Fona and I are still trying to complete our DVD collection and since
Finn was going out with a friend we decided to watch one of the
remaining 69 films in our collection. Only while the cover said Master
and Commander, the disc inside was a film called Match Point and
neither of us knew the film. It's a Woody Allen title with a cast full
of people we recognise so we said, why not? We watched it and it
seemed far from Woody Allen's comfort zone, not being very fun and
also about upper class Brits rather than New Yorkers. It turns into a
love triangle thing between Jonathan Rhys Meyers' Chris Wilton, his
wife Emily Mortimer's Chloe Hewett Wilton and Scarlett Johansson's
Nola Rice. More Woody Allen perhaps but without the farce elements.
Any road up, at the risk of spoiling a film from 2005, Fona hates a
film that doesn't end well (she dislikes Arlington Road for the same
reason), so while she gives this 1/10 for the flat I was more okay
with it and I've give it 2/5.
So we still have 69 films to watch!
21 September 2012
17 March 2012
The Piracy Threshold epilogue
Someone told me about MakeMKV, a free bit of software for ripping Blu-Rays. I used it and showed Rare Exports to my first class of Culture and Media students yesterday. We all liked the film and found its premise and execution very original. Better yet, I have started discussing comic book adaptations with my other Culture and Media class and they thoroughly enjoyed Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The rips were about 20 GB each, so not exactly portable but I now know what to do to show Blu-Rays to my students. Cyberlink were very good and didn't quibble at all about giving me the full price of PowerDVD back. I'm still out my time and the €90 I spent on a waste of time Blu-Ray drive and HDMI cable, but hey, that's the trouble with trying to do the right thing...
Oh yes, and the MKV file didn't complain about being played in VLC over the VGA cable to the projector either.
Oh yes, and the MKV file didn't complain about being played in VLC over the VGA cable to the projector either.
11 March 2012
The Piracy Threshold
On 17th February this year, Matt Gemmell posted an insightful and perspicacious article to his blog entitled The Piracy Threshold. In it, he describes how people basically want to be honest, but once the difficulty of being so reaches a certain level, when dishonesty is not only the easier option but also the one to keep you sane, people turn to copyright infringement in response.
Like many other people the world over, I've done my fair share of downloading in the past. As other research shows, those that download are often the greatest consumers of legally-acquired media too. I think my 650+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection, my large book library and accumulation of CDs would point to that.
Just post-Christmas I decided to spend some of my gift vouchers on the Blu-Ray of a film I didn't catch at the cinema, Rare Exports directed by Jalmari Helander. My laptop, though impressively furnished with ports and power only had a DVD drive, so my first step was to enquire with Dell, the laptop's manufacturer, about the feasibility of replacing the DVD drive with a Blu-Ray drive, and if it was something I could do myself, or would the laptop need to be returned to Dell. After 45 minutes on hold or switching departments I got the good news that yes indeed I certainly could replace the drive myself. Delighted by this I asked how much such a drive would be, whereupon I received the bad news. €738. That's nearly $1,000 or £620. For an internal Blu-Ray drive. A price I could buy a Blu-Ray equipped laptop for. Okay, next idea. The reason I wanted the Blu-Ray drive for the laptop was so that I could show my Culture and Media class the film, but obviously I wasn't willing to spend that kind of money to do so, so I thought I'd try a new angle... ah yes! Samsung do an external, USB-powered Blu-Ray drive! It doesn't burn Blu-Rays only DVDs, but that was fine. If I really needed to burn 30 GB of data, my desktop machine has a Blu-Ray burner. Right, okay. €15 for the film, €80 for the drive, but I'm sorted for any future Blu-Ray films I want to show my class, so that's an acceptable outlay.
Ah, not so fast. VLC 1.1.4, my preferred animation player can't play Blu-Rays. Since the time I started on this quest, VLC 2 came out with the potential to play Blu-Rays but only if you download an AACS dll from somewhere and a list of certificates from somewhere else, and then your Blu-Ray will play only if it is included in that list of certs. Windows Media Player doesn't read Blu-Rays (perhaps still in a sulk over the failure of HD DVD). This means I need to actually *pay* for a media player? Something I haven't done since Windows 95. Okay, let's see what's on offer...
After hunting, the main "recommendation" was Cyberlink's PowerDVD. I put the inverted commas because no-one actually recommended it, it was more a case of "Dude, I'm afraid free and open source players are probably never going to be able to offer easy Blu-Ray playback because of all the licensing". So I stumped up the £79 for PowerDVD 12, that's about €95 or $123, and installed the mess of shovelware that comes with it. I wasn't happy, but I guess I was sorted. I tried it out on my desktop machine and yes, it worked. It showed the disc. So I installed it on the laptop and it worked there too.
