Sherlock Holmes is one of those timeless characters whose incarnations have been numerous — from a literary icon to an animated mouse to a swashbuckling superhero in the upcoming Robert Downey Jr. film.

But yesterday, Babelgum uploaded four original Sherlock Homes adventures from the 1940s, three of which star the man many consider to be the gumshoe’s ultimate portrayer, Basil Rathbone. While technically feature-length films, the actual runtimes range from one hour to an hour and 11 minutes (being a feature meant something different back in the day, apparently).

While relocated temporally from the Victorian era to the 1940s, these mysteries still offer an interesting contrast to Guy Richie’s action-packed update (especially as previewed by Your Geek News). The Sherlock Holmes of this era was cerebral, wry, and quick to explain things both obvious and unobvious, and Rathbone is perfect in the role.

How’s the viewing experience? Well, while we’ve all gotten spoiled by recent advances in streaming HD video, the grainy black-and-white footage doesn’t suffer nearly as much on the small screen as it would broadcasted on TV. And given that the runtime isn’t much longer than watching an hour of TV on, say, Hulu, it turns out to be relatively palatable.

However, a bit of advice — skip A Study in Scarlet. Not only is it slow to start, with Holmes himself not making an appearance until at least six minutes into the video, but it’s also the one installment not featuring Rathbone — instead, Reginald Owen stars, and there is simply no comparison. The use of the title A Study in Scarlet is also regrettable, as the plot of the mystery has nothing to do with the first, and arguably one of the most popular, of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original tales. Which is, of course, the comparison against which all adaptations are levied — and rarely live up to.

UPDATED Following on the heels of similar announcements from Ustream and Bambuser, Qik’s application for live video streaming on the Apple iPhone has finally been approved, and the app should arrive in the App Store shortly. But with so many live streaming apps already available for the device, how does it separate itself from the pack?

The Qik app has all the same features that one might expect. The app works over both 3G and Wi-Fi networks, has social sharing features that allow users to alert their friends of streams they’re broadcasting, and is location-enabled to allow a broadcaster’s friends to know where a stream is coming from. All pretty standard stuff. But there’s one big difference between Qik and some other live streaming apps out there.

While some others are limited to streaming from the most recent iPhone 3GS version, Qik works on all iPhones, including the 2G and 3G versions. While those versions of the iPhone were technically capable of recording video, the capability was hampered until recently, when Apple enabled recording through the third-party iVideoCamera app. Update: Ustream also enables live video streaming through 2G, 3G, and 3GS iPhones.

In addition, the Qik app allows users to mark their video streams as private, enabling them to choose who can view their broadcasts and who can’t. When a video is marked private, it can be viewed only by users who have received an MMS or email.

Hotmail, which goes by the moniker Windows Live Hotmail these days, has a long and winding history as a free, web-based email service. Many people have abandoned Hotmail for Gmail and Yahoo Mail, but Windows Live Hotmail is still more of a focal point at Microsoft than you may think, as a new post on the Windows team blog bears out.

When Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in December 1997 for a reported $400 million, it became part of the MSN services, and the software giant stripped it of much of the open-source plumbing that it ran on. When Google delivered Gmail in 2004, it featured far more free storage than users got with Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or AOL Mail accounts, and people continue to migrate to it. But Microsoft has steadily improved Windows Live Hotmail, and it even won PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice award in a roundup of webmail offerings in 2007. Microsoft radically boosted its performance and made a raft of usability improvements in 2008.

This week, Microsoft’s Arthur de Haan, who is responsible for Test and System Engineering in Windows Live, has an informative peek behind the scenes of Windows Live Hotmail, found here. Here are some of the details de Haan supplies on Windows Live Hotmail’s architecture and reach:

• Hotmail serves 59 regional markets, in 36 languages.
• Microsoft hosts well over 1.3 billion inboxes. (Some users have multiple inboxes.)
• More than 350 million people actively use Hotmail on a monthly basis (source: comScore, August 2009).
• Microsoft handles over 3 billion messages a day and filters out more than 1 billion spam messages — mail that you never see in your inbox.
• Total Hotmail storage grows at over 2 petabytes a month. (A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.)
• Microsoft currently has over 155 petabytes of storage deployed. (Seventy percent of storage is taken up with attachments, typically photos.)
• Windows Live Hotmail is the largest SQL Server 2008 deployment in the world.

