ReidNews

A Couple of Good New Shows

Posted by in entertainment
at 2:06 am on Sunday, 6 December 2009

Two new shows are on BBC that are pretty good.

Paradox is about what look to be cell phone pictures from the future appearing at the lab of a solar astronomer of some kind. He contacts the police, and they end up trying to prevent the disasters predicted by the pictures.

It seems to be a mini-series with only 5 episodes, but I’m not sure.

Misfits is about a group of young offendors doing community service. Thanks to a freak lightning storm, they (and many others in the area) are given special abilities. Yes, it’s another “Heroes”-inspired show. But the kids in this one would never be seen on mainstram US TV. There’s no end of sexual innuendo, foul language and bad behaviour. It’s great!

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Testing a Post via Google Wave

Posted by rae in General
at 8:47 pm on Thursday, 1 October 2009

Testing a Post via Google Wave
I’ve created a wave with the Posterous bot, and apparently this wave will be posted on posterous.com. I assume updates will also automatically be propogated? We shall see.

I will embed a picture to see if that works.

You should see a humourous “communist party” image above.

via google-wave-robot

Posted via web from clith’s posterous

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Whither Firewire S1600 & S3200?

Posted by rae in General
at 10:18 am on Tuesday, 8 September 2009

The spec was finalized in early 2008, and parts have been available since October 2008, yet I cannot google any sign of *any* Firewire S1600 or S3200 devices!

These things would transfer data at 1600 and 3200 Mbps, which (egad) is a bit slower than USB 3’s 4000 Mbps.

Maybe that’s why?

Hrm.

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

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Why did nobody tell me of this? “Batman: the Dark Knight Strikes Again”

Posted by rae in General
at 8:03 pm on Monday, 7 September 2009

I had no idea that Frank Miller revisited the “Dark Knight” mythos. But today I discovered, seven years after the fact, “Batman: the Dark Knight Strikes Again“, by Frank Miller and his wife, Lynn Varley.

Apparently reviewers were upset that it wasn’t exactly the same as the dark, gritty original “Batman: the Dark Knight Returns”. I think I’ll read it and see how it is for myself..

After Luisa and I dropped Michael off at rez at UofT, we took a leisurely drive along the Danforth. We had lunch at Astoria, and then went to the Carrot Commons. Or, rather, Luisa did, but everything seemed closed for Labour Day.

I noticed what *I* thought was a “new” Mac store across the street and took a snap with my iPhone — RiverdaleMac

I posted it to Facebook, where I was informed it is, in fact, a very old store, that used to be called “The CD Shop” (gee, wonder why they changed their name?

I trundled over to the book store just east of the ‘Carrot whose name escapes me.

And they had a graphic novels section.

And there I saw the tome above.

And bought it.

Luisa found me a copy of the latest Cinefex, which I’ll probably also read on the GO train.

All in all, a nice day. Great weather, too.

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

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My Favorite iPhone apps, Sep 2009

Posted by rae in General
at 3:49 pm on Monday, 7 September 2009

My Favorite iPhone Apps, Sep 2009

The iPhone Facebook app (free) is pretty good. The recent update has seen its UI overhauled, very much for the better.

There are still things you cannot do with the iPhone app, but for most things it’s just fine.

“Now Playing” (free) is the best app for movies. With it you can find what’s playing near you, at what time, and what score it has on Rotten Tomatoes. It has the phone numbers for theatres, and a Google Maps link to show you where they are.

One feature I appreciate is that it shows you DVDs as well. You can restrict this to show you only Blu-rays, so I find it handy to find out what’s coming out on Blu-ray this week.

“Stanza” (free) — recently acquired by Amazon — is the best text/book-reading app. It comes with built-in links for downloading classics like “Pride & Prejudice”, “War of the Worlds”, and others to your Stanza library.

You can adjust font size, and the page turning is nicely done. It also works in portrait mode.

“WeatherEye” *(free) is my favorite weather app. It doesn’t have the fancy graphs and graphics ofr “MyWeather”, but I find it’s short- and long-term forecasts very useful.

”TouchTerm” (free) and “VNC” (free and $$ versions) kind of go together, because they’re somewhat geeky. I dunno. But they are very good.

VNC struggles a bit when I view my dual-24″ monitor desktop. It tells me it is getting short on memory. I persevere though, and I haven’t head it crash on me.

TouchTerm is nice to have so you can ssh in to anywhere you like … except your iPhone. *sigh.

“eBuddy” (free) seems to hold the crown currently for multi-protocol IM app. It supports “push” notifications, but only stays connected for a maximum of 30 minutes. The AIM iPhone app, by contrast, stays online for 24 hours without your having to run the app once during that time.

Now iPhones can save websites as “app-like” icons on your screen, and I have a few favorite sites that I do this for.

”Google Latitude” is a way to share your up-to-the-minute (but not second!) location with friends. This is very handy when you’re supposed to meet up with people somewhere. When I’m driving I just start it up and leave it running.

Beware, however: the frequent access to the GPS necessitated by Latitude can drain the battery somewhat. It’s best using it when it’s plugged in (in your car, for example).

I use http://ping.fm/m to update all my various micro-blogs like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc. It’s a one-stop spew shop.

You can also set it up to do real blog posts etc, but this mobile-based web page isn’t suitable for that. How much can you type into a single, one-line text input box?

I’m curious to see how this is formatted on http://clith.posterous.com since I’ve used float alignments to float the inline pictures to the left or right of the paragraphs..

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

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New Mac store on the Danforth

Posted by rae in General
at 2:01 pm on Monday, 7 September 2009

Saw this store this afternoon, right across the street from the Carrot Commons.

Reid

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

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Pride & Prejudice Blu-ray

Posted by rae in General
at 2:55 pm on Friday, 4 September 2009

I bought the Blu-ray version of the 1995 BBC miniseries “Pride & Prejudice” a little while ago. They did an excellent job of the transfer.

Take a look at Elizabeth Bennet’s first glimpse of Pemberley:

DVD

Blu-ray

Just to be completely fair, these are not actual Blu-ray stills. Rather, they’re stills from an mkv down-encoding of the Blu-ray. But they’re of sufficient quality as to demonstrate the amazing difference the new transfer makes. All the colours have been corrected. As well, the soundtrack is much clearer – you hear things you never heard on the DVD.

I’d give this Blu-ray a 9/10 — I took one off because the dark scenes were too grainy. But I suspect this to be the fault of the equipment and film that was used during original filming, not of the Blu-ray transfer; you can’t make it better than the original film, after all.

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

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Testing out Posterous

Posted by rae in General
at 12:38 pm on Thursday, 30 July 2009

Found out about posterous.com from Andy Ihnatko’s blog. Testing it out with a picture.

Posted via email from clith’s posterous

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Recent ‘Net Stuff

Posted by rae in General
at 9:43 am on Wednesday, 29 July 2009

There is a new book that could be as important as Version Control with Subversion was several years ago. It’s called Pro Git, and the source for the book is available on GitHub.

Another item of note is an online Settlers of Cataan dice-rolling app that Vartan should like, since it keeps track of how many of each roll there has been. However, it does not track who rolled what each turn, so perhaps not quite up to scratch.

Then there’s two sites for Mac OS X users who like the QuickLook feature: QuickLook Plugins and QLPlugins. Between the two of them you should be able to hit spacebar with a huge variety of files.

Finally I’ll mention the Google Maps API V3, because it has lots of stuff in it aimed at mobile devices (specifically iPhone, Android). The major feature is going to be how fast it loads up. I can attest to the fact that V2 does take a long time sometimes on the iPhone.

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