Somebody at work forwarded a link to this picture of the new Uncle Owen & Aunt Beru Lars action figures from Star Wars Episode IV. I should have guessed what it would be from the names of the characters. This would be an easy one to make at home: scan an existing card, tweak the text & picture and add a couple of melted figures of your choice. The original image is from smugbaldy.com by the way.

I don’t have time for a full Comic-Con write-up just yet but I did see the tin box for the MST3K 20th Anniversary DVD boxed set (4 discs). They told us at the booth (where I bought one of the 400 special 20th anniversary t-shirts with the same logo) that we could pre-order cheaper at Amazon now and then it will ship in October when it’s released. Sure enough, list price is $70 but the pre-order is only $49 at Amazon. I’ve already ordered mine, what are you waiting for?

One downer was that I missed out on the 20 year reunion of the original cast at the Con. Turns out after the fact that they cut off the line three hours before the panel and I only went about an hour ahead. Oh well, I had fun doing other stuff during those hours.

Sadly Bo Diddley died today. I really love his music and it’s unfortunate that he really never got the recognition he deserved for his pioneering work.

Vancouver Sun article

I ran across this trailer (taped in a theater) for the upcoming X-Files 2 movie (I think it’s a July release).

There’s another “retrospective” trailer that has some spoilers at the X-Files News site but be careful, there are spoilers at the end. This second trailer looks like it was taped at a convention of some sort.

I’m not really a bit anime fan, although I loved Akira. I just discovered via Topless Robot that there’s an upcoming anime DVD of Batman: Gotham Knight. Here’s one image, check out the full story for more.

Topless Robot reported on the 2008 Toy Fair and showed this cool X-Wing kite (scroll down, it’s #5). I may have to look for it later this year since my wife likes to fly kites and I don’t have one. (#4 Remote Control Zombies looked fun, too.)

Yep, I’m plugging someone else’s product but I don’t care. I think that Iron Maiden’s Live After Death could be the best live concert recording ever. They are re-releasing it on DVD in a couple of days and at US$15 for two discs it’s a steal. Below is the teaser video from their site. I just might even pre-order it from Amazon.

Better yet their 2008 tour is named “Somewhere Back in Time” and according to Blabbermouth.net it

revisits the band’s incredible history by focusing almost entirely on the ’80s in both choice of songs played and the stage set, which is based around the legendary Egyptian production of the 1984-85 Powerslave tour. This is arguably be the most elaborate and spectacular show the band have ever presented, and includes some key elements of their Somewhere In Time tour of 1986/7, such as the Cyborg Eddie.

Well a quick visit to the MythTV site led me to Schedules Direct which might be my replacement when the ReplayTV guide eventually goes away (which I know it will, at least it was available long enough to make my $200 “lifetime” subscription pay for itself and then some). SD is only charging $20 per year which is great, I may join just on principle to keep the project alive.

One of my future project was to build a homebrew  DVR at some point instead of buying one. All you need to do is get a nice PC enclosure and build a Linux box to load MythTV or Sage onto it with a giant hard drive and one or more TV tuner cards. Now that I know about SD I may still be able to go that route once my budget allows for it. Thank goodness hard drive prices have fallen through the floor since I’ll probably build an HD-capable box which will take a ton of drive space.

Once again we see that the superior technology has lost the battle. I agree with all the comments about how the ReplayTV DVR feature set has always been better than TiVO (it took TiVo five years to add Ethernet for cryin’ out loud) but of course TiVO had better marketing and basically drove RTV out of business.

Here’s an article about DirecTV buying the ReplayTV patents and intellectual property (IP) from the Japanese company that bought it from Sonic Blue when SB went bankrupt a couple of years ago. Luckily there are a lot of other hardcore RTV fans out there so even if the current program guide goes away we still have options.

I remember choosing RTV over TiVO many years ago because it had Ethernet capability. I hadn’t even discovered DVArchive yet but I obviously made the right choice. I have really enjoyed being able to download shows to my large PC hard drive and then burn them to DVD to save for posterity. I even upgraded the small hard drive in my RTV from 40GB to 150GB a year ago with no hassle at all. I’m really disappointed that RTV lost the DVR wars. I read that Tivo will let you buffer a whole 30 minutes of live TV, that’s ridiculous. The RTV will buffer as much empty hard drive space that’s available, sometimes we can pause a show for twelve hours and come back to finish watching it.

Luckily you can still buy old RTV units on eBay and get the program guide for free from Zap2It Labs. Sadly I just today came across an article from six months ago that says they were going to discontinue the free program guide service in September. I found this forum thread from June that discusses options so now I’m going to have to go in search of current news about online program guides. I don’t have a problem paying a modest fee for program guide info every month (say US$5) so hopefully someone has stepped up to the plate on this.

One disconcerting thing I did read in a thread was that

FYI, Tribune Media (aka TMS, the company that owns zap2it) is the *only* source of episode guide data in the US other than the stations themselves. They have an exclusive license to all of it (even if a large chunk of the descriptions are incorrect). Everyone else providing listings is just buying it from TMS.

Thanks to Mangoat for finding an Internet quiz that was actually interesting. Apparently I’m “an extreme sci-fi geek. I’m probably wearing my very own homemade TRON costume right now.”

	I received 86 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
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