DivX labs: DivX Browser Plug-In
archive for 2005
With my hard earned xmas bonus I’ve splashed out on a new digital camera, a Pentax Optio 60.
It’s a 6 mega-pixel thing with oodles more features than my old skool Fuji 2800. I will miss the mighty 6x optical zoom but I absolutely will not miss the size of the flippin’ thing. It was huge. Get ready for an influx of pictures when my new one arrives.
I got some awesome gifts this year, including:
- Roy Lichtenstein Whaam! prints (both of them)
- Jarhead by Anthony Swofford
- Banksy’s “Crude Oils” postcards (getting framed)
- Shiny new parker pen
- Sin City DVD
- Batman Begins DVD
- Block of kitchen knives
- Smoother Maker
So the tree is dressed, the presents wrapped and the beer is chilling. Kerry and I decided to take the diplomatic route this year and have christmas all to our selves. Neither parents would have to receive us on the big day. This is actually my first christmas away from home, which will be strange, in a good way. Kerry and I have oodles of food planned (just for us!) tomorrow, I’m on beef roasting duty and trifles making. Mmmm, trifle.
Sorry about the ass-ness of the photos, they’re from my phone. I’m going to pick up a new digi-cam in the January sales.
Now that IE 7 is going to use the orange feed icon developed for Firefox Matt Brett decided it was about time to vaguely standardise the thing. Seems like a good idea to me. Accordingly I’ve stuck a grey-scale version in my menu.
Re-reading this again 🙂
Uh-oh, I think I might own an ipod. Not sure how that one happened… It might have something to do with mentioning to my parents that I would like one for Christmas. It is unbelieveably shiny and so small!
I opted for a (ninja) black 4 Gb Nano, mainly for the ease of carrying and for a decent amount of space. I don’t really want to carry around my whole music collection, but then I don’t want to have to rotate albums every day or something (like with a shuffle). As a Windows user I’m allergic to iTunes so I ditched that at the earliest convenience and I’m using mlipod for winamp which is aces-cool.
The screen is great and the scroll wheel is easy to use once you get the hang of it. The UI is the usual Apple slickness and makes navigating around really easy. I haven’t tried any video on it, but the photo album is vaguely useful and has pretty slideshows. It’s usability is limited on a screen so small though. The whole Nano is incredibly easy to scratch, I have a few minor ones after only a week so I’ve ordered a case for it which should help a bit.
More on my adventures in Apple-land in time.
At work Sandy recently implemented Google-esque “did you mean?” results on our site search. It’s pretty neat.
Buy some toys for sick children at xmas.
So, the big Y! makes yet another social-software purchase and buys del.icio.us. I started using delicious last year and while I didn’t find the whole book marking thing that useful I do try to trawl delicious popular once a day to catch up on all the latest trends. It seem that Yahoo! is taking taking a different approach to the big G. Google tend to hire the super-academics and take the “look how smart we are” approach. Whilst Yahoo! are hiring (and buying) the entrepreneurs to broaden their portfolio of online services to provide to Yahoo! users, “look how friendly we are”.
It’s quite a turn around as Google used to be the friendly new kid on the block, with Yahoo the bumbling, messy old guy trying to keep up. Now everyone is realising that Google is not infallible, is making billions of dollars a year, has endless beta cycles and generally wants to index every bit of data, ever. Yahoo are trying to get close to the people who use their products, they’ve finally got into blogging, launched a nicer API than Google and started buying up the social apps that people actually use (upcoming, flickr, delicious etc). I still like Google’s products, Maps is just awesome, but somehow I feel they’ve become more corporatey than Yahoo!
F.E.A.R.
FEAR stands for something daft like First Encounter Assault Recon. FEAR has some truly awesome fire fights, the “gun play” is very, very good. In firefights the developers have gone for a full on experience. Particles and chunks fly off every surface as your bullets inpact on it. Paper sprays off bundles of paper, splinters fly off piles of timber, glass shanters into lots of pieces and sparks and smoke come off all the weapons. Whilst you’re getting all of this eye candy thrown at you, the AI is cunningly flanking you, flushing you out with grenades and generally being clever (or giving a very good illusion of being clever). This was the first game since half-life 1 (when the grunts first flushed me out with a grenade) where the AI actually surprised me. The bad guys will vault over surfaces and pull over desks and filing cabinets to provide cover. Get too close to them and they lunge at your and knock you flying. It’s all very impressive.
