Hulu: My Newest Bookmark

For those of you who haven't heard, there's a new Web site on the block called Hulu, and it's definitely worth a look.

From Reuters:

Hulu, the online video joint venture of News Corp. (NWS) and General Electric's (GE) NBC Universal, makes its public debut Wednesday with programming from Warner Bros., Lionsgate (LGF) and sports leagues.

At launch, Hulu will offer full-length episodes of more than 250 TV series, from current hits such as The Simpsons to older shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It also will offer 100 movies, including The Big Lebowski and Mulholland Drive.

While some of the movies and televisions series listed on the site are only partial clips, there are enough full movies and episodes to keep a videophile amused for weeks. The quality is surprisingly good, and while you "pay" for the videos by having the videos interrupted occasionally by un-skippable commercials, from what I've seen they are both infrequent and short, especially when compared to the commercial breaks on American television networks.

Not to be outdone, Google has announced some new developments in store for YouTube that suggest that it might not be long before we're streaming our favorite movies and television episodes from the world's most popular video site.

Nice Ubuntu Installation Video

For those who don't want to wait for my series, here's a fairly nice video showing the installation process for Ubuntu Linux using the Live CD. This video shows each step of the installation process, but only for a very basic installation. It doesn't discuss partitioning your drive properly, barely touches on using or customizing Ubuntu once it's installed, and certainly doesn't provide any information about some of the more common issues you might encounter, such as installing drivers for unusual video or wireless cards. However, it does an excellent job of demonstrating how simple installing Linux can be.

Since that video also doesn't show off any of Gutsy Gibbon's nicer desktop effects, for those of you who like the slick appearance and graphical features of Vista and Leopard I made this short video of my desktop. (I had to severely reduce the resolution of my screen to get smooth video capture, so what you're seeing doesn't come close to conveying how slick Ubuntu looks on my system. I'm still playing around with my screen capture software, so hopefully my future videos will look better.)

[EDIT: Videos moved to the "Tech" playlist of the Video Player.]