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November 26, 2009 in Bookmarks with Leave a Comment

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Tech updates

November 18, 2009 in Technology with Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago I did a triumvirate of tech-related posts (about TV tuners, Magic Mice and backup disks.) Here’s a quick follow-up post, updating on progress on each.

TV tuners

I left the original post broadly happy with the Elgato EyeTV tuner I’d acquired, but wondering: “Will I watch video on the iPod with this new arrangement? … We shall have to await a tie-breaker and some longer-term data.” Well, the medium term data is in, and I’d have to declare the TV tuner experiment a resounding success.

I really am using it – a lot. A surprising amount in fact. As of today I have some five programmes lined up to record, all of which will auto-export to iTunes for playing on the move on my iPod. The type of programmes I’m watching this way tend to be the ones that I’d struggle to get around to watching at home through lack of time or burning inclination – yesterday it was Top Gear, currently it’s FlashForward, tomorrow it’s Horizon, and other programmes have included Russell Howard’s Good News and The Closer – all shows I think I would have missed if not for the option of watching on the go.

I have noticed a very odd feeling whenever I finish watching a programme and pull myself out of the TV world and find myself back on the train. It’s actually a little disorientating: watching TV even on a small screen can be completely engrossing, and while we’re used to that depth of involvement on a TV screen in the living room it’s quite something when it can pull off the same sensation on a small screen on a crowded train as well.

I have to say, the EyeTV software is really excellent: it’s got a TV guide that is the best and easiest I’ve used on a computer; setting recordings is as simple as clicking on a little button next to each programme title. And it can be set to automatically convert and export the file to iTunes in the correct format for an iPod or iPhone so it’s ready and waiting for you next time you sync. Honestly, all DVRs should be this easy to use: even down to the global preference settings that allow you to start a recording a set time earlier than the scheduled time, and finish a few minutes later (providing it doesn’t clash with any other preset recording.) It’s so obviously how it should work, you wonder why it’s not on every DVR.

The one downside that could have affected my use of the system was the length of time it takes to convert a recording to iPod/iPhone format (H.264). Even on a pretty new iMac it takes almost as long to convert to the smallest iPod size as it did to record in the first place. While you can get around this by having it automatically carry out the process (say, overnight), it was very quickly annoying me to the point where investing in Elgato’s turbo.264 accelerator product was required: it’s a pricey little USB dongle, but the speed boost it gives on the conversion is awesome. (It’ll work for any H.264 conversion, so it’s also useful for camcorders, iDVD, Handbrake and more.)

Magic Mouse

Good news, everybody! I’m not crippled yet. I have no discernible increase in RSI symptoms, and it feels perfectly comfortable. And the sheer delight and joy of brushing a finger over the multi-touch top of the mouse to scroll windows on the screen simply doesn’t get old.

Battery life isn’t great, however, and I keep opting to turn off the Magic Mouse and going back to the old Mighty Mouse. Which I have to say still feels reassuringly familiar and comfortable in my hand … until the cursor starts skipping all over the screen, and the nipple wheel refuses to scroll, and I remember why the Magic Mouse was such a good idea in the first place!

Backup disks

After a month of use, I had quite a major glitch with the new backup disc a couple of weeks ago.

Since I don’t need constant backups, I’d taken to dismounting and powering off the backup disk during the week, and having it on during weekends when I’m using the iMac more heavily. But come Friday evening, as the backup disk came on, it started to panic: Time Machine no longer seemed to know what the status of the backups was. To try and find its bearings, it started to go through every single file on the backup disk to compare it with the main hard disk … And this went on for hours. Finally, it appeared to have crashed and nothing would stop the process. I was forced to take drastic action and ended up powering off the backup disk in mid operation.

Now this is something you never, ever do because the damage to key tables on the backup disk is almost designed to lose all data. It started to behave very oddly thereafter, with Time Machine now returning errors, and even the smallest read or write operation taking an age (17 minutes to copy over 17Mb of information? Not good.) It seemed that some process was still going on, taking all the backup disk’s time and attention and leaving it no time to actually operate. Restarting everything didn’t seem to help, and running Disk First Aid was a non starter because after running for 8 hours it was still barely started. Something was seriously wrong.