So, the guns, the fire fights and the AI is all good. Unfortunately the level design is mind-numbingly repetitive. Abandoned warehouse, abandoned office, sewer, repeat. The story seems pretty good initally but the briefings at the start of each mission get more and more pointless as you realise its just another warehouse of bad guys to shoot your way through. It does have some genuinely creepy moments, just as you turn a corner a ghostly figure will walk past into a wall. Or, just as you reach the top of a ladder a figure will be there and then scatter into lots of fly-like black particles. It does bits of horror stuff very well in places, but then you round the next corner and it’s back to mowing down bad guys again.
I’ve been playing it in small bursts, it seems to be best that way.
Call Of Duty 2
Call Of Duty 2 is very much a sequel. It doesn’t look vastly different from the first one. There has been a bit of polish to the engine, it has very good smoke for one thing and still has its intense edge. The one thing that stands out after playing FEAR is how static the scenery is. Everything is completely glued to the floor, unless it’s scripted to get blown up by a tank or something. I mean, a small wooden crate can provide cover from a tank shell, which is just silly.
The various scenarios are still huge fun though, and you get into those intense situation we’re you’ve got enemy fire zipping past you and you’re throwing grenades and jumping over walls and stuff. Crouching…reloading…popping up…sighting down the weapon…capping a bad guy. Great stuff.
I’ve totally forgotten to give some props to my work-mate Blair’s band Charlie’s Boat. You can hear some of their tunes on their myspace page. Looks like they’re playing in Edinburgh on Thursday night, so y’all should go and stuff.
So I bought Ian’s old PC case of him as a replacement for my monstrous tower. “old” in Ian terms is, like, more than 6 months so it’s still pretty spiffy. It’s made from super light aluminium and has a very shiny black automative paint finish. Rather hilariously, as I was trying to take a picture of it to post here my camera fell off my desk with the lense extended…ouch. It’s now at a rather wonky angle and won’t zoom in and out, officialy “shonky”. Oh well, it is more than three years old and probably only worth about £50 (its got quite a bit of previous battle damage). Looks like I’ll be picking up a new one in the January sales.
Update: Just remembered. When I had got everything moved into the new case I fired it up and got a continuous high-pitched beep. Strange….because this case doesn’t even have a speaker! I finally realised that I hadn’t plugged the molex power connector into my uber geforce 6800 graphics card. That did the trick, the card itself must have a speaker to warn you of low power or something.
Rome: just watched last episode of season one. Wow. Can’t wait for the next season.
Days Off Work: Aces, I’m off today and tomorrow.
XUL, XML, BBQ, XPI: Firefox plugins and XUL is cool. I’m thinking about making some kind of firefox plugin and learning XUL.
Blog Tweaks: All you feed-readers might not have noticed some tweaks I’ve made lately. Come and have a look at the site!
Wow, Revolver is a total head-f**k (to put it mildly). It’s a surprisingly cerebral movie for Guy Ritchie and I’ll be honest and say that I Googled for an explanation of the plot as soon as I finished watching. Revolver is absolutely nothing like Lock Stock or Snatch other than it has Jason Statham in it and it’s vaguely about gangsters. Ritchie has definitely matured with this movie and I had to shift my brain out of comedy gangster movie mode and up a notch to take this in. I can’t really describe much of the plot without giving it away but there is lots of voice-over and innner monologue from Jason Statham. André Benjamin (from Outcast) is also very well cast in it and Vegas, as always, makes a gorgeous backdrop. I’d recommend giving it a watch, its central theme about the “ultimate con” is intriguing.
Viggo Mortensen is excellent in this David Cronenberg directed movie. I watched this knowing nothing about the plot and so was pleasantly surprised at the twists and turns it throws at you. The plot is simple but nicely presented and keeps you guessing right until the end. In typical Cronenberg style the move is very raw, and the violence is sudden and explicit, much like The Sopranos. The ending is Hollywood but not too much of a cop-out and leaves you upbeat but still reeling.
Kerry bought me the shiny new Banksy book “Wall & Piece”. It is supremely awesome, practically every page makes me smile at the ingenious stencils. This book is a very arty coffee table type thing which is quite a departure from his others, which were almost like pamflets. I’ll never forget the jacket blurb on “Cut It Out”:
If you only ever read one book in your life
I highly recommend…
you keep your f***ing mouth shut.
I heartily agree.
Yeah, yet another Crichton. I just need something easy to read at the moment. I really can’t face getting back into QuickSilver. Typical stuff so far, very entertaining and easy to read.
Update: Finished it. It has adjusted my view of some environmental issues a lot.
