Recently I have replaced my aging Dell Inspiron 8600 with a new Studio 15 laptop. Things have changed a lot in the laptop market in the last 4 years, I bought a laptop in the same relative place in the product lineup for half what I paid for the old one. The one I have is ‘Midnight Blue’, one of a VAST array of colours and styles. It is a sort of dark blue, but the colour changes a bit in different light.
First off, some of the good points. I have never been a fan of glossy laptop screens due to glare issues, but the screen on this machine is quite good. I got the upgrade to a 1440×900 native resolution screen which give crisp, clear images, especially while watching media. The selection of ports on the sides of the laptop are good, with plenty of USB ports, wireless and wired ethernet, bluetooth, firewire, eSATA (which will become more important in the future) and mostly importantly, HDMI. The HDMI output is SO much better than the old DVI/D-Sub out on other laptops, you plug in the cable and it just works. Sound is also pumped through HDMI. The keyboard is a good size, and looks good backlit (I have this option) while the trackpad is also responsive. Finally, the upgraded 9 cell battery lasts a good 4 hours or so on light work and movie watching (from hard disk, not DVD) and raises the base of the laptop into a comfortable typing position.
On the downside, my biggest gripe is with the speakers. They are tinny and have little frequency response in the lower half of the audible range. Other minor things are the use of a slot loading DVD drive to save space (I prefer tray loaders). The graphics card I have is the best you can get, an ATI Radeon 3450. This means you can’t play the newest games, but it is good enough for most applications. This reinforces the purpose of the laptop as a multimedia machine, not a hardcore gaming laptop. Importantly, the 3450 has the grunt for multimedia work (what I got the laptop for) and driving the HDMI port.
Overall, the Studio 15 is a good buy, with the usual excellent Dell service and customisation options. As with all Dell laptops, it is worth waiting until a good online special comes up. It may not be a true desktop replacement able to do anything that is thrown at it, but it does balance well battery life and portability with the flexibility of a desknote.
Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I did one of these. Not much has been happening, just chugging my way through the work roster. Some of you know I have joined the league of cyclists a couple of months ago. I have a really nice bike, a Giant Cypress. Now that it is kitted out with a bag rack and some pannier bags, it is a great way to get to and from work (except during a build-up storm!).
Speaking of the weather, we are well and truly in the build-up now. The first week of October was horrible with 36+ degree days, then this last week has been hard to forecast, with storms popping up where they seemingly shouldn’t. It has been fairly busy and, of course, all the concreters are ringing again to find a good time to pour. The answer of course is “the dry season”!
A couple of cool things I have come across recently. Firstly, Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog is FINALLY available on the Australian iTunes store and is FANTASTIC. It was created by Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel, Firefly, etc) during the writers strike and is only available as a web series. It stars Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother, Starship Troopers, Harold & Kumar), Nathan Fillion (Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly) and the extremely talented Felicia Day (Buffy and her own web series The Guild). Great, catchy songs hold together an intentionally cheesy plot, making for a funny 45 minutes in total.
The other thing is Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on the 360. It has been getting decidedly average reviews on the various websites, but really I found this to be the Star Wars game I always wanted to play. Kickass graphics, cool looking force powers, great boss fights and an ultimate choice between good and evil make this a really compelling game. The storyline beats the 3 most recent Star Wars movies, showing the introduction of a lot of characters into the canon (Mon Mothma and Garm Bel Iblis), the formation of the Rebel Alliance, Vader’s Jedi hunt and more. If you have a next gen console and even remotely like Star Wars, this one is for you.
So I have been to see the latest movie that has bolted out of the Wachowski stable and I have to say………I liked it! This is totally a Wachowski film, with a lot of really vibrant, stylistic colour and amazing effects. It is pretty obvious that most of the movie was shot in front of a green screen.
Spritle Racer and Chim Chim (pictured above) are well used in the movie to provide the laughs every time them movie heads into ’serious’ territory or starts to slow down. Those guys pop up EVERYWHERE, and whoever trained the chimp deserves major kudos. As a whole, the movie is great with stacks of action sequences and crazy racing. John Goodman is a great Pops Racer and Roger Allam has been given a great role (the Wachowskis must have loved working with him for ‘V for Vendetta’).
Don’t expect a high class movie, go to see it expecting a fun romp through a fantasy world and you won’t be disappointed. It is an appropriate homage to the animated series, and the remix of the original theme at the end of the movie is kind of catchy.
