Tag Archive for 'Entertainment'

The Dog Whisperer Live

Published on 5 March, 2010. 0 Comments Tags: 3D, Alice in Wonderland, Birmimgham, Broad Street, Cesar Milan, Cineworld, Dog, Dog Whisperer, Entertainment, Jimmy Carr, Live, National Indoor Arena, NIA, Symphony Hall.

I just – literally, an hour ago – arrived home from seeing Cesar Milan at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham. Now…why would I see that, you ask? Well, simple. I love dogs. I don’t own one for the simple reason that in my life, I’ve not lived in one place for longer than 4 years, so I don’t think owning a dog would be fair to it…however, I still love seeing dogs and being around them, and I watch The Dog Whisperer on Nat Geo Wild HD all the time, so I thought it would be fun to go along and see him live. It’s not something that would interest everyone, but I enjoyed it and it was quite good to hear him talk about training dogs, and so on.

Anyway, so, I thought I’d make this quick post as a couple of people asked me why I was there on Twitter, and I can’t really fit that into 140 characters.

While we’re on the subject of Birmingham, in the past week I’ve actually been there three times. I saw Cesar tonight (well, it’s 00:20 now, so last night), Jimmy Carr at the Symphony Hall on Saturday, and Alice in Wonderland in 3D at one of Sky’s special preview screenings last Thursday, which was quite good. They sent out an email to Sky Movies subscribers for free tickets, so I went along and saw it, along with the premier which they were showing live from London, which was pretty cool. So yeah. That’s all for now.

Sky

Published on 26 November, 2009. 4 Comments Tags: BskyB, Entertainment, Rant, Sky, Sky HD, Sky+HD, Television, TV.

Sky Logo

Sky. If you live outside the UK, you’ll know it’s that thing above you that’s usually either blue, grey, white, or black. Water falls out of it sometimes, and other times, planes do.

Except if you live inside the UK, you’ll know I’m talking about Sky. Yes, them. So, why am I talking about Sky? Well, simple. I want to complain. I like complaining.

So at the moment, we have Sky’s “full” package. Which means we get all the “entertainment” packs – stuff like entertainment, documentaries, music, kids shows, news, etc. That’s the base price of £22.50 a month. Which, for the range of channels, isn’t too bad. It’s pretty much everything except movies and sports. Which we also get. Which brings the total up to £47.50 per month. Okay, so that’s expensive, but my dad loves the sports, and I watch a fair few movies, so we do use it. Then, of course, we have Sky’s HD box, with access to the HD channels…which is another £9.75 per month. So far, the total is £57.25 per month. Yeah, we’re starting to get expensive here.

Now, my parents almost always watch boring crap (I don’t have any interest in Strictly Come Dancing or Football / Rugby / etc, okay?), so I have my own Sky+HD box in my bedroom. Which means that we have a multiroom subscription (£9.75/month), and a second “HD” subscription (£9.75/month). So right now, we pay £76.75 per month. Which is US$127, CA$134, EU€85, or AU$139.

Oh, and I wouldn’t mind watching Sky News on my iPhone – Sky have an iPhone app that can do that (along with sports), which is £6 a month for non-customers…and actual customers. So you want to charge another £6 on top of that £76 we already pay? Um, no. If I buy a Slingbox, it’s more complicated, but it’ll cost the same over two years and it gives me access to ALL channels.

I would consider this to be on the high end of things – it’s a lot of money to pay for only TV (no broadband or phone), and yet…after all that, I hate the Sky+HD box. I hate their service in general. The content itself is great, but the rest of Sky….no.

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Xbox 360 Super Epic Elite Pro Core 250GB Monster Special Limited Edition Video Games Console with Free Bonus Special Edition Forza 3 Game and Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City. Oh, and it’s black.

Published on 8 November, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: 360, Console, Entertainment, Games, HD, Microsoft, Xbox, Xbox 360.

Okay, maybe the title was a tad long, but hey, it works.

