July 19th, 2008
Although not a big Diane Lane fan I was persuaded to rent “Under the Tuscan Sun” a few days ago. I must admit that although the person that recommended it to me has rarely steered me wrong I was a little less than thrilled with this suggestion. Not that I think she can’t act and since I was recently pleasantly surprised with “Untraceable” I decided not to bemoan their selection to much and just watch the dang movie.
Let me set the premise for you. A lady finds out that her husband has cheated and basically looses almost everything. Because they are worried about her some friend send her on a “Gay” tour of Tuscany to help her get over this point in her life and while there she impulsively buys a Tuscan Villa and decides to move. Sound pretty far fetched if I had asked me. However, it isn’t. Yes, most people wouldn’t do what she does or for that matter have the money to do what she does but this story is artfully written so that you understand not only why she does it but why it turns out to be the best decision she could ever have made.
Plus they keep you guessing as to if this is a romantic movie or an uplifting one and I would hazard to say that even in the end your still not sure if it can be categorized as one or the other or both. Over all the story will touch you and you will find yourself feeling her struggles (especially if you have ever been hurt before) and joy. I mean after all who hasn’t done something foolish and it accidentally worked out?
Extras where a little less enjoyable for me. There was a commentary from the director but it really started to put me to sleep. One person doing a commentary just isn’t the same as a group. To me it comes out as a little more like narration but that is strictly my opinion.
In short if you like movies that can make you think and open your eyes to some things in your life you might want to change this might be the movie for you. And if not you still might enjoy the sunsets and atmosphere of the movie.
Tags: comedy, diane, DVD, lane, Movie, review, romance, sun, tuscan, underShare This
By Tiff -- 0 comments
July 19th, 2008
There’s been a lot of press recently about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which just released its third, and final, act this morning. It comes down off the free web tomorrow, so watch it now, while you can. It’s brilliant!
While watching it, I noticed that it’s hosted by Hulu. I’ve come to watch a bit more Hulu recently, especially since I noticed that they have complete movies on the site. Who doesn’t love free movies?
Even better is if you just go to their RSS Feed page and subscribe to the Recently Added Movies feed, so you can keep track of all of their new releases.
And, of course, while you are watching, note that there is an option (after you start it) to switch to a higher-resolution (480p, in this case) mode. Not HD, but better than nothing.
Tags: dr. horrible, Hulu, rssShare This
By Christopher Swenson -- 0 comments
July 18th, 2008
Consumer Reports is known to put out some advertising posts for some of their HDTV reviews. They do a range of tests amongst models, and decide which are the best ones to get. The one on HDTV projectors looks especially interesting (they claim a particular 1080p Kodak model for $3,000 has the best picture).
They also have some good tips on whether or not you should buy a projector. The gist: it’s much more expensive, but it’s probably the best experience you can reasonably get in a home.
Subscriptions to Consumer Reports online cost about $26 a year, or $5.95 a month. Slightly less if you subscribe to the dead tree version. If you are the kind of person who regularly updates their home theater or gaming rig, then this is probably a drop in the bucket. Even so, if it prevents you from making one bad decision (a poor HDTV choice, wrong audio system, more money for unnecessary features, etc.), then the subscription more than pays for itself.
Tags: consumer reports, HDTV, projectorsShare This
By Christopher Swenson -- 0 comments
July 17th, 2008
Yes everyone is so excited for Nicole Kidman right now with the birth of her baby girl so as a fun tribute I decided to rent “Golden Compass”. I’m not really sure what I was expecting but I am pretty sure that I didn’t get it.
If you’re not familiar; the basic premise is that there are many different worlds that are barely separated. In this particular world people walk around with their souls in the form of animals that they call demons. At the center of this story are of course Nicole Kidman’s character, Mrs. Coulter, and a spunky little girl named Lyra portrayed by Dakota Blue Richards.