Now, I don't show my class films on the laptop's screen, that would be crazy. I use the school's projector to throw the image on the wall where the whole class (all 12 of them split over two classes) can see it in comfort.
When I tried to show the Blu-Ray the first time I got a warning because the projector was hooked up through VGA to the laptop and oh no, you can't play a Blu-Ray through an analogue connection! So, adding to the expense I had run up to try and show this film I had to add an HDMI cable to the mix, another €10. It would be fine, my laptop is well-furnished for I/O, it has an HDMI port and so does the projector.
Before we go further let me tell you more about my laptop. It is a Dell Precision M4600. It has an Optimus system with an integrated Intel HD chipset for low-end graphical work and an NVidia Quadro 2000M for when more grunt is needed. Fortunately, you can shove applications onto that card as you like and VLC works nicely with it. But I wasn't using VLC for showing this film, I was using PowerDVD. Hunting for the reason why it still wasn't working, I went onto the Cyberlink forum to discover that people had been complaining about the issue that PowerDVD couldn't be moved away from the integrated chipset for two years already. Nothing had been done about it in that time. I was stuffed. If I wanted to play through HDMI I needed to use the NVidia chipset because that was where the HDMI connection went to, otherwise it was only VGA, which can't be used for Blu-Ray playback.
When I go to people's houses to repair their computers I charge €45 an hour to do so. I reckon I spent at least three hours trying to sort this issue out, so let's add up:
Rare Exports: €15
Blu-Ray drive: €80
PowerDVD: €95
HDMI cable: €10
My time: €135
Total: €335
Have I reached my "Fuck this point" as Matt Gemmell so eloquently puts it? Gosh yes, some time ago, and even if I hadn't the fact that one of my students (not in that class, you greedy studios) could find a torrent of the film and download it within two hours certainly would have pushed me over that threshold. To add insult to injury, the dodgy version of the film, while not as high resolution, was actually better since the subtitles were in French.
The fact is, people do want to be honest in my experience. I certainly do. I want to reward the makers of films like Rare Exports for entertaining me (not that I've seen it yet. Part of the reason I wanted to show it to the class is so that we could discuss it fresh). I couldn't care less about rewarding the money men in the middle that have no talent except for making money turn into more money.
Interestingly, this situation and Matt Gemmell's blog post turned into quite a talking point in the class with several saying that they had been trying to purchase legitimate versions of albums or films and being unable to, found better solutions through "piracy". They are students, so not overburdenend with cash, but they wanted to give it to you film and music companies. You turned them away, so is it too hard to understand why they went and got what they wanted elsewhere? Are you stopping sales yourselves? We live in a connected world, where information can be transferred at the speed of light, but are you working by telegram? Carrier pigeon?
Take some responsibility for your own actions before you blame others.
Like many other people the world over, I've done my fair share of downloading in the past. As other research shows, those that download are often the greatest consumers of legally-acquired media too. I think my 650+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection, my large book library and accumulation of CDs would point to that.
Just post-Christmas I decided to spend some of my gift vouchers on the Blu-Ray of a film I didn't catch at the cinema, Rare Exports directed by Jalmari Helander. My laptop, though impressively furnished with ports and power only had a DVD drive, so my first step was to enquire with Dell, the laptop's manufacturer, about the feasibility of replacing the DVD drive with a Blu-Ray drive, and if it was something I could do myself, or would the laptop need to be returned to Dell. After 45 minutes on hold or switching departments I got the good news that yes indeed I certainly could replace the drive myself. Delighted by this I asked how much such a drive would be, whereupon I received the bad news. €738. That's nearly $1,000 or £620. For an internal Blu-Ray drive. A price I could buy a Blu-Ray equipped laptop for. Okay, next idea. The reason I wanted the Blu-Ray drive for the laptop was so that I could show my Culture and Media class the film, but obviously I wasn't willing to spend that kind of money to do so, so I thought I'd try a new angle... ah yes! Samsung do an external, USB-powered Blu-Ray drive! It doesn't burn Blu-Rays only DVDs, but that was fine. If I really needed to burn 30 GB of data, my desktop machine has a Blu-Ray burner. Right, okay. €15 for the film, €80 for the drive, but I'm sorted for any future Blu-Ray films I want to show my class, so that's an acceptable outlay.
Ah, not so fast. VLC 1.1.4, my preferred animation player can't play Blu-Rays. Since the time I started on this quest, VLC 2 came out with the potential to play Blu-Rays but only if you download an AACS dll from somewhere and a list of certificates from somewhere else, and then your Blu-Ray will play only if it is included in that list of certs. Windows Media Player doesn't read Blu-Rays (perhaps still in a sulk over the failure of HD DVD). This means I need to actually *pay* for a media player? Something I haven't done since Windows 95. Okay, let's see what's on offer...
