New TV

Finally we got ourselves a new TV. We're sticking with Philips since our old set has done us proud for ten years. It's a 37" 1080p device catchily titled the Philips 37PFL5603H. I've downloaded the current firmware upgrade (bizarre, eh? How times change that we can upgrade our tellies!). The only fly in the ointment is that our local Intermarché is proposing a similar Philips 42" set for the same money and with a bunch back on our fidelity card. However, two strikes against it. 1, 42" is really too big for the distance we're playing with and 2, it doesn't have an HD tuner for the French equivalent of Freeview - TNT. I think I'm happy with this set. It's purty and there's an actual power switch to reduce the standby consumption of electricity to, well, 0w. Plus there's a chance I won't even need to reprogram the remote since it's a successor to the Philips TV we already have, and so the remote commands are likely to be similar enough.

I shall review it once it's here tomorrow night.

Yay! Greasemonkey's back

I've been without the invaluable Greasemonkey for about three weeks and have finally had time to sit down and work through it methodically. All the solutions proposed to create new profiles etc. did not work for me. The only thing that did in the end was remove extensions one by one, restarting each time and adding Greasemonkey and restarting again to see if it got installed. I removed extensions in ascending order of importance, starting with Greasemonkey collections from Lifehacker since obviously they couldn't be used without Greasemonkey in the first place. I removed; restarted; added Greasemonkey; restarted about five times in total, each time making a note of what extension I removed. The fifth one removed was Distrust, an extension for secure browsing, and that did it. Greasemonkey was installed. I reinstalled the extensions I had removed and all still works well.

Watchmen

Okay, is the film any good? Well, the delay and the false starts have certainly been long and many so people's expectations of Zack Snyder might be too high to live up to. Certainly, the boy dun good wiv 300 (and there's a nice nod to it in the first 10 mins or so of Watchmen). I will give you my impressions, there may be spoilers involved so I shall ROT13 them so they aren't immediately legible. ROT13 is easy enough to decrypt by hand and there are many, many websites (or even Thunderbird extensions) devoted to the task too should you wish to read them.

Okay, first the non-spoilers. The film is okay. The characters are quite well-drawn; Rorschach's mask is splendid; Archie is well-realised and Bubastis is lovely. The CG is for the most part quite invisible and yet this is not the masterwork we all want it to be. The fights are too frequent and go on too long - imagine if half of three of the twelve issues was devoted to fight sequences? Sometimes, the words feel forced, as though the actors are unnaturally trying to repeat verbatim what is said in the comic and don't feel comfortable doing it.

There are a couple of my favourite bits missing: Znaunggna genafsre, Ebefpunpu trggvat uvf znfx, naq zbfg vzcbegnagyl gur snpg gung na nyvra vainfvba erhavgrf uhznavgl.

Jon Osterman deserves a paragraph to himself. His creation is beautifully done, although I think they make him look too melancholic, not distant enough. He works well at all scales and unlike in the original comic book his knob is on full display! :D There's no explanation of why he has the hydrogen symbol, nor how he reduces his costume, but there are several shot-perfect sequences, such as him getting himself dressed for the TV interview and his first large-scale appearance when Rorschach comes to visit.

Overall, if you are not expecting any more from this than other filmed Alan Moore works (with the possible exception of From Hell, which I never read), it will be fine. If you don't know Watchmen at all it will be fine. If you deeply love the original story it will be okay and
you'll be relieved that it didn't come out worse. I'm glad I've seen it, the DVD with all the extra stuff, like Tales of the Black Freighter, will be a must-buy, and I'll give it 3/5 overall.

Do computers dream of Electric Sheep?

This is not really news to anyone that's visited our pad or anything, but I've been using an open source screensaver called Electric Sheep by Scott Draves for about four years now. It recently got a version bump to v2b11 and now works better with Vista than it did before. The thing that's special about it is that it uses spare CPU cycles to create an ever-changing semi-fractal display that's beautiful and unique. If you like the way a sheep (as the displays are called) is turning out you can hit the up arrow while the saver is running and the evolution of the display will follow the sheep. If you hit the down arrow that specific sheep will not contribute its "genes" to future sheep. This is also a collaborative effort, so others are doing the same and you can also create your own sheep manually.

Go get Electricsheep for yourself and have a look. Be warned, downloading the first sheep can take a while but after that you will have a unique combination of sheep in your screensaver...

Replacing hard drives

Last time I changed over hard drives for my machine I did it badly and ended up having to reinstall Windows and all my software, which took a while :(

This time I used a piece of software called HDClone by Miray. It comes with an ISO image you can burn to a bootable CD then it does a bit by bit copy of the old drive to the new one. If the new one is bigger it automatically increases the size of the partition (the last if you have more than one on the drive). There is a completely free edition that I used and it works fine. If you want to do more complex operations like partition <> drive then you'll be wanting the Basic version for 20€ (which also copies much faster meaning that the operation I had to do should take four instead of six hours. If you have a RAID then you need to get the 40€ standard version, which seems less of a bargain.

Anyway, this free version worked perfectly...

How to find unread gmail mail

Just type "is:unread" in the search field.

Senseo makes a good latte shocker!

The Senseo's coffee is a little weak. It just doesn't feel like a good coffee, no matter what brand of capsules you use, especially when compared to an industrial machine. However, recently Philips introduced an Espresso "saucer" for the machine, with espresso capsules. The coffee made from them is a little better since it's the same amount of coffee, but less water - an espresso measure is only about half a standard measure. If you just use the bog-standard Corsé dosettes, with this saucer and with about two-thirds of a mug of milk heated in the microwave, you can make a very acceptable latte.