Master Zaps Zaptronic inZanity

Me on 3D

2011-11-22T09:35:00.001+01:00

So, I just did something I never thought I'd do; me and my son (a budding film critic) went and re-watched Tintin... in 3D!

Now people may have heard me somewhat whine about 3D, because I think it fundamentally is a distracting viewing experience. So why on earth did I go see Tintin in 3D? Well, there are several reasons:

Primary goal was actually to re-watch it in the original English. My first viewing was together with my in-laws, and my father in law was the one who introduced our kids to Tintin by owning all the albums. I allowed the in-laws to choose what screening to go to, and they favoured the Swedish dub - in 2D.
I've already seen the movie. Since I historically find 3D distracting, it was an advantage that, having now seen the plot, it was "ok" to re-watch the movie on a more "technical" level.
I actually wanted to study it from a technical standpoint and had some hopes that some bits - specifically, the opening credits - could work nicely in 3D!

What were my conclusions after doing this audacious thing? Well, same as always...

The 3D of Tintin - my Verdict

3D still feels fundamentally distracting. While the Tintin 3d was some of the best I've seen, there were still cases when they were poking canes in my eye, or doing swirly stuff just to show off. For example, early in the film, Tintin steps into the street, is almost hit by a car, but saved by the Thom[p]sons trademark canes.
I'll bet that shot oroginally was the one shot of the car, and them then pulling him off the street.
But someone wanted wanted "more 3d", so insterted there is a completely pointless, rotate-y, spinny, undercarriage-viewing shot, which only distracted. It was out-of-place both editorially and stylistically, IMHO.

Other such sequences were much more gracefully handled; the massive long one-shot action sequence in the middle with the dam bursting was marvellously crafted for 3D. It was actually better (I never thought I'd ever say that!) in 3D than in the 2D showing! The problem with that sequence is instead that Tintin and Haddock pretty much demolish a small town with unknown casualties, and it is treated as a throwaway gag, which felt a bit out-of-place to me.

3D Overall - my verdict

I still think 3D has a long way to go before I willingly accept it as anything but a method for trying to "trick" people into going to the theater for the supposedly "enhanced experience" for extra money. In my life I've seen exactly three things that was better in 3D:

"Day and Night", beautiful Pixar short
The opening battle from Star Wars Episode 3 (shown as a proof of concept at Siggraph - they managed to make it look large)
Aforementioned single shot from Tintin

Here's the thing:

Actually shooting for 3D is tricky and cumbersome, and while it in theory should give the better result, issues of polarization in the mirror rig generally used actually causes very annoying differences between the eyes.

Converted 3D - don't even get me started on that mess. Yes it gets "better" for every year but without actually having the full 3D information from both eyes there in the first place, some stuff invariably has to be invented, pulling apart stuff from one eye and shifting it haphazardly to some "neat" place for the other eye. Some poor underpaid roto-person has to invent the missing pixels hid behind some object seen from the one camera but is needed for the other eye. Conversions tend to look flat, cardboard-cut-out-y, and anything volumetric in nature (smoke, mist, clouds), or spatially compelx (A Shrubbery! Ni!) are bound to cause issues. Sometimes the 3D effect is "enhanced" into a completely unrealistic space and if you have an acute sense of geometry you spot this immediately.

The only 3D that seems to "work" for me, is the CG generated, and specifically, the more simple CG generated. Like Day & Night that I mentioned above, the way-better-than-the-actual-movie animated sequence about the three brothers in Harry Potter and the Dead Hollow Things.

Why 3D doesn't work, and why Jim and Peter may be right

Others have explained why 3D doesn't work. The primary problems I see are these:

The fundamental discrepancy between focus plane and convergence for stuff going a lot off-the-screen plane. This isn't such a big deal, though, because we really only do a lot of changing to the focus of our eyes for stuff really close to us.
The fact that movie-makers try to "solve" this by playing with convergence, which actually ends up changing the "scale" of what you are looking at. Sometimes people are perceived as "huge", sometimes they are perceived as "tiny". I know 2D movies kinda do that too, but I'd honestly rather perceive a close up as "close" than "huge". Maybe that's just me.
Incorrect 3D space (mostly happens in converted movies where they literally screw up and make impossible geometry)
The fact that the perceived "depth" actually depends on the size of the movie screen and how far you sit from it!!
Frame rate judder! Yes! JC and PJ may be right! More on this below

Zap, did you say frame rate?

