Film Review: Lesbian Vampire Killers (and watching films on an iPhone)

 Film, iPhone  No Responses »
Jan 012010
 

So O2 is giving away free downloads for the 12 days of Christmas (or something like that) and have just given away a free copy of the film “Lesbian Spank Inferno” … sorry I mean “Lesbian Vampire Killers“. Well as it was free, I decided to give it a go …

The first thing to note is that watching films on an iPhone is a pretty bad idea. Ok, it is portable and probably isn’t too bad for watching an old film that you are familiar with for entertainment on the move (although reading a book is probably better). The screen is just too small.

As for the film itself, well you will have to turn off your “PC filters” before watching – the title itself and the first few minutes reveal a misogynistic fear of lesbians (the writers seem to be under the impression that lesbians are that way through a hatred of men!).

After you turn off these filters, what do you get ? Well two principle characters who are pretty repulsive – one pathetic type whose girlfriend  is routinely unfaithful (and with good reason), and another who is even more pathetic and unsurprisingly has no girlfriend.

These two pathetic losers journey to a village under an ancient curse whereby all 18 year old women suddenly turn into lesbian vampires (surely a contradiction in terms). They meet up with an unlikely bunch of history students – all female and all with a predilection for wearing low-cut tops. At which point the “story” (if it can be called such) progresses through an unlikely series of events until our two “heros” with a surviving love interest manage to defeat the lesbian vampire queen.

It isn’t good porn (whatever that is).

It isn’t comedy. And no I’m not being superior – I like simplistic “Carry On” style smutty comedy.

It isn’t a good vampire story. It doesn’t even have much of a story.

All in all, a complete waste of time. One of those “freebies” that cost too much.

Don’t bother.

Chinese Government Kill The English Madman

 Politics  No Responses »
Dec 292009
 

(With apologies to the relatives of Akmal Shaikh – I’m using somewhat impolite terms for mental illness)

The Chinese government has just executed an Englishman for drug smuggling despite the fact that he was plainly more than a little unhinged.  Even ignoring the fact that executions are a barbaric way of dealing with criminals, not taking into account someone’s mental health is positively medieval.

Well it would be except that medieval societies may well have been a trifle more understanding of those with mental health issues than the Chinese authorities have been.

The Chinese authorities are claiming that there are no reports indicating that Akmal has mental health issues, but it doesn’t take a report to know that he’s a bit of a fruitcase. And if there has not been a mental health assessment it is fully the responsibility of the Chinese authorities that there hasn’t been one!

Apparently the Chinese authorities are annoyed that people are criticising them for executing Akmal. They claim we have no right to criticise them! Well it’s not about whether we have the right to criticise them but about whether we find the behaviour of the Chinese authorities repugnant.

The Future Of Printed Newspapers

 Computing, Media  No Responses »
Dec 282009
 

There seems to be an impression amongst fans of digital media that printed newspapers are on the slow decline on the way to oblivion, and they could well be right. Without some radical changes, printed newspapers could be going the way of the town crier – around only as a historical oddity.

But what about radical change ? There are certainly possibilities there. The key is to look at the weaknesses of digital news :-

  1. Authority. Whilst some digital media news sources have some credibility, much of the time when you bump across some random blogger (like me!), you will have no idea on how credible they are – do they know what they are talking about ? I certainly don’t!
  2. Location. There are zillions (well a large number anyway) of places you can find digital news and it can take time to look for the news you are interested in. That is fine for a number of specialised areas – for instance my job includes an unwritten requirement to keep up to speed with what is happening in the IT industry, so I’ll spend a few hours a week searching. But for something less important to me – such as general European news, I’ll pass.
  3. Photography. Funnily enough given the quality of photo printing in most newspapers, this actually a weakness of digital news – whilst they all do photographs, they don’t do them well. Some of the most dramatic moments in history have had their stories told in newspapers with just a photo printed large. This does not happen often, but when it does it is a very powerful way of telling a news story (or starting off the story).
  4. You can’t read digital media in the bath. In the past, Sundays would often include a period of an hour or two sitting quietly reading the newspaper; whilst we can do that on the computer screen, this is rarely as relaxing as reading in the bath, at a quiet spot in the garden (or the local park), etc.

But what are the weaknesses of the printed newspaper ? Here we also have many :-

  1. You pay for the whole paper. Out of an ordinary newspaper, I am probably interested in at most 50% of it, and it seems rather irritating paying for that sports journalist who puts in some long story about a hockey tournament that I have never heard of, do not care about, and will not take the time to read even if you pay me for it. On the other hand, I might be interested in some random articles on things I would otherwise not read – for instance I am completely uninterested in car reviews, but there has been a recent review of a car “made” by Top Gear that I wouldn’t mind reading (for humour if nothing else).
  2. If you are lucky the newspaper you buy was put together by an editor whose interests closely match your own. Far more likely however is that there are news stories that did not get in (because you have “oddball” interests) because they are not seen as popular. I want to see news stories on what is happening in Europe, and local interest stories for Portsmouth, Winchester, Bangkok, and Sangüesa – a rather eclectic set of locations it may seem, but what they really are is individual.
  3. The quality of news photograph prints needs to be improved on. If you can print fashion photographs in a supplement properly why cannot the news stories also be printed properly ? Maybe that would cost more but I for one would be willing to pay extra for it.
  4. Some people want a daily newspaper and some want a weekly one. Actually some of us probably want a newspaper on some Sundays.

