Apple has a new high def trailer for Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower. Apple reports the North American release date as December 22nd. Given the success of Hero and House of Flying Daggers, I’d say that Dec. 22 theatrical release bodes well for those of us who live in Nanaimo, where “wide releases” aren’t always wide enough. Luckily Sony is pretty good about their DVD releases.

Followers of Google may or may not be aware of their famous (at least on the Google campus) whiteboard. It’s been alluded to occasionally in interviews and Google Blog posts. A (non-english) site called UnderGoogle has a cool Zoomify shot of the entire board as of some random period in time. I can’t wait for the goat teleporter.

Cesar at TeamXbox has posted an update that has links to the Megadeth website, where they have uploaded an mp3 of the GoW song, as well as the lyrics.

basshunter.se has finally posted the new video that was originally scheduled for the 16th. It’s Basshunter’s remix of “Vifta med händerna” by Patrik och Lillen. Go watch it infinite times!

Logboy at Twitchfilm has posted some details on Takashi Miike’s Django-inspired Spaghetti Western. Rumor has it this will be the first of Miike’s eleven-billion films to be shot entirely in English, and it will feature a cameo from Quentin Tarantino. The cast of Japaneses talents have been given two-month English crash courses. Lets hope that’s enough and they don’t end up sounding like the English dialogue in Ichi…

“sh4rd” has posted a bulletin at SourceForge that comes as a bit of a pleasant surprise this morning. His post, “WASTE Undead” hopefully announces the long-awaited return of Justin Frankel’s secure p2p application.

Is WASTE alive again? I’m not really sure. After 3 years on the internet, it’s actually more relevant than it was way back in version 1.0b. With government wiretapping, ISP logging, and general sneaky spying, it’s a great time to keep your private matters…well…private, and use WASTE.

It’s also a call-out to coders for help on the project. Huzzah!

A lengthy article at the shamelessly-named Xbox 360 Fanboy describes how Halo 3 will hopefully fix the ages-old problem of weapon whoring. It also talks about Bungie’s clever solution to the problem of player identification in-game. My gamertag is plain english, so nobody has a problem reading it. …or on Live, should I say hopefully MOST people can read plain english?

No mention of the thing I’d most like to see changed: Let’s make map the melee to a button you can actually press while using the right thumbstick!

I saw a link to this article at GameDaily, so close to the anniversary of the 360 and on the eve of the PS3 and Wii’s releases, and I thought it would be one of those articles. You know, the type that counts down a bunch of things and then slaps you across the face with its number 1 spot. I clicked the link, ready to be outraged and see them call my beloved Xbox “lame”, but my fears were put to rest when I read it. This article pretty much hits the nail on the head. Virtual Boy, Gizmondo, and N-Gage are all present and accounted for.

Since the fall dashboard update, Windows XP users have been able to stream WMV videos for playback on the 360. Most of the stuff I wanted to watch was in AVI format, and I was a bit suprised to see some AVI files come up in the curiously unorganized browser in the video blade (no heirarchies like the photos and music? in fact nothing other than alphabetical sorting). Of course I got a message saying it was an unsupported filetype, though. I’ve got all these movies and episodes of Aqua Teens and no way to watch them… Luckily HappyBeggar has already done the hard part. They tested three different transcoding solutions, and settled on VLC as the best (no surprise there, I swear the program is magic if it can play HD videos on my . They even have some batch scripts so you can just drag your video onto it and go. Make sure to set the location of vnc.exe in your batch file, and enjoy the show.