I did.

You see, movies are done at 24 frames per second and I love them for it. I have always been a proponent of 24p filmmaking (and using a 180 degree shutter, i.e. 50% of the time the shutter is open).

I was physically unable to sit through "Public Enemy" (the Johnny Depp ganster flick) because of the film was using a 360 shutter, which looks suspiciously like a higher framerate, and something that screams "VIDEO" to me!

I've spent a lot of extra cash over the years to be sure all cameras I buy shoot 25 progressive frames rather than shooting the standard PAL 50 fields interlaced. It has been expensive but worth it, and I still can't stand high framerate viewing for narrative content. It is perceived as cheap and crappy, sets look like sets and not places, actors look like actors and not characters, and it cheapens the experience tremendeously.

Having said all that, - Yes - I think 24fps is one of the issues with 3D! Because somehow, as your eye is trying to follow all the action, the juddery motion of 24 frames adds to the distraction. What is so beautiful in 2D somehow breaks down in the fundamentally different 3D viewing world.

So I honestly think Jim Cameron and Peter Jackson are right in this regard; 3D will look "much more lifelike" when shown at a higher framerate. Still, though, I am afraid, because I retain my fear from my 2D film experience; one could argue that high-framerate 2D viewing is also "more lifelike"... but that that is exactly what kills it!

Something strange and magical dies at higher framerates, and I don't know what it is. Does 3D change that... maybe, maybe not? I don't know yet!

I eagerly await to see The Hobbit with it's 48 fps 3D (tho I pray the 2D version is done 24 fps) because I need to see what it looks like.

Because - Yes - I am afraid!

I am afraid that we get in the same situation as the 2D; while it looks "more realistic", that also murders it as being filmic. That it will make sets look like sets, actors like actors, props like props, make-up like make-up, and will completely cheapen the whole thing.

I'm scared. I quiver.

The Zap Solution for 3D

So... what do I think people should do to add the third dimension? Or should they?

Well... movie makers have tried to give "depth" to their film for years. Because stereoscopic viewing (i.e. the parallax difference between the two eyes) are not the only depth cues our brain uses to decode depth. And make no mistake, preception happens in the brain, not in the eyes. If you can fool the brain, you don't need to fool the eyes.

A few other cues for depth are:

Motion parallax (as you move side to side, stuff at different distances move at different speeds in your field of view)
Perspective change (as you move forward and back, proportions of stuff and angles of lines change)
Depth haze (particles in the air change the contrast and saturation of near/far things)
Focus (playing with the depth of field of the camera can help induce a depth effect)

Filmmakers have always tried to give the fundamentally flat movie screen a sense of depth by doing all of the above; by adding smoke, focusing the lens, and dollying and trucking the camera. All these depth-cues try to communicate depth to your visual cortex. And sometimes it succeeds quite well and can give a good sense of depth.

Unfortunately, two depth cues are fighting it:

Eye focus (eyes always focused in the screen plane)
Binocular Vision (both of your eyes see the same thing)

The focus thing isn't a massive deal, and good filmmakers have always been able to trick you with depth-of-field effects, but Binocular vision, is a bigger deal.

Your two eyes are clearly telling you "this is happening on a flat screen". So even if the filmmaker loads up his shot with a metric ton of dollying, trucking and smoke, your two eyes are still telling you... but it's all on a flat screen.

So what can we do?

We have a bunch of cues saying "It is 3D..." and one major cue (your two eyes) saying "....but it's not"?

Simple.

Remove the conflicting cue!

Yes - the Pirates were right. No. Not the ones downloading movies, the other ones. Y'know the kind that sometimes are from the Carribbean?

Coz they knew that the best, cheapest 3D glasses in the world - those which turns any well shot movie into a 3D movie with no extra production cost....

...is a pirate eyepatch.

You can thank me later.

My Metabolic Experiment

2011-04-15T11:12:00.004+02:00

I've been doing a "metabolic experiment" in the last few months, and the outcome has been quite nice. It all started when I stood on my old rusty scale after Christmas and went "oy". Plus, I had heard from some people like @jocke about the nerdy WiFi connected scale from WiThings, which can post your weight on twitter!

So I thought - this is my opportunity to a) buy a nerdy toy b) apply external pressure (my twitter audience) and c) go down in weight.

