Rosario Tech

A thousand videos are worth one word.

Holiday season of 1978, Mr. Lucas gives us the Star Wars Holiday Special. In it, we learn:

- Chewbacca has a father named Itchy and a son named Lumpy
- Maude actually works and sings at the Mos Eisley cantina
- Ed Norton is now somehow cleaning sewers in the Star Wars universe
- Jefferson Starship has a gig on the Death Star
- Chewie has a holographic home version of the Cirque Du Soliel
- Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford will do ANYTHING for money

This makes the Turkish Star Wars look like Gone with the Wind.

You can order it here, if you dare.

(click on for more clips)

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Wow! The effects in this version are incredible. Kind of looks like a combination of Galaxy Quest, Flash Gordon and Hong Kong Phooey all wrapped into one amazing tale. Maybe with a little touch of The Border as well.

I don’t know… I think I prefer Midnight Express…

UPDATE: Oh, it gets better. There’s even an official website for this movie. Go check it out!

You know, I have the feeling just watching these clips that this movie is WAY better than the first three episodes of Lucas’ Star Wars. You think he minds that they “borrowed” some of his footage? Some of my favorite scenes include:

1 - The Richard Simmons Rock Dance to Indiana Jones music;
2 - The Matrix meets the Curse of the Mushroom People (aka “Neo vs. Matango”);
3 - The Birth of the Toilet Paper Mummy Fingernail Folks.

Oh, and a favorite line (translated):

Murat: Begin to your famous whistle which no women can resist.
Ali: [Whistles]
Murat: You whistle it wrong!
Ali: Why?
Murat: Skeletons came instead of woman!

Tell me what your favorite scenes are and let’s all prey that this comes out on DVD soon.

(click on the link below this clip to see more and be prepared to spit your coffee at your monitor!)

UPDATE: It DOES exist on DVD. You can buy it here.

UPDATE 2: You can buy it here with English subtitles!

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What does Democracy have to do with TV? Well, I wasn’t sure democracy had anything to do with TV, until I downloaded Democracy, an internet TV viewing client.

This is one of the slickest programs I’ve seen for viewing online videos.

What you do is basically subscribe to video feeds and Democracy downloads and organizing them for your viewing pleasure. There are lots of custom settings so that it can download videos in the background and let you know when a new video is waiting to be watched. And, it cleans house too. You can tell it to delete videos that you’ve watched after a certain period of time, so that your hard drive doesn’t fill up.

It has a very clean interface and is quite easy to figure out and navigate. In fact, it looks like a program Apple would/should have built into iLife. There’s a fairly decent sized directory of video feeds you can subscribe to (Channel Frederator and Mac Break being two of my favs). It’s not Time Warner cable, but the content and quality are increasing. And, best of all, its free!

Pericles would be pleased.

the Hulk’s new point’n’shoot camera.

See that little black dot on the right side of this picture, well that’s a full sized Hasselblad 203 FE camera, which makes this lens about the size of the space shuttle.

This is a Carl Zeiss 1700mm f/4 lens, weighing in at a crane-busting 564.3b lbs!!! I’m particularly impressed by the f/4 rating, which means, in theory, one could shoot with it hand-held and get some decent shots of someone’s nostrils three miles away.

So, if size matters to you, I suppose all you’ll need to pony up is the equivalent of the GDP of Botswana and have it delivered to you via FedEx heavy lift (which also doubles as a tripod).

Now, off with you. Go take those pix of the Crab Nebula that’s you’ve been dying to shoot.

After watching this video, it’s not hard to imagine that we’re closer to having the Replicants run amok, crushing our heads with their thighs.

And, what the heck? We’ve got to clean up after them too!? Kinda defeats the purpose, no?

PC Mag.com has posted a fairly decent review of Epson’s new scanner, the V750-M Pro (the “Pro” stands for “Expensive”).

The great thing about this scanner is that it has the ability to scan large transparencies using what is called a “fluid-mount kit.” This is something that you find with high-end drum scanners. PC Mag explains:

“You’ve probably noticed that some scratches—on a polyurethaned wood floor, for example—disappear when you wet the floor with a cleaning solution, only to reappear when the floor dries. If you took a photo of the floor when it was wet, however, you wouldn’t see the scratch. The fluid-mount kit works much the same way. Put the mounting solution—available from Aztek—on the mounting kit’s glass plate, place the negative on the fluid to fill in the scratches, and put a few more drops on top of the film, a piece of Mylar (also available from Aztek) on top of that, and scan.”

Go over to PC Mag.com and read the full review.

[By the way, if anyone gets a chance to test out this scanner in person, please email me the results so I can post some samples here. Thanks]

Watch this video. It’s incredible.

[you might need to update your Flash player. Download it here.

This is a slightly advanced topic, so the novices amongst you might want to hire me to explain it to you (sorry about the shameless plug here)

When I speak of RAID, I’m not taking about the bug spray. RAID (in geek speak), as defined by Wikipedia is:

…the acronym RAID (originally redundant array of inexpensive disks, now also known as redundant array of independent disks) refers to a data storage scheme using multiple hard drives to share or replicate data among the drives.

Boiled down, it’s a great way to either speed up your hard drive storage or create built-in redundancy, specifically for purposes of back-up.

A great RAID program for the Mac is SoftRaid. I just found a very informative review of SoftRaid by the folks over at AMUG (Arizona Mac Users Group). If your interested in the nitzy details of this program, read the review and learn what you can do with this cool program.