So, yesterday, I went to Game in town and picked up the Xbox 360 Elite Forza 3 bundle (which has 2 controllers, a 250GB HDD, and of course, Forza 3), as well as GTAIV: Episodes from Liberty City (which is a standalone game, with the two GTAIV expansion packs). I’ve previously owned two Xbox 360s – the first one was in Australia, which I had to sell (it RRoD’d), and the second one was here in the UK – which I liked, but it was somewhat noisy, and I didn’t really play all that many games on it back then. Anyway, the 360 has since had a revamp (NXE), and now has a lot more titles which I’m interested in playing, so I decided to buy one again – however, the main factor that made me buy it was Forza 3 and the GTAIV expansion packs.

So, I now own one.

Except, a problem. Due to cost cutting by Microsoft, the component AV cable is no longer included (why not, MS?), and instead, there’s a cheap-o composite cable (the one with a single yellow RCA jack for video), and that’s it. Which is somewhat of a problem, because I want to hook it up to my projector. I could use HDMI (which I will eventually), but the projector doesn’t have anything to do with the audio, so it’s just ignored – and for some stupid reason, the composite cable that’s included with the 360 is too large, and blocks the HDMI port. So right now, I have two choices:

Use HDMI to my projector, and have no audio. The upside is it’ll be HD, but the downside is, I won’t be able to hear anything.
Use composite video to my projector, and use the stereo RCA jacks for audio (I’m using my PC as an amplifier at the moment but in the near future I’ll be getting an AV Receiver for switching the 360, Sky+HD box, and PC, into the projector’s one HDMI jack). The downside for this is that it’s horrible SD video, but the upside is, I can hear everything.

So of course, for now, I’m sticking to SD video. I’ve ordered one of those HDMI breakout cables for optical audio off eBay, which should arrive soon. Once it’s here, I can use the HDMI port for HD video, and the RCA or optical jacks from the cable for audio. Perfect.

Finally, the gamertag I signed up for is WilliamTM UK. The reason for this is simple. I’ve sort-of adopted the nickname “WilliamTM” around the web, so I’ve decided to use it on the 360. The only downside is that my original account that I created in Australia is WilliamTM – and Microsoft won’t allow you to change the account’s country (which you need to do in order to use a UK credit card). So, I’ve now got WilliamTM UK, which is my UK gamertag which I’m now using.

One day, I might try to change the old gamertag to something else, and then change my UK one to WilliamTM, but I’m not doing it yet, for two reasons. One, it would cost about £14 worth of MS points to do so, and two, I’m not sure if it’s possible to change your gamertag to a previously used one. If I can confirm that with MS, I might do it, but until then I’m not going to do so.

So anyway, that’s enough about that. Again, if you want to add me, please do.

Oh and finally, if you’re wondering, no, I’m not selling my PS3. And yes, I did swap my bedroom TV for the Xbox 360 – I really didn’t use the TV for all that much other then some SDTV off Sky, so I’m not really going to miss it that much.

Let’s get DiRTY!

Published on 15 September, 2009. 1 Comment Tags: 2, Codemasters, Colin, Console, DiRT, Entertainment, Game, Gaming, McRae, PS3, Videogame.

DiRT 2 Jump

I was first introduced to the Colin McRae series back with the ‘04 version of the game, and I was instantly hooked. Despite having to play it at very low settings on my old PC, it was great fun, and I used to like seeing how hard I could push a car before smashing it into a wall and losing a wheel or two, and a bumper, and possibly the windscreen, mirrors, doors, boot, lights, and every other part of the car before eventually passing the finish line with a scrap metal cube with one wheel*.

Anyway, just five years on, Codemasters have released Colin McRae: DiRT 2. I enjoyed the original DiRT, but it was nothing special – sure, it looked nice, and was fun to play, but the cars seemed to be unrealistic to drive – for example, they seemed to accelerate too quickly, and they slid around on the road. A lot.