The post from de Haan also notes that distinct Windows Live Hotmail accounts are hosted on various distributed clusters in multiple data centers around the world. Multiple types of redundancy are used to protect against outages.

Yahoo Mail remains the market share leader in webmail, but many people don’t realize that Windows Live Hotmail is No. 2, according to ComScore’s data, with Gmail well behind it in third place. (Gmail is faster growing, though.) Especially as Microsoft moves forward with cloud-based applications and online services, it can leverage the webmail share that it has, and tie Hotmail in with them. Clearly, the company hasn’t thrown in the Hotmail towel.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Niallkennedy.

Image Credit: Gearlog

Like many web workers, I take a lot of notes in client meetings and on phone calls, but have yet to leave my yellow legal pads behind despite being a longtime Microsoft OneNote and Evernote user. The biggest reasons are that I am a slow typist, my notes have a lot of diagrams, and I’ve yet to find a tool that works well enough to bridge the gap from my yellow legal pad to one of my PCs.

Capturx for Microsoft OneNote 2007 2.0 is a digital pen product from Adapx that offers tight integration with OneNote 2007, with a suggested retail price of $349. The pen includes a docking station with a USB cable and software. Adapx kindly loaned me a trial unit so I’ve had the opportunity to spend some quality time with the product, putting it through its paces in various note-taking scenarios, and came away impressed with it. The pen is a bit chunkier than normal ink pens but still felt comfortable in my hand. It runs on a lithium-ion battery which you can recharge by placing it in its docking station.

OneNote is a great integration choice for this product, because of the searching and organizational tools it provides for your notes. You can also use it as a jumping-off point for transferring your notes into Microsoft Word 2007 or PowerPoint 2007.

Using the Capturx Digital Pen and Notebook

Capturx requires OneNote 2007, and either 32-bit Windows Vista or Windows 7. Like other digital pens out on the market, Capturx works with a special paper that you can purchase directly from Adapx or print out yourself. The software enables you to print the paper directly from Capturx to a four-color PostScript laser printer.

For purposes of my review, I used one of Adapx’s digital notebooks with the pen. The notebooks resemble a loose leaf binder but the paper inside is a bit thicker and glossier than normal notebook paper. I brought my poor penmanship along and started taking notes in the provided notebook and on some of the paper printed from my printer. Downloading my notes was as simple as docking the pen in the included dock.

Once you dock your pen to download your notes, Capturx prompts you to name the notebook, or choose a notebook for your notes. Your notes then appear in OneNote:

Choose Tools -> Convert Handwriting to Text and your handwriting is converted to text:

While I’m not going to say that the conversion was always perfect during my testing, even with my poor penmanship the conversion left me with enough to work with. I could easily see myself taking the Capturx digital pen to a client meeting for taking notes and getting enough out of the conversion to start a technical document after making some edits to the converted text. My handwritten notes have become a bit chunkier and boxier over the years, so I don’t write using cursive script, but I still found myself paying a little more attention to how I formed my letters, which seemed to help in how the software understood my handwritten notes.

While you can’t convert your hand-drawn diagrams for use in a tool like Visio, I did like the way I could archive the diagrams in OneNote for searching later. This would help me stay more organized and give me another reason to move past the old-school yellow legal pads that I use for taking notes.

If you’re like me and looking to better bridge the gap between your handwritten notes and your PC but have been hesitant about digital pen technologies, I recommend checking out Capturx for Microsoft OneNote 2007 2.0.

I give it high marks for its tight integration with OneNote and handwriting recognition that even worked with my poor penmanship. I can envision myself using this tool to digitize my own notes from client meetings and doing away with unnecessary transcription of my handwritten notes or having to retain paper notes, and avoiding the ever-embarrassing situation of not understanding my own notes a week or two after the call or meeting.

Have you tried out Capturx for Microsoft OneNote 2007 2.0, or other digital pen? How did it work for you?