Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Hulu is a site designed to bring professional TV and movie content to the web in a legal, ad-supported format. It’s a joint venture of NBC and the News Corporation, with partnerships with many content providers and web services for syndication.

They’ve been in private Beta for months and just officially launched a few weeks ago, and they’ve been getting a lot of attention. The content is still limited (we’re not talking NetFlix here) but there’s an interesting assortment full-length content here, old and new — the entire run of “Arrested Development,” 48 episodes of the old Bob Newhart show, 78 episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and other old shows like “Barney Miller,” “Hill Street Blues” and “The Practice.” There are lots of
current shows here, too, with several full episodes and lots of clips.
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Two recent news stories caught my eye, quite literally. Each reported the discovery of a previously-unknown childhood photograph of a legendary American woman. The women couldn’t be more different : the notorious Lizzie Borden and the inspirational Helen Keller. In each case, the newly-discovered photographs give us a rare glimpse into the childhood of these women — in both cases, the new photographs may be the earliest known photographs of their subjects.
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Here’s a handy little Firefox extension that can be really useful. It adds a little cellphone icon to your Firefox browser. Click on it, and you get a pop-up window that lets you send a text message to your own phone or anyone else’s as long as you know their number and carrier.

I mostly use this to send messages to own phone, things I’d otherwise write on little scraps of paper and lose. I copy and paste meeting information like addresses and room numbers, just as a backup to my memory, or titles of books or articles I want to check out. It’s easy to copy and paste from webpages or e-mail, or if I just need to send a reminder to myself or someone else, it’s easier for me to type it in from the keyboard than to use the phone’s keypad. The window shows you how many characters you’ve used, so you’ll know if your message is going to get split into parts.
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