DiRT 2, on the other hand, is MUCH better. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that DiRT 2 is one of my all time favourite games. I’ve only had it four days now, but it’s insanely fun to play, and looks amazing. When you jump into the game for the first time, you’re greeted by…well, it can’t really be described as a menu, because a menu is a static boring list of options. In DiRT 2, you’re basically greeted by a pretty amazing interior of an RV, and when you go outside, you’re greeted by a pretty detailed festival-like environment, with the background of whatever country your last race was in. Honestly, the menu alone is worth buying the game for.
Continue reading ‘Let’s get DiRTY!’

Brüno

Published on 9 July, 2009. 5 Comments Tags: 18, BBFC, Bruno, Cinema, Entertainment, Movie.

So, I really want to see the new film, Brüno, which comes out tomorrow. However, one problem. The BBFC have rated it as 18, so, strictly speaking, I can’t see it legally until I’m 18, which is next month (August). I’m gonna try to go and see it anyway though. Hopefully I can get in without them noticing me too much. If not, sorry BBFC, but you’re making me do this…I’ll just have to pirate it.

Even worse is that in Australia, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and the United States, I would be able to see it, because it’s rated between 11+ and 17+ in those countries. So, I wonder why the BBFC have gone and stuck an 18 on it? You can see it in Sweden at 11, so…wtf? Why do 11 year old Swedish kids get to see it? If an 11 year old can see it, surely it can’t be that bad?

Moral of the story: ratings encourage piracy.

HTPC Upgrade

Published on 29 May, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: Computer, Entertainment, HD, HTPC, Media, PC.

I don’t seem to have much luck with silence. The PC that I built back in 2006 was incredibly loud, due to both the power supply and graphics card fans being very noisy ones. Then, when I switched to an iMac last year (and, after, my MacBook), my room was suddenly very quiet – both machines are absolutely silent, and I rarely hear my MacBook’s fan unless the CPU is at 50% load (or more) for a while. However, when I decided to build an HTPC earlier this year, I chose to build it into a Shuttle SFF case. Bad idea. The CPU fan on the Shuttle wasn’t too bad, but the power supply was noisy as hell, which is not what you want when you’re building a PC designed for watching movies on.

So, a few weeks ago, I decided to do an upgrade. Simply put, I sold the Shuttle case on eBay (annoyingly, for only £120), and instead purchased an Antec 300 case, a Corsair HX520 modular PSU, a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4550 silent GPU (all new), and a Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 from Fr3d (used). The motherboard finally arrived today (after a week in the post, stupid Royal Mail), and I built the machine this afternoon. Finally, I booted it up to install Windows 7 and…wow. What a difference. You can hear it, but it’s pretty much silent compared to the horrible Shuttle. Finally, some peace and quiet again. I might just leave it on 24/7 like I was going to do with the Shuttle.

I’ve come across a few problems though – nothing major, but they’re a bit annoying. Firstly, because I have five HDDs (160GB for the OS, 3×1TB drives for storage, and a 500GB drive for overflow), the case is, well, a mess. I like to keep it as tidy as possible, but when you install 5 HDDs, the mass of SATA and power cables is a bit much. Without the HDDs, it’s a lot tidier, but as it is, it’s messy. However, I’ve tucked as much of the cables away as I can, so the airflow is pretty good and there’s plenty of room inside.

Next, because Antec insist on putting the space for the PSU at the bottom of all their cases, the 8 pin ATX power supply cable is too short to be neatly tucked away, so next time I purchase something from or visit OcUK, I’m going to pick up an extension cable for it.

Finally, I ran out of SATA cables and SATA power cables, so I’ve ordered some extras off eBay. Corsair, in future, please include more SATA power connectors. 4 is not enough!

So, overall, I’m very happy with the improvements, and I’ve got a pretty decent HTPC built now. In fact, later this year when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is released, I might actually get an LCD, powerful GPU, and use it as a gaming machine too.

