The Bench

Sadly not in regular distribution outside DK, but such a wonderful movie I have to mention it: The Bench. Especially for somebody like me who normally don't like "human drama" movies, it's really outstanding. Part of it is an underlying sense of humor which is often missing in drama movies.

You can buy it from imusic.dk as a region 2 DVD. It's in Danish, but has English subtitles if you like.

Earth from space

Unusual sights from space.

Leopard coming out

Apple has posted a video guided tour of the upcoming version of OS X, Leopard.

It seems rather cool.

It seems that the "big secret feature" that Steve Jobs hinted at many moons ago has gone awol, though. That's probably why it was secret: they were not sure it could be done.

The new iChat includes screen sharing. If the other person accepts, you can see their screen as if it were your own, and you can even work with documents on it, while you're chatting about what you're doing. Quite impressive. This feature has existed in other kinds of software, but I bet iChat makes it easy.

Perhaps the most significant feature, though, is Time Machine. Only a very tiny percentage of users do proper backups, or even any backups at all. Time Machine is an easy and fully automatic way to make sure this is happening.
(I wonder why Apple has decreed it will only work with an external hard drive, though. I'd like to make use of the nice four drive slots that my Mac Pro has.)

Update: For help with Mac upgrades and many other technical issues, I recommend TidBITS Take Control books, many of them written by Joe Kissell, who is very helpful both in his books and personally.

Hello Kitty machinegun, anyone?

This store says it's a parody. I'm not sure what of, though. I'm not even sure if it's funny. Baroque, perhaps.

Bach

I am very tenderly getting back into classical music. So I have just bought The Very Best Of Back on iTunes. I used to listen to Bach and Mozart when I was a kid, but I changed.

iTunes Sterling prices are 80% of iTunes US$ prices, despite the dollar now being only half of the Pound Sterling. Typical.

Oh my god, Stan...

One of my favorite Karen Walker moments, so I captured it for you.




(I wonder why my videos on YouTube often look very distorted (like solarization) in the first couple of seconds. I don't see it with others' videos.)

Nikon D3

First-impressions article about Nikon D3. Sounds very impressive.

About light

Michael Reichman illustrates what light does for a picture.

I am not sure if he means to say one of them is superior. I like both of them.

I suspect most people will like the one with the dark foreground best, since it has more depth. But I may actually be leaning towards the other one. I tend to like the abstractness of very flat pictures.

Reliiiiii-gion

Joe said:
"Christianity and Islam are no worse than any other religion. It's religion itself that is the scam. Of course Communism is up there too, but at best it's a distant second."

This is a popular view. There was an interesting comment on it on, of all places, South Park. Since Matt and Trey make fun of religious figures, many people have assumed they were atheists, and were surprised when they denied this in interviews. One of them said that he (like me) has a kind of belief, but it would be very involved to explain.

So they did a show (a really good science-fiction two-parter) which contained a reaction to that famous book The God Scam. (No wait, that's not the title. It's The God Delusion. But looking for it, I found this amazing site.) Like they said in the commentary to the show, these are such big and complex subjects, that they focused in the show on one of the central tenets of the book: that without religion, there would be significantly less war in the world. They believe that this is a falsehood, man is war-like for some reason, and he will always find something to fight about. In the show, they have a future atheist world where the various atheist factions wage wars about which of their beliefs is the more logical.

As for me: all religions sound silly to outsiders, sure. But how about the dominant "scientific" theory, that everything arrived from nothing in a big explosion? Without explaining what was before or how it came about? That's as silly as anything.

Blade Runner

Update:
leviathud said...
Just wondering, can HD versions run on regular dvd players and televisions? Or do I need to wait until I get my house completly HD'd?

eolake said...
Generally they can't. It's a completely new format with many more bits per disc.
But I think a few releases contain both an HD edition and a regular DVD edition, perhaps on opposite sides of one disk. (If I were publishers, I would do this on all releases, it surely would improve sales.)

I just found this HD info page on Amazon.

=========
Hey, "Blade Runner" is soon available in HD. If ever there was a movie which begs for high definition viewing...

Here are some less likely candidates, which nevertheless are coming out in HD-DVD: "Abba the Movie", "Leaving Las Vegas", and "Clerks 2". Geez. :)

A good candidate, though, and also coming, is "Pan's Labyrinth", which I watched recently on DVD. It is a visually stunning fantasy movie for adults, in Spanish. Take note, though, when I say "for adults". It really is. It is so violent that it makes "The Passion Of The Christ" look like Winnie The Poo. OK, not really, from what I hear, The Passion still reigns supreme in the violence area. But Pan is really gruesome.

Also coming out in HD: "Darkman". If you think you've seen bad superhero films, you ain't seen nothing yet. When I saw it in the cinema back in the day, there were laughs where the producers really would not have wanted them. It was so embarrassing. I don't get why this film is not buried deep.
... Update: Ah, it was made by Sam Raimi, who has made good movies since. That explains it.

Update: talking about Blade Runner, look at this edition, geez.

Update: OK, I had not even noticed that the HD version I have ordered is also this "final cut" version. It is getting very good reviews.

Earth-like planet found

Earth-like planet found, 20 light years away.

Olympus E-3

High-end Olympus digital SLR cameras has been languishing with the aging E-1 camera, which is only 5 megapixels. But now they finally have releases a major new camera for pro and advanced amateurs. (The fact that they skipped an "E-2" model tells something about how much time has passed. I guess they figured that it would look old in a time when both Canon and Nikon has gone to "3" models.)

This is the first time in a (semi?) professional camera body that we get in-body image stabilization and also an articulating LCD screen, for shooting at unusual angles.