Heath Ledger won the Golden Globe for his performance as the Joker in the Dark Knight, which was my best film of 2008. This means that he stands a good chance to win the Oscar as well. We will find out in a months time.
Archive for the 'general' Category
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Watched the new comedy Role Models last night, and it was very enjoyable. It was Imran’s birthday last night so after a late dinner we decided on getting in on the late show.
The film is about a pair of anti-drugs spokespeople, played by Paul Rudd and Sean William Scott. After a performance at a local school, they find their truck being towed and in a fit of crazyness they cause havoc.
As their punishment the pair are sentenced to 150 hours community services. Which they end up serving at a big brother like programme, where they are paired up with two equally troubled kids, resulting in some more antics.
You get the setups for the jokes at the end, right from the begining – so don’t miss any of it! Not quite ‘Pineapple Express’ funny but great fun. Besides any film that has Elizabeth Banks is going to be fine as far as I’m concerned.
Well I got the new Nvidia card, installed it as planned, and guess what it’s not working properly either. However it does seem that it is a little more stable since it is not freezing the computer every 10 minutes like the ATI card I took back.
Looks like that the ATI card was not the problem after all. It has got to be a power problem. I also just realised that the power supply I have is a cheap and nasty EZCool 550W psu and not the nice 550W Antec psu, that was originally in the case. (I think is blew a few years back.)
So I have now ordered a nice 600W OCZ power supply. Hopefully this will be last of the problem. At least the fan is not as loud as the ATI card either. I also got 4GB of new RAM to put in, but will hold off until the graphics card issue has been resolved. It’s amazing how a simple graphics card update for £100 has cost me £300+. Ok, I can’t really count the £100 for the new LCD screen but still, it has ended up being an expensive month since I also got a new Xbox as well.
Well I have decided to take the Sapphire card back. Even under windows is crashes after 30 minutes. It is possible it is just a hardware fault, but my confidence in an ATI card has totally deminished. I’m going to get an Nvidia 9800 based card. It might cost me another £20 but it will at least be stable under Linux, and Windows games should fly, should I decide to keep an install.
I have tried a clean Windows install, tried older drivers. But things get worse, a totally corrupted screen to BSOD under Windows. Linux is worse even a 2D desktop without any effects crashes after 10 minutes. Can’t install an older driver since, the older releases don’t support the hardware past Catalyst 8.10. With the current release being 8.12.
This card has had amazing reviews on the web, so it could be hardware. Why can’t PCs be like Mac and just work dammit.
My new 22″ Digimate screen showed up this afternoon, and I have just wired it up. It is excellent, and a steal at £90! The desktop looks great, and the Warcraft character screen looks great too. However the game play only manages about 10fps when in 1680×1050 since my old card can’t handle that resolution at all. Oh well back to playing CoD4 on the XBox!
Been using WordPress for over a year now, and I still haven’t finished tweeking things, or in reality I didn’t really need to change things in the first place. As a new year resolution I should probably go and publish the 60-odd posts I have in draft mode in the next couple of days. I really have become the uber retro-blogger out of being plain lazy. It has also been a year since I switched to WordPress, however I have a bad feeling that I have lost a couple of post from about a year ago. Need to go comb the archives properly. Also I just upgraded WordPress and the new Admin interface is a big improvement, the unecessary navigation has been removed, thank god!
UPDATED: as it turns out I have only been using WordPress since May, so actually it’s only 7 months of use!
Well I got myself a new XBox Elite today. Admittedly the black case is vastly better than the usual white one. However I’m begining to wonder what the extra £70 has got me. The HDMI cable is a nice extra, and the bigger hard disk is great. But £70 does seem like a lot, especially since John Lewis don’t bundle any games. John Lewis didn’t have any regular 60GB units left. Plus £200 worth John Lewis vouchers have been laying around for over a year so I thought what the hell, and just got the Elite. I know I could have ordered online, but I’m impatient what else can I say. Plus with the added downess of having to take my graphics card back today did not help, and I needed to buy something.
I just hooked it up, and ran the updater. Now I just have to renew my Live account, then migrate old Live profile over. Don’t want to screw up my acheivements and save game info.
I’m actually not going to keep this unit any way. Warranties being what they are Mati and me have decided to actually swap units, though I’m keeping the 120GB drive. Our main Xbox360 is like 2+ years old, so it has the hackable kernel and Hitachi DVD-ROM. I can then take that apart and modify the hell out of it.
Happy Eid everyone! Taken the day of so I’m heading to my Aunt’s house for a feast, after visiting the mosque now.
Just downloaded the Google Contact Sync for Blackberry to my Curve, I think the last niggle I had, has just been solved. Since I don’t use my Mac much these days I don’t have a desktop for syncing all of my contacts, calendars and notes. Now that Google support over-the-air syncing I don’t have to maintain a desktop set of contacts I can just use GMail which is what I have been doing. But now I don’t need to try and sync GMail to Apple Address Book, then to Blackberry.