I saw this in Forbidden Planet yesterday, it even comes with a copy of Canned Heat on CD. Awesome 😀
The BBC has been keeping a vast catalogue of information about all the programmes it has put out for more that fifty years. It has been maintained all this time by a “crack team of librarians” and has so far been for internal BBC use only. Now, with the help of the BBC Backstage project (use our stuff to build your stuff) it could soon be useable for anyone on the ‘net and hopefully hackable for all of us geeks. Matt Biddulph is working on this for the BBC and gives us a sneak peek. Take a look at some of his screenshots, the breadth and detail of the information is vast.
This is awesome. I’d love to get a poke around that place.
This is great so far. I got this as a proof about two years ago when I was still working at Waterstones. It’s a translation of the original russian and is set in 19th Century Moscow. “Erast Fandorin” a criminal investigator for the Moscow police is the hero and when he sets out to investigate a simple suicide all is not what it first seems…
Update: Finished it already, that was quite fast for me. The ending is quite a shock and leave me wanting to read more of Erast’s investigations.
Kerry and I were invited to a combined Halloween and Flat Warming last night at Anna & Jen’s new place. Kerry was unforuntely working and so I went alone, without a costume. I did bring snacks, liquer and wine so they still let me in. Lots of people had cancelled and Anna wasn’t very well so the back-up plan of heading to the Auld Hoose swung into action. We somehow got stuck watching Bound (the Wachowski bros. film before The Matrix) and ended up at the Hoose just after midnight. It was packed out with lots of kerazy dressed-up folk, so I had a quick drink and then escaped to annoy Kerry at work.
I’ve just realised that I haven’t blogged about the free blueyonder speed increases. I was originally on a pretty standard 1Mb cable line, but now have a mighty 4Mb! This is mainly the cable companies playing catch-up with ADSL and completely out-doing them so they don’t get left too far behind. This new connection means I can download at 500kb/s (that’s kilo-bytes!) and upload at 48kb/s. Awesome 🙂
So now that I have my shiny new wireless access point I’ve managed to get my media player thing working over wirelss. Which is just beyond cool and keeps Kerry happy, as there aren’t huge lengths of CAT-5 trailed eveywhere. Its a nice little box and fits in with the rest of the D-Link range. I’ve had no problems so far with reception but then it’s only going about five metres. The firmware is pretty neat and has stuff like syslogd support so that the access point log gets piped across to my linux box’s logs aswell. Now I just need a laptop or something to waft around the flat, marvelling at the magical wireless technology.
Woo-hoo, an extra hour in bed!
We’re often joking at work about how cold it is. Maybe this is the answer: The Heated Mouse.
Now that we’ve got a TV and everything in an actual living room the problem arose of how to watch all of our downloaded media on it. Kerry would have probably killed me if I’d set-up a noisy media PC in there, plus it would be a bit too expensive. A chipped xbox was another option, or some kind of dedicated divx player. I was browsing ebuyer and came across the Lite-On LVD-2010 which is a DVD player than can also play mpg4, divx etc and can stream stuff via ethernet. Seems pretty sweet! I faffed around too long though and ebuyer sold out, I eventually got one from dvdplayers.co.uk, who have now sold out aswell.
It’s a neat bit of kit. It looks just like a normal DVD player but can play content from a ‘Media Server’ on the local network. This clever ‘Media Server’ is actually just a web server that offers a file browsing interface and streams the files to the box. The server software that comes in the box is pants, and uses Java (eww). SwissCenter is a much nicer, open source project that just uses a mini version of apache and PHP. The only problems so far have been that it can’t play q-pixel encoded divx files (whatever the heck they are) and it doesn’t support movie subtitles in external files.
In the retail box you also get a wireless bridge adaptor so that you don’t need to run CAT-5 to the box. I haven’t yet got this working, mainly because I don’t have a wireless access point for it to work with. This presented an excellent opporunity to get one though, and I shelled out for a D-Link DWL-2000AP+ which should arrive tomorrow. More toys! 🙂
Kerry and I watched this last night and it was pretty good! If you’re expecting a Gladiator-esque Crusades movie, this is not it. There is actually quite a bit of plot and acting around all the usual Ridley Scott high speed photography battle scenes.
It’s a wee bit slow at the start but picks up towards the end with the siege of Jerusalem being a high point. Very nice CG, as pretty as Lord Of The Rings but not quite as ‘magnificent’. Neil is right about Orlando Bloom’s character. One minute he is a lowly blacksmith, the next he is a master swordsman and siege tactician.
I got this from the library a couple of weeks ago and have been engrossed by it since. Now that we have an actual bedroom without tv and computer I have much more time to read before bed, which is nice.
Blimey! Dabs have gone all CSS, and have valid XHTML! They’re even displaying the W3C buttons in their footer. I can’t think of another sizeable e-commerce operation that does that. Good on ’em!