Random Thoughts

Posts Tagged ‘DVD’

Sometime back I did a post detailing some of my favorite apps for my new Android phone. Just realized I never went back as planned to do another post for my favorite games and other fun stuff.

So at long last, here is said post.

A Few Favorite Games:

Just recently had my SD storage card crash, so had to reformat and reinstall a lot of my apps. Which was okay, had a lot on there that really didn’t need to be there anymore, so it gave the card a good cleaning. The only game that I’ve not reinstalled that really SHOULD be on my list of favorite games is Plants vs Zombies. LOVE that game, have it on my PC, my NintendoDS, and when Amazon’s App Store gave it away as a freebie, downloaded it for the phone as well. Unfortunately though, while the game was able to be put on the SD card, apparently the saved game file was not, so when I reached the end of the game for the first time, the saved game file was huge, and ate up too much space on my phone, so I uninstalled the whole game. 

But these games are the ones I tent to go back to over and over again. They’re all fun, but I tend to play Angry Birds Rio, Fire Ball Deluxe, Gem Spinner, Peggle, and Fruit Ninja the most. All of which are either free games, or were given away by Amazon as freebies at one point or another. 

Newly Found “Useful Tools”:

Got quite a few of those. Apps Organizer is what set up my massive assortment of phone apps into the useful categories you see here. You decide what categories you want, and which apps go in them, and voila, a nice organized phone desktop. Still using the Amazon App Store for their freebies of the day. Droid of the Day is pretty good, it pops up and suggests a free app every day. App2SD Pro is one of those apps I tried as a freebie, liked, then Amazon gave away the paid version. Makes it easy to move apps from the phone to the SD card, something very handy with the Optimus’s limited storage space. App Backup saved my bacon when my SD card crashed. I’d backed up all the apps with that program, then when I moved the contents of my SD card to my PC to reformat, I was able to reinstall most programs that I wanted from the backup I’d done. Converter is kind of handy, any kind of measurement you can think of that you might want to convert to some other format, it can probably handle. I order from AmazonUK a lot, and it does a fast conversion from dollars to pounds, among other things. Useful and free (I think it might have been a Droid of the Day app, actually). Also on the phone is Cool Reader and eReader. Handles various and sundry types of ebooks and documents. Fringe Glyph Translator is a purely fun app. If you watch Fringe on Friday nights, and you see all those funky symbols with the dots next to them at each commercial break, those actually DO spell something different each episode. Makes me want to go back and watch Seasons 1-3 to see what I missed in those codes. 

GetGlue is probably, especially with the new TV season starting, one of my most used apps. Make it easy to tweet about what I’m watching, listening to, and reading, and earn stickers in the process. Kind of addicting. The two apps in the bottom row on each end – Remote Web and WiFi File Explorer – are both essentially the same thing, they allow you to wireless connect the contents of your phone to your PC to transfer files, use your phone cam as a webcam, all sorts of stuff. It’s how I got the screen caps of my apps from my phone to my PC. I actually paid for Remote Web and had been using it for a while, until Amazon gave away WiFi File Explorer. Now I use them both until I decide which one I like better. The app in the bottom row second column is Shoot Me, which is supposed to only work on rooted phones, but works just fine on my unrooted Optimus. Run it in the background, if you want to screencap your screen, just shake the phone, and instant screencap. Yes, it’s what I used to screencap my apps. And last but not least on that screen is Tweetcaster. I’d mentioned before that the free version was my favorite Twitter app, well you guessed it, Amazon gave away the paid version as a freebie so now I’m running the full version and have never looked back.