It’s been a while since I have done one of these, but I guess there has not really been a lot to talk about. I’ve been playing a bit of golf (badly!) with the guys from work, but mostly I have been in the routine of going to work, then catching up on all my domestic stuff on my days off. I have been to see Ironman at the movies, it is really awesome, anyone vaguely interested in action/comic book movies MUST see this, Robert Downey Jr really is great as a smart-arse Tony Stark.
Lately I have been playing a bit of Mario Kart Wii. If you have played a Mario Kart game before, you pretty much know what to expect. The new tracks are even more outlandish and change slightly on each lap. The ‘retro’ tracks are great blasts from the past, especially the old SNES battle mode course. One of the bigger changes is upping the number of competitors in each race from 8 to 12. This makes it more likely that you will suffer a CASCADE of adverse item effects sending you rapidly from frontrunner to distant last in a race. The online modes are the biggest new feature, the Nintendo WiFi Connection is implemented seamlessly and playing against ‘real’ people is so much fun.
Another game I started playing a day or so ago is Penny Arcade Adventures - On a Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness: Episode One. Short title there. As you may have gathered, it is based on the characters of the Penny Arcade web comic and is very true to the humour and animation style of the comic. Very funny game, and at roughly $20 it’s a real steal.
OK, I haven’t done one of these in a while. I’ve just been too busy!
Darwin is coming out of the wet season now and becoming a much more comfortable place to live. You can comfortably breathe the air again instead of drinking it and the nights are getting colder. I went on a round of golf with some of the guys from work, and the daytime heat was not that oppressive, showing that the large drop in humidity makes a huge difference. With the weather clearing up, the markets are starting up again at Mindil Beach again next week, and the Deckchair Cinema has reopened.
Just came across a really good cheap game on Steam called AudioSurf. Basically you can pick any music file you like on your computer and the program turns it into a puzzle game where you have to collect coloured blocks as you race down a track. The blocks are proxies for notes in the song, the track undulates to the beat and as the song builds up or winds down, the track goes up or downhill. Depending on the car you use, you have different powerups, some of them are an easy mode where there is only one colour of blocks, others have the ability to scramble up blocks or delete certain colours. It is a GREAT way to listen to your music and is only US$10. I created a short video showing how AudioSurf interpreted ‘Your are a Pirate’.
Anyway, check it out, it’s a great break from Hellgate and will tide me over until MarioKart Wii comes out!
…Blu-Ray! In a statement released by Toshiba today, HD-DVD is the new Betamax video tape.
Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders….”We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation.
The interesting thing about this is that HD-DVD is actually the official successor to DVD, with the standard ratified by the DVD Forum. HD-DVD devices were cheaper than Blu-Ray devices because much of the tech was lifted out of conventional DVD players. Goes to show what marketing can do for you. Sony ‘won’ with Blu-Ray because it negotiated with movie studios and made the cheapest Blu-Ray player (the PS3). Stunts like throwing in a free PS3 with a big Bravia screen over Christmas also helped.
What does this all mean? Hopefully, it means that as the market concentrates on one format, the consumer install base hits critical mass and everything can become cheaper. At the moment, the price of discs and players is similar to what DVD was in the late 90s, this needs to change for the format to gain traction. Also, this will probably motivate fence-sitters to go out and buy a PS3.
On a seperate, but not totally unrelated note, I got my Austar PVR called ‘MyStar’ installed last week. It was pretty glitchy the first couple of days, but has settled down now that I know when I need to baby it. The series link function is great for automatically recording a whole series and the 2 free-to-air tuners are pretty good. Hopefully the firmware updates keep coming, I am still having to whack the reset button every couple of days. It would also be good if access to Foxtel’s HD channels will be enabled via firmware update. My only real gripe with the unit is the lack of outputs, but it has component connections, so the quality isn’t bad.
Let me put it this way. Spamalot is INCREDIBLE. It is a very tough call to say if it exceeds ‘The Producers’, but I would happily go and see either of them over and over again. There are a lot of Python in-jokes, but 99% of it works even if you haven’t seen a bit of Python material in your entire life.
Lucinda Shaw as the Lady of the Lake is incredible, I have no idea how she has any voice left after a show! Bille Brown is a great King Arthur. Together with the rest of the cast they keep the charm of the original movie while adding their own unique spin to it. The songs are incredibile and fit beautifully with the storyline and the song and dance sequence at Camelot is just crazy fun. They have also stretched out parts of the movie that people loved so much, like the French taunting.