It also happened that, by some other friends, I was handed the book "Why We Get Fat (and what to do about it)" by Gary Taubes, and it was a bit of a revelation.

Well, the result, anyway, can be seen here:

Yes, this is updated in realtime as I weigh myself.

I've been asked by people what I do, and the easy answer is that after reading Gary's book I stumbled into the hitherto-unknown (to me) world of "LCHF", which stands for "Low Carb, High Fat" (although to not scare people who still thinks fat is dangerous, you can just call it "Low Carb").

Being a Swede, I'm surprised I *hadn't* heard about it, though, because as it turns out the whole "LCHF" movement is the strongest in Sweden, and a recent poll showed a lot of adherents to the "eating style".

The cool thing with this "diet" is that you eat as much as you like (until you feel full) of a LOT of Yummy stuff. What about a steak, drenched in garlic butter? No problem. Cheese molten over broccoli? Perfect. Whipped cream with chipped hazelnuts? Lovely.

Just don't touch that french fry. Or put bread under your cheese. Or have any sugar in that whipped cream.

Basically, DON'T eat or drink:

Anything with sugar in it
Anything made from flour (bread, pasta, etc.)
Anything containing starch (potatoes)

Yep - it's the carbs. Those evil carbs. Especially those in liquid form (so it's bye-bye to beer, except on "occasions"). Our body isn't evolved to even comprehend that energy comes by drinking. We are evolved to drink to supply hydration, and the regulartory systems that says "that is enough" only triggers on hydration, and there is no "fullness" after drinking, even though some beers are - literally - a whole meal in themselves (I had a dark Leffe at last end user event, and I'm never doing that again, it's a beer you should eat with a spoon).

Secondly, the carbs make you hungrier, and lack of carbs makes you more satisfied, which makes you eat WAY less often, and WAY smaller amounts. So it's not that calories "don't count", it's simply that YOU don't have to "count calories". Just eat, and as long as you don't eat carbs..... voila.

It's worked out okay for me, anyway. And trust me, the cravings for sweets go away. You can eat cheese cubes or Macadamia nuts instead for a "snack".

The biggest thing w. this diet is the satiety (you never need to go hungry, as a matter of fact, you go non-hungry for hours on it), and the amount of completely delicious food you can just chow down with no remorse (things that most other diets would have a big red "no no" sign on. Such as using whipped cream in your coffee).

If you are curious about this LCHF stuff, you can go to Mattias "Diet Doctor" Ernfeldts blog, available in a

Swedish version at kostdoktorn.se
And in English at dietdoctor.com.

Have fun.

/Z

Welcome to MasterZap.com - finally.

2011-01-31T15:31:00.000+01:00

So, as of a couple of days ago, I finally own the domain MasterZap.com

*champane cork sound*

"Huh", you say, "didn't you always?"

No.

As a matter of fact, the domain I "always" owned is Master-Zap.com - yes, the hyphenated one.

Now, I finally own the unhyphenated version. And this in no small thanks to some horrible scumbag scammers known as "InTrust Domains" (stay away from these slimepuppets, far, far away).

But Glory and Justice(tm) prevailed in the end. Yay.

Some history

A long time ago (1997), in a galaxy far far away (right here, actually), I made a CD.

As I've been known as "Zap" in computing circles for years, and also used this as a bit of a name when making music. This CD contained some space-techno-pop-electronic-stuff, was called "The Curvature of Space", and what "artist" name did I choose?

Well.. the CD is made by "Master Zap and the Null Pointers".

Yeah. Funny me. "LOL".

So time comes to do this internet-thing. I already had a website since eons, but no "real URL".

Stupid move: Trust a free domain service, such that I once "owned" the URL zap.base.org (now not working, but prominently splattered across the CD cover, sigh)

This taught me a valuable lesson: Never promote an URL you do not own.

So I needed to buy a domain.

"Zap.com" was taken already back then. So I figured that I try something else, and was juggling between "Master-Zap.com" and "MasterZap.com". (The scariest part of this story is that only a couple of weeks earlier, I had seen that Zap.net was free, and I was STUPID enough not to snag that, ARGH!)

After asking around, most people at the time felt the write-together was harder to read, and, sadly, I chose the hyphenated variant..... this was back in the day when domains were $50 a year!!

Soon after, someone sucked up "MasterZap.com", as they do, the slimy domainsquatting idiots, so when time came to change my mind, I noticed the domain had been registered since October 2000.

