Finally got around to see it. It has been out for a while, and you still need to prebook seats to get a good spot. Anyway, saw it in 3D, and the glasses worked really well. I knew not to try and focus on stuff that weren’t supposed to be in focus. That’s what hurts the eyes. The 3D became very realistic at times, I almost waved the dust away when the big tree fell!
The story was good, though maybe not original. However I don’t necessarily mind that. Many stories are good for a reason. Good character development, but very predictable. Very textbook I think. All that aside, what really sells the movie is the amazing beautiful planet and very creative plant and animal life they created with their CGI. Great attention to detail. Now that is a very important point. The animated details are amazing. Also all that treehugger-mumbojumbo was framed in a plausible setup that didn’t make my sciency side cringe.
The movie has a definite wow-factor to it, very similar to what I felt when I saw Jurassic Park the first time at the cinemas (was the most expensive CGI movie of its time back 17 years ago).
This movie may very well deserve a place on my best movies list, and definitely the best one of 2009 (and I’ve seen a lot of movies in 2009). I think it beats Inglorious Basterds and Public Enemies, though they don’t really compare as they’re in a different class.
This is a definite must see, and it must be seen in cinemas. I’ll be getting the BluRay when it comes out. 1080p is the only way to go for this one!
A very different book by Alastair Reynolds. In this book humans have long colonized our galaxy and split into many different sub-species and sub-civilizations. One such sub-civilization is the shatterlings. They are clones who’s purpose are to explore the galaxy. The particular faction we follow are all clones of a woman who’s childhood is one of the parallel storylines in the book. These clones live for millions of years, both due to relativistic time dilation and cryogenic technology. But something threatens their existence, most of them are killed in an attack, and the survivor are left to figure out what happened.
The setting of the book is brilliant, but this time I think Reynolds got a bit lost in his storylines. I felt too much time was spent on less significant tracks, and too little on the conclusion. The end of the book comes really fast and while magnificent, a bit hasty. Still a very good book.
Catching up on my book reviews, so here is yet another book I just read by Alastair Reynolds. This book is the continuation of the story in “Redemption Ark”. In that book we left a shipload of refugees on a habitable planet after fleeing from the Inhibitors, a machine intelligence who’s task is to prevent intelligent civilizations to arise in our galaxy in an effort to prevent galactic wars. In “Absolution Gap” they’ve caught up with our refugees. We follow these people as well as the story of a man employed by a Conjoiner to survey solar systems for treasure. He has a religious experience involving a gas giant that seems to periodically vanish from existence for a fraction of a second. On an orbiting moon he forms a cult of believers who sole purpose in life is to observe such a vanish. The two storylines meet at the end to form a grand finale.
I have to say I enjoyed this book the most of the 3 Revelation Space books involving the same characters. The characters in this book are even more colourful than the previous, and the story is entertaining and involving in every substory and side tracks. Reynolds description of futuristic technology is more imaginative than ever, and his attention to details is as great as always.
Well, I had already bought new hardware for my Media Centre PC a couple of months ago, but this week my good old Silverstone HTPC box died (or the PSU did). I looked a bit around and landed on the Chieftec HM-03B box and a 400W PSU. The box is just fantastic. Has plenty of room, though it only takes a micro-ATX mainboard and low profile expansion cards. The HM-02 box is taller and probably takes the full size expansion cards, though I didn’t really care as I don’t need any additional cards. Anyway, the box comes with a display, a volume and selector knob and a remote. All connected through a single USB cable which fits onto one of the USB connectors on the mainboard.
In addition to the box, I run this setup of an ASUS M4A785D-M PRO mainboard, with a AMD Athlon II X2 240 CPU. Now I’m a long time fan of both AMD and Asus, and generally only buy their hardware. In any case, the Asus mainboard has a ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphic chip and a 7.1 HD audiochip built-in. The GFX card uses shared memory, which is not a problem as I run 2GB of Crucial DDR2 PC5300 RAM. The mainboard has VGA, DVI and HDMI connectors, so I bought a HDMI cable as my now ageing 32″ LCD TV supports 720p. I have to say it was amazing how much difference the HDMI cable made compared to the VGA. The picture suddenly became crystal clear.
With the addition of a Blue ray drive and a used SATA-II HD, my setup is complete. It is installed with Windows XP. I had a spare key around, so I saw no reason to run any heavier OS. I don’t run Windows Media Center, can’t stand the software. Instead I run XBox Media Center (aka XBMC) which I will write a review of on its own later.
Yesterday a testrun of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN produced the first collisions and collision data after 20 years of construction and preperations. They produced collisions in ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb. The beam was running at injection energy, so no acceleration. Next steps will be to crank up the power. This is looking promising so far, and I hope it all runs well. People were really excited here at the Institute of Physics in Oslo yesterday when they followed the unexpected test run online. Too bad I wasn’t there myself at the time, so I didn’t get to see the live feed.
I got fed up with the comment spam I get on my blog. I googled a bit and found a few solutions, but ended up with a plugin that adds CAPTCHA to the comment form.This little gem can be downloaded from here.
