Jerry O'Connell to Play Herman Munster in NBC's 'Munsters' Reboot

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First Look: Lindsay Lohan as Liz Taylor in Lifetime Biopic

First Look: Lindsay Lohan Transforms Into Elizabeth Taylor in Lifetime Biopic (Photo)   follow on Twitter | THR on Facebook | forward to a friend  © 2011 The Hollywood Reporter, All rights reserved. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy   unsubscribe from this list | update newsletter preferences |

June 4th, 2012Top Story How to Turn Your Android into a Killer Portable Media and Gaming Center By Adam Dachis Click to view Your home media center may be awesome, but it doesn't do you much good when you're at a friend's place and desperate to watch the Game of Thrones finale, get in a few laps on Mario Kart, or listen to a great new band you discovered. Here's how you can turn your Android device into a badass portable media center with a few apps and one magic adapter. In this post we're going to take your Android device and turn it into a portable media center that can do all the cool things in the video above. We're going to put together a system that can play and stream your music and videos, function as a retro arcade, and take input from a game controller. When you're done you'll be able to hook your Android device up to any television set with an HDMI input, so it's like you're bringing your home media center everywhere you go. Every time I'm with friends and we want to watch a movie or show we don't have or just don't have something to do, I've got the solution in my backpack. After a minute, we're up and running. It's incredibly easy. What You'll Need An Android phone or tablet with a reasonably fast processor. (If it can play 720p MKV files, it's probably good enough.) An HDMI adapter for your device (like this one for the Samsung Galaxy Tab series). An HDMI cable (if your friends don't have any extras lying around). Plex for Android, plus a few other apps we'll discuss later. OPTIONAL: A Sony Sixaxis Wireless Controller (my preference) or Nintendo Wiimote for playing games and/or controlling your device from afar. So how much will this all cost? There's a decent chance you'll only need to buy an HDMI adapter, which costs $20-30, and Plex, which costs $5. If you don't already have a game controller, you can usually pick one up for $30-50 (or less if you buy used). Either way, the set up is pretty cheap and worth the total cost. Step One: Test Out Your HDMI Adapter This part is easy if you've ever plugged in a cable before. Simply connect the HDMI adapter to your Android device, then connect the adapter to an HDMI input on a television set with an HDMI input. In most cases, this is all you need to do to see your tablet on screen. In some cases you might need to do a tiny bit more work to get things up and running. In the case of my tablet—a Samsung Galaxy tab—I also need to connect it to power. It provides an additional port to connect a USB power cable. As soon as I do this, the tablet starts sending its video to the television. Other devices may have slight variances, so check with your adapter's manual if you're having any trouble. Step Two: Set Up Plex to Stream Your Media Plex is fantastic media center software. It's based on the open-sourced XBMC and, in my opinion, is a marked improvement. It now runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, and—of course—Android. It's free on the desktop but will cost you a very reasonable $5 to purchase for your Android device. If you want to stream media from your home, it's the best app for the job. To get started, download it. You'll also need to download and install Plex for the desktop. If you're already using XBMC, or just don't want the full media center always active on your desktop, you can install Plex Media Server instead. You'll be offered the choice on Plex's download page after you select your operating system. The nice thing about Plex is that to get it set up you just need to create an account and sign in on all your devices (including your desktop computer). This makes it very simple to connect remotely without any advanced configuration. That said, if you want to do it the old fashioned way (i.e. port forwarding) or just want some very detailed instructions, we have a guide to help you out. However you go about, when you're done you'll be able to stream media from your home to your device. Got Image Quality Problems? Here's How to Fix Them One problem you may run into is poor streaming quality. In my tests, Plex defaulted to the poorest possible quality even though my computer was fast enough to encode HD on the fly and my internet connection could manage to send large data streams. To fix this issue, go into Plex's settings on your Android device. You'll find a couple of settings for streaming quality. Plex will default to automatic quality detection, but you can tell it to always use a particular bit rate. Doing