Well, fast forward 10 years, and I never really cared much about "MasterZap.com", since people don't really type domains by hand anymore, I owned many OTHHER domains anyway, etc.... it wasn't a huge deal that I didn't own it..... it was just a minor nag.

I always held a small amount of glee, though, to the poor idiot who was paying money for having "masterzap.com" for no use whatsoever to them.

But then something happened

I suddenly got this email from some bloke "Arthur Simmons" at "InTrust Domains", saying that they were "about to put masterzap.com on the market" and "since I own a similar domain" I may be "interested", wich a clickable link of some sort.

Alarm bells rang for several reasons:

Rule of Internet Life #1: Never trust anyone with the name "trust" in the name
The clickable link had some other domain name in it
And worst of all: At the bottom was an "Unsubscribe from our list" link that was the SAME LINK as the one to "inquire about purchasing the domain".

I was mildly annoyed, but thought little of it. I played with the idea of actually clicking for a while, just to see what extorsion-amount they were planning to chargme for a domain I am the only reasonable user in the universe of.

But I didn't.

Instead I went to my favourite registrar, tera-byte.com, which registers all my domains, and just did a whois lookup on "masterzap.com".

To my surprise, I noticed the domain was listed as "Expired"

Yes, the domain had been registered from October-2000 to October-2010. Someone had owned it for ten years, hoping to get me to pay them. They had finally given up.

"Huh", I thought, does this mean it's actually FREE? And I tossed off a try to register the domain.

No, came back the reply from my registrar, it's not free.

I discussed it with the tera-byte.com tech support (these guys are just GREAT, with the best tech support response time I've ever seen, btw) and they explained to me that when domains are unregistered they enter an X-month "grace" period, where they are held in limbo. After that, they enger a 5 day "delete Pending" mode, after which they are ACTUALLY deleted.

As I read this, I get ANOTHER email from a "Raymond Pontius" from "Limited Time Domains", making the exact same offer that our friend "Arthur Simmons" had done the way before.

Now, if alarm bells had gone on before, big loud klaxons and rotating red lights was now on!!

On top of this, I got further email from our friend "Arthur Simmons", but this time every clickable link in his message went to somwhere else. Then I got a third. And a fourthn. Similar "offer", different links......

I checked with my buddies at tera-byte.com, they recommended I do not click ANY of those links. Which I didn't.

I also googled "Arthur Simmons InTrust Domains" and got a TON of stories similar to my own. I learned a bunch of things from these stories:

There is practice know as "DropCatching" a domain. This means trying to steal it the second it is unregistered. Unreputable companies tries to figure out 'cool' domain names about to expire, claim that the own them (hoping they can dropcatch them when they expire) and try to sell them to you.
Many many people had horrible stories about InTrust Domains and the "Arthur Simmons" moniker. Some stories had happy endings, others notsomuch.
Thosw eithout happy endings either had

Their domain go to someone else
...or have to buy it out for many hundreds of dollars.

Those that DID have happy endings came in three versions

They simply contacted intrustdomains, and actually got to buy their domain at a reasonable price (although nothing below $69)
They simply waited, and after the "deletePending" period was over, the domain was simply free, to be picked up by anyone (so they did)
They used another "dropCatching" service to get their domain back, some recommending "SnapDomains.com"... but this never costed less than $69 either. Funny that.

I looked at those "happy cases" and started considering going the "SnapDomains" route. But not before doing some research. And what do you know, "SnapDomains" are owned by "Moniker.com"... which is the same entity that already had had my domains registered in the 1st (and had just released them)!! I also found some (although not well verified) links between Moniker.com and the very InTrustDomain scumbag links!!

So, no, I won't use another branch of the scammers scam to avoid the original scam in the 1st place, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

I simply waited.

Sure, I set up a script to do a "whois" on masterzap.com roughly hourly, and ping me when something happened.

And whaddayaknow, six days after the record went into "pendingDelete" in the whois database... it was free.

I registered it with my belovable reistrar, tera-byte.com, costing me ALL of $9 (plus six bucks URL redirection), et voila, as they say in France.

Lessons Learned

Here's the moral of the story:

Trust InTrust Domains as far as you can throw them
If you ever get an email from Arthur Simmons, run for the hills
Coolness prevails (unless it's a super popular domain name, but who has any user for masterzap.com but me??)
Never actually buy hyphenated domain names in the 1st place.
If you are alive when zap.net is free, buy it. Or any other three letter domain.