Anyone who has the chance to see the show I STRONGLY recommend it, it’s in Melbourne for a while longer and is also still playing in the US on Broadway and in Vegas, as well as in London.
About this time last month I posted a gut reaction to Kevin Rudd’s grand plan for mandatory internet filtering. I was reminded of this on the Whirlpool forums today after reading some posts from one of the guys from Internode (a large internet service provider). This one in particular addresses things well: Data Blocking
Essentially, the point is that copyright holders have a vested interest in keeping their material off the net, yet with billions of dollars, fairly uniform copyright laws across the globe and complete cooperation from ISPs everywhere, they have been 100% unsuccessful in stopping the flood of pirated movies, music, etc. Now with adult content, you have no uniform standards of what is acceptable around the world, different personal standards and far less in the way of monetary resources to ‘clean’ the internet. No filter is going to work on that basis, and we haven’t even looked at technical issues yet (which are discussed here).
I still stand by the position that it is not the job of government to force ISPs to play parent. Parents should be responsible for monitoring what their kids do online. If they want a filter, fine, download the free one from the government you can install on your PC, but don’t force me to deal with slower internet and subsidise ISP filtering for you.
For more on Comrade Kevin’s rise to power, watch this video:
So I am currently in Melbourne taking a break from the tropics. On a professional level, Darwin is great but for me it can get physically draining, so I am glad of the break. Yesterday I wore long pants for the first time in nearly 3 months, and today I am in a warm polar fleece jacket! It’s a long way from 33 degrees in Darwin to 21 here! I took the Virgin Blue direct flight on Monday night which was a good experience, but I am not looking forward to the Jetstar return leg on Tuesday as much.
There is only so much you can try to cram into a week, I am not getting to catch up with as many people as I probably would like to. I am heading to Spamalot (the Monty Python musical) tomorrow night at Her Majesty’s Theatre. I am really looking forward to it, I regret not seeing ‘The Producers’ when it was in town and I am not going to let this show slip by. There are a few other bits and pieces planned for the weekend which will fill up my time here pretty well. Wednesday next week will be busy, it’s my last full day of leave and I look like I will be having a parade of tradies through the house to fix up various things. Thursday back to work on nightshift, so it really is a whirlwind holiday!
Finally, I should mention that I saw the movie ‘Juno’ yesterday. Incredible is all I can say. It is very charming in a Napoleon Dynamite kind of a way. The script was great with very real characters and dialog and Ellen Page is brilliant as th titular character. It is a must see that really defies any attempts to plonk it into a simple genre.
OK, this thing is so outrageous that it has got coverage on the mainstream Australian media (here, here, here and here), it has also made it to the BBC, the awesome videoblog WebbAlert and cause the Electronic Frontier Foundation to issue a press release. What could be so outrageous? MANDATORY internet filtering.
Congratulations guys, we now live in China. What is SO wrong about this proposed system is that it is mandatory, you have to ask to opt out. Senator Conroy says that if you oppose the filter it means you are you are pro-kiddie porn. That is just trying to inflame the media, if the intent of this is really to protect kids, then it should be opt in for parents, not opt out for adults. Kiddie porn is already illegal in so many levels (rightly so) so in my opinion it is a moot point.
Lets say I don’t want the filter because it will slow down the internet. This is a valid concern, imagine a big ISP that is supposed to filter each and every one of its clients. It has millions of queries every minute which is has to check against a massive hash table of blacklisted sites. This all takes CPU grunt, which costs money and inevitably you have to wait for the request to go through before the ISP even starts grabbing the data. This will make the internet slow and expensive and suddenly you are on some government list of people who rejected the filter. Way to go K Rudd, you really thought this through completely before making an announcement.
Of course, the filter is going to be ineffective anyway. Anyone with any experience with a filter at work or school knows that all it does is make it painful to get at the information you need and does a lacklustre job of keeping inappropriate material out. All you would need to do is change domains for your content to sidestep the blacklist generated by Rudd’s ‘what is appropriate on the internet committee’ or access the information via means other than the world wide web (ftp, scp, p2p, there are plenty of choices).
If the announcement had been ‘we are going to force ISPs to do ISP-side filtering, which you can opt in to when you sign up’, I would have siad that his intent was good, but I doubt it would work. This hare brained scheme is an insult to adults and an ineffective barrier for children, and will do nothing more than lull parents into complacency and stop them keeping an eye on their kids online.
