Check out this screenshot from the upcoming , which depicts a network connection being made to a Windows machine.
Nice choice of icon, yeah?
(Spotted on Digg.com.)
-
1
That Patented Mac Conceit
24 Jun 2007 -
49
Help test syndeo’s new social network
22 Jun 2007we’re looking for people to test our new social network project with our partner, advertising agency ogilvy & mather. all you have to do is play around with the site, and answer a short feedback form which we will email to you. each tester who turns in a complete feedback form will receive a PhP500 gift certificate from Starbucks and/or Powerbooks. the site is INVITE-ONLY right now, so i can’t broadcast the name to everyone. let’s just say that it’s for a pretty well-known brand.
if you’re interested, please send an email to luis AT syndeomedia DOT com with your full name, mobile number and email address, and I’ll get back to you with details on how to access the site.
-
23
Geeky Movie Links, Mid June Edition
20 Jun 2007- Robot Chicken does Star Wars parody. I love Robot Chicken, and I love Star Wars. How could you possibly go wrong with this combination? ( off a couple of weeks back as well. Must be the whole Star Wars 30th anniversary thingamajig.)
- from the WB. Trailers for Direct-to-DVD releases are never very good, but I have a lot of faith in the DC cartoons so I’ll probably grab this one regardless.
- This Dane Cook/Jessica Alba sendoff of the classic John & Yoko Rolling Stone cover is just appalling, don’t you think?
-
- Amazingly, production on Starship Troopers 3 was kicked off recently under the auspices of director Ed Nuemeier. Amazing because I had no idea they made a Starship Troopers 2.
- Everybody seen the new Batsuit for the upcoming Dark Knight Returns by now, but here’s an interesting side-by-side comparison with the costume from Batman Begins.
- New Bond movie to be directed by Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Stranger than Fiction). Not exactly Paul Greengrass — which is who I would’ve picked if I could choose anyone — but at least his previous films didn’t suck.
-
6
Annoying Movie Cliches
19 Jun 2007TheMovieBlog (one of my current favorite blog/podcasts, thanks mostly to the comic insanity of Doug Nagy) had an interesting post recently about various movie cliches that they are absolutely sick of seeing. The following are 20 of my own contributions:
1. In ghost horrors, you always know that a ghost is about to zip by in the background from the way a character is positioned within the frame. Usually, you have your actor in the foreground with just enough space over their shoulder to allow your audience to be “suprised” by the sudden movement behind him. The actor will then turn, and see nothing there.
2. In slasher films, characters get into their cars and drive around for minutes without noticing that there is someone hiding in the backseat. Anyone who’s ever driven or ridden inside a car knows that this is impossible, no matter how dark it is.
3. In monster movies, there is always some enterprising fool who thinks he can make money from the creature, if he can just figure out a way to capture it without killing it. This cliche has been around since the original King Kong, and has found its way into a plethora of movies such as Aliens, Anaconda and Lake Placid.
4. In teen slasher films, the female character who shows the least amount of skin will survive until the end. Blondes have the highest death rate in any genre, generally because audiences feel they are dispensable.
5. In teen comedies, the most beautiful car in the film always get wrecked by the end.
6. In sci-fi’s, all aliens belonging to a single race dress exactly the same. (The implication being that, unlike Earth, with its 16 million unique cultures, alien races only have one.)
7. In disaster movies, there is always one character who will die right after resolving his/her differences with another character. (See Poseidon.)
8. In action flicks, whenever a villain has a change of heart and decides to help the good guys, he will end up dead.
9. Nobody ever waits for change. Characters in movies know exactly how much their bill at restaurants, in cabs or at bars will be, and thus can make a quick exit no matter what the situation is.
10. In action films, it doesn’t matter what kind of make/age/size of cars are involved in a chase, or how many passengers and hardware each vehicle is carrying. They will always be practically neck-and-neck.
11. During foot chases, the female character always trips at least once.
12. In action films, whenever a character falls from a great height, he lands squarely on a car, and the alarm sounds.
13. Computers in movies have user-interfaces that exclaim, in big screen-filling letters, things like “TEMPERATURE DROPPING” or “PAYLOAD RELEASED” or “EXPLOSION IMMINENT.” This is invariably so as to help the people in the audience who have never seen a computer before understand what’s going on.
