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  • Sci-fi London 2010 Manga All-Nighter

    It is Sunday evening, and I’m now still processing all I saw last night at the Apollo cinema in London. A fantastic night of entertainment, liked some of the films, didn’t like others, but the overall evening, and the organisation deserves mentioning as being wonderful, everyone that set up the night deserves props for the hard work they did to make it such a good night.

    Okay, props done, lets get to reviewing what I saw there. Let’s get the disclaimers out the way now, I really am not an expert on Anime, I’m just reacting to these films as a cinema goer, what caught my interest, what didn’t.

    Redline

    Blimey this was good. Redline is the ultimate car race of the future, held every five years. If I’m being harsh, it minded me of Rollerball, in so much as the races are everything, and the rest was filler just getting you to the races. But feck me they were stunning. Visual treats drawn in an amazing fashion, with a earbleed soundtrack, echoing through every inch of your soul. Nothing subtle about this, all action, all entertainment. Loved it.

    Bleach 2.0

    Not for me, bit weak. Mysterious bloke appears that bloke is a bit worried about, runs away, needs help to beat mysterious bloke, beats him in the end. Lots of battles, nothing outstanding in the animation, just didn’t engage me.
    Musashi

    This was odd, and in many ways very unsuitable for 4am in the morning. However it was very engaging for me, a documentary of a 17th Century swordfighter whose techniques laid the groundwork for what became the Samurai. Quite a lot of explanation of historic texts by essentially a Wii avatar. Strange, but it worked, because the source material was so engaging. When I have more energy tomorrow I’m looking up loads about this legend, because the detail just got to me. If you’re awake and up for a bit of learning, this will be even better.
    Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works

    Rubbish. Really bad. In wrestling, they have the term Spotfest where two wrestlers don’t link together a match, don’t work hard to draw you into an engaging match, they only concentrate on trying to do cool moves. This was a spotfest, but the spots weren’t that good. Everyone changed sides a hundred times. I’m told you need to know the anime to get it, know all the backstory, and this was entertaining fan service for people that know what is going on. Even with that in mind, this was just a load of spots, and ones that weren’t that good.

    In summary, see Redline. Rocked my world.

  • Oxford Twestival 2010

    This year I’ve volunteered to help organise Oxford Twestival 2010. I went to the first event last year, which was a great evening bringing together Twitters from all over Oxfordshire to raise money for charity. This year’s event is being held at The Living Room on 25th March 2010 (doors open 7pm), and playing will be Will Phipps, Ben Walker (aka @ihatemornings ) and Invisible Vegas!

    All money raised by the event will go towards the education programme of the global charity Concern Worldwide, who provide funding and support to 28 of the world’s poorest countries. As an example, they have an emergency team in Haiti at the moment, assisting in the support effort following the recent severe earthquake. As well as providing general survival supplies and assistance, they are presently providing education for 30,000 children.

    So it would be great for people to show their support for Concern, and to do so by enjoying a top evening’s entertainment. Tickets are only £3, or £4 with a raffle ticket for the evening’s charity auction. Book a ticket now!

  • Otakucookup – Green Thai Prawn Curry

    400g Prawns (larger and fresher the better, shelled)
    1 can Coconut milk
    2-3 tablespoons Thai Green Curry Paste
    1 lime
    1 lemon
    1 tablespoon Thai Fish Sauce
    Small handful of cashew nuts
    6 chopped spring onions

    1) Fry the prawns for a minute in a little oil.
    2) Squeeze in the juice of the lemon and the lime, and add the fish sauce, simmer them for a couple of minutes.
    3) Bung in the cashews and the spring onions, and if you need an extra hit of spice, a little chilli powder too.
    4) Now add the curry paste (2 tablespoons for newbies, 3 or so for if you’re used to it), and stir it well into the ingredients whilst frying for a couple more minutes
    5) Finally add the coconut milk. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, and testing for taste towards the end once it is thickening up nicely.

    Serve with white boiled rice.

    This post is part of the #otakucookup as suggested by Tim Maughan of Tim Maughan Books, providing a useful service to hungry otaku everywhere.

  • Drop

    I dropped my iPhone on the floor this morning. It is fine, I’m typing on it now. What occurred to me though was how underworried I was that it would be okay. I have dropped it before, on harder surfaces, and it was fine. I’ve got insurance. And it is close to being due for an upgrade.

    In conclusion, I think I may be ready for parenthood.

  • Getting Google Buzz to post to Twitter

    Google Buzz has been out for a couple of days now. It certainly seems to be getting a lot of attention, personally speaking it looks a lot more active than Twitter was when I first joined it. There is quite a bit of scope to link accounts to Buzz from the off, I’ve already got my blogs, Flickr, Twitter and Youtube posting to it. However at the moment it is all one way. What if you want your posts on Buzz to go back to Twitter?

    Well for starters, looking at the API, it looks like that will come soon. However for now I have come up with a way of doing it to some extent. An existing service that has been pulled in to become part of Buzz was Google Profiles. This now has your Buzz posts on it. Usefully though, it also has an RSS feed (okay, an Atom feed), containing your Buzz posts. See my Google Profile for an example, once you’re there, in Firefox click on the blue RSS icon in the address bar, and you should get the option to subscribe to the page (depending on your settings). This will give you the URL for that page.