After hunting, the main "recommendation" was Cyberlink's PowerDVD. I put the inverted commas because no-one actually recommended it, it was more a case of "Dude, I'm afraid free and open source players are probably never going to be able to offer easy Blu-Ray playback because of all the licensing". So I stumped up the £79 for PowerDVD 12, that's about €95 or $123, and installed the mess of shovelware that comes with it. I wasn't happy, but I guess I was sorted. I tried it out on my desktop machine and yes, it worked. It showed the disc. So I installed it on the laptop and it worked there too.
Now, I don't show my class films on the laptop's screen, that would be crazy. I use the school's projector to throw the image on the wall where the whole class (all 12 of them split over two classes) can see it in comfort.
When I tried to show the Blu-Ray the first time I got a warning because the projector was hooked up through VGA to the laptop and oh no, you can't play a Blu-Ray through an analogue connection! So, adding to the expense I had run up to try and show this film I had to add an HDMI cable to the mix, another €10. It would be fine, my laptop is well-furnished for I/O, it has an HDMI port and so does the projector.
Before we go further let me tell you more about my laptop. It is a Dell Precision M4600. It has an Optimus system with an integrated Intel HD chipset for low-end graphical work and an NVidia Quadro 2000M for when more grunt is needed. Fortunately, you can shove applications onto that card as you like and VLC works nicely with it. But I wasn't using VLC for showing this film, I was using PowerDVD. Hunting for the reason why it still wasn't working, I went onto the Cyberlink forum to discover that people had been complaining about the issue that PowerDVD couldn't be moved away from the integrated chipset for two years already. Nothing had been done about it in that time. I was stuffed. If I wanted to play through HDMI I needed to use the NVidia chipset because that was where the HDMI connection went to, otherwise it was only VGA, which can't be used for Blu-Ray playback.
When I go to people's houses to repair their computers I charge €45 an hour to do so. I reckon I spent at least three hours trying to sort this issue out, so let's add up:
Rare Exports: €15
Blu-Ray drive: €80
PowerDVD: €95
HDMI cable: €10
My time: €135
Total: €335
Have I reached my "Fuck this point" as Matt Gemmell so eloquently puts it? Gosh yes, some time ago, and even if I hadn't the fact that one of my students (not in that class, you greedy studios) could find a torrent of the film and download it within two hours certainly would have pushed me over that threshold. To add insult to injury, the dodgy version of the film, while not as high resolution, was actually better since the subtitles were in French.
The fact is, people do want to be honest in my experience. I certainly do. I want to reward the makers of films like Rare Exports for entertaining me (not that I've seen it yet. Part of the reason I wanted to show it to the class is so that we could discuss it fresh). I couldn't care less about rewarding the money men in the middle that have no talent except for making money turn into more money.
Interestingly, this situation and Matt Gemmell's blog post turned into quite a talking point in the class with several saying that they had been trying to purchase legitimate versions of albums or films and being unable to, found better solutions through "piracy". They are students, so not overburdenend with cash, but they wanted to give it to you film and music companies. You turned them away, so is it too hard to understand why they went and got what they wanted elsewhere? Are you stopping sales yourselves? We live in a connected world, where information can be transferred at the speed of light, but are you working by telegram? Carrier pigeon?
Take some responsibility for your own actions before you blame others.
29 September 2011
Setting a timer to shut down the computer, or...
If you are running Windows 7 and want to shut down your computer at a specific time, Windows' Task Scheduler is ideal. In fact it's ideal for any time you want to run a specific task.
To get started, Open your Start Menu and type "task". You should see Task Scheduler appear quickly in the list.
Start it and you'll be presented with this window:
If you think you might want to create more than one regular task, it's probably worth creating a new group so your tasks don't get lost in the mass that get run all the time. To do this, click where it says "Task Scheduler Library" on the left-hand side and on the right you can see an entry for "New Folder...". Click that and choose a good name for your tasks, like... ummm... "My Tasks".
Now, click on your Task Group on the left-hand side, and then on the right click "Create Basic Task...". This will present you with a new window in which you give the task a descriptive name (and an optional description).
Click Next once you have done that and you'll be presented with the Trigger page.
Here you can specify an action that will set your Task in motion and the "When a specific event is logged" option can get quite in-depth, but for now we are just going to specify a time. This computer is on a lot, but I have to get to bed at times, so I shall set a daily task and hit Next again.
This presents me with a timer and you can use Tab to switch between fields and cursor keys to switch between parts of fields (in the time, hitting cursor right switches between hours, minutes and seconds). Enter the time you want to do your task here. For me, I'll change the 16:36:25 to 03:00:00 for 3 AM. Hit Next again.
You are now presented with a choice of things to do, just hit Next here for our task of shutting the machine down.
When you hit Next now you are presented with a recap of the task you have created and you can hit Back to make any changes you'd like, or hit Finish to set your task going. If my time of 3 AM doesn't suit you, you can always go back and change it at a later date.
