Well, I got my edition of the Special DVD Edition of The Two Towers, and spent a lovely evening enjoying the second part of the LotR trilogy. One week after the release of this DVD edition (very clever), more details have been anounced of the Extended DVD editions. There will be, unlike with the FotR DVD editions, *two* Special Extended Editions :

1. The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers Platinum Series Special Extended DVD Edition.

• Discs 1-2: The Feature (208 mins)- A new version of the second installment in the epic trilogy! The film includes over 40 minutes of never-before-seen footage incorporated into the film, made especially for this video release. Four audio commentaries by director and writers, the design team, the production team and the cast featuring more than 30 participants including Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Orlando Bloom and Academy Award winners Richard Taylor, Howard Shore, Randy Cook and many more.
• Discs 3-4: The Appendices
  Two discs with hours of original content including multiple documentaries and design/photo galleries with thousands of images to give viewers an in depth behind-the-scenes look at The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

2. The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers Collector's DVD Gift Set

The following contents will be presented in packaging illustrated by famed artist, Alan Lee :

• 4-disc Platinum Series Special Extended DVD Edition of The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers.
• Collectible Gollum polystone statue created by Sideshow Weta
• "The Evolution of Gollum" exclusive:
  Bonus DVD on the Weta Workshop and how the Gollum statue was created, featuring interviews with Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, the cast and more!
• A printed companion piece showing how Gollum evolved from pencil sketch to sculpted maquette to digital character.

A nova is an astronomical event where a star brightens suddenly and to an unprecedented degree, creating the impression that a new star has appeared where none was before. Hence the name, from nova for "new star". Hideo Nishimura, a Japanese astronomer, has found a nova in the constellation Scutum (the Shield). I was so lucky to locate the nova with my Newton 114 telescope. As the nova has a magnitude of 8.7 to my estimation, the star can be seen with smaller telescopes. Current observations indicate that the star is even getting brighter in the last days ! Information in Dutch and some star maps (overview and detail) can be found on AstroBlog.

In december, the long awaited third part of the trilogy Lord of the Rings, Return of the King (RotK), goes into premiere. But most theatres will do more than that : the final episode is an excellent opportunity to replay the first two -extended- episodes of the trilogy, followed by RotK in a dazzling marathon. As you know that the movies take 3 to 4 hours each, the full marathon will take up to 11h ! These marathons will be played worldwide, with the support of New Line Cinema. There are already some details available about marathons in Holland, and I hope to get more info about Belgian LOTR marathons shortly.

Some fine examples of the better Photoshop work.

I upgraded lately to Linux-2.4.22, and I don't know why, but my whole desktop is kinda feeling sluggish. DVD playback is bumpy, and Mozilla feels like a whale. Weird, because the last kernels I used, 2.4.18 and 2.4.20, were really great in terms of performance. Maybe it's time to look for those preemptible and low-latency patches again...

Update : when playing a DivX, I got a load of 7, so I knew something was wrong. DMA access bailed out with a Operation not permitted. Seems that somehow VIA block device support was left out. Much smoothly now !