Other favorite apps are QuckPic, a replacement for the default Gallery. Comic Strips, a new one I just added that lets you collect and share some of your favorite comic strips from the paper, like Scary Gary and Argyle Sweater. GhostTown is essentially a music player that lets you search YouTube for videos, and plays them back as music. Kinda nifty. Roku Remote and WDTV Media Player are substitute remotes for, yes, my Roku box (currently used for streaming movies at Netflix and Amazon on Demand) and my Western Digital media player box, which lets you plug in a hard drive and play back almost any video type you can think of on your TV set. Great for all those series episodes that would take up too many DVDs to burn. Tune In Radio Pro is another paid app that Amazon gave away as a freebie. I’d been using the freebie version to pick up Internet radio stations, like the various BBC stations or formerly local CA stations like KFOG. The paid version is essentially the same, only it also includes a recorder if you want to save any of the radio station broadcasts. I use it a lot. And Zinio works in conjuction with the PC app to download either free or paid digital versions of magazines to either your phone or your PC hard drive. Once you’ve downloaded them, you can view them on either. Have only used it a few times so far, but it seems pretty well made.

Well, that be pretty much the majority of what apps I use fairly regularly. Given that Amazon gives away a freebie every day, I’ve got quite a list of apps still available to me that I’ve not actually installed yet, but they’re there if I need them.

Another fluff post, but why not.

The start of the fall tv season is when our DVR (which thankfully has two tuners, otherwise we’d never keep up) gets a workout. We tend to watch nearly everything new at least once, then eliminate the crap shows from the schedule and end up with a reasonable number of shows to watch.

The only problem this fall? Not a whole lot of crap shows to speak of. LOL. We skipped H8R right off the bat, as well as The Playboy Club and Charlies Angels, plus a couple of other shows on the CW that just plain did nothing for us. And no, are not watching X-Factor. But have tried pretty much every thing else so far, and most shows are pretty good. So have started dropping show that are okay, but not great. Definitely deleted off the DVR’s on screen scheduler: Pan-Am (bummer, that’s the airline that flew me to Europe in 1984! ), Two Broke Girls, and Up All Night. Not sure about (we’ll watch for a second week and then decide): Unforgettable and Gifted Man. New Girl was supposed to be THE new comedy of the season, and jury is still out on that one too. It was cute and quirky, but it may lose out just due to the sheer volume of other good shows airing.

What’s funny is the number of shows that we thought we’d just watch to see just how awful they were, and they turned out to be pretty good. Didn’t think I’d like Ringer, or Revenge, or Whitney. I’d heard Whitney was supposed to be funny, but the previews looked kind of obnoxious, so we only tuned in to see how bad it would be, and found ourselves laughing several times in just the first couple of minutes. So definitely giving it another go.

A few more new shows that I’m liking right after the first ep: Persons of Interest and Suburbitory. Prime Suspect is pretty good too, although, if they don’t make the cops a bit more likeable, may drop it. Life’s too short to spend an hour with people on TV you don’t like. LOL.

Between old shows and new shows, the busiest night for the DVR has got to be Wednesday. There’s something on nearly every network that night. CBS has Survivor and Criminal Minds. ABC has their 2 hours of half hour comedies (The Middle, Modern Family, Suburbitory, and Happy Endings), plus Revenge at 10. NBC has Harry’s Law, and Law&Order SVU. Plus for 4 weeks BBC America has season 2 of Luther. Have all 4 eps saved on a hard drive from an internet download, but it’s been so long since it aired on BBC, not sure which drive it’s on. LOL.  So Wednesday, we usually end up with the DVR recording on both tuners AND our older DVD burner recording a third network to RAM disc (just like a VCR, only on an erasable DVD vs tape).

Then there’s all the returning favorites: Good Wife, Castle, Parenthood, Mike & Molly, Big Bang Theory, Fringe, The Mentalist, Blue Bloods, Supernatural. Haven on SyFy is still running from the summer season, soon to be replaced with Sanctuary after this week I think. And Doctor Who is just finishing up, to be replaced I guess with Bedlam (which naturally, we’ll have to try, along with American Horror Story on Fox). Just got hooked on a couple of the BBCA British comedies, Friday Night Dinner and Outnumbered, hope those are coming back.

Whew. Yeah, kind of sad how much TV we watch. Not everyone here watches every one of them, but we kind of split the difference.