I decided to go to the Wrath of the Lich King launch event last night, did think it was going to be that busy, but around 2500 other people showed up as well. Making it one of the biggest Warcraft launch in the UK, bigger than any event held at HMV in London.
I casually showed up at about 10.50pm thinking the queue is only about 50 people, but then I got directed down the alley, where the queue went around the block. The guys next to me in the queue and I reckoned we were about 800′th in the line. So we reckoned on a 2 hour wait if the doors opened on time. We turned out being right, we went in at exactly 12.57am. I was out at 1.09am after faffing about with some posters.
I did take some pictures, however the Blackberry is not that great in night mode. However there are plenty of pictures on the web in the various pieces. I put some pictures on to flickr. The pictures I took in normal mode, earlier in the evening came out better.
New Ubuntu release hits today. I’m not going to rush to upgrade for a few days at least. Hoping things are a little more polised than 8.04 was initially. PulseAudio caused me so much pain intially, even though I was running it fine with 7.10. I just don’t want sound to break and Wine to work without a hitch and I’m happy. Was just looking at the release notes, and there isn’t nothing major that I’m interested in. The new GNOME features are not amazing since I run E any way. The 3G modem support is interesting if I install on my Eee, but for my main machine I’m not that fussed about that.
Thinking about it I should probably do a major cleanup of my drives since I’m runnig short on space. Also with WotLK around the corner I need the space. I should also probably order a new graphics card before November 13th also. Going to go with ATI this time around, since the mid-range cards seem better than Nvidia’s offerings, plus their driver support has increase 10 fold. HDMI out is the future, though I would need to get a new monitor as well to utilise that.
In response to a post on CruchGear :
I do agree in part with the essence of this post. Blu-Ray in part was dead before it even hit the market. However it does have some features that will ensure it is around for a while, and it may eventually replace DVD, it just is not going to happen as quickly as the Blu-Ray Association would like.
Blu-Ray always was going to struggle establishing itself as major format for movies. The jump from VHS to DVD was one of the fastest format adoptions in history. Especially when compared to Vinyl vs. CD. In both of these cases there was a notable difference in both technology and quality of the medium. This is really not as straight forward with Blu-Ray.
An upscaling DVD gives an image that is on par with a Blu-Ray player on a full 1080 display, most people will not be able to tell the difference any way. Also because DVD is still a major revenue for the studios, I can’t see any off them going Blu-Ray only any time soon. In fact the positioning of Blu-Ray has made DVD titles even cheaper. Add to the mix digital downloads, be it in DRM’ed format of plain DivX from BitTorrent provide a perfectly good viewing experience.
The problem Blu-Ray always faced was physically and technically it is still just an optical disk. The capacity and how it works is abstract to most people. Technically it is superior due to its storage capacity. But other than that it does exactly the same thing DVD does. It is because of this perception, adoption is going to take time. Sony’s strategy of using the PS3 to drive Blu-Ray is a stroke of genius without it Blu-Ray would not have even got ths far. Also the use of Blu-Ray in the PS3 has pretty much guaranteed Blu-Ray will be around for a while just because of the PS3’s lifecycle, which is going to be at least another 8 years.
Also the argument about Blu-Ray writers getting cheaper will ease adoption is also mute. In that hard disk recording is becoming the major format for recording. Every major comsumer electronics company already offers HD based recorders. Blu-Ray is more likely to become an archive medium for recordings from a HD recorder, much like how I use my DVD-R right now. The argument that older people understand the DVD interface so jumping to Blu-Ray is trivial is probably correct. However HD recorders have the same interface so they don’t cause a problem for the older generation either. I know this because my parents use a HD recorder and Sky+ without issue.
Another factor also slowing High-Def adoption in general right now is cost for services like Sky-HD, and until free-to-air services go fully High-Def in 2010, people in general are not going to rush out to buy Blu-Ray players. As a storage format use with PC’s is really going to be decided by cost of media, right now it looks like it will be a while before that happens.
Well it has happened Apple have unveiled their new MacBook and MacBook Pros.
I want the new MacBook, will wait till christmas I guess though or even the New Year still looks like flying to NYC to buy an Apple laptop still works.
Well today Apple is set to announce new laptops finally. There have been rumours of new MacBooks and MacBook Pro for months now. Some people are even expecting an Apple Netbook, however I think that is unlikely. I just want a new MacBook which is cheaper. Though rumours supporting a totally new design for the Pros do seem quiet intriguing when you look at recent patent filings. Going to stay in the office for the announcement. No streaming but the engadget feed should do the trick.
I agree whole heartedly. Whilst I’m big on 7Digital and Play.com, and I can’t wait till Amazon launches in the UK. Sometimes the best thing after buying CDs is reverting to downloading tracks from BitTorrent or some GNUtella network. Try before you buy baby!
Though I still use iTunes on occasion and the free tracks are good sometimes. Plus on the Mac I can use Audio HiJack to re-rip a DRMed track.
The UK gov is going to introduce fees for business which want to hire foreign skilled workers from outside the EU. (For more info see : BBC Article).