    So, go to your own profile page, grab the RSS feed URL, and then go over to Twitterfeed.com. Create an account there, set it up to use your Google Profile feed, and after a delay of a few hours, it will start posting your Buzz posts onto Twitter.

    Provisos are:
    1) Obviously Twitter has a much shorter character limit, so your posts may potentially get cut short
    2) If you set a post limit in Twitterfeed, it will only take the first x posts you’ve made.
    3) It is only your posts, no comments
    4) You’ll not get any of the other data such as location etc.
    5) It does seem a little flaky thus far, there is potentially for tuning a bit how Twitterfeed changes the post to get it on Twitter, but not lots of options.

    A proper integrated solution within Buzz will probably fix all of these, but it will do for now.

  • Simon Cowell – Do More Evil

    It’s always good to try and get yourself into someone else’s mindset. Try and see the world from their point of view. So today I was wondering What Would Simon Cowell Do? See, he took a little dent this Christmas, what with the Rage Against The Machine campaign. X-Factor stuff still earned him a pretty penny, but the public will have seen it as a small defeat for him, after so much success. Obviously next year, there will another attempt to do the same, it may even be a bigger defeat.

    What to do? One could lick one’s wounds, take a pragmatic approach, be slightly more subtle. Just pick a better song than an insipid Christmas-ish one like they’ve done the last few years, that might work.

    However I suggest a different approach. Balls out, pure unbridled evil, make a load of money, and essentially stick it in the face of the RATM protesters. Release every performance on X-Factor on iTunes the following day. I suspect it could potentially sell enough for him to have 12 consecutive number 1s, up to and including Christmas. He could take up all of the top ten in a week. I think it’s a horrific idea. However Cowell never went broke underestimating the desire of certain broad swathes of the public to buy any old tosh. Look at Robson and Jerome. They actually broke sales records.

    Just imagine, rather than a world where RATM gets a surprise number 1, the British public has a load of half-arsed performances clogging up the charts for months. That would teach them.

  • Why I won’t buy an iPad yet

    Thought I’d ponder this a little while, give the product and the chatter a little chance to sink in. The iPad looks gorgeous. Pretty much a few weeks after I’d bought my iPhone, I knew I wanted the same thing, but somewhat bigger. I’m not a genius on this front, I know many people felt exactly the same. And now it exists, it looks right, and as one would expect from Apple, there are a few little twists that make it better than I imagined. Getting properly into the ebook reader market is one, an Amazon that works like the iPhone store is perfect. Price is another, if as it seems it comes in around the £400 mark, that’s a lot cheaper than I’d have guessed.

    So why not buy one? Well, for me, the iPad is going to be a device I’d use sat in front of the TV. I’ve got an iMac for doing my own work, and for serious surfing. I’ve got a proper laptop for work. For the sofa surfing, I’ve got my trusty Acer Aspire One netbook. Now, the netbook isn’t the iPad, isn’t as lovely. But it does fulfill the same task very adequately, and I just don’t think I can justify it to myself on the basis of loveliness. If it breaks, and can’t be fixed, then I’ll happily buy it as a replacement, but there isn’t any other reason to get it yet. It doesn’t doing anything else over and above a netbook to me, so I’ll happily wait. By the time I need an iPad, it may be in a second generation. It may be cheaper. Most importantly of all, I’ll have the need for it.

  • Scalextric Obsession

    Scalextric Cars - Ferrari 330 and 250

    I’m building a nice little obsession with Scalextric at the moment. Decided that I needed a set for my birthday last year, and have enjoyed that so far, but since the end of the last F1 season, I think I felt I was missing the racing, so to fill the void I started building up my collection somewhat. Now have a few NASCARs, F1 cars, old Ferraris, and just any cars that take my fancy. NASCAR and F1 are my favourite ones at the moment, will probably concentrate on building up my sets of those.

    I’ve started making plans, scary plans, ones that might involve solder, painting and woodwork. All things I will confess are not high on my greatest talents list at the moment. I’ve looked into what other people have done, and there are some scary/brilliant tracks out there. I’m not intending to come close to that at all, but I will have a go at making something nice. Couple of thoughts at the moment, one is to build a NASCAR oval, the other is to make something with a few more turns. Something to be said for both ideas, but I think the best bet is to aim for something manageable.

    I must go, I’ve got to check on the price of a sidecar on Ebay…

  • Happy Birthday to Me

    38 years old today. Great weekend to celebrate it, wandered round the Steampunk exhibition in town, then a nice walk around Oxford, followed by a cracking meal at Shanghai 30s. Scalextric was my main pressie, a fitting addition to a growing collection for a man of my advanced age.

    Not really pondered too much the passing of time, tend to do that at New Year. This was more just mellow progression, like a smooth chord change, rather than the bells and whistles the change of year brings. If I’m looking for one thing though, did get thinking about getting out on the bike again, both for traveling to work, and for some trips further afield to take photos out in the countryside. Sounds like a plan.

  • Crowdopensourcing

    A quick chat on twitter today turned into a rather large comment on Ben Werdmuller’s blog. Ben had written about how game dynamics, such as the scoring mechanism used by Foursquare, gets involvement from its users in a competitive sense, and wondered if that could be applied to open source development. This got me thinking, and I suggested how it could drive a very general question and answers application. Go over there and have a look.