiast, located in the DC metro area, who covers media centers and home theater computers at Floppyhead.com.

Two things I hate about exercising with my current MP3 player are how the cable from the player to earbuds constantly bounces around and how covered in sweat my MP3 player gets when I hold it. With this in mind, OTTO has developed a Wireless MP3 Player Headset.

The unique concept behind the OTTO Wireless MP3 Player Headset is that it combines an mp3 player and headphones into one compact device, eliminating the wire from earpiece to MP3 player. For most people, carrying around your entire music collection in your MP3 player is overkill. 10,000 songs in the palm of your hand is great for long vacations or business trips, but not necessary for your commute or trip to the gym. OTTO embraces this fact and has developed an MP3 player that has a useful form factor with the following specs:

PS3’s Virtual ‘Home’ Delayed

Bad news for PS3 owners… Looking forward to setting up your new digital digs in the upcoming “Virtual Home” world coming to the Playstation Network? Well real-estate still isn’t for sale, and it won’t be for a while. In another embarrassing blow for Sony, the much touted “Virtual Home” has been delayed until Spring 2008 … Read more

Dragon’s Lair HD DVD Review

Infinite free respawns never felt so good? Kevin Tofel, of jkOnTheRun, shares his Dragon’s Lair thoughts and pics.

Ah, 1983. A time when I was waiting for my growth spurt, had no gray hair and could often be found in an arcade or pounding away on my Commodore 64. I enjoyed all different game genres in the arcade: I didnât discriminate on which machine was worthy of a quarter. However, I was always drawn to Dragonâs Lair which was one of the first laserdisc-based games. Maybe it was the movie-like cartoon graphics that captured my attention. (Actually, it was more likely glimpses of the spunky liâl Princess Daphne, but I digress so letâs get to current day.)

Fast forward to 2007. Iâm still waiting for that growth spurt, I bleach the grays and have no time for arcades these days. And whatâs with these âtokensâ? everyone keeps trading real money for: is this Second Life in the real world? No, these days, I stay home and play games in high definition on an Xbox 360 and 60-inch Sony SXRD set. Itâs all exactly as I would have predicted back in 1983, of course. ;)

Thatâs why I was excited to get a copy of Dragonâs Lair in HD-DVD to review. With the remastered disc from Digital Leisure and my Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive, I figured Iâd be giddy with Daphne sightings, er, I mean, ready to once again quest away as Dirk the Daring.

TiVo v EchoStar, Part XVI – Revisited

One TiVo stockholder’s take… The USPTO action finalizes the first phase of the Patent Office reconsideration of TiVo’s patent. The enforceable part of a patent is a series of “claims” (basically descriptions of part of a thing or process). Some of the claims of TiVo’s patent were validated, some were rejected. The claims that were … Read more