(Oh, and finally, the photo at the top was taken before I put the CPU cooler, SATA cables, and SATA power cables in. )

Hollywood makes stuff suck.

Published on 18 April, 2009. 6 Comments Tags: Cinema, Entertainment, Fail, Hollywood, Movie, Prison Break, Production, Sucks, Television, TV.

Back in early 2006, I heard about a brand new TV series called “Prison Break”. Long story short, I started watching it, and was hooked after the first episode. The first season of Prison Break was really ground breaking, and I enjoyed it immensely.

However, three years later, and Prison Break is currently in it’s fourth season. Which is three seasons too many. See, I think Fox have gone and made seasons two, three, and four simply because they know that by doing so, they can make a profit. Season one of Prison Break was superb, the rest…not so much. It’s not just Prison Break, either. I greatly enjoyed the first season of Heroes, but I’ve since given up watching it. It just became boring and rubbish. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is an even bigger mistake – sure, it’s an enjoyable show, but if you ask me, it shouldn’t have been made in the first place. Terminator should have been kept to the four movies, and that’s it. If they make a third season, I’ll probably just skip it. I was bored for much of the second season, and chances are, the third, if made, will suck even more.

My point is, TV shows, and in many cases movies too, simply go on too long and become boring or stupid. And yet the movie and television studios keep on making them because they know they can make money off them. And I just wish they wouldn’t, or if they did, I wish they would actually make them not suck. Case in point: 24. Despite now being on it’s seventh season, it’s still awesome.

Oh, and in case you’ve not yet seen Prison Break, but want to, watch the first season and then stop. DON’T watch the other seasons. But do watch the first.

Marley and Me

Published on 12 March, 2009. 1 Comment Tags: Cinema, Dog, Entertainment, Labrador, Marley, Marley and Me, Movie, Owen Wilson, Theatre.

I just got back from seeing Marley and Me at the cinema, and I must say, it was a brilliant film. Not because it had car chases (because it didn’t have any), gunfights (because it didn’t have any), corrupt cops (because it didn’t have any), a teenage superhereo (because it didn’t have any), or a superhero (because it didn’t have any), but because it’s one of the few hidden gems that come out of Hollywood these days.

It’s a great film about a man, his family, and the most hilarious Labrador that you will ever see which literally chews everything. I’d give the film a pretty nice 7.8/10, because it’s a great watch. Don’t compare it to other films like the Dark Knight, because they’re totally different. Compare it to other dog-related films. And go see it!

11 Features That Sky+HD Should Have

Published on 6 March, 2009. 6 Comments Tags: BskyB, Entertainment, HD, HDTV, James Murdoch, Media, Satellite, Sky, Sky HD, Television.

Sky HD, for those who don’t know, is the UK’s largest subscription TV provider. Similar to, say, Dish Network in the US, it provides HD and SD satellite TV for a monthly fee, and has all the usual channels you’d expect, such as entertainment, news, sports, kids, music, and so on. Anyway, Sky themselves offer three set top boxes:

Sky Digibox: Provides basic viewing-only access to Sky.
Sky+: Provides viewing of Sky channels, but adds an internal HDD so you can record and timeshift programs, and has two tuners so you can record one show while watching another…or record two shows and watch a previously recorded show.
Sky+HD: Same thing as Sky+, but with an HD decoder too.

All three boxes share the same EPG (Eletronic Program Guide) software, which, while it’s a decent and easy to use design, it’s showing it’s age now, is severely in need of a makeover. However, Sky have announced a makeover of the EPG for the HD box only, which is great news…when it’s out. It’s almost a year since they announced it, so hopefully it’ll be out soon.

