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Thor And Captain America Will Be In 3D -sigh-

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:22:17 +0000

Yes, it’s official “Thor” and “Captain America: The First Avenger” will -sigh- also be in 3D. Apparently this is something we have to get used to. Don’t get me wrong, I think 3D is cool in cartoons, where kids can laugh when something comes close to their eyes. My son loves to watch “Bob The Builder” in Legoland in 4D, but let’s keep the 3D in Legoland and in Pixar movies. I’m sure those that have seen “Clash of the titans” agree with me.

In the picture you see Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Chris Hemworth as Thor and Tom Hiddleston as Loki. Some of the film takes part in Asgard (where the Norse gods live) and some of it in a town in New Mexico, as you might have seen in Ironman 2. All we know so far is that Thor banished from Asgard by his father, Odin. Kenneth Branagh is directing the movie, which is dure May 6, 2011.

Joe Johnston (who directed Jurassic Park 3 and The Wolfman) will direct “Captain America: The First Avenger”. He isn’t a big fan of 3D. I’ll let these quotes fom the LA Times explain.

“I think it tends to be overused and can be a little bit gimmicky,” said Johnston, who began shooting last week in London but will travel to San Diego for Marvel’s Comic-Con panel. “A lot of people are using 3-D now because they feel have they have to … that will come and go and the pictures that deserve to be in 3-D will continue to be. When it’s done bad, it can make you carsick.”

Johnston did a one-day test shooting with a 3-D rig — as opposed to shooting in 3-D and converting — and said it was “a nightmare” due to bulky gear, calibration issues and restricted filmmaking options. He said he’s a firm believer, though, in the conversion approach if done right and he’s enthused to move forward. “It’s a new challenge and it’s exciting,” Johnston said.

The last film that I’m looking very much forward to is “The Avenger” which probably will be directed by Joss Whedon (Firefly, Dollhouse and Buffy), where most of the superheroes from Marvel’s universe will meet using the original cast ie. Robert Downey Jr. as Ironman, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and Edward Norton as Hulk. (Perhaps Adrien Brody or Joaquin Phoenix will play instead.) The movie is due in 2012.

The upcoming ComicCon will surely reveal a lot more details and perhaps a trailer?

What are your thoughts about 3D? Is it Hollywood’s way of ruining good movies or does it add anything?

Music From Star Trek Trailers

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 11:01:30 +0000

Maybe you’ve seen the latest Star Trek trailer. If you haven’t, you’ve missed one of the best trailers in a long time. I saw it several times and it gives me goosebumps every time I see it.

I blame the goosebumps on the music used in the latest trailer. After seeing the Star Trek Movie trailer a couple of times, I had to find out where the music was from.

So I did a little research and stumbled upon TheTrailerMusicMan on YouTube. I wrote to him and within a short time, he told me the music written by Two Steps From Hell and was called Freedom Fighters.

So far so good. I’ve done some more research and it turns out that one of the composers behind Two Steps From Hell, Thomas J. Bergersen started a blog a few days ago. He wrote this the other day:

There has been a lot of interest in the Freedom Fighters music in the new Star Trek trailer (thanks!) so here’s some more information for you. The executives at Paramount studios ultimately had the final say in what music was used for the trailer. They ended up liking the music so much they wanted exclusive rights to use it (to avoid us from licensing it to other advertisement campaigns). This does however not mean that the music cannot be published on CD, and we’ll likely include the modified version on one of our future public releases.

Make sure you catch the trailer at your local theatre, as the surround sound mixing is EPIC!

Best,

Thomas J. Bergersen

So unfortunately the music from the third Star Trek trailer isn’t available yet.

If you are into music from trailers and what I would call “epic music”, you should definitely check out Two Steps From Hell.

They also wrote the music behind the second Star Trek trailer. That track is called “Down with Enterprise”.

Their albums will become available on iTunes.

Now if you are really really interested in their music you can find their music on YouTube and on their Facebook fan page. A simple Google search will also give you a lot of hits. There are a lot of forums discussing the latest Star Trek trailer and the music in them.

(and just a small hint: If you really want to download “Freedom Fighters”, it’s out there…)

Are Cracked iPhone Apps The End Of Jailbreaked iPhones?

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:30:09 +0000

It was bound to happen sooner or later. A cracking program for iPhone apps has been released. It’s called “Crackulous”. I’m not mentioning it here because I want you to use it. On the contrary. This program can do more damage than good.

Crackulous removes copy protection (Apple calls it FairPlay) from iPhone app. There is nothing new in that. Several sites already offer pirated iPhone apps for free. But with Craculous everybody can remove FairPlay from their iPhone apps and share them with friends, p2p sites (torrents, newsgroups etc.) or sell them.