this has helped some people achieve better quality, but it didn't work for me. I solved the issue by going into Plex's advanced settings and forcing it to use "Direct Play." The image quality looked beautiful after that. Step Three: Set Up Your Retro Arcade One of the benefits of the Android platform is the number of retro game emulators available for it. Additionally, you have access to several apps that will allow you to wirelessly connect multiple controllers to actually play those games. We'll talk about the controllers in the next step, as they can also be used to control your device from afar, but for now we're just going to add the arcade. Mobile emulation can get pretty specific, so if you want detailed instructions be sure to read our complete guide. That said, installing a couple of emulators is pretty simple. Here's a list of our favorites for Android: NES: NESoid SNES: SNESoid Sega Genesis: Gensoid Nintendo 64: N64oid Sony Playstation: FPse Once you've got the emulator you can find games on sites like EmuParadise and CoolROM. Just toss your games on your Android device (or on its SD card) and you'll be able to play them in the emulator. Step Four: Pair a Controller Even if you're not planning to play any video games, pairing a wireless controller is really useful for controlling your Android phone or tablet from the couch. You probably don't want to have to get up to pause the movie, make adjustments, or navigate to another app. You can map a video game controller's buttons to Android's keyboard so you can easily input commands from afar. Although I prefer the A Sony Sixaxis Wireless Controller because it has more buttons and is more comfortable to hold, a Nintendo Wiimote will also work. You can connect up to four of either type of controller (and, presumably, a combination of both), but you really only need one to get the job done. If you're visiting a friend and they have a few extra controllers lying around, you can temporarily pair theirs as well. To pair controllers, it's best to root your device. While there are a few Wiimote apps that do not require root access, they're just not as good and there is no option for Sony controllers. If you want to pair a Wiimote (or four) you'll want to download Wii Controller IME. It'll run you $3 but it's one of the better options. It can handle up to four Wiimotes, works with the Classic Controller and Nunchuck attachments, and easily maps buttons to other controls on the keyboard. Sixaxis Controller ($2) does essentially the same thing for wireless Sony controllers that were designed to work with the PS3. Pairing one of these controllers takes a little more work initially, as you have to connect it to your computer over USB and use a pairing tool to set it up, but once you're done you're done—it'll remain paired to your device until you choose to reset it. Sixaxis Controller doesn't work on every Android device, however, so be sure to download and run the compatibility checker before buying the app. Once you've got your controller configured, you'll be able to assign letters to buttons in the interface. In Wii Controller IME you'll be able to do this by tapping the Mapping button. In Sixaxis Controller you can do this by tapping the standard Android settings button, choosing Sixaxis Settings, and then Keyboard Emulation, then Key Mappings. In both apps, you just select the controller you want to map, choose a button, and enter the key you want to map it to. I'd recommend mapping the start and select buttons to enter and home (respectively) and setting one of the top controller buttons (or the button on the backside of the Wiimote) to the back. The directional pad should be mapped to the arrow keys. Everything else is up for grabs. Making these specific choices will allow you to navigate your home screen and launch apps from the couch. When actually playing a game, your button choices won't matter that much. When you're navigating the tablet from afar, however, they make a big difference. Step Five: More Media Technically, you're done. You've set up a streaming media center and an arcade that can go anywhere and you can control with your choice of wireless video game controllers. That's pretty great, but you can take your device as farther. For starters, if you prefer higher quality video you can always just copy media files directly to your device to play them locally. You can also add apps like Netflix, Hulu, Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player, Spotify, or anything else you might want. Android is full of tons of apps that can benefit from being hooked up to a television or a home theater system. You can even install Skype for video conferencing on the big screen. Because there are so many apps out there, you have tons of options. With this basic setup in place, all you have to do is add the app you want and it'll become a part of your portable media center in minutes. Photo by XYZ (Shutterstock).