In the end, with some fiddling around, I restored the disk to basic conditions: reformatted (so all backups to date now gone), a new driver firmware patch installed, switched from Firewire to USB 2 connections, and it was looking promising. In fact I didn’t even mind having lost the accumulated month’s worth of backups because I only needed the backup if anything happened to the main hard disk, and so far – touch wood! – nothing had. The reformat even gave me the opportunity to partition the disk properly (into a 720Mb – 250Mb configuration) that I had overlooked in my plug-and-play raptures first time around.

That was now two weeks ago. Now I’m keeping the backup drive attached and running all the time, not just at weekends, and hoping that the major glitch was a one-off not to be repeated, and I can return to my contended state of backed-up bliss once more.

links for 2009-11-17

November 17, 2009 in Bookmarks with Leave a Comment

November film reviews

November 16, 2009 in Films with Leave a Comment
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I’ve actually managed to watch three DVDs in the last couple of weeks – not bad going for me! – and some capsule reviews are in order.

10,000BC

Since the adverts for Roland Emmerich’s latest blockbuster 2012 are all over the place, I allowed myself to fall into the trap of watching his most recent previous film. 10,000BC is basically about a pre-historic tribe in the snowy frozen lands, who are raided by slave traders. The hero sets off to rescue his beloved from their clutches.

And, err, that’s it. Simple quest film from there. And quest films can be pretty successful – a large part of Fellowship of the Rings is nothing more than a quest story, after all. But that’s because Lord of the Rings had far more interesting things going on below the surface, and interesting well-developed characters that you cared for.

10,000BC has neither. There is no story, and the characters are non-existent. The dialogue is so bad it’ll make you long for it being done Apocalypto style (but leave out the subtitles) and the cast are interchangeable. Any modicum of interest in the plot (such as: who is the “God” figure? What was the hero’s father up to when he disappeared? What’s the significance of “the mark”?) are squelched and dismissed almost as if the film is embarrassed to even hint at being anything more than a brainless action and FX blockbuster.

Emmerich clearly has a major Ridley Scott crush, but he can’t be bothered to stick to the historial detail of a Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven. So he tries to create a quasi-mythic world-before-time, something Tolkien-esque in setting up mythos for the modern times; only Tolkien was incredibly intelligent and detailed in how he did this, and Emmerich doesn’t have a clue. So the film falls between two stools – too absurd for a historical epic, and too bland and realistic for a fantasy film like LOTR/Narnia. It’s like the historical epics that came at the tail end of the 60s after the fad had died – and which helped to kill it off completely.

If the film has any saving grace, it’s that it looks good: Emmerich really shoots the scenes quite beautifully and the cinematography at times almost bears comparison with Ridley’s. And the CGI effects are really quite excellent and don’t look nearly as plastic and fake as a lot of the current CGI crop tend to.

That just about lifts it out of one-star territory, but really it’s a close shave.

Rating: a barely tolerable * and a half stars out of 5

Star Trek – The Motion Picture

Or “the slow motion picture” as it’s been dubbed. I was feeling poorly when I watched this, and for me this film is rather like comfort food – chicken soup or crumble and custard. Basically it was the first film for the Star Trek franchise in 1979, ten years after the original series’ cancellation: the crew are reassembled to intercept a massive alien vessel heading to Earth. Only they can stop it, naturally.

The film makes the mistake of being overly reverential towards its source, with everything treated with solemn pretentiousness. Considering that the basis of the TV series was to be light, fun and action-orientated, this sudden re-purposing of it as some kind of grand po-faced epic along the lines of 2001 – A Space Odyssey couldn’t have been less appropriate. Fans (Trekkers) loved it purely because it brought the old crew back together again, but everyone else was left yearning for the next Star Wars film instead; fortunately the producers learned from this misstep and the next film was The Wrath of Khan which did a far better job of reviving the TV series’ spirit and joie de vivre.

Personally I’ve always really liked the first film too: it helps if you see it more like 2001 than the TV show. But there’s no doubt about how slow it is. The first half hour is full of sequences where four establishing shots are used when one would be almost too much. Considering that they’re meant to be racing the clock to stop an alien invader from reaching Earth, you’d think that some of that pace would have transferred to the film.

The FX get too much screen time, but at least they are very good effects – the journey through the alien vessel being comparable with the final sequences of 2001 and delivered by the top FX guys of the period. And the music (by the incomparable Jerry Goldsmith) is left to carry the film through long sequences of inactivity, and almost pulls it off. You’ll recognise the film’s main theme as the one that Star Trek – The Next Generation appropriated for use some years later, it’s that good.

