Tis the season for shopping and crappy products on store shelves. Here are two products that were recently found while out and about shopping for the holiday season.

First is the “Stay Straight” Doo-Hicky

What is this thing? Is it a hair appliance or maybe a homophobic person’s dream device? From looking at the packaging, there is no indication whatsoever about what in the hell this thing is for or even how it works. The information gleaned from the package is that it is a kitchen product. That is it. It was selling for $1.00 and I was thinking about buying it just to have if I needed to keep things straight.

Second up is the “Peg Legged Kitty” Ornament

This poor item was found tucked away in the holiday section at my local TJ Maxx store. I see the concept but it is a horrible execution. Did anyone step back and look at this poor thing before they sent it in to production? And what blind retail buyer decided to pick this product up?! Honestly people, are you serious?! I don’t know what is worse, the fact that the cat is crippled or the fact that the cat looks like it knows and is sad and confused about it. I almost bought it out of pity because who is honestly going to buy a crippled kitty to hang on their Christmas tree?

Thank you to my lovely Lisa for pointing these things out in the store, making me take the pictures, and suggesting that I post them on my blog.

Technorati Tags: Holiday, Shopping, Funny

So, Sean, my co-worker decided that he wanted to archive all his movies in a NAS and watch them streaming through his home network. Then he changed his mind and decided that he wants it to handle downloads and I am sure the next thing is that he wants it to be like a sling box. Or at least it will be when he reads this

So, I am toying around with creating a software package for Linux/Mac that will allow you to manage videos, music, and photos locally and clustered to NAS arrays that will allow you to watch uncompressed or compressed on the fly movies via direct access or a web interface. It will also have a built in torrent downloader and an indexer that will allow you to quickly and easily find media on the cluster. It will also support multiple users and roles so that you can let you friends in to download and upload things with disk and bandwidth quotas.

And there you have it. Its only an idea at this point and I won’t be able to do it alone so if anyone that happens upon this blog can help, shoot me an email or IM.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Mac, OS X, Media, Music, Video, Movies, Photography, Software, Technology

If you own a JVC Everio video camera you will share in my frustration on this.

For some stupid reason, JVC decided to use a damn proprietary file type for their video files. .MOD

.MOD seems to be an MPEG2 format that nothing but iMovie can read and to make matters worse, the tools that came with the camera are windows only and by what I have read don’t even handle the files right.

Thankfully though, I have found hope in converting the stupid useless files in to something more useful and even compressing them for web use. Check out: http://www.squared5.com/ they have the answer that I have been looking for and its for Windows and Mac! I just used it and it works beautifully. I converted to .MP4 and posted it on my you tube account. You can check it out here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7gX_IHn0_4

The converter even has full H.264 compression support for .MP4 files!!! YAY!!

Technorati Tags: Photography, Video, Videography, You Tube, MPEG 4, JVC , Everio