Beware Email's Cunning Little Ways How Can I Learn to Take Criticism Without Taking It Personally? How to Turn Your Android into a Killer Portable Media and Gaming Center The 10-20-30 Running Concept Can Increase Performance in Less Time How to Keep Track of How Other People Are Using Your Media Online Official Instapaper for Android App Now Available Five Best Android ROMs More Stories on Lifehacker »

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June 4th, 2012Top Story This Is How You Make Something Go Viral: An Impractical Guide By Neetzan Zimmerman In effort to free up the longtime staff writers from a daily content quota and give them more breathing room, we instilled the whole traffic-whore model for about a month with varying results. The ultimate goal of this exercise was to show how, often times, the stories thought to be guaranteed traffic-drivers never materialized and how some of the longer stories outperformed them. The message: good is good, and you don't have to anchor your success to the oftentimes flukey nature of internet readers' tastes. Internet publishers — successful ones — have concocted numerous sub rosa playbooks around traffic-goosing techniques: from the early days of annoying email blasts and Google-juicing headline techniques to, you know, more boobs. Then HuffPo came along with its lefty megaplex Drudge Report amalgamation which has morphed into the modern day Buzzfeed curating algorithm of business in the front, party in the back (or vice-versa), now considered standard wisdom for some of the bigger publishers. Admittedly, I hate this trend. I hate cats in hot tubs, cats sitting on babies, Keyboard Cats playing off babies who suck at singing, etc. Looking at them is fine. I mostly hate that, at some point, a viral video becomes the default hit-switch for a slow news day. But when your job is to grow a site's traffic, it's tough to ignore — and for the sake of the other writers, it's a necessary cog. To acknowledge this trend of internet strip-mining, we hired Neetzan Zimmerman, founder of The Daily What, to essentially "cover" The Internet for Gawker. His coverage isn't done conventionally, nor is he gravitating to posts he particularly likes: he's tracking what the Internet's hive mind will react to by his own system, which is to me more of a sabermetrician's approach to viral content. I've asked him to outline his formula for both me, but also for readers to show how his method of traffic-generating content is actually employed and why you're reading what you're reading from him on a daily basis — A.J. Daulerio The Most Valuable Content On The Internet: A Manifesto Step 1: Background. In the Summer of 2008 I started a small Tumblr called "The Daily What." It was meant to expand on a feature I had been running on a separate site dedicated to a zine I was self-publishing at the time called Man With Crisis. That feature, "While You Were Working," was just that: A compendium of the most "newsworthy" items of the day, as determined by the Internet. I became increasingly intrigued by what I like to call "the Internet as Value Barometer" — deciding not only what there was to know, but what was worth knowing. Can the wisdom of the crowd be used to determine what warrants attention and what can be willfully ignored? If enough people think some story deserves to be shared, does that automatically make that story more valuable than all the stories not being shared? To put it another way: Do stories that are not being shared even matter? To answer these questions, I first needed to come up with a structured formula for figuring out the Most Valuable Content (MVC) on any given day. Step 2: Experimentation. I started by tracking down the Internet's main sources for MVC. In order to seperate the "listeners" from the "storytellers" I put together two lists: One with all the websites from which content was being culled for dissemination, and another with all the sites doing the disseminating. Examples of the former include big deals like Fark, Reddit, Digg (this was in 2008, mind you), Slashdot, MetaFilter, b3ta, and Oh No They Didn't, as well as lesser-known sites like Super Punch, Cynical-C, Arbroath, and 3 Quarks Daily, that seemed to be a regular source of content for larger, more popular sites. Examples of the latter include Boing Boing, the Gawker Media sites, BuzzFeed, Neatorama, Laughing Squid, and Urlesque. The point was to try and suss out not only where the content was actually coming from (as opposed to where it was ending up), but also to keep track of an item's movements across the web in an effort to pinpoint the exact moment at which it could be defined as having "gone viral." Using an RSS reader to organize my findings, I established a set of categories for each site-type (news, vids, pics, link-sites, general interest, tech, geek, gossip, entertainment, design, art, fashion, and food), and further arranged each site within each category by order of influence. The top tiers were reserved for "mainstream sites" — sites where most of the sharing was occurring (i.e., the content disseminating sites listed above). The lower tiers were reserved for sites that supplied content to top tier sites, but were themselves low on visits. This allowed me to have a streamlined, bottom-up view of content progression: From the lower tiers to the top, where the viral magic happens. In short order I was able to track content from the point of inception to pre-mainstream saturation. I learned to recognize when items were reaching that critical stage of going from radar blip to full-scale red alert. Some of The Daily What's most successful "gets" could be attributed to the employment of this system: Sad Keanu, Nyan Cat, Double Dream Hands, and Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" — which The Daily What posted months before many other major sites became aware of its existence. Step 3: Maintenance. The Internet is mercurial to say the least, and while certain conversation-mongers like Reddit, BuzzFeed, and The Huffington Post are likely here to stay, lower tier sites — the ones that tell them what there is to discuss — change rapidly. In order to stay as current as possible, I make sure to run a spot-check of the most visible sites at least once a week. Refreshing the index with the most fruitful lower tier content sources is only half of it: Losing the dead weight is crucial as well. My rule is simple: If a site hasn't produced at least on item of value during the week, it drops down a tier. If it bottoms out and still hasn't proven useful, it's gone. Step 4: Predictability. At this point, you should be well on your way to gaining a firm grasp on the inner workings of the Internet. So much so, that you don't even need to wait for content to be deemed valuable by a top tier site in order to know it will eventually end up with that designation. Let's review what we've learned so far: The Internet starts below the surface, so get to know the unsung sites supplying the big shots with fodder for dialogue. Pay particular attention to the items that get published on lower tier sites. Chart their progress across similar tiered sites. If they shows up on enough lower tier sites, they're likely in the process of going viral. Learn what the top tier sites like and look for. This will help to cut down on time spent waiting for an item to make its way across the trenches. Ditch the sites that don't improve predictability: Lower tier sites are only as good as their effecacy in determining the output of top tier sites. Note that it may not always be readily apparent why something is more shareable than something else, but having that intangible quality necessarily makes that thing more valuable. That may seem like a truism, but the fact is that, once you've established the viral probability of a video or an image or an idea using the methods outlined above, the "why" is no longer important. It has been commodified by the Internet, and lifted above the noise. It is significant because it was significant enough to get noticed in the first place. (A word of caution: When the internet is particularly starved for content, it tends to reach for low-hanging fruit. And that fruit is low-hanging for a reason: It's ripe to the point of being rotten. Insipid, pointless, patently unintesting and unfunny items are brought to the fore when they would otherwise remain unmissed in obscurity. Be on alert: Just as in other areas of life, obnoxious elements can, occasionally, gain undeserved attention when there is nothing good on.) Step 5: Results. So do stories that are not being shared even matter? The answer, undoubtedly, is no. How could they, when they are seemingly invisible? This isn't a comment on their bona fide merit, but if the purpose of the Internet is to engender exchange, then anything not being shared must therefore, in this context, be worthless. As above, understanding why something works is an exercise in futility. More than that, it is completely unnecessary when the point is to be part of a larger community, not an outlier. Being able to determine what will be discussed next is, therefore, far more valuable. Advancing the conversation will always be looked upon more favorably than trying, and likely failing, to start it. In the end, the Internet will always tell you what you need to know because it is a digital extension of the world writ large, and out there, as in here, the greatest story will always be retold. Image by Jim Cooke.