I don’t usually get very political on this site, however I don’t consider this to be a good idea. Some genius in Whitehall obviously wanted a pat on the back for coming up with a new revenue stream for the government.
The government will sell it as a form of protection from cheap foreign workers, but actually this is coming too late. Plus also it seems to be for workers from non-EU countries. Our workforce faces the biggest threat from other EU countries. The proportion of skilled workers coming from say Asia or the Middle East is I would have thought a lot smaller than that from other EU states. The quotas introduced last year still don’t conclusivly show any signs of quelling the problems.
In the long run the changes will probably make things worse. It will aid in legitimising illegal entry into the UK for skilled workers, especially for small businesses. Plus I can’t easily see where the resources to police such changes to the immigration laws are going to come from. What about professions like doctors and nurses which we are having to look abroad to fill vacancies anyway. Will the National Health Trusts be exempt from such fees?
Well I was expecting great things from Lucas, Spielberg and Harrison, I’m glad to report that I was not disappointed Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull delivers in every way, providing the excellent mix of action, adventure and comedy, just like the original films.
The action starts from scene one and keeps on rockin’ and rollin’ till the end. I think they did really well keeping the main plot line secret, I enjoyed the film more by not knowing. Some bits were predictable, but not in a bad way. It is set in 1957 so a whole 13 years after the last film. Since that time, Indy has been an ISS agent in Europe as well as keeping his teaching job and partaking on his regular adventures.
The film starts with a bunch of Army types breaking into Area 51, to recover an artifact that Jones had previously examined. I thought oh, it going to be the Ark. But no it is not, having said that it does put in a little cameo. Once you do find out what the item is, the rest of the plot does sort of come evident, but you are still going to enjoy how it plays out. A must see, can’t think why anyone would not like it.
Well it is has finally arrived, Indy 4 hits the cinemas today. I can’t wait till this evening. Haven’t booked tickets yet, should be okay since most cinemas are showing the film on multiple screens.
Apart from the Star Wars trilogy, the Indiana Jones movies are my favourite films from my childhood. I think any 80s child adores them. People have tried to replicate the mix that the Indy films offer, but failed in some way or other. I still think the original script and idea for the 4th film, Fate of Atlantis. Which was written some 10+ years ago would have been great, I know I loved the computer game which was released back then. So lets see what the ‘Crystall Skull’ is all about. Had hoped there would have been some late night screening last night, but none of the cinemas did that. I guess with the football they didn’t want gamble on people not showing up or showing up drunk.
Since I sort of hit a minor set back, of not having my UBCD USB key. I postponed XP install on the EEE and decided to tinker with WordPress this evening. I have now tweaked the theme a little to at least get the colours I want. So the next thing on my list was pages. However I quickly discovered putting arbitary PHP, JS and CSS doesn’t work to well. After a bit of googling I quickly discovered that there are plugins to address these problems. So after about 20 minutes of tinkering that was all working. However the styles and block of HTML that WP applies is sort of interfering with my HTML. Take a look at the Music page and you will quickly see what I mean. MT has the mechanism of publishing pages as static files or bind a page to a static file, I haven’t found the equivalent in WP yet.
Other than that with about 3 hours work the site is now fully functional under WP. The next things on the list are the sidebar, I want a flickr feed, facebook, linkedin and twitter profile links, not difficult at all plugins do exist but I will probably have a go at writing my own sidebar plugins. I also need to make it look a little better, the current styling was rushed just to get the theme working like I wanted. Comments are currently off, but once I get the WordPress API key I will re-enable them.
I will plumb in the AdSense under the first post as well since I can. Also just realised that when I did the upgrade to MT4 I wiped out the Google Analytics JS code resulting in no stats for the last couple of months, no biggie really. Not like I get more than a few people reading the blog anyway, fortunately I do have the server logs so I will try to do something to them so I can register the data into Google Analytics, if such a facility exists that is.
Phil Collins was not at MacWorld after all, instead Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air a super lite MacBook targeted at the people that want a super portable but with a full keyboard. The most important feature is the flash drive option, why didn’t Apple standardise on SSD. The default configuration uses a 1.8″ iPod style hard disk.
There is no integrated optical drive, however Apple also unveiled a USB portable SuperDrive. Until I get my hands on an Air and have a play. I can’t really decide if it the right new Mac for me. Since I do need more storage and a bit more power. The Air is clearly not a primary or single machine option. I would have liked to have seen a builtin HSDPA modem, like in the Sony TZ. But I guess they were trying to keep the price down. Also the other strange thing is that it only has one USB port, so that would mean you need to have a hub with you at all times. Hell even the EEEPC has 3 USB ports, and the new X300 from IBM also has 3.
I do want the portable SuperDrive that also got announced, for $99 it is a steal. The new Time Machine capsule is also an interesting idea. Though a cheaper SATA NAS solutions are available that are better value for money. but until I play with Time Machine I guess I’m not that bothered. I still haven’t got Leopard obviously since I really need a new Mac, I thought I would wait until then.