So what’s wrong in sharing your iPhone apps with your friends? I guess nothing is worng in that?! If only it would stop there. It won’t! The next thing we’ll see will be some kind of distribution program on your iPhone. It’ll be the pirated version of Cydia, which lets you download the pirated version of the app straight to your iPhone. Of course there are always some people who use pirated applications as a demo. “I’ll buy the program after I try it…”. Do you really want to try out a $ 1.99 application before you buy it?

90% of the applications on iTunes are made by people like you and me. (Well if I could develop an iPhone app I would, but you know what I mean.) Independent developers who has worked hard to make a great application for us.

I’m sure most developers aren’t making a living of the apps, so money isn’t my main concern here. I’m more concerned at how Apple will react on this. I’m no big fan of the way Apple locked the iPhone down. I mean it’s simlocked and you are forced to use iTunes to buy apps. I think the fear of piracy caused Apple to keep the iPhone on a leash like this. Apple could have allowed the “unofficial” developers more elbow space. A jailbreaked iPhone is even more powerful than an “official”. I think Apple knew, that if you allow the unofficial developers too much space, you would end up with a problem like this. I’m sure Apple know that they’ve sold even more iPhone because of the unlock and jailbreak possibilities, so they could live with that.

Apple can’t have people distributing unlicensed iPhone apps. If pirated versions of EA Games’ Monopoly surfaces on too many sites, they will pressure Apple into doing something about it. This could mean the end of Cydia and all the great programs there. Swirly MMS has given us MMS on iPhone, Snapture let us take better photos, SBSettings let’s me control my shortcuts and Cycorder let’s me record videos. Cydia could now be the pirate’s extended arm and dig their own grave.

Would you use a pirated version of iPhone apps? Do you have any on your iPhone now?

Bush’s Robots.txt Vs. Obama’s Robots.txt

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:10:03 +0000

If you run a blog or a website you probably know what a robots.txt file is, so you can skip the next line. It’s a small text file that tells search engine what to include and not to include in their indexing of your site.

As you might have noticed or read www.whitehouse.gov has been given an Obama make-over. The changes has aren’t just graphical and textual. Perhaps as a comparison to the previous government, the new robots.txt is a bit more welcoming.

This is Obama’s robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

Yes that’s it!

Now compare it to George W. Bush’s 2400 line robots.txt (I won’t post it all)

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin

Disallow: /search

Disallow: /query.html

Disallow: /omb/search

Disallow: /omb/query.html

Disallow: /expectmore/search

Disallow: /expectmore/query.html

Disallow: /results/search

Disallow: /results/query.html

Disallow: /earmarks/search

Disallow: /earmarks/query.html

Disallow: /help

Disallow: /360pics/text

Disallow: /911/911day/text

Disallow: /911/heroes/text

Disallow: /911/messages/text

Disallow: /911/patriotism/text

Disallow: /911/patriotism2/text

Let’s hope Obama keeps it this way. It’s a good start. So American…please don’t screw this up

The Internet Year 2020 – Do You Believe The Predictions?

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:31:12 +0000

It’s always difficult to predict things, especially the future, and even more the future of the internet.

That was also my first thought when I read report from Pew Research Center, The future of the Internet III. The third report is just released and this one is based on a survey of, how the internet will be in 2020. They’ve asked 1,196 people.

If you feel like chewing through the 138 pages The future of the Internet III report you are more than welcome to.

If you are a bit lazy, I’ve collected the important conclusions below:

The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.

The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.

Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.

The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

The list is a strange combination of tech predictions and predictions of more sociological and political future scenarios.

Most discussions are often centered around tech predictions and seldom about future political scenarios. Is the technological progress also progress for mankind?

Those that have a cell phone and a laptop often works more and longer. You are always connected, so wouldn’t you fear that we would crash at some point if we keep this up?

Read paragraph #2 again please.

Will the technological progress in the next decade also create a better world when it comes to personal integrity, social tolerance and forgiveness?

What do you think?

Windows Vista And Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Beta Available On Technet

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:58:09 +0000

I’ve just downloaded Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta from TechNet Plus. I was a bit surprised to see Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Beta in the same pack.

I didn’t even know there was a Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1?! Why yes there is. It’s already built into Windows Server 2008. Pretty clever huh?!

You can read the most notable changes in Windows Server 2008 SP2 Beta and Windows Vista SP2 Beta here.

Now the question remains. Should I install Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta on my work laptop?

Would you dare install it on your “production” PC?

Speaking of Windows. According to ZDNet we could expect Windows 7 Beta 1 in January.