This Is How You Make Something Go Viral: An Impractical Guide Trax Read: Listen to Young Galaxy's Fantastic New Track 'Shoreless Kid' Chasing After Miami Residents While Pretending to Be a Zombie Somehow Not the Best Idea New Dark Knight Rises Footage Premieres at the MTV Movie Awards Here's Richard Dawson's Psychedelic Single 'Apples and Oranges' Richard Dawson, Original Family Feud Host, Dies at 79 'Get Off My Lawn, Tattoos,' Says Curmudgeonly Columnist More Stories on Gawker »

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June 4th, 2012Top Story Black Ops 2 Blows Up E3 and Los Angeles in New Gameplay Footage By Evan Narcisse Click to view The City of Angels goes to hell in the newest gameplay footage from Treyarch's upcoming sequel to the hit Call of Duty: Black Ops. L.A.'s iconic freeways become a shattered battlefield when future America's massive store unmanned war assets get turned against us. An escort mission where the player character safeguards the American president through a full-scale attack showed off x-ray sniper scopes and what appeared to be a web-connected engagement theater. The bar for COD's trademark set pieces looks like it' getting raised big time in Black Ops 2. Look for more coverage this week on Kotaku.

Black Ops 2 Blows Up E3 and Los Angeles in New Gameplay Footage Cortana Is Angry, But Halo 4 Looks Incredible Watch E3 Live Right Here, Right Now How the Wii U and Pokémon Could Destroy Wallets Worldwide Nintendo Shows Off Wii U Online Community, New Control Pads Microsoft Wants to Stream Console Games to Phones, Turning Handhelds Into "Xbox Live Companions" The Wii U GamePad Is Different. Here's How. More Stories on Kotaku »

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