And still find ourselves with enough time to watch Jeopardy every night.

Took a little while but I consolidated all five of JB’s Desperate Housewives clips and turned them into a single half hour video stream which I put on the front page of the JB section of my site, down towards the bottom of the page.

Also working on a full screen DVD version of the same, but in the meantime, here’s the link to the streaming version of the simple photo montage I put together to use as the menu background of the dvd. You’ll find this one right near the top of the page.

Enjoy!

This WAS going to be a tweet, but I realized that I kept typing and couldn’t shut up, so decided to make it a blog post instead.

Brought back the Tivo box back to Best Buy tonight, and made a pitstop at PetSmart on the way, to pick up the new 10 gallon aquarium that we’re buying to put in the living room this weekend. Or as I like to refer to it, “The Guppy Birth Control Device”. Once it’s set up, I’m fishing out all the male guppies from my 20 gallon tank downstairs and putting them in the 10 gallon upstairs, leaving just the Fertile Myrtles in the tank downstairs. Guppies really should come with a warning label, that when you buy two you’re really buying 30+ of them. In any case, separating the males from the females should put a stop to the population explosion my aquarium has been experiencing since the first batch of babies was born during the opening ceremonies of the winter olympics. Of course the fun really begins when I actually try to fish out JUST the males from the tank. YeeHAW! Fish rodeo!

Then finished hooking up the rest of the video stuff tonight. Stole the HDMI cable from the Roku box to put on the DVR, bought new component (the red/green/blue ones, one step down from HDMI, but better than s-video or RCA) cables when I took the Tivo box back to Best Buy, for the Roku box, but then had to pull the Wii’s component cables from the back of the TV to give the Roku a place to plug in (the other component jacks are being used by the Panasonic VCR/DVD burner combo, and the other HDMI cable is hooked to the Toshiba HD dvd player), so switched out the components on the Wii back to the RCA composites (the red, white, yellow ones). I didn’t notice a whole lot of difference on the Wii when I upgraded from composite to component before, so no great loss there, really.

Whew! Confused yet? LOL Lucky I do this for a living, among other things. Didn’t have time to test either the Wii or the Roku out yet, by then “The Middle” and the rest of the Wednesday night shows were coming on, but things LOOK like they should work now, nothing is left hanging out in the room anymore, and even the cables that were hanging along side the TV while we were testing things out have been run down the back of the entertainment unit and out of sight. So HOPEFULLY everything works, I’d hate to have to try and move anything now.

“The end is where we start from…” – Captain Jack Harkness

Waaaah. “Exit Wounds” ended pretty much how I thought it would. Not QUITE as sad as Daniel’s demise on SG-1, but then, by then I’d been watching that show for a good 5 seasons, vs just the two seasons for Torchwood. Not quite as much time to get attached yet (and well, Owen had been a wee bit of a butthead – whether he was dead or undead – for many of the shows ). Still, between the demise of two main characters, and Jack’s “reunion “with his missing brother, twas a pretty emotional way to end the season.

‘Course, with my warped brain, for some reason, the phrase that kept coming to mind after watching it was “come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth.” LOL. Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog? Or Weevil of Cardiff? In any case – Run away! Run Away!

Got several screencaps from the episode here. (Mostly just to see if I could actually get a shadowbox gallery to work on the blog. Yes, she apparently can be taught! )

Already have “Torchwood – Children of Earth” cued up and ready to watch via the Roku box next chance we get. Although given the grumblings that I’ve been hearing about what happens to ANOTHER major character during THAT series, I’m kind of dreading that one now too. Oh well.

Still thinking about getting the three series dvd set. Would love to watch a lot of the shows again, there’s some really great one liners throughout (even in this last one, as sad as it was, they managed to throw in several good lines), and it’s just a great sci-fi show all together. Not in a huge rush though, as long as I can stream them via netflix, I can hold off buying them.

Great show, even if it did get a little dark during the second season.