Movie Review: Dark Country January 31st, 2010

Dark Country is a film about a newly married couple driving through the desert. It tries to combine the cheap budget of a single setting of Phone Booth and the comic book like photography of Sin City – and fails painfully every step of the way.

My main problem with this movie was continuity. It jumps all over the place and has too many holes. I noticed when I checked IMDB that I’m not alone. Since I don’t advocate watching this piece of trash, below is a little bit of a spoiler.

There are two timelines set in present day and some time period that is hard to detect and is only once vaguely refereced as 30 years ago. They drive around in cars from the 50’s, 80’s, and 2000’s and use cell phones intermittently. If you’re trying to decode all of this nonsense, then you’re probably putting more thought into it than the makers did.

A lot of time is spent in a car with very bad green screen. The backgrounds are a joke. Everything is just a black background.

Wikipedia says this movie had a budget of $5 million. Where did it go? I hope every penny went to the actors, because even though they didn’t do an amazing job – everything else was a complete flop.

Rating: (1/5)
Hover over the stars to see why

Anyone who disagrees, I’d love to hear why! Leave me a comment or tweet @KristopherIves with your two cents.

RSS Feed Notifier for Windows January 30th, 2010

There are some sites I have to interface with that are uncompromising. Thankfully, there are RSS feeds to even-out some of the crummiest sites around. Feeds take out the hunting for important content in a jungle of non-sense. While they aren’t anything new, it’s nice to talk about something that isn’t a just a buzz-word.

Readers vs Notifiers

Many applications, including Google Reader, are in the business of organizing your content for you. This isn’t my primary use for a feed, so the focus is on notification RSS applications. I’m looking for something like Twhril or GMail Notifier but for feeds that is:

  • Minimalistic – It shouldn’t try to do everything under the sun. I just want it to read feeds, notify me, and let me navigate into my default browser.
  • Unobtrusive – It shouldn’t bug me all the time, and has to provide a readily available option to toggle notifications.
  • Lightweight – I don’t want to run a Virtual Machine (VM) just for my feed reader. Python is okay though.

Feed Notifier

This is a very simple and sleek application by Michael Fogleman. It’s simple to use and easy to integrate with Firefox, and it’s new and still being actively maintained. It weighs in at 8MB, which I thought was a bit much, but I think this has something to do with including Python. This is closed source, which is my only gripe.

RSSNotifier

This is a free (GPL) notifier written in Java, so it runs everywhere. You can run it from the web by clicking here (WebStart) or download and install it from their homepage. When I found the project I saw they didn’t have an installer, so I “packaged” an NSIS installer, so you can easily install it on Windows.

Install RSS Notifier for Windows (EXE)

NSIS script for RSSNotifier for developers (for NSIS)

Use a better RSS notifier that’s free? I’d love to know! Leave a comment or tweet @KristopherIves and I’ll update the article with credit.

Tired of the same music? Dive into SoundPond January 28th, 2010

Over the last few years I’ve listened to progressively less music, and the reason was mainly because:

  • Most new music really irritates me. I know there is some good stuff coming through the noise, but I hate subjecting myself to all the horrible crud to find a diamond in the ruff, all while getting spammed with advertisements the entire time.
  • I don’t want to wear myself out on the music I do like. A lot of bands have been put on hiatus to pursue other interests.
  • Also a lot of bands that used to be good got drastically worse, probably just because they had contracts saying they had to keep making music – or they just want more money.

It’s gotten so bad that I’ve basically outsourced my musical taste to trusted friends of mine. With services like Last.fm and Pandora it’s easy to just clone someone else’s musical taste. Today I saw a simple Facebook status update from Daniel O’Connor about becoming a fan of SoundPond.

These are folks from Australia that use UStream to offer a nice rotation of DJs making original mixes. They have a very simple (and limited) chat room, and they communicate with their listeners, which can be quite engaging. The folks I spoke with had a great attitude and everyone seemed to be having a great time, and it was 2:30 AM in their timezone!

I don’t know much about the service under the hood, or who is really behind it all, but I think it’s some of the folks from LibertySound, which consists of Ka$h, Penny Drops, and Kim Savage. This is another world for me, so if I’m drastically wrong please help me out.

