Watch TV on your PC

This post is a bit outdated but could prove to still be useful.

Some of the links here I found from Lifehacker.

• Six ways to catch your favorite TV shows
• Watching TV on a laptop--and on the cheap
• All of TV
• Watch free TV online
• 13 places to watch TV online

That's enough TV links for one day. Post in the comments if you have links on how to watch free TV online.

Edit: Listen to The Real Deal with Tom Merritt to know where you can watch some legal TV shows online.

Orcs & Elves going to the DS

Orcs & Elves is a very engaging fantasy role-playing game made for mobile phones. It is based on the Doom RPG engine, but is much more improved.

The news is: it's coming to the Nintendo DS. It is John Carmack's first DS game. This is great news for DS fans but I hope that Carmack will not abandon mobile phones to stick solely with the DS. I'm still anticipating Orcs & Elves 2 for the mobile phone.

Old Time Radio - An entertainment goldmine

Everything old is new again. I just found an entertainment goldmine for your MP3 players--it's called Old Time Radio (OTR). I know, it may be old news for most of you, but for some of us new to this stuff, there're tons of entertainment here.

Just imagine listening to the Sherlock Holmes radio dramas, or to that completely cheesy but very entertaining Tom Corbett: Space Cadet. Not only is it a free stroll back to memory lane, it's also tons of fun to listen to the acting style of yesteryears. Heck, even the old commercials were entertaining.

You can download MP3's of Dimension X and X minus 1, the sci-fi dramas written by luminaries like Bradbury, Asimov, and a host of others. Listen, this is better than the Twilight Zone.

Visit Zoot Radio for an extensive list of OTR downloads. You will be obliged to a free registration. I urge you to do it. It doesn't cost anything, but you'll get a ton of content. The content in Zoot are just too much to list here. Just give it a visit and you'll see...or hear great OTR from the 40's, 50's, and 60's.

Newspapers are dead - Dvorak

As a blogger and someone who used to write for the print media, it saddens me to read analysis like this. Sad to say, I think Dvorak is correct on this one.

Many of the pundits say the biggest hurdle the newspapers have is the transition from print to online. In fact, most already have made the transition, and most cannot make the online model work well enough to make up for the downslide in print. They never will.

The reason is simple: In an online world, there are too many bloated newspapers.

As a third world country, I give newspapers in the Philippines 20 more years before most of them fold. Just look at the show of force of PDI in the net. Their homepage is one of the most updated and most extensive newspaper sites.

But Dvorak has a solution (kinda) on how a newspaper can survive online:

The only papers or news organizations that can expect to survive will be those with lots of original content available only at their individual sites. The operations that rely more on universally available news feeds will be at the mercy of a fickle public -- one that doesn't care where they read a particular story, especially if it is the exact same story with the exact same headline.

What do you think? Will print media die or will it somehow survive the online onslaught?

K-Meleon is Firefox lite for Windows

There's this article by Nate Lanxon where he proposed a Firefox lite for low-end PC's:

There's no doubt Firefox is the best Web browser in the world. I advise everyone to use it. However, I think that the memory-hogging issue isn't really too serious for slightly-above-average PCs these days --they can handle the memory for the most part. Those who can't suffer for it.

As a user of a low-end PC, I can't agree more on his views about the memory issues of Firefox. But I think that if Firefox lite is not being considered by Mozilla, there's K-Meleon as an alternative to Firefox.

K-Meleon is a Windows only browser based on the Gecko rendering engine that Firefox runs on. But since it's a native Windows browser, it's much more optimized, hence the smaller memory footprint.

I've been a user of K-Meleon for about a year now and I find it stable with only minor problems with some websites. I believe that you can use some Firefox extensions as add-ons for K-Meleon, but I haven't figured it out yet. It would kick-ass to have Scribefire in K-Meleon.

The best thing about K-Meleon is the active community and it's open source license. This means you can expect incremental improvements and bug fixes with each latest releases.

MOO clone for mobile phones

Rise of Antares is a 4x space strategy game in the vein of Master of Orion. The object of the game is to colonize the whole galaxy and exterminate your rivals.

The difference between Antares and MOO is the diplomacy. While MOO had a basic diplomatic AI, Antares's focus is on combat and technology. Hey, it's a mobile game, are you seriously hoping to negotiate with aliens using your phone?

Another difference from MOO is the armada combat. In MOO, you have tactical control of your ships during warfare, but in Antares, the combat is somehow predetermined by the number of ships you have and the weapons technology they carry.

Just look at the delicious screenshots of the gameplay. It's really MOO lite in your mobile phone.

You can try to find a download of Rise of Antares here.

Ancient Empires - a cool Advance Wars clone

Ancient Empires is a game for MIDP 1.0, J2ME phones (like a K750i). The gameplay and artwork are somewhat reminiscent of Advance Wars for the GBA, but this time it's a fantasy setting.

You are King Galamar and you command an army out to destroy an evil that possessed your brother. But the thing is, you need to defeat your brother in order to free him.

As I mentioned, the gameplay is Advance Wars, but Ancient Empires also borrowed some ideas from The battle for Wesnoth. An example of this is the ability of Galamar to recruit personnel when he is stationed in the stronghold. This feature added a bit more strategy to the game than just plain terrain advantages.

I can't believe how well-made this game is. Considering that it's for a mobile phone it has captured the best element of a GBA game. Buy this game, now! You can check out the game here.