YouTube – What Is That Ugly Search Bar Doing In The Videos?

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:06:05 +0000

YouTube has silently just “updated” the embedded videos with a very ugly search bar. It’s there until you click play and will reappear for a few seconds every your cursor is near the top of the video.

If you pause a video it will also reappear.

I know I know, this will help YouTube (Google) get even more user data and probably help them target ads even more.

To me it looks more like a piece of malware has infected my PC/Mac and added this terrible search bar to my videos.

YouTube please remove it or I’ll find another service to host my videos. (Yes, that quite a threat I know). Viddler, Vimeo, Blip and a few more are very interested in my many videos and they will give me a free T-shirt if I let them host my videos.

What do you think? Do you like the search bar or is it annoying?

Update: You can remove the search bar by adding this “&showsearch=0? to the URL. Google Code has released this information concerning the search bar.

My First “Post” On TechCrunch

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:35:57 +0000

Earlier today I wrote an email to Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr explaining the story about Stein Bagger, IT Factory and how he is wanted by Interpol and the Danish police for fraud worth $130+ million.

Unfortunately I didn’t hear from Duncan and I guessed he wasn’t interested in the story, so I contacted Techcrunch explaining it to them.

10 mins. later Michael Arrington wrote back to me, asking for more information about the story.

Robin Wauters from Techcrunch then wrote the post on TechCrunch. I’m proud to see that my tip has already gotten 27+ comments.

Though it didn’t give me any kind of link love or mentioning, I know deep (deep deep) inside me, that I contributed to a story that made it to TechCrunch.

You can read the story about IT Factory so far on TechCrunch.

New Microsoft Ads Are Hilarious And Creates A Buzz

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:22:00 +0000

Microsoft’s latest ads are hilarious! I admit they are a bit strange and really don’t have much of a story or message. It could remind you about a certain sitcom featuring a certain actor with a certain last name.

The $300 millon ad campaign features Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld as opposite to “Hi I’m Mac and I’m PC”.

There are no big sales pitches or statements, why Vista is better than MacOSX. It’s just an “ad-com” (Not sure if it’s a word, but I cleverly combined sitcom with advertisment).

To explain this pretty clever campaign in a popular way let me put it like this:

Launch huge ad campaign featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld $300,000,000.00
Start a buzz in the blogosphere including all tech major blogs PRICELESS!

I guess $300,000,000 could buy you a few 125×125 ad spots on a lot of blogs, but getting the exposure on YouTube, TechCrunch, TechMeme, The Inqusitr, Mashable, Engadget, The Beta News (!?) and a lot of other minor and major blogs can’t be put into value.

It’s almost like the ads are made for internet distribution. Why make a long and short version? There is nothing better, than bloggers who can’t figure something out.

We love to talk/write about stuff we just don’t get. It’s not keeping us from guessing though, and when/if we find the golden eggs, we’ll write a post more about it.

You can see the two ads here: (they are both in high quality)

This is the first one:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is the second:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can read the official press release from Microsoft here: Microsoft Kicks off new Windows Campaign with Star Power

Read all the other major blog’s coverage here:

Image credit: Mashable

Leo Babauta And Friends Launch TrainforHumanity.org

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:50:29 +0000

When I asked Leo Babauta from ZenHabits to Show Me Your Desktop, I didn’t know that I was about to set The Beta News record. With 4,298 views this is the most viewed page on The Beta News.

It’s only fair that I help Leo Babuta and friends to spread the word about their latest project called: Train for Humanity.

Over the past five years, 200,000 civilians have died due to violence, malnutrition, and disease in Darfur and an additional 2.2 million people have been displaced. We want to do something about it.

Fed up with watching humanitarian crises on the evening news and not doing anything to help, a group of bloggers (most notably, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits) have created and founded the non-profit Train for Humanity, which is an online humanitarian awareness and fundraising organization.

Over 150,000 new blogs are added to the internet everyday. Train for Humanity’s mission is to utilize the web, social media, and blogging, in tandem with athletes in training, to support organizations that help prevent suffering and alleviate the pain of children, orphans, and refugees who have been displaced due to genocide or internal strife and war within their country.

Quite simply, they believe – getting fit + social media + blogging = social good

The three pilot project athlete-bloggers, Mark Hayward, Dan Clements, and Leo Babauta are hoping to raise awareness for the current crisis in Darfur and funds for the organization Darfur Peace and Development. All three are training for endurance events of varying distances ranging from a triathlon to a marathon.

They hope to show people that with a little creativity and innovation, anyone can assist and make a difference in the world. If you would like to learn more, have a look at the Train for Humanity website and please consider sponsoring one of them or spreading the word.