What we are looking at here is a newspaper suited to the individual requirements. Conventional newspaper printing and distribution won’t cope with that, but that does not mean it is impossible to provide. After all we have printing on demand for books, so why not newspapers ?

What I envisage is a web site where you start off by choosing something very conventional … “I want a copy of the Sunday Times delivered every Sunday”. From this unpromising start (and a start that is probably more expensive than the current way of getting the Sunday Times), you can add customisations :-

  • Print on quality paper for extra cost.
  • Remove any articles relating to Sport.
  • Add articles relating to this set of locations.
  • Add articles relating to IT, astrophysics, and archaeology.
  • Reset the formatting to use body text font as “Liberation Serif” at 12 points, headlines as “Verdana” at 14 points, and make the pages four columns wide.

From there, you could add additional customisations to the point where the newspaper has little or no relation to the real world “Sunday Times”. Whilst the default preference would be to pay for a printed copy, you could opt for downloading a PDF (or any other suitable eBook format) at a cheaper cost if you wished.

I am sure that if some newspaper magnate were to read this, they would think “hell no, that’s just too expensive” or some other reason for not doing it. That is probably more an indication that their imagination is too limited.

Rockbox and the 240Gbyte iPod

 Computing  No Responses »
Dec 222009
 

So in the interests of science (ok, I wanted a new toy with a large amount of storage for music), I bought a pre-upgraded iPod 5.5 with a 240Gbyte hard disk in it. Loaded up Rockbox as soon as it arrived with the special version for upgraded iPods and everything was working …

Well … sort of. I could copy most of my music onto it, but nothing with a filename that broke the rules of pure FAT … no long extensions (so no FLAC files!!), no UTF-8 filenames (and “f#a#oo” isn’t quite a catchy a name as “f♯a♯∞”). So I rebuild the filesystem with the standard Linux tool mkfs.vfat

Bad move! Whilst all the files now copied onto the iPod, the Rockbox bootloader was now unable to load the main rockbox binary (“rockbox.ipod”). Seems that Rockbox’s idea of FAT32 on large disks isn’t quite the same as Linux’s version (or to be fair OSX either). So I spend ages hunting around to see how to create an appropriate filesystem on the iPod to allow things to work, without success.

Thus this page.

First of all, connect up the iPod and determine what device it is (mine showed up as /dev/sdh). The command fdisk -l is quite helpful here particularly as we use that next.

Once you find the iPod’s device, use that to display the partition table using fdisk :-

# fdisk /dev/sdh
# fdisk /dev/sdh
Note: sector size is 2048 (not 512)

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 22506.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
 (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdh: 240.1 GB, 240057409536 bytes
84 heads, 62 sectors/track, 22506 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 5208 * 2048 = 10665984 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x20202020

 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdh1               1          13      128394    0  Empty
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdh2              13       22507   234302542    b  W95 FAT32

Command (m for help): q

Here we use the “p” command to list the partition table, and “q” to quit. The key bit of information we are looking for are the number of cylinders, heads and sectors per track (22506, 84, 62). For the number of cylinders, we need to subtract the number of cylinders used by the first partition … or perhaps easier the value of the cylinder that the second partition starts on (13). This gives the values we use for mformat to format the filesystem.

Next we need to create a “drive letter” (!! – why doesn’t mtools allow you to specify a device to work with in the proper Unix fashion?) by editing /etc/mtools.conf and adding a line at the end like “drive z: file=”/dev/sdh2″”.

Finally we need to use mformat to create the filesystem :-

mformat -t 22493 -h 84 -n 62 -S 4 -M 2048 -F -v FATBOX -N deadcafe z:

The “-v” and “-N” options are unnecessary, but at least the “-v” option is kind of handy to allow the iPod to be automatically mounted in an appropriate place. And I usually take every opportunity to assign some funky hex value 🙂

Gender Differences In Photography

 Photography, Politics  No Responses »
Dec 062009
 

I have just read this article on whether men and women take different photograph. Without going into too much detail, the overall impression is of confusion with some people saying yes and others no.

This is going to be very short. Whilst there may be gender-based differences in the way that we make photographs, these are likely to be overwhelmed by the simple differences between us that are down to us all being individuals. Most of us are far too keen to jump on the obvious differences (gender) and assume that these explain everything.

Or to put it another way, why did Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson make images that were so different when they are both men ? That’s right, because they were individuals and so was Gerda Taro. That she was a woman adds to her individuality, but being a woman didn’t make her any more of an individual or any less of an individual than Robert Capa was.

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