The DVD I was watching was a new remastered version, and it looks wonderful – as good quality as any film just released in cinemas. Alas, they could only remaster the theatrical cut which means that many well-known sequences from TV and director’s edition versions are missing, which feels rather odd, but apparently these were never completed in high definition film and so can’t be remastered, which is a shame. Just occasionally the film looks as though someone’s gone overboard on the color rebalancing – the scenes on the Klingon bridge and on Vulcan look suspiciously neutral – but that’s a minor quibble to an overall excellent restoration.

The film’s faults are still there for all to see, but if you like the film then you’ll love the new version.

Rating: a well-restored *** out of 5.

Duplicity

This is essentially a con or heist film with a screwball romantic comedy plot involving Clive Owen and Julia Roberts as two spies collaborating (or competing?) in a plot to steal a company’s industrial secrets.

I’d expected this to be a light and fluffy film with little substance, but found I enjoyed it much more than that. Clearly influenced by the likes of Oceans 11 (or the TV series Hustle) this film puts a similar emphasis on style and fun over any serious substance. But if you liked the Ocean films of the classic double-crossing David Mamet puzzlers then there’s no reason why you won’t like this just as much.

This is a smart, stylish film with a fantastic visual sense to it – the title sequence punch-up between Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson is especially stunning, and the writer-director Tony Gilroy is fond of the split screen technique we haven’t seen since the 60s. He’s also supplied his stars with some crackling dialogue reminiscent of the type that Grant and Hepburn used to snap back and forth, and while Owen and Roberts don’t have quite that class they do pretty well with it nonetheless.

If there’s a complaint, it’s that the film is just too complex to be fun: there are wheels within wheels within wheels just to get to the start of the enigma wrapped in a puzzle. No one could figure this one out until very late in the day, and you could well prove to be exasperated by the whole affair. The best con/heist films are the ones that look really simple – you’re sure you know what’s going on right until the moment the film pulls the rug out from under your feet and shows you how you were conned from the very start and nothing was as you assumed. But instead, this film takes pains to remind you at every opportunity by flashbacks and dialogue that no one has a clue who is doing what to whom or who can be trusted, and that can leave you feeling a bit tired and frustrated rather than entertained.

But if you let it slide past you, accept that you have no idea what’s going on, and just drink in the intelligent script and gorgeous locations, then there’s certainly a rewarding payoff at the end, with unexpectedly deep characters for such an initially frothy-seeming piece of fluff.

Rating: a generous **** out of 5.

del.icio.us links for 2-13 November 2009

November 11, 2009 in Bookmarks with 1 Comment

links for 2009-11-13

  • Twitter users share early adopters symptoms
    Recent findings of a Pew Internet study revealed, Twitter is being extensively used as a status update service to keep in touch. Youth (age 18 -44), social network users and users with access to mobile internet show early Twitter adoption symptoms.
    (tags: twitter socialmedia trends metrics)
  • Communicate Magazine
    As chief executive of the Central Office of Information, Mark Lund is using his 30 years of private sector experience to transform the communications agency of the UK government.
    (tags: coi)

links for 2009-11-11

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  • DVR is TV's New BFF
    How fears that the digital video recorder "threatens the very lifeblood of how television is funded" evaporated and turned out to be good for the industry, and how this isn't an isolated incident and happened with the VCR, the audio cassette, and even the turntable. Next up: music and movie file sharing: piracy or just the latest example?
    (tags: piracy copyright dvr television advertising)

links for 2009-11-02

Mouse traps

November 2, 2009 in Miscellany with Leave a Comment

So this weekend I finally managed to get my hands on one of those new-fangled Magic Mouse devices from the local Apple Store. They were announced a couple of weeks ago but have been slow appearing in the wild: but this weekend, finally, there were mice to behold and purchase.

Now I should say that I’m not usually the type of person to rush out and get the latest gadget – even the latest Apple gadget – just for the hell of it when it’s released. I was about 18 months late getting an iPhone, for example. But seeing how I also went out and got a new iPod nano the minute I could, I realise that my protestations of not being a new gadget whore appear rather weaker than they might have done previously.

So I’ll try and explain my reasoning and rationale.

Have you ever used the Mighty Mouse, the Magic’s predecessor? (The name change is the result of a copyright infringement court case that went against Apple, by the way.) One of its features is the little “nipple” scroll wheel, which – like all things Apple – is quite beautiful and aesthetically done, but tragically flawed in the pragmatism stakes.