14. During foot chases in buildings, elevator doors do not re-open automatically when a villain inserts something in between them, allowing the hero to escape unmolested. In some cases, the villain attempts to pry the elevator doors open forcibly; this usually ends up with him getting shot in the face. (See Terminator 2.)
15. Whenever a hero is in a repeat showdown, the part of his body that got injured in the last fight always gets hit again, causing him great pain and usually allowing the villain to gain the upper hand momentarily.
16. In horror movies with child characters, one of them always maintains a collection of incredibly sinister stick figure drawings to creep out the adults. (See Hide and Seek, most recently.)
17. Characters who are shot will usually fly backwards dramatically, even though this is patently impossible. (Simply physics will tell you that if the blast were that powerful, the person wielding it would fly backwards too.)
18. Running or jumping through a glass window never results in any kind of injury to a hero. I hate this one mostly because it’s usually unnecessary; it’s just one of those idiotic movie flourishes that don’t really make any sense.
19. During an earthquake or some other tremor, lightbulbs in a row will shatter in sequence, beginning from the one farthest from the camera.
20. During phone conversations where the caller is being traced, a helpful computer display will show a flashing dot moving across a map as the caller’s location is slowly triangulated. (Most memorably in Sneakers.)
-
4
ZDNET: Leopard looks like Vista
16 Jun 2007MacOS 10.5 “Leopard” was the topic of much discussion during the recent WWDC 2007, where Steve Jobs (re)introduced what he described as the “top 10 of about 300″ new features that the new edition brings to the Mac. This morning I stumbled on a ZDNet blog comparing the upcoming Leopard with the now-in-stores Vista that absolutely stunned me: the intent of the article was to downplay a lot of the Leopard features as being derivative of Vista, and I honestly could not believe how ignorant the author was. (For additional amusement, check out the comments thread on digg.com, as well as the resulting ridicule from the tech blogosphere.)
Exempli gratia:
1. New Leopard Desktop: Not a whole lot different from Vista’s Aero and Sidebar. [...]
4. 64-bitness: Leopard is the first 64-bit only version of a desktop client. Vista comes in 32-bit and 64-bit varieties. And most expect Windows Seven will still be available in 32-bit flavors. Until 32-bit machines go away, it seems like a good idea to offer 32-bit operating systems. [...]
8. Dashboard with widgets. Isn’t this like the Vista Sidebar with gadgets?
Un-friggin-believable. Now, keep in mind, folks, that this is the work of a ZDNet writer with 20 years experience covering the tech industry. The first item alone is a laugh riot. She seems to be under the impression that the Leopard Desktop is something that, uh, hasn’t been around since 2001? All that was added was deeper shadowing and some funky translucency … in other words, purely cosmetic changes to a technology that’s about 6 or 7 years old.
Item #4 meanwhile is a total fiction, and leads one to believe that Leopard won’t work on a 64-bit machine. Kinda makes you wonder if she made any effort to double-check her facts at all. See the Engadget post clarifying the issue.
Item #8 is another laugh-riot. Dashboard was a 10.4 application (circa 2004). Leopard just added some new widgets and core functionality to it.
Granted, I am not an Apple user. So I’m sure I’m glossing over some subtleties regarding what’s new and cool in Leopard. But given how often I hear the “Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers” message, I was thinking that Leopard would be light years ahead of Vista.
The issue isn’t whether Leopard is light years ahead of Vista. It’s the fact that you’re light years behind MacOS X.
Two days later, after a massive deluge of email and comments, the ZDNET writer posts a followup defending her article as being “personal, biased opinion”. Nice comeback there, hoss.
-
10
The Fantastic Torch
14 Jun 2007Saw Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer yesterday, although not on purpose. (We were originally supposed to catch Arthur and the Invisibles at the French Film Festival at the Shang, but did not find the rather dismal 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes very encouraging. On the other hand, it’s been 13 years since Luc Besson made a decent movie; why do I even bother?)
Now, I should probably say that I didn’t think the first Fantastic Four was a total waste of time (unlike say, Spider-man III), although I need to qualify that further by saying that it was really due to extremely low expectations. Spider-man II was a phenomenal movie … very nearly my favorite comic films of all-time, so III was a major letdown. The Fantastic Four, meanwhile, have never quite been my cup of tea, and as such, I go into each FF movie expecting it to suck.