I had to major problems with this movie. While entertaining I couldn’t tell whether Kidman’s character was really the villain you feel they are trying to make her out to be and if it was really a children’s movie then shouldn’t it be a little more child themed? Don’t get me wrong I think the kiddies will like it if for no other reason all the animals talk and the heroine is a little girl but some of the wording and themes just seemed a little adult to me.
Plus I know one of the new things is to leave you hanging for the sequel (think Lord of the Rings) but I like for my movies to well end at the end. I appreciate that Hollywood is looking to make as much as they can from a story they feel could be a franchise but after 2 plus hours watching a movie I don’t the feeling like I’m stuck waiting a year to two for who knows what. I feel like I wasted my time and should have just waited and done it in one 4 hour lump sum. If you do the math it just makes more sense. 4 hours or 2 hours plus 395 days at 24 hours per day equal more than I care to count and at least I would know the real end (unless they are going for three movies instead of two).
As far as extras I didn’t get any. Once again I think it is because it was a two disc special edition and of course I only got one and my local rental store which is another blog altogether.
So my advice is that if you have kids this might be one that you would like to buy but unless you are just a big Kidman fan or really liked the story then renting is the way to come out golden.
Tags: compass, DVD, family, golden, kidman, Movie, review, richardsShare This
By Tiff -- 2 comments
July 16th, 2008
One lesser known feature of Firefox 3 is the improved zoom feature. If you are using it, try it out now: press Ctrl–”=” (Cmd–”=” on OS X) and Ctrl–”-” (Cmd–”-” on OS X) to zoom in an out. This will zoom in on all of the page structures, including graphics, background, etc., as opposed to the older browser behavior of just increasing and decreasing the fonts.
One of the best benefits of this? You can do it on Flash cartoons. Since Flash cartoons (not videos, though) are vector objects, they zoom quite nicely.
Tags: firefox, flashShare This
By Christopher Swenson -- 1 comment
July 14th, 2008
I’m a big fan of FLAC, the super-high quality, Free Lossless Audio Codec. I have a bit of my music stored in FLAC. However, my iPod doesn’t support FLAC as it stands: the highest quality format is Apple Lossless, so I’ve been using that for a lot of my modern music.
Even some artists online are selling FLACs of their music for the high-def audiophiles out there. For example, Jonathan Coulton has a FLAC store.
A problem I have is that once I’ve bought said music and want to listen to it, or if I want to listen to my old FLAC files, I am stuck on my computer. What about my iPod?
Well, there are several options, most of which are bad. Most involve hacks, like using the standard FLAC utilities (for example, installed from Fink) to convert it to a WAV and then import it into iTunes. However, with these kinds of methods, you often lose all of your metadata (artist, album, title, etc.), or you have to resort to some fancy shell scripting to convert them.
This is where XLD (X Lossless Decoder) comes in. It supports converting to and from a variety of formats, including FLAC, Apple Lossless, AAC, WAV, MP3, Vorbis, and WavPack. The best feature is that correctly converts the metadata from one format to the other. It’s also dead simple to use: simply set your preferences to what you want, i.e., for Apple Lossless:
Then open the file you wish to convert from whatever (e.g., FLAC) and it pops out as Apple Lossless in just a few seconds. The size difference between the two formats in the test file I just checked was about 1.1% (with Apple Lossless being smaller than FLAC).
Tags: apple lossless, conversion, flac, os x, xldShare This
By Christopher Swenson -- 0 comments
July 14th, 2008
Okay so gas prices are peaking over $4.00 a gallon and more and more people are getting laid off; what is a girl to do? Why not take a job at a federal reserve bank and steal a few million just to get by? Sound like a plan to me or at the least a fun movie and that is what you get with “Mad Money”.
Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah, and Katie Holmes are great in this light entertaining movie. Keaton plays a housewife whose husband gets downsized and has to find a job to keep them from loosing their home. After taking a job as janitor for one of the federal reserve banks she realizes that there is a way to steal money that is about to be shredded and hatches a plan that includes Latifah and Holmes. Together they steal an undisclosed amount of money that even at the end you’re still not sure how much it was.