Put simply, the “nipple” wheel gets gunged up very easily. Okay, most scroll wheels on mice do, but here you have Apple a little too in love with the beauty of its products and not wanting to ruin it with anything crass – such as a way of getting into the “nipple” wheel compartment to clean it out. instead you have to make the most of what you can do with paperclips and Sellotape to clean it out, which is a hassle, hard work – and doesn’t work for long.

The Magic Mouse does away with this problem by … doing away with the scroll wheel entirely. Instead, the upper body of the mouse is touch sensitive like a trackpad or an iPhone, and stroking a finger up and down (or left or right or in circles if you’re so inclined) will scroll the window on screen. Sounds good? Well, in practice it’s even better – it’s scrolling as it should always be done. And no more gunging up the “nipple” wheel ever again. Bliss!

The other selling point for me was that the Magic Mouse boasts an improved “laser precision” optical tracking system. For some reason, all the mice (PC as well as Apple) I’ve tried on my desk surfaces end up suddenly shooting off in same random direction, and after a while it gets seriously irritating. It’s the kind of torture they should use in interrogations if they want to drive someone psychotic. So I took a gamble and hoped that this new laser tracking system on the Magic Mouse would fix this. And you know what? It has. Perfectly.

On the flipside, the concern I had in getting the Magic Mouse was that the side profile is very, very low. It looks immediately as though it’s going to be an ergonomics disaster and cripple users within a single sitting. Apple don’t have a very good track record with making ergonomic mice for some reason, and I particularly remember the original iMac’s “hockey puck mouse” as being the worst such device I’ve ever tried, literally unusable. It drove me to buying a Microsoft mouse in replacement, it was that bad!

So it was with some trepidation that I tried thr Magic Mouse in store, decided it didn’t feel at all bad, and decided to risk it nonetheless. But how would it feel after two days of use?

Surprisingly – pretty good. No problems at all. In fact, better and more comfortable than the previous Mighty Mouse. The low profile meant that my hand isn’t held arched over the hump so much, which means that raising fingers to scroll on the surface (rather than on a scroll wheel) feels perfectly comfortable. I’m not saying it’s going to win any ergonomic awards, but I can see that it’s been shaped as it has to do its best in this area even if aesthetics still reign supreme as they always do with Apple.

The biggest different is probably the fact that you can choose how to hold the device – your positioning isn’t determined by where your finger has to fall on the scroll wheel, because you can scroll on any part of the mouse’s top surface. It’s a small distinction but one that makes a big different in comfort.

And in some minor, miscellaneous points about the Mighty Mouse, I’ll add that it feels far more solid and high quality that its predecessor (the added weight is thanks to the batteries – more of which in a minute), and putting the Mighty and Magic Mice side by side suddenly makes you realise that the Mighty Mouse is dumpy, frumpy and old by comparison with the sleek sportscar model that replaces it.

But there has to be at least one downside to all his, right? For me, it comes in the form of Bluetooth: the Mighty Mouse only comes in a wireless version, since obviously sticking on a cable for a USB version of the mouse would offend the beautiful lines of the product and have the Apple designers running screaming form the building, right?

I’ve never seen the problem with having a short cable from my mouse; why are people so obsessed with wireless mice and keyboards? I start obsessing over the battery life of these things and then I get all anal about turning them off when not in use to make the batteries last longer, as opposed to their nice, perfectly behaved cabled counterparts that turn off when the computer turns off. And Bluetooth devices do strange things when you try and turn them off; all of a sudden your sleeping computer wakes up, startled, wondering where its little buddy has disappeared to. “Connection lost!” it insists on waking up the screen to tell you. “Yes, I know, I pressed the ‘off’ button” I have to tell it, before putting it back to sleep, hoping it doesn’t have a second or third anxiety attack that wakes it up again. I’ve never known people with half the separation anxiety disorders of Bluetooth-enabled computers.

Seriously, I’d rather just have a cable. But the cable version of the Magic Mouse doesn’t exist; or rather, it does – it’s a renamed but otherwise identical Mighty Mouse. In the world of Apple, you can have your Magic Mouse anyway you like it, as long as it’s (a) Bluetooth and (b) solid white.

But I guess that’s a minor quibble. Slightly more important is my hope that over the longer term, the mouse doesn’t leave me crippled with RSI. While the signs are good so far, I’ll let you know if there’s any change; although such a blog post would of course be slow coming, as it would have to be typed one-handed…

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