Don’t get me wrong though. Both FF movies were crap. I wouldn’t go out of my way to see either one again. However, they also didn’t make me want to jump out of my seat, rip my shirt apart, curse the Marvel universe, and run screaming out of the theater (again, like Spider-man III did).
If you’ve already seen the first FF, the sequel is more of the same. The FF is easily Marvel’s most archetypal superhero movie franchise. Loved and revered by their fans, impervious to emotional weakness, facing down world-threatening enemies on a daily basis … these guys are postcards with super-powers. In the movie’s overly-long opening scenes, we are reintroduced to the Fantastic Four at a random American airport. They’re signing autographs left and right while watching themselves on the news. Later, we see what is apparently Reed and Sue’s nth attempt to have a proper wedding ceremony without some new crisis erupting in some remote part of the world. It’s a media circus; there are thousands of fans waiting outside the Baxter Building for news. Of course (and we know this from the trailer, so I’m not spoiling anything), the Silver Surfer chooses this as the perfect moment to make an appearance and ruins everything.
As an aside: both Spidey III and FF II featured their principal characters dancing. Apparently it’s a newly-revived comics tradition, you know, like . For some reason though, I thought that Tobey Maguire’s dance number was absolutely horrific, while Ioan Gruffud’s was only mildly nauseating. (There’re those lower expectations again.)
A couple of minor, spoiler-laced comments:
1. The Silver Surfer likes making holes. Throughout most of the middle-third of this movie, the Surfer goes around making these huge 200-meter holes in the ground and generally laying waste to well-known landmarks. Why he does this is never adequately explained. I was under the impression that he was making giant tunnels to the center of the Earth to allow for easier access upon Galactus’ arrival but why were they not spewing magma then?
2. Galactus is a cloud. People who aren’t familiar with Galactus should probably know what he looks like in the comics:
Cool huh? And totally un-cloud-like. To be fair, there is one version of Galactus, used in the alternate-universe version of the Fantastic Four penned by Ellis & Millar (in the series) in which Galactus is depicted as a hive-like alien race bent on destroying the Earth. Still not a sentient gas cloud, but a bit closer than the classical mega-robot Galactus.
I have a number of issues with the cloud Galactus, the most important being that it’s visually boring. There is no sense of dread seeing this massive gas cloud approach the Earth (it has about the same amount of dramatic tension as the killer ice in The Day After Tomorrow). The secondary issue is how far this really falls from the comic book mythology: Galactus is one of the 5 cosmic forces that bring balance to the universe. Like Shiva in Hinduism, Galactus is a destroyer. In this movie, there’s no clear reason for his (its) arrival, and no clear reason how the Surfer could become the herald of a gas cloud that doesn’t even communicate.
3. The Fantastic Torch. In a very peculiar showdown between Doom and the Human Torch, Johnny absorbs the combined powers of the entire team and becomes what I can only describe as “The Fantastic Torch.” This is a strange thing to do, and is totally audience-pandering; the movie fans love Chris Evans a bit too much, and the screenwriters capitalized on that fact shamelessly. I’m not saying it wasn’t interesting, but the motivation behind it was just a little too obvious for me to become completely comfortable with the decision.
Over all, I’d probably give this movie a 2.5 out of five. Kids in a certain age group will love it to death, just because it’s got cool fights and visual effects up the wazoo, and comic fans who aren’t total purists will probably be able to forgive its various misrepresentations. If you don’t fall into either of these two categories, my advice is to stay well away.
-
4
Samsung i-600: First Impressions
10 Jun 2007
Switched over to a new smartphone yesterday, after several months of my HP Mobile Messenger constantly rebooting in the middle of calls. I had originally intended to replace it with a Nokia E61i — it’s the better phone on paper — but when I actually had the two options in my hands, it was clear to me which one I needed to get. The Samsung is just brilliantly engineered (the whole Ultra series is, actually) and it just made the Nokia look like a dull gray brick beside it.Feature-wise, the Nokia and Samsung are pretty even. Being business phones, neither of them have a very good camera (the Samsung has a piddling 1.3MP, while the Nokia has a slightly better 2.0. Connectivity options are conversely quite exhaustive: both have WiFi (802.11-b/g), 3G (HSDPA on the Samsung), Bluetooth and USB. The Nokia has a much larger screen with better color depth (16.7 million colors vs 65,536) although both are running resolutions of 320 x 240. A couple of key differences with these two phones are related to the fact that the Samsung is so much smaller and lighter than the Nokia — nearly 50 grams lighter, in fact. Apart from the screen, it also has a smaller battery and a slightly smaller QWERTY keyboard. Neither of the two phones use styli, so if you’re the kind of person who absolutely must be able to point and drag, then you will probably want to look elsewhere (perhaps a Dopod or an O2?)