Anyway, enough of that. This post is about the features that I wish the Sky+HD box had. So, on with the list.

eSATA HDD: The box has an eSATA jack on the back, but at the moment, you can’t use it for anything. Why not? The box has a stupidly small 320GB HDD (of which 160GB is reserved for Sky’s Anytime service), so why not open that up like the US services allow, and let me plug in my own 2TB drive? The current box, if you full it with HD movies, lets you have about two pages of programs, and then the HDD is full! In fact, this is perfect – put a 320GB minimum restriction on external drives, and then keep the internal HDD for Anytime, and use the eSATA drive for recordings!
USB Port: Again, this isn’t used for anything so why not let people use it for HDDs too? Or, just leave it unused, since eSATA is far better for HDDs.
New EPG: It’s already been done by Sky, so WHEN are we getting it? (According to Twitter, it seems to be out on Tuesday the 10th of March, actually. Fingers crossed!)
HD Swap: It’s a descriptive name for it…and I think it’s would be a useful feature. Basically, the Sky box should be able to detect when you’re watching something in SD (such as Nature’s Great Events) on, say, BBC1, and see that it’s being broadcast at the same time on BBC HD. It should then pop up a suggestion saying “This program is in HD! Switch to the HD version?”, and you can choose if you want to switch or not. This could be made even better by having two more options in the settings – first of all, a setting to automaticially switch over to the HD version without asking you, and secondly, the option to map the HD channel to the SD channel number (quick example: set the box to switch to 4HD whenever you type in “104″, since 4HD’s quality is much better then the non-HD 4…even on SD channels.
Commerical break skipping: Windows Media Centre already this this feature. It would have to be mapped to an existing button on the remote (I considered double-tapping “Play”), but it would mean you could skip forward a specific time (instead of fast-forwarding) so as to bypass the ad breaks. Again, this could be an option that you can set in the settings, allowing you to change how far forward it goes, say, 30, 60, 90, 120, 180, or 240 seconds. I suspect this would cause quite an uproar from the broadcasters though, so it’s probably unlikely this would ever happen.
Shared DVRs: The ethernet port on the back of the Sky+HD box is unused, so, this would be a great feature for it. As long as all the Sky+HD boxes are on the same gigabit ethernet network, allow them to share their programs with each other. I’m not sure how well this would work with HD programs, or even SD programs (though you could perhaps buffer them, like YouTube does), but if it works well, why not allow the Sky+HD boxes to share their content? For example, if I record the cricket downstairs, on our main TV, but my parents then watch something else on that TV, I should be able to watch the football, stored on the TV downstairs, from my TV upstairs. I believe you can do this already with AT&T Uverse in America.
Pizza ordering: TiVo can order Dominos pizza, so why can’t we?
On-demand internet TV: This may be a little harder to implement, but the technology itself is there (the H264 decoder(s)) – allow the Sky+HD box to use the ethernet connection to connect to the internet and download TV shows such as Revision 3’s Tekzilla. This would, of course, be trickey to do due to the codecs needed, but I’m sure if Sky crammed ffdshow or similar into the box it would work for most video podcasts/internet shows. In terms of adding shows, this could be done via the Sky website, or something similar.
While we’re on the topic of internet TV…YouTube? I’m sure it can’t be that hard. Other devices can do it, so why can’t Sky?
Remote Record v2 (which the Sky+ box could do with as well): The current method of remotely recording programs is rubbish, if you ask me. You can either do it using Sky’s flash-only website (which won’t work on the iPhone, because, well, it’s Flash), by text (which I’ve never bothered to remember how/what to do and where to send it to), or via their Java app, which, annoyingly, works on only a few handsets. Also, setting it up is a nightmare, and you have to record things at least 30 mins before they start. The NEW remote record, however, should have both the website, using both Flash (for PCs) and non-Flash pages (for stuff like the iPhone), text, a Java app that works on all phones, an iPhone app, and finally, setup an official API for it so other people can code apps and so on for various devices. Setup should be made easier – you should simply have to enter your viewing card number on Sky’s website, then enter a code on the box itself if necessary, and that’s it. Simple. Oh, and finally, I’d like to be able to choose which box to send it to if you have two HD boxes.
CSS: What is CSS, you ask? Cascading Style Sheets. Oh yes. I think it would be amazing if you could go onto Sky’s website, input your own CSS (or user-submitted CSS), and be able to customize the colours of the EPG yourself. Again, this would send itself to your box using the ethernet jack, over the internets. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

So, those are the features that I wish Sky+HD had. Most of them should be easy to implement, and several of them are already available in the US and on other platforms. If Sky added these features (oh, and Sky News HD too please! ), Sky+HD really would become the best HD service available outside the USA.