To get started, Open your Start Menu and type "task". You should see Task Scheduler appear quickly in the list.
Start it and you'll be presented with this window:
If you think you might want to create more than one regular task, it's probably worth creating a new group so your tasks don't get lost in the mass that get run all the time. To do this, click where it says "Task Scheduler Library" on the left-hand side and on the right you can see an entry for "New Folder...". Click that and choose a good name for your tasks, like... ummm... "My Tasks".
Now, click on your Task Group on the left-hand side, and then on the right click "Create Basic Task...". This will present you with a new window in which you give the task a descriptive name (and an optional description).
Click Next once you have done that and you'll be presented with the Trigger page.
Here you can specify an action that will set your Task in motion and the "When a specific event is logged" option can get quite in-depth, but for now we are just going to specify a time. This computer is on a lot, but I have to get to bed at times, so I shall set a daily task and hit Next again.
We want to start the Windows program shutdown.exe so we'll type:
C:\Windows\System32\shutdown.exe
in the Program/script field. In the Add arguments field we're going to also put in /s that tells shutdown.exe that we want to shut the computer down (shutdown.exe can do a lot of other things).When you hit Next now you are presented with a recap of the task you have created and you can hit Back to make any changes you'd like, or hit Finish to set your task going. If my time of 3 AM doesn't suit you, you can always go back and change it at a later date.
23 April 2011
Quick language post
- Acrobat 9 - the easiest of the lot since the program's preferences allow you to swap between French and English directly.
- Photoshop CS5 Extended 64-bit - Go into C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5 (64 Bit)\Locales\fr_FR\Support Files\ and rename tw10428.dat to tw10428.dat.bak. That gives you the US English version so you just have to put up with "colour" being spelled wrong.
- Bridge and Camera Raw have to be changed separately, but you just have to go into Bridge's advanced preferences and choose your language and keyboard layout there and Camera Raw follows.
- After Effects CS5 64-bit - Create an empty text file here: C:\Users\[user]\Documents\ae_force_english.txt
- InDesign CS5 - a little more complex. You need to use the Registry Editor to edit the following node: HKLM/SOFTWARE/Wow6432node/Adobe/InDesign/7.0/User Interface Locale Setting. Mine was set to 4, which is French and I wanted UK English, so changed it to 2.
- Illustrator CS5 - Unfortunately there seems to be no way of changing the language here.
17 December 2010
Just... no... time
I've wanted to post new things over the last couple of months about migrating an OS, installing a RAID, new job and so on, but the new job, while part time, actually has taken all of my time +5. I shall bid my reader (mainly me) a happy Christmas and a prosperous new year.
17 October 2010
Striking over retirement is like...
Today we went into Bordeaux to watch some movies and as part of the French national tradition the streets were crowded with poor deluded people "manifesting" for keeping the retirement age at 60. I'm sorry, is there something I don't understand? You're demonstrating to have a higher tax burden? What's worse is that these people have convinced young folk to join in - people who will be paying for the organisers' extended retirement. Singapore has just abolished statutory retirement and while I'm not saying that's right either, this seems to be more ridiculous. Some of the people were chanting that they wanted no change! LIFE IS CHANGE!
I am not an economist andmight probably have it completely wrong, but it seems to me that if you have an ageing population and a very good public health service, coupled with an increased life expectancy, isn't it only logical to expect people to contribute to the state's coffers for a little longer? Otherwise, where is the money going to come from to look after the aged, to pay for retirement funds and healthcare if it's not taxes? So, fine, the current generation want to live forty years sponging off the state and leave their kids and grandkids picking up the bill? I think that's disgusting, particularly at a time of financial crisis in the world.
The retirement age was set at 60 in a time when people were expected to live to 70. Now, someone living to 100 is less miraculous an event and will become more and more commonplace over the coming years with improvements in healthcare and if people still want to retire at 60 they'd need to pay as much in tax as they receive in their pay packet to fund it! I'm sure they'd complain about rises in income tax, or VAT.
This is not my most thought out blog post but I am severely pissed off with a whole bunch of French people today (and on all the other days where such retirement strikes occur). For me striking over the retirement age is as stupid as complaining your car's new square wheels don't roll very well.
I am not an economist and
The retirement age was set at 60 in a time when people were expected to live to 70. Now, someone living to 100 is less miraculous an event and will become more and more commonplace over the coming years with improvements in healthcare and if people still want to retire at 60 they'd need to pay as much in tax as they receive in their pay packet to fund it! I'm sure they'd complain about rises in income tax, or VAT.
This is not my most thought out blog post but I am severely pissed off with a whole bunch of French people today (and on all the other days where such retirement strikes occur). For me striking over the retirement age is as stupid as complaining your car's new square wheels don't roll very well.
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