Hulu is the NBC corporations new attempt at distributing their content to their customers via the internet. Their shows are all going to be posted on hulu.com in flash format to be provided on demand to users on their computers.

Their slogan is “anywhere, any time.” This is of course a steaming pile of bull excrement as the shows are region locked, and you cannot view them when you are outside of the United States. But who would that matter to? Me dammit! I am in Japan right now, and I want to watch American shows, screw you NBC. The other thing that NBC does not allow you to do, is to download and store the content that they are providing on Hulu. This means that you are not able to play them on devices that do not have internet connections.

This may be an issue for people who use things like video iPods, but I I believe that portable devices will all have internet connections soon enough, and that services like Hulu will come into their own. It allows the companies control of their media, which I think is perfectly fine given they are providing it for free, and it allows users access to it truly “anywhere, anytime.”

Maybe soon enough your iPhone will get flash support, and you will be able to watch any NBC show you want, any time, on the go. Go bug Stevie J about that!

Want to give it a try? Too bad, no soup for you! Hulu is in a private demo period. The only users that are allowed to use it are individuals who have been invited to participate in the demo.

There is a loophole however. One of the features of Hulu is that you are able to embed videos into web pages and blogs similar to what Youtube offers. There is now a website that takes advantage of this functionality, and simply posts embeds all of the Hulu tv shows that are currently offered on one website.

Openhulu.com

Pretty cool it is, awesome it is not. Imagine if you could load a shotguns shell with advertisements, and shoot them at a fantastic concept. Thats what openhulu currently looks like. These are not just ads, they are ANNOYING advertisements. Blinky ads, flashing ads, bouncy ads, and stupid ads, they are all there bombarding you.

This site is a nifty way to play with Hulu before it is released, but it will go as fast as it came as soon as Hulu is released to the public, and I wont miss it. But for now, give it a shot.

-The Digital Kitty

I absolutely love science fiction television. Actually, I love most all action television shows, however lets just talk about scifi for the moment. Depressingly, or gloriously, I have watched every episode of the following series, or every episode released thus far for the current ones.

1. Firefly
2. Farscape
3. Stargate sg-1
4. Stargate Atlantis
5. Babylon 5
6. Crusade
7. Star Trek TNG
8. Star Trek DS9
9. Star Trek Voyager
10. Star Trek Enterprise
11. Earth Final Conflict
12. Battlestar Galactica
13. Eureka
14. Seaquest
15. Seaquest DSV
16. …

Yeah it keeps going.

Anyway I have been scraping the barrel for interesting stuff to watch. Recently, I watched all of Andromeda, and started watching some of the new Dr. Who episodes, and you know what, I was right to put them off this long, they are absolutely awful.

Andromeda, not only as a completely confusing and compelling storyline, but the only two characters that I found remotely interesting were Rommie and Seamus, but neither of them received all that much character development. Anyway, I watched all of them, and it was a complete waste of my time.

Next up, is Dr. Who. This series is an absolute steaming pile of farm animal excrement. The stories make no sense, are more random than a vegas slot machine, employ crappy special effects, and everyone has an English accent. You cant get much worse.

A film snob I am not. The only thing that matters to me is whether or not I enjoy watching a show, am I entertained or not. Which reminds me of…

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?! … sorry had to do it. Despite my rather lax criteria for passing judgment on television shows, I have trouble understanding why anyone watches Dr. Who other than for the cute main actors and girls who play his sidekicks. If that why you watch this series, then I suggest you make use of your mute button, it improves the viewing experience exponentially. If you are looking for something more interesting to watch, I suggest something from the list up above.

-The Digital Kitty

I love toys. Cars, skateboards, electronics, video games, computers, the Internet, web 2.0, consumer products, television, film, IPTV, and modifying all of the above.

Why is my blog unique?

Let me tell you a little about myself. I am female, 21 years old, a geek, living in Japan, from the San Francisco Bay Area, my home University is in the Silicon Valley, and I am a perpetual entrepreneur.

I do not purport that these attributes make me qualified to review the things I am going to review on this website. However, I do suggest that they make me unique. I loved Tech TV, I love TWiT, Revision3, Digg, Engadget, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker to name a few sources of tech analysis. What is a common trend amongst them though, is it seems to be a bit of a sausage fest. Granted, you do have female personalities like Cali Lewis, Morgan Webb, and Irina Slutsky out there, and they are wonderful. They are not however, in college, on a college students budget, living in Japan, or independent.

I am not tooting my own horn, I don’t even have a horn to toot, but I am sure you want to know the “who” of this blog to figure out whether or not you actually care.

Now the what.

I will probably inundate this site for the first few days to catch up on important products that I love, are in the news, or are totally NOT in the news but are important to me. These will range from the common, like the IPhone, to the uncommon but interesting of the Nokia n810, to the obscure of my Sager 4880 laptop. Electronics are nifty, but there is more to being a geek. I may talk about my love of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly, or perhaps my current absolute infatuation with Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat.

Cars? …oh yes… there will be cars. On a daily basis I see amazing vehicles. Today I saw two Unimogs, an r34 Skyline, an Evo 4, and Evo 6, an FD Rx7, etc. I will try to take pictures of the cars I find the most sexy, and share them. Also, I will browse Jalopnik, and babble on about cars that are on sale. What do I drive? A heavily modified 1995 BMW M3, with around 120 thousand miles on it. She is not in Japan though, shes back in San Francisco awaiting my return.

I will also give you some information on Japanese tech culture as I experience it as a flaming gai-jin. Two days ago was my first experience in Akihabara (the electronic playground of Tokyo), and let me tell you, I have a lot to say about it.

If you have a request for me to go look at a product in the stores here in Japan because it is not sold in your home country, send me an e-mail and I will go take a look. I live in the Greater Tokyo area, so I should be able to find it.

Anyway, enjoy.

-The Digital Kitty