Opinions?

HTPCv2

Published on 16 January, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: Centre, Computer, Entertainment, HTPC, Media, Movies, TV.

In 2007, I decided to build myself an HTPC, however it wasn’t much of a success – first of all, the case I had chosen was too wide for the cabnet where our TV was (and still is), and the BluRay drive I later got for it never worked, because it wasn’t compatible with the AMD chipset or something. I eventually sold it, and got my PS3, but it was a bit of a failure.

However, since I got a TV late last year, I decided to build myself one again, but this time, 1) it would be for my bedroom, and not the lounge, and 2) I decided to base it off an Intel CPU, and using a Shuttle SFF PC as the base. So, I went ahead and ordered the parts, one by one, and I got the last order yesterday, from Scan – the CPU, HDD, DVD burner, and a few other bits I wanted for other stuff. I was actually going to get a Pentium Dual-Core CPU, and Windows Vista Home Premium OEM, but I decided to get a more powerful CPU instead, and use the Windows 7 beta until the final version is out, and I can buy that.

I set about building it today, and, got it up and running successfully – almost. Windows 7 installed without a hitch, and almost everything worked – except for the ethernet card. Because the Shuttle has no WiFi, I *had* to get this working somehow, and the included driver CD wasn’t much help – despite including Vista drivers, it simply refused to work. So, I did a bit of Googling and found someone else who had tried Windows 7 on a similar model, with no success – however, by getting the drivers from the Marvell website, they fixed the problem. So, I did the same, and boom, it worked! I then installed my usual must-have apps for every install I do (Firefox, Wakoopa, Whatpulse, Last.fm, and Steam), and since this is the first Windows box I’ve had for a while, I installed Xfire too, since there’s no Mac-alternative for Xfire, and of course, since it’s an HTPC – the K-Lite Codec Pack. I know codec packs are generally a bit crap, but I’ve never had an issue with the K-Lite one, and it’s one single installer, so I’ve always used it.

So far, I’m pretty happy with it – it handles 1080p video no problem, and Windows 7 is very stable so far, so no problems there. I also ordered a Microsoft Media Centre Remote off eBay, so I can use my Harmony Remote with it (the remote itself includes an IR reciever, which is what I wanted). It’s not arrived yet though.

It seems that Microsoft have actually discontinued the remote, which is a great pity, because it’s a good remote overall (I had one with my last HTPC) and the only way to get an IR reciever otherwise is to order another brand remote, and all the ones I’ve found look pretty cheap – plus, only a few of them offer true Media Centre compatibility.

Anyway, the all important specs:

Shuttle XPC SG33G5B SFF PC
Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 @ 2.66GHz
OCZ 2GB PC2-6400 DDR2 RAM
Samsung SpinPoint F1 500GB HDD
Sony DRU-V200 DVD Burner
Akasa Internal Card Reader
Microsoft Media Centre Remote

I also had a rather clever idea – I could make my room even more minimalistic (and a bit quieter) if I put both the HTPC and the Sky+HD box into the roof – it’s cooler up there (better cooling), and they’ll be out of the way. Only, it’s not exactly easy to do this, since I would have to 1) get a power source up there, 2) get the Sky wiring into the roof somehow, and 3) route two HDMI cables down to my TV. If we owned this house, I can’t see that being a problem, since I could just drill holes all over the place, but we don’t own it, and I don’t want to make the landlord angry. I’m guessing they’ll already be slightly cross for the hole in my bedroom wall for the Sky+HD cabling, so I don’t want to make it worse.