The software is where the two phones differ the most, I suppose. The i600 runs Windows Mobile 5.0, while the E61i runs the S60 Platform 3rd Edition. I haven’t had enough experience to comment on the S60 platform, but I’ve used every version of Windows Mobile since the PocketPC Edition days so I’m fairly familiar with it. I was a bit surprised that Samsung hadn’t chosen WinMo 6.0 as its operating system, but seeing as I was coming off of Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition, any kind of upgrade was definitely welcome.
It took me a few hours to wrap my mind around the notion of using a combination of scroll-wheels, directional buttons and number keys to navigate the WinMo interface, but I’m getting there. I’m actually a bit impressed by how intuitive it all is: I found that I didn’t need to break out the manual to get up and running with this thing at all (although I finally gave in this morning as I was looking for more hidden UI shortcuts). Because it’s running Windows Mobile, getting the i600 to sync up with my Mac’s Address Book and Calendar was as simple as connecting the USB cable and letting Missing Sync pick it up. The whole process took about 10 minutes (couple thousand contacts and a few hundred calendar entries) and pretty much just involved me sitting there watching the progress bar.
Once I had my contacts and calendar in place, all that was left for me to do was get GPRS and 3G working, and make sure the phone vibrates when it rings (it doesn’t by default; wonder who decided that was a good idea). Unfortunately getting wireless internet connectivity proved to be a bit more difficult than I thought: this model is still rather new, and the configuration instructions for it haven’t managed to find their way to Smart’s customer support personnel yet. (Normally, all you would have to do is call in a request and wait for an hour or so. Configuration specs are sent over-the-air, and once you receive the SMS, all you have to do is press “Save” and it makes the changes for you. Unfortunately, no such luck on the i600 yet, so I’m waiting around for tech support to give me a call.)
The lack of 3G connectivity meant that the only way I could get online was using the WiFi antenna, which turned out to be ridiculously simple to accomplish. (It took me longer to find the Connectivity Manager application in the phone’s interface than it did to set the darned thing up.) There’s WiFi everywhere in Eastwood’s public areas, so I decided to pay highfiber a visit. The site itself took awhile to load up, although I’m guessing that that had more to do with Mobile IE 7.0 having to distill the HTML it was receiving than it did the speed of the actual connection.
In terms of actual phone features, I was reasonably happy with everything I got. Voice quality through the built-in earpiece is quite good, and the included headset sounded decent as well. Minor annoyance: the headset, charger and sync-cable all use the same port on the phone, which essentially means that you can’t talk hands-free when the thing is charging/syncing (well, you could use the loud speaker I guess, but that’s generally not appropriate in a lot of situations).
Dialling can be a bit of a challenge for first-timers, especially with the rather strange alternating layout Samsung decided to employ on its keyboard. It does have a numbers-only mode though, which is useful when you’re actually, you know, trying to make a phone call.
Small geek features that I liked: WinMo comes with an RSS Reader and a Podcast aggregator, both of which are reasonably decent little apps. I’m not sure how much time I’d spend reading RSS feeds on such a small screen, but it’s a nice to pass the time if you’ve got nothing better to do. The Podcast client, meanwhile, will depend greatly on what kind of connection I can get, as the average cast is a bit on the hefty side filesize-wise. Speaking of filesize, the i600 comes with a MicroSD slot that supports up to 2gb of external storage. I bought a 1gb one for PhP700.00 and should have enough space for a quite a few podcasts.
Some bits here and there that I didn’t like:
1. The aforementioned single-port-of-entry for hands-free operation, syncing and charging. (Obviously this was a design decision to save space, but it’s still annoying.)
2. It takes too many key-presses to send an SMS. I’m currently looking for a shortcut that will display the “Compose SMS” screen immediately, but so far no luck. The main annoyance is that for some reason, it doesn’t do as-you-type search the way Windows Mobile 2003 did. This is a direct result of the small screen that the i600 uses. With a larger screen, say 320×480, you would be able to type “john” and get a list of all the contacts you have matching “john,” which you would then scroll through to select the right one. Because the i600 only has a 320×240 screen, there isn’t enough space to show the contact search results and the message window at the same time. So instead, you type “john” then select Menu, then select Check Names. That would load up a new screen that would show you the various search results. Select one, and you are returned to the message window, where you can proceed with typing in your actual message.