It is fun to observe the spammer-scripts bang their virtual heads against this simple little tool. I can observe all the spam attempts in my website log.
So, I was messing about with my Thunderbird email client today in an attempt to make it do exactly what it is I want. I have currently 3 computers accessing the same email account, and I want to have the same emails, both inbox and sent items, on all of them. Now, same inbox is easy, sent items not so much. There is always IMAP, but I don’t want to use IMAP due to server side storage limitations. So here’s my solution.
Inbox:
This is simple, I designate one main computer, which is the main desktop PC at home. This is also the computer I am away from the longest when travelling. It is set up to download all emails, and leave a copy for 30 days before removing them from the server. My other two laptops are configured to just download and leave a copy. No deletion. All the necessary options are found in “Tools -> Account Settings -> Server Settings”.
Sent items:
Now this is the tricky one, although simple enough.
First you need to disable the automatic storage of a copy of your sent items. This is found under “Tools -> Account Settings -> Copies & Folders”. Instead what I use is an experimental Thunderbird addon (don’t worry, it works just fine) called Auto-CC, found here. The instructions how to set it up are on that page too, they are quite easy really. Basically you set up the client to email yourself your own email as a blind carbon-copy (BCC) each time you send out an email. This is done through “Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Config Editor”.
Second step is setting up your client to recognize these copies and move them to your sent folder. You do this by entering “Tools -> Message Filters” and clicking “New”. I named my filter “Sent Items” (clever ain’t it?) and entered these settings:
Where the red-outed bit is your email address. I have a separate email-alias for this, if you don’t, you would probably want to just select “From” from the first dropdown list and have it grab all emails sent to you from you. The “X-Original-To” option is not in the list, but you are given the option to customize the list and can just add it yourself.
That’s it really … Now all my emails will be synchronized on all my computers, both inbox and sent items.
This excellent YouTube video takes care of the accusation we sceptics often has thrown after us that we need to be more open-minded. This always bugs me because my inquisitive mind is very open to new ideas. I’ve spent most of this year learning quantum physics for fucks sake. Being open-minded is however not the same as naivety…
A talk by physicist Steven Weinberg. It is well worth the listen.
“Steven Weinberg, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he founded its Theory Group and holds the Josey Regental Chair of Science, was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into electroweak force. He has written several popular books including the prize-winning The First Three Minutes, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, and Dreams of a Final Theory.”
I sat down yesterday and watched the first double episode of Stargate Universe. I have to say they made a pretty good first episode there. I also liked the first episode of Atlantis, but this one was much better told. They used the familiar story device of jumping between present and recent past in the introduction phase of the story (probably the whole first episode of the two, didn’t pay attention to when the story became linear). Although the self sacrifice scene towards the end was very very clishé, most of the story was quite well done. I also loved the scene where they were looking at the map and the path the ship had travelled over the millennia. They did a decent attempt to tie the show into the existing Stargate universe, and O’Neil’s “we’re gonna beam you up to our spaceship” comment at the start was hilarious
Basically the story takes place on an ancient space ship that were sent from earth a few thousand years ago, and is travelling through the universe by itself. The first episode explains how these people ends up on the ship after discovering a specially designed stargate that leads there. I do dislike the whole ancient ascension bit. (”The Anscients” is the name of an old race who lived on earth, for those unfamiliar with the Stargate universe.) Too religious-ish for my taste, and it made the reason why the ship was abandoned in the first place a little cheesy. I like the concept of an ancient race who made all this technology, but I prefer the way the Asgard-race disappeared over the way the ancients did. However that’s a rant for another time.
Also, I doubt this show is going to turn into a BSG (Battlestar Galactica, i.e. a space soap) ripoff as some accuse it of. I didn’t really see much in this episode that reminded me of BSG besides a few details. The power struggle may be a part of the story, but in no way like in BSG I hope. This is more like the Atlantis power struggle that popped up now and then. In Stargate such story devices are short lived. Also, I doubt this show is going to be about on-board drama either (I truely hope not). I see people criticizing the show for its characters too, but character development is very important for a good show, and can be done without ending up as a soap like BSG tended to. Babylon 5 had a brilliant balance between character development and action. In any case, Stargate is traditionally (after 15 season we can use the word traditional) a “us vs. evil alien villains” kinda show, and I doubt they’ll deviate from that path. They’ve already set the scene when introducing the secondary usage of the on-board stargate for resource gathering. I bet this will be a much used plot device. This will make it more a Voyager-like show than a BSG-like show. That is not necessarily bad, it is hard to invent a plot from scratch without using anything that has been used before. Atlantis did remarkably well in that respect though I think, so the creators certainly have the skill needed.
Looking forward to the next episode, and the eventual DVD releases!
Finally got around to see it. It has been out for a while, and you still need to prebook seats to get a good spot. Anyway, saw it in 3D, and the glasses worked really well. I knew not to try and focus on stuff that weren’t supposed to be in focus. That’s what hurts the eyes. The 3D became very realistic at times, I almost waved the dust away when the big tree fell!
