Technology connoisseur, hardware mod artist, and Crashnaut extraordinaire Brett_N added another feather to his cap this weekend, with his tragic yet uplifting video tail of a terminally ill Xbox 360… and some delicious scrambled eggs.

Way to go Brett, I can’t wait to see your PS3 souffle!

Here’s a strangely addictive animated music video that is making the rounds on the interwebs this morning. It’s a little story about love in the early 2000s, when the landscape was dominated by AOL and IRC. Enjoy trying to get this little jingle out of your head for the rest of the day! <3

So I got interviewed by the Wall Street Journal last week about my experiences with Apple’s iTunes Store. Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro found my recent post about the service while researching the story and decided to ask me for some additional comments. The story ran today and does a good job of surveying the movie download services currently available to customers. Unfortunately it looks like access to the article requires a subscription (when will old media learn?) but you can see a video interview with the reporter here.

I decided to try downloading a film from the new iTunes store this morning. After a quick browse through the store I came upon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a favorite book of mine and a great example of an adaptation done right. Hitchhiker came out last holiday season so it was available for the “old releases” price of $9.99. Perfect. I plunked down the money and the download started straight away.

The download was quick, about 45 minutes over my 6Mbps connection, but perhaps not as fast as originally advertised by Apple. That said, I was impressed by how easy and painless it was to watch the film as it was downloading. About 15 minutes into the download I started it up and it played in full resolution with no stuttering. As for the quality, “near-DVD” is a good description. It plays in widescreen (thankfully) and some compression is noticeable but it’s certainly not distracting. From what I’ve watched thus far, it looked great even in fullscreen mode on my 20.1″ Dell widescreen monitor. I imagine it would look just fine on a standard definition television as 640 x 480 is roughly the resolution of SDTV.

Films remember your playback position (just like a DVD player does) and even feature a chapter selection built right into the controls. The chapter names are displayed along with a screen capture of each chapter. This is quite handy for calling up certain scenes or specific moments in a film. The standard track skip will take you to the next chapter in a linear fasion.

I’ve got to say, thus far I’m very impressed with the service. The download was fast, inexpensive and of high quality. My 1.33Ghz Powerbook G4 seems to be handling playback just fine even while using Photoshop CS and writing this blog post. I could have spent $13.99 plus additional shipping charges and waited a week for this film by purchasing it through Amazon, but that seems so 90’s at this point. iTunes will allow you to play back the film on 5 computers and unlimited iPods, and come this Spring beam it wirelessly to your main television using Apple’s iTV. I’m starting to feel like physical media such as DVDs and CDs are more of a bother than they are worth. As hard disk and flash drive storage prices continue to plummet, and connectivity between consumer devices improves, why even bother having all those silver discs lying around? I would much rather call up the media I’m looking for over an advanced home network.

The future is coming, resistance is useless.

UPDATE: I’ve just realized that when you sync your iPod with your computer it will make note of how far along in the movie you are and start playing at that point if you access it on your ‘pod. Nice touch!