Tuesday, April 03, 2007

iTunes and Extreme Engineering

Is iTunes music store also really, really slow for you? Like when you make a search it takes ten to thirty seconds? (Laurie says his is fast, but mine is this slow over several different machines and connections.)

If you are in the US (or have a US friend who will make you use his/her credit card) you can get movies and TV shows. (That service is a bit slow coming for Eu, huh?) This is attractive to me since I don't have TV, it uses too much time. But I like to cherry pick the most interesting shows to watch whenever I want.

Example: the show Extreme Engineering, especially the "science fiction" episodes like the one about a possible transatlantic tunnel or a big pyramid city in Tokyo Bay. Very kewl.

Paul sez:
"I don't have a TV, but a friend convinced me to buy a portable DVD player last week. I can borrow DVD's for free from the library, and I even bought the player on sale. Entertainment is remarkably cheap these days."

It really is! And in a few years, sites like YouTube will have millions of hours of high-resolution content all for free. Entertainment, education, you name it.

8 comments:

Paul Sunstone said...

I don't have a TV, but a friend convinced me to buy a portable DVD player last week. I can borrow DVD's for free from the library, and I even bought the player on sale. Entertainment is remarkably cheap these days.

Anonymous said...

I've been watching Extreme Engineering for about six months now. My favorite episodes are the ones with a host named Danny Forster. He's an on-screen, hands-on host, working alongside the people building or operating stadiums, aircraft carriers, tunnel boring machines, etc.

There are a lot of very talented, hard-working people doing amazing things in no-glamour jobs. These people live all around us, every day. But they don't have publicists, so we tend to see them as inconsequential. But they make the world we all live in.

Only the Danny Forster editions of Extreme Engineering seem to focus on these amazing workers.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Can you mention a couple of those episodes?

Anonymous said...

According to Wikipedia, it looks like he was the host of just six episodes.

They were Arizona Cardinals Stadium, a giant tunnel under Kuala Lumpur, the construction of the U.S. aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush, an oil drilling rig for Sakhalin Island, reconstruction of the levies in New Orleans, and the Torre Espacio tower in Madrid.

I've seen them all, and they all seem to focus more on the construction workers than on the designs -- although it's clear the designs are very impressive. I'm sorry to learn there aren't a lot more Forster episodes for me to discover.

Paul Sunstone said...

Have you already found this site?

http://www.tv-links.co.uk/

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Gee, what is this? Free TV on the web? How can this be?

Anonymous said...

It seems they link to content on YouTube and on Veoh Video Network. Perhaps elsewhere too. Anyway, these appear to be just links.

Broadcast TV is starting to look so 'last century' its almost humorous.

But who wants to buy TV shows from iTunes store when its all pirated elsewhere and this easy find/access?

Can't find Extreme Engineering here, though. (I would also like to watch that show, but don't know how.)

Anonymous said...

"Just links"? Try this on for size: http://videodl.org.
Download the free 1.85 MB FLV Player installer, and you can save YouTube and Google videos on your PC to view them offline at your leisure. It took me more than two hours on my dial-up connection to receive the Marx Bros "Night at The Opera" sequence (15 MB!), but it was not wasted time. Now I don't have to pay for hourly online time and wait 2 new hours every time I want to watch it.
:-)))
All you need to know is on the page on the address above. Super-cool!
Try it and send feedback, people. :-)