Windows\Mac\Linux: If you’ve got a virtual pile of e-books but no good way to organize them, Calibre is a feature rich e-book manager, complete with Cover Flow-like looks and network sharing.
Whether or not you have a portable e-book reader, Calibre is packed with features to help you organize your e-books. To start, you simply tell Calibre where you store your book files. It does a pretty good job pulling the necessary information and self-populating, although you’ll still find yourself making occasional edits, like swapping the author and title fields. If you’re a LibraryThing user, you can also hook into that account to populate the fields.
Calibre has a Cover Flow-like browsing feature for skimming through the covers of your books. You can leave comments on your reads, and a tagging system for organizing your collection beyond the basics of genre and author. Calibre supports extensive file conversions, with the ability to convert over thirteen document formats into EPUB, PRF and MOBI formats for use on popular e-book readers like the SONY PRS 500/505/700, Cybook Gen 3, Amazon Kindle (1 and 2) and the iPhone (with the stanza reader software).
You can also set up Calibre to fetch news from websites and RSS feeds and convert it into a compatible format, so you can load up your e-book reader with information from your favorite sites. There’s even a built-in web server so you can access your e-book collection remotely. Calibre is freeware and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Calibre [via gHacks]
That frozen over pond you’ve been hiking over all winter is warming up, so do yourself a favor and check out Wired’s illustrated guide to survive falling through ice.
The guide is simple and direct, with four main steps and some sound advice for handling the pyschological aspects of the scary situation. For example:
As you hit the water, a physiological reaction known as torso reflex will cause you to gasp for air. Force yourself to take slow, deep breaths. You’ll begin to shiver violently and feel intense pain; try to remember that these are natural responses and not life-threatening.
Head on over to Wired to read the full details. It’s good advice, and learning how to survive falling through ice is certainly a good thing, but we’d suggest avoiding that frozen pond altogether if you have a choice.
Survive Falling Through Ice [Wired How-To Wiki]First Look: « FirstShowing.net
Last year during Comic-Con we announced that Eric Powell’s cult comic The Goon was being adapted into an animated feature film by none other than David Fincher. Although I’ve never personally read the comic, it seems like a pretty damn good cult comic, and I’m very interested in seeing how the movie will turn out. Well thanks to Quint at Ain’t It Cool News, we’ve finally got a first look at the first few shots from The Goon movie and it looks much better than I was expecting. Blur Studios, also behind the upcoming Heavy Metal movie, is developing this, which is one of the first complete features they’re entirely behind creating.
The Goon is a comic book series created by Eric Powell in 1999. The story is about the adventures of the Goon, a muscle-bound brawler who claims to be the primary enforcer for the feared mobster Labrazio. The Goon (and his sidekick Franky) often get tied up in other machinations, often in relation to the evil zombie gangs under the command of the Nameless Zombie Priest. The series has a distinctly paranormal slant, with the average story concerning ghosts, ghouls, skunk-apes, extra-dimensional aliens, and mad scientists. I really can’t wait to see more from this soon, because it certainly looks awesome so far! Thoughts?
Ever since Disney snuck in that awesome sneak peek at Comic-Con last year, we’ve been trying to figure out what the heck Tron 2.0 is all about. We know the basic premise, or at least some of the characters, including the original Flynn and original Tron, but what exactly is going on? A few months ago I started to try and piece together some of the plot from an amalgamation of casting news, only to come up with a bit of a crazy idea reminiscent of The Matrix. Well, Ain’t It Cool News is claiming to have some details from a trustworthy source in Vancouver, so if you’re interested in knowing a bit more about the plot, read on!
I’ve paraphrased the e-mail they were sent and took out some of the big spoilers, so here goes. The movie starts in 1989 (the original was set in 1982). Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges’ character), who has a five year old son named Sean, has created some of the world’s best selling video games since the events of the first Tron took place. He disappears and Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner’s character, the original Tron) takes over his company. Jump forward roughly 15 years, Flynn’s son Sean is now 20-something, and Alan has info on his dad, which sends Sean back to Flynn’s old arcade where he gets sucked back into the computer world.