Give them some love on facebook by becoming a fan (button on their homepage too), tweeting @SoundPond, and most importantly – enjoy the music.

Movie Review: Zombieland January 19th, 2010

Having just watched Zombieland, a comedy-horror film, I’m giving a great review. This movie was refreshing because it mixed elements of survival with comedy in an interesting contrast. Without giving any spoilers, the film draws you in and delivers a good laugh at the right moment. It’s narrated in a somewhat Wonder Years fashion and involves a colorful cast, each with a surprising amount of depth. The film never breaks the third wall, but comes quite close, and once you see the movie I think you’ll know what I’m referencing.

The movie does have a lot of action (including a good shoot-em-up scene with Woody Harrelson), but it’s at the heart a comedy. The film uses the non-comedic elements as bait, but you don’t feel cheated by any means. As Ebert said, it truly has “well-tuned comic timing” and creates a good atmosphere like 28 Days Later and fellow serious apocalyptic movies do.

You should be able to make it through this movie without checking your Twitter a single time.

Rating: (4/5)
Hover over the stars for why

Checking out Thwirl January 14th, 2010

I’ve been using the Twitter web interface for a long time, and I prefer to keep my tweeting simple. However, with the stock web interface you can’t be logged into more than one account unless you’re using multiple profiles, incognito mode with Chrome, or some other trickery. I didn’t look around much before I found a client that did everything I wanted: Thwirl. My only gripe is that it’s based on products from Adobe, but they seemed to have side-stepped many of the problems that plague many applications based on this framework.

Moving Along

People on Twitter move quick, so it baffles me why the official site has no way to mark tweets as read to have them removed from your timeline. Similar to how GMail (and other e-mail applications) let you mark e-mails as read so they don’t appear in your inbox.

Multiple Accounts

I manage Twitter accounts for various web sites, as well as my own personal twitter. This means I have to be logged into multiple accounts at the same time. Doing this with Thwirl was very simple, as the application supports multiple accounts much like Pidgin does with Instant Messaging.

Tweet Management

It’s easy to get flustered when you miss a lot of tweets with the stock web interface. Thwirl has a nice little trash icon that lets you mark all the tweets as seen, so you can focus on the tweets you haven’t read and ignore the ones you have already seen.

Notifications

For sites that have a high volume of tweets, Thwirls notification system is great. It’s easy to get notified about things I want, or disable notifications for a specific site. Sometimes I can’t be bothered with tweets, and it’s nice that Thwirl lets me turn off notifications globally at the click of a button.

Hammer Protection

Thwirl seems to do a great job of not hammering Twitter API servers, and even gives you a little bit of information about how many requests it’s making and the limiting metrics. This is good because rate limiting can be IP-based with the Twitter API, and when you’re accessing multiple accounts you have to be resourceful. I’ve stayed connected to 3+ Twitter accounts with a decent volume of tweets without any problems.

One downer is that I don’t think Adobe AIR applications run on Linux, so Thwirl won’t run on my Ubuntu. You can also run Adobe AIR applications in Ubuntu, but @rfkrocktk tells me it’s got some funk with 64-bit, and that  OMG! Ubuntu! article helps. Flash and 64-bit combined can get ugly for proprietary software it appears.

Tweet @KristopherIves if you have anything to add, questions, or comments and feel free to leave a comment below.

Edit: I had a chance to actually install Thwirl in 64-bit Ubuntu, and it does work quite nicely, but the installation process was a nightmare. Essentially you have to:

  • Download the AIR installer .bin from Adobe, which is a 32-bit application
  • Install a helper tool called getlibs that makes it easy to wrap 32-bit libraries
  • Wrap some 32-bit libraries (listed in the OMG! Ubuntu! article)
  • Run the Thwirl .air installer

Other than that it worked as expected on my 64-bit 9.10 Ubuntu (Karmic) updated as of January 16, 2010. It even added a nice icon to my desktop, but oddly the icon in the notification area is of lower quality. Thwirl also updated to 0.94 automatically, so I believe the update also works.