The Studio

Great news!

It is now possible to have alerts about series/actor/director/language you are interested in sent via RSS.

For example, if you are interested in the movies in Hindi (see the first image) after performing a search  click on the RSS chicklet (circled in red on the right hand side) and subscribe (second image).  This means that whenever we get a new movie in Hindi or with Brad Pitt or whatever is your passion an alert will be sent to your RSS aggregator such as Google Reader.

[Cross-posted from the Radar]

If you’re like me and you grew up watching the Transformers (the old school cartoon, not the recent live-action movie) and staging endless battles between the Autobots and Decepticons with friends, you’ll be happy to know that you can now pre-order your very own Ravage USB drive (via Gizmodo). It’s pricey and I don’t really use USB drives as much as I used to, but I really want one!

Are you a Transformers fan? What do you think of the live-action movies? Okay, now back to my adult life…

I am loving Grooveshark and I think you will as well.

The Grooveshark website allows you to listen to music through the internet. I stumbled upon this site while preparing to teach Listening to Music Online (click here to see the slides from that presentation).

Grooveshark’s greatness stems from you being enabled  to pick particular songs and even particular albums to listen to (I am currently listening most of  Leonard Cohen’s works).  Similar music search websites such as the very cool Songza will enable you to find one song but not stream an entire album.

Grooveshark even has a recommendation system.  For example, if you like the Pixies you may also like the Breeders, Modest Mouse, etc.  This is not an unusual feature for this type of site but really isn’t its strong point.

Give Grooveshark a shot.

I don’t own a Blu-ray player yet, but if I did the first movie I’d watch on it would be the Matrix. If you can believe it, this month is the 10-year anniversary of its release in the U.S.  I have vivid memories of watching the movie for the first time in a packed New Jersey theater and just being completely blown away. I ended up watching it in the theater three more times in a span of a month and even worked it into the grad classes I was taking at the time! Like many others at the time, I was completely obsessed with the movie.

Photo Credit: Sujay Thomas

If you’re interested in learning more about Blu-ray, join us for our Tuesday Tech Talk tomorrow night at 7pm in the Mary Radmacher Meeting Room (register online). One of our tech assistants will be explaining everything there is to know about Blu-ray. If you’re one of the lucky ones and already own a Blu-ray player, you should definitely check out our growing collection of Blu-ray discs. The Blu-ray version of the Matrix is being ordered and should be available at the library soon [Update: The Matrix Blu-ray disc has been ordered, so feel free to place a hold today!]

So, if you could pick one movie to watch on Blu-ray with the ultimate home entertainment system, what would it be?