Flynn has programmed a CLU character to look like his younger self that goes around and makes the world a better place. However, the CLU is corrupt and is creating his own interpretation of that “perfect world” (hence why you see him kill that guy in the teaser footage). Apparently this CLU is out killing programs called ISOs (anyone catch that reference too?). And these ISOs think Sean Flynn is their savior, but of course, the real Flynn is also still stuck inside the computer world and they eventually catch up with him, too. But will he help? I think there’s a lot more to this story than just that, but it’s a very good start.
While that synopsis is only a tad less vague than what we already know, it’s a good update and introduction to what we’ll see eventually play out in Tron 2.0. The report also claims that we’ll see big disc battles, light cycle fights, and “light jets” (think light cycles that can fly), which should make for some awesome battles. See, the reason I think Tron 2.0 will be incredible, is because they’re taking that classic Tron world and infusing it with some modern energy and excitement (just like J.J. Abrams is doing with Star Trek). And that alone is enough to make me very excited to see what Joseph Kosinski is cooking up for Tron 2.0.
No matter how much I continue to hear about the Monopoly movie, I still feel like it’s all just a big hoax, created by Hollywood for no legitimate reason. I can’t really imagine that Ridley Scott, the man behind Alien and Blade Runner and Gladiator, would want to direct a movie based on a board game?! Oh, but he does, “I have to direct it,” Scott told MTV. In their recent update, Scott and Hasbro’s CEO Brian Goldner revealed some interesting thoughts on the direction of the movie and it’s modern societal connection - the economy. But is that enough to actually make this into a great movie or instead kill it before it even starts?
“The whole world is about the financial markets,” Goldner told MTV. “You can’t turn on the news today without understanding the financial markets and what’s going on out there.” So why not make this movie about that issue as well as the “personal story” contained with the Monopoly experience? Does anyone know what Goldney is talking about besides the status of Hasbro’s stock? “[Ridley has] built these great big worlds of imagination,” Goldner said. “Combine that with Pamela Pettler who’s writing this great script about real people kind of playing a real-life game of Monopoly, not the board game, although they’re icons of the game. And then you really get the idea why this story could make sense right now.”
I get a feeling that this reminds me a lot of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and how they tried to connect that movie to the current concern over our environment. So it sounds like Hasbro and Universal want to capitalize (pun intended) on our recession and make a movie that hits home with audiences because it deals with money. We’ll let Ridley Scott, who seems to have lost his edge over the last few years, explain why it could be good. “We have identified a pretty good story and it is fundamentally a movie, not a game, probably describing in a way the characters in the film, the passion of the game, and how the game came about.”
I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m not sold yet. I think Ridley has a lot of work to do before he can convince me that this isn’t just a big gimmick designed to capitalize on our ailing economy. Thoughts?
by: Peter Sciretta
It’s no secret: Jon Favreau would love to helm an Avengers movie. He’s has gone on the record multiple times talking about the possibility. But after Marvel announced their overly ambitious release schedule, Favs was forced to admit that the production schedule would likely prevent him from doing so.
I would love to. Clearly I have stated that The Avengers would be fun. But I look at their release schedule and they have announced ‘Iron Man 2? for 2010 and then Avengers for 2011. I know from experience there is no way I could. I don’t know what they have in mind, but there is no way that The Avengers could be done in a year. Either they are thinking about somebody else doing it or they have something up their sleeve that I don’t know.
But as you now know, Marvel decided to push back the release date of The Avengers an entire year to May 4th, 2012. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Today a spy over at AICN confirms my suspicions:
“The Avengers is delayed a year because of financing issues but also because the plan is for Favreau to helm it. Everybody here loves the guy and he wants to do it, but it would have been impossible for him to do before the date change given his Iron Man 2 commitments. Also partly the reason why he agreed to do the Stark sequel on such an accelerated schedule was so he could get given first dibs on this. It would still be a punishing schedule for him, so hes not firmly confirmed yet, but he is certainly the presumptive director at this point.”
Clearly Favreau is the best many to helm Marvel’s superhero team-up film. He’s been talking about the idea since he got hired to direct Iron Man, and we all know how that turned out. Can you think of a better filmmaker for the job?
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