This was actually better than I assumed it would be. I had heard all the different reviews of “I loved it” or “It’s stupid” and so I really didn’t know what to expect but I have to say that I am in the “love it” camp. It had me laughing and thoroughly entertained and as someone who use to work in a bank I actually found the story a little plausible. I’m not recommending anyone try it at home but I could see how it might be able to happen. Plus in the extras there is a behind the scenes featurette where someone mentions that the story was based loosely on a true story about a group of women stealing money from the Bank of London some years ago.
Speaking of extras, there weren’t as many as I like to see but there was a commentary with the director that I have to say I found a little boring. Still if you find that you have a little “Mad Money” tucked away somewhere this might not be a bad splurge. If nothing else you might get a little vocational advice but if asked you didn’t hear it from me.
Tags: comedy, danson, DVD, holmes, keaton, latifah, money, Movie, release, reviewShare This
By Tiff -- 0 comments
July 11th, 2008
All the rage of the newest LCD TVs is supporting a few things like “120 Hz” and “dejudder”. What are these?
When a TV is marked as “120 Hz”, it means it is capable of redrawing the screen 120 times a second. Traditional tube TVs in the US refreshed around 59.94 times per second, and other kinds of TVs typically fell into providing 60 or 75 Hz refresh rates. Since most video in the US is encoded at either 24 (film), 29.97 (television), or 30 (VHS) frames of video per second, these refresh rates were more than sufficient to keep the video playing smoothly.
What does 120 Hz buy us? Well, first, it adds a lot of cost. More powerful video processors are needed to process the video twice as fast and to do fancier operations, and will, of course, cost more money and generate more heat. The video components, like the screen itself, will have to be higher quality.
And what does this cost give us?
Basically, double the frames it can display per second. The reason for this is two-fold: one is that LCDs traditionally have a lower refresh rate than CRT and plasma screens, leaving some models to display “ghosting” and other mysterious artifacts. Some people notice it, some don’t care. Doubling the refresh rate to 120 Hz provides, potentially, a more natural, smooth playback. Possibly.
The second reason has to do with “dejudder“. What does that mean?
Well, as I said above, video sources come in a variety of frame rates, typically 24 frames per second if they originated from film. If you can display only 60 frames per second, then there’s some arithmetic error: 60 ÷ 24 = 2.5. There way this is normally handled is by showing frames multiple times, and some more than others. This can cause an uneven jerkiness (”judder”).
There is also judder on 120 Hz screens, since the source is still usually 24 Hz. Some believe that it is still jerky, if it is just evenly.
So, now that there’s dejudder technology, that’s great right? Not quite.
It appears to be different with every person, and different TVs implement dejudder differently. The dejudder technology interpolates extra frames in between the real frames, which can appear to degrade the video source. Some may mind, some may not. Some people even like the jerkiness of the original source, and so the 120 Hz and dejudder technologies are actually bad things.
The moral of this story: Don’t leave the store that you are buying your 120 Hz, dejudder TV without playing with the dejudderer. Make sure that you will be satisfied with the quality, and that it looks better to you.
Tags: 120 Hz, dejudder, HDTV, LCD, what's the dealShare This
By Christopher Swenson -- 3 comments
July 10th, 2008
I might be the only one that wasn’t a big fan of “Little Miss Sunshine” but even though I didn’t love the movie something in it did capture my heart. A little bit of sunshine names Abigail Breslin and she has continued to melt it ever since.
And so it goes with “Definitely, Maybe” which is a cute story about a dad that through a quirky mix of events ends up telling his daughter the story of how he met her mother. The story becomes a little more complicated because of course there is more than one woman.
This movie does boost good performances out of everyone from Ryan Reynolds to Rachel Weisz. And Isla Fisher is just as lovable as she was in “The Wedding Crashers”. Yet I wish that there had been a little more comedy for her to sink her teeth in. Still there is really nothing bad I could say about script or movie.
The extras were the standard behind the scenes that we are all getting use to. There is a rather fun commentary from the director and Reynolds.
