Phil Recommends: William’s Semester in Britain Blog

The blog has been going by the way-side as of late. Why? Well at work they are having us pretty much come in for any amount of overtime that we can do. Basically, at I am at the end of the production “line” and us guys in coating cannot coat the circuit boards as fast as we are receiving them. So we are super busy and I have been going to bed more on time than I ever have before. Getting up early, like at 4am, gets a little tiring after a while too.

Anyway, this time I want to recommend my brother’s blog. My brother is currently in York, England for a semester abroad program at York St. John University through Calvin College. I think he is doing a awesome job so far at posting and there is plenty of content and pictures.

Some of his posts are a bit lengthy, but he is trying to keep more of a journal on it that way too. He takes notes in a notebook and writes his posts from that, which is a pretty good idea. Seeing as he has only been in Britain for a week now he has a pretty good amount of posts from there already, but might not be so regular so I would recommend subscribing to emails of the posts here. Or do like I do and use Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feed (well actually I have both now, but whatever).

Where might you find my brother’s blog you ask? http://york.williamoverbeeke.com that is where. Well hopefully he does not lack in his bloggings as I do, but we all no that this whole blog thing is a bit hard to do all the time when it is not a necessary thing to do in life.I hope to get more posts up soon on other topics/recommendations, but I can keep hoping a lot with no results too, haha.

Phil Recommends: Lifehacker

Well this post is kind of a little late in coming. The recommendation for this time in a sense should proceed the ones I have already done. Why? Because almost everything I have and will recommend usually is found by me on it first.So without further ado this week’s recommendation is the website/blog Lifehacker.com.

Let me just say, I like Lifehacker a lot. As the name implies its all about doing things in life with “hacks” to make it easier or better.  It only started way back in 2005, but I have found it a pretty good resource for a lot of awesome life hacks when it comes to online and computer life. At least thats mostly the kind of stories and posts I look into.

If you want to know more about Lifehacker.com from their FAQs page, here. While it is primarily a digital life focus, once in a while they will post things about other aspects of life. Like one time they gave instructions on how to create Skittles flavored vodka. Who doesn’t want that once in a while? Needless to say I have not tried that, but a friend did and was impressed. I have noticed that a lot of posts are about food or drink, if they are not about digital things.

If you use a RSS or blog reader of some kind then I would suggest adding Lifehacker to it. You never know if you will find something useful there. I know I favorite or star a lot of their posts everyday in Google Reader. Maybe that will be my next recommendation.

Anyway, go to Lifehacker.com you might just find something there that makes your digital life easier, if not you might just find a recipe that suits you too.

Physical media will die

Well I kind of forgot about writing anything for Christmas, but whatever. Mine went rather well and got mostly things I needed anyway. Seeing as I am getting older thats about all I expect anyway. I did get the first 2 Dresden Files books. If you haven’t read any of Jim Butcher’s writing, then I suggest that you get on that as soon as possible. This is especially true if you like mystery and detective stories, then Harry Dresden is for you. There is 11 book in the series so far and the 12th comes out in April 2010. I plan on reading it once it comes out.

Anyway, on to what the title of my post is. Yeah, thats right I say physical media will die. I have thought this for quite a while, especially after the struggle for Blu-ray to declare dominance over HD-DVD. Yes, we needed a new standard and all, but I believe it came too late for it to really make the difference that regular DVD did when it came out. Oh, and what the heck is wrong with the name? Blu-ray? Its made using a blue laser and thats about it, woopdedoo. HD-DVD makes much more sense to me. The fact that they have to promote Blu-ray as high definition everytime a new one comes out. But whatever really thats not my point.

Apparently though recent reports show that Blu-ray is being adopted about as fast as DVD was when it first showed up on the scene. I don’t think it will have the life of DVD though. There is too many new ways to get media that will become even more widely used over Blu-ray and other physical media. For instance, Netflix pretty much streams alot of the content on-demand over to your computer, gaming console, or other streaming media device. This is the future. Physical digital media will probably not be around in the future. Music is already offered on places like iTunes and Amazon. Oh, and a lot of movies too.