I know that may sound like a deal-breaker, but in reality, you are only ever searching for a contact very rarely. Why? Because 90% of the time, you are replying to someone’s message, so the contact’s mobile number is already known.
3. The keys take a bit of getting used to. Apart from the slightly different arrangement of the various auxiliary keys (Shift, Function, Backspace), the narrow gaps between the keys can be a bit perplexing. Remember though, that I’m saying this after less than 24 hours with the unit, so it’s totally possible that in a couple weeks time I’ll be touch-texting one-handed with this thing. (I doubt it though.)
Overall, I’m quite happy with the i600. These things go for about PhP23,000.00 on the open market (probably even less if you spent enough time canvassing Greenhills), making it easily one of the cheapest Windows Mobile smartphones you can get right now with HSDPA and WiFi built-in. The fact that it’s exceedingly easy on the eyes is a nice plus too.
-
4
Rage Against the Machine Reunited
7 Jun 2007
Audioslave bugs me. They had two decent singles on their but the second one sounded way too much like they were just going through the motions. Morello goes out and channels Johnny-Cash as , and Cornell decides to without the rest of the band and I’m thinking Christ Almighty what the hell are these guys doing?
Meanwhile, de la Rocha had been stuffing around for the past two years post-Rage with lots of recordings but no actual releases. Then, in late April, it happened: Rage Against the Machine headlined the final day of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and rumors of a permanent reunion began to stir.And suddenly, there it was: ratm82407.com. Looking for all the world like a forum discussing Lost, the innocuous domain had little more than a countdown and the opening riff of “Bulls on Parade” on repeat. Exactly what happens 77 days from now is anyone’s guess, although the guys over at Vietnow.org already have a couple of theories.
Honestly, I can’t wait. Rage’s brand of righteous (some would say “self-”) wrath has never quite been replicated by any other group, and the fact that they’ve got a genius like Morello on guitar makes them easily one of my all-time favorite rock groups. (I’ve personally got my fingers crossed that the clock counts down to a live album release of the Coachella performance. That would be sweet.)
-
1
Contacts!
4 Jun 2007I got contact lenses yesterday, after wearing glasses for a good 8 years of my life. It’s pretty cool how quickly I made the decision too, I started talking to friends about it Friday, and by Sunday, was driving home glasses-less for the first time in nearly a decade.
People who have had contacts for awhile will probably not find this at all interesting, but I cried like Chris Carraba at the optical shop. It took me ages to get the first lenses in, and when it finally did I immediately started tearing up. Soon I was starting to sniffle, too. The doctor patted me on the shoulder reassuringly and lied about how it was a very normal thing and not to feel bad, blah-blah-blah.
When I got home, I practiced taking the lenses off and putting them on again for about half-an-hour, crying all the while. I was a bit surprised how long it took to get used to rolling the little jelly-like things in my fingers, but I figured at least I had all the time in the world to learn.
The whole exercise paid off this morning when my right lenses popped off all of a sudden while I was driving to work (I must’ve put it in backwards). After managing to park with little or no depth-perception, I managed to get it back in a darkened parking lot with just the dashboard lights and the rearview mirror to guide me. So yeah, I’m pretty proud of myself :/
-
5
Geeky Movie Links, Early June Edition
1 Jun 2007-
Speed Racer’s Mach 5
The Wachowski Brothers’ upcoming racing movie-based-on-a-cartoon is off to a good start, so to speak. -
Hidden Message in Dark Knight-related website
Here’s a clue: Select-All. -
Zooey Deschanel in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening
My all-time favorite non-actress is moving up in the world. I am glad. -
Elisha Cuthbert in Captivity
Reprising the role that made her famous in the hit show 24, former Popular Mechanics for Kids presenter Elisha Cuthbert once again plays an abductee in what can only be described as Saw without the meat chunks. -
UPDATE: Not movie-related, but interesting nonetheless: Tentacle Rape makes its way into Marvel Comics
Well, sorta. Check out some notes on the resulting uproar here.
-
Speed Racer’s Mach 5