I would say that this is a great movie to pick up if and if you love that little sunshine like I do then this is definitely, maybe one that you need to add to your collection.
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By Tiff -- 0 comments
July 9th, 2008
Since the days of Napster, the Internet has been flowing with this magical, wonderful beast known as “MP3″. What is it, exactly?
Well, it’s a compression standard dating back to 1991 that shrinks the size of audio by throwing away parts we don’t hear very well. The higher the compression ratio, the more information is thrown away and the lesser the quality of sound.
Needless to say, we’ve learned a lot about audio compression in the years since 1991. After all, MP3 is part of the first set of standards on digital video set forth by MPEG (MP3 = MPEG 1, Layer 3). There are a lot of modern alternatives that are worth considering for your audio collection.
What would you move to? Well, there are a few options. We’ll start with the most direct competitor to MP3:
AAC is the most popular: it’s has been made widely popular as the audio codec of choice of iTunes and iPod. In addition, support is strong among hardware and software players, as almost every major vendor supports it. And with good reason: it’s a very decent codec, engineered more recently than MP3, and sounds better than MP3 at the same bitrate. The only two downsides to AAC are that iTunes, by default, encrypts the AACs you buy from them (this is changing soon, and does not affect ones you rip yourself).
Another strong competitor to the powerhouses that are AAC and MP3 is Ogg Vorbis (often just referred to as “Ogg”, despite the fact that there are several other Ogg codecs). Ogg’s appears to be of similar quality to AAC, and is completely free. Support is mixed: many software players support natively or through add-ons, but hardware support is very lacking. For some reason or another, it just never really caught on.
MP3, AAC, and Ogg are all lossy codecs, as opposed to lossless. The difference being that lossless audio codecs have the exact same quality as the original source, whereas lossy codecs make no such guarantees. But the lossless codecs also require much more storage space. (But, with ballooning hard drive sizes, are we really concerned with how much space our songs take nowadays? This used to be critical when I had a 4 GB hard drive, but in the 1+ TB age … not so much.)
Compare the normal, lossy codecs like MP3 and AAC: these have typical bitrates of 128–256 kbps, meaning that a 3-minute song is roughly 3 to 6 MB in size. With no compression, the same song would be about 31 MB in size. The lossy codec would preserve most of the quality, but there is loss of information. The lower the bitrate encoded, the more “tinny” it will sound. Most people can’t tell, so lossy codecs are very popular due to their small size.
For audiophiles, though, any loss is too much. This is where lossless codecs come in, giving sizes of around 15 MB for a 3-minute song. The main competitors are probably FLAC and Apple Lossless.
FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio Codec. It has good compression ratios and is well supported in software. As a matter of fact, I used it for quite a while since it is the only format that was (at the time) well-supported by Windows, OS X, and Linux. Hardware support is fairly poor, with almost no hardware vendors supporting it. Honestly, this is sort of to be expected with lossless codecs in general. Except …
Apple Lossless is Apple’s proprietary lossless codec. However, it’s not too proprietary, as it has been successfully reverse engineered and supported in many major music players recently, including VLC. Hardware support is “limited” to Apple iPods (other than the Shuffle), as far as I know. Limited in the sense that it supports only the most popular portable music player in the world. It’s fairly comparable in abilities to other lossless codecs, typically giving you an audio file about half the size of a raw WAV file.
So, after all of this, what is the verdict? MP3 is dead. It’s only good component is that it is universally supported. But AAC is extremely well supported, more modern, and sounds much better. For true audiophile needs, sticking with FLAC or Apple Lossless is your best option.
Personally? I rip all of my albums from CDs using both AAC (typically 192 kbps) and Apple Lossless. This way, if I ever get pickier in the future about my audio, I can just re-encode it later, but in the mean time I can fit plenty of songs on my iPod.
Tags: aac, apple lossless, ipod, mp3, ogg, vorbisShare This
By Christopher Swenson -- 2 comments
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