But hey, as a consolation price I own Z4P.COM, it almost looks like ZAP.COM ;)

/Z

How to use a full sized SIM chip in the Apple iPad while keeping it's size (for dual use)

2010-08-05T17:21:00.000+02:00

To make a long story short; I now own an iPad. I'll post a "review" of it later, but I just figured this little trick out which may - perhaps - be useful to some.

My problem:

For 3G network subscription, the iPad uses a "MicroSIM", which is the same as a regular SIM but simply less plastic. And I already had a 3G internet dongle thingy to my computer, which NEEDS a full sized SIM chip.

The snag was, I want to use the SIM in both, depending on what I'm carrying at the time. So cutting it down to "MicroSIM" size wasn't really an option.

So I figured out this rather ... special... solution.

Not sure it is useful to anyone, but hey, here it is:

Simply put, the "lower half" of the iPad-microSIM inside the iPad-microSIM-holder is nearly (but not exactly) identical to the "lower half" of the full sized SIM. You can't just jam it in as-is, it needs a minor size reduction in width, which you can do with scissors. Just take a millimeter of each side. The chip will still fit in any full sized SIM holder but ALSO fit into the iPad. Yes, it'll stick out a bit and isn't really a long term solution.... but it works.

/Z

The Masters Do It: Nokia N900

2009-09-23T12:53:00.004+02:00

Remember how I rambled in the last post about cellphones, and how nobody did the perfect device with the perfect UI and the perfect OS with the perfect features?

Well, I've been silenced. And who silenced me. Freaking Nokia!

Yes. They did. And what they did was the N900

It's so funny too. This magnificent device hasn't even been created by the cellphone branch of nokia. No, it's been made by the internet tablet branch! Which in retrospect makes total sense.

Because what I wan't isn't really a "cellphone". A "cellphone" is an archaic piece of stupidity (I hardly ever make voice calls at all these days). I want an internet tablet with a phone function.

And Nokia did exactly that.

The Nokia internet tablet division basically said "Well, lets make our next tablet smaller, include a 3G modem in it, and by the way add a phone app, so you can make calls with it" - the later almost like an "oh by the way it also makes calls" kind of deal. And they created the perfect smartphone

And it runs Linux. Well okay a variant called "Maemo" but it's still Linux. And you can log in as "root" on it. I mean, come on, what could possibly be cooler? Anything? Ever?

Even "little things" like, oh, SIP, Google Talk or Skype over 3G networks is a Standard Feature, like it should. What, me, pay for airtime when I'm calling someone? Don't be ridiculous, I have a dataplan and I use it for whatever I want.

The N97 basically stopped existing the day the N900 came out (although for some reason Nokia still markets it), and it does have two tiny piece of "edge" over the N900: The compass (magnetometer) and the "flip up" design, which I honestly preffer to the flat "slider" of the N900.

But what is more important is that Nokia considers the N900 their low end device in this space...

..which basically means I just keep my N95 8GB for a few more months, await whatever-comes-after-N900, and it'll be heaven.

Basically, there are no contenders for this.

None.

Apples iPhone isn't even worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as the N900. As the iPhone was a start of a "new kind of device", so is this.

I full expect a future "N950" to be something with NVidia Tegra accellerated graphics, HDMI port, HD video camera, and 128GB storage standard.

I'm drooling already :)

/Z

iPhone vs Palm Pre vs Nokia N97

2009-06-17T08:28:00.007+02:00

Here's the Zaptronic Smartphone Rant about the N97, the Palm Pre, and the iPhone.

I'm currently a Nokia user, having owned an N95 8GB since it came out.

That iPhone thing, fron a non-US perspective

When the original iPhone (which I affectionately name the gayPhone, because lets face it, it looks gay*) it showed the world how to make a nice touch UI. Man, was that thing slick as hell. But then you looked at the actual feature list of the device, and you want "what!?". It was missing so many things that it was simply frustrating.

No GPS
No mulltitasking!?! No background processes!?!? REALLY!?!!??
No user installable apps
No exchangeable battery? (This is a joke, right?)
No usable bluetooth (Headset *only*? You *are* joking, right?)
No video? Seriously?
etc. etc. etc.

Fast forward to the iPhone 3G, which was better, but still very much underwhelming. Now there are "installable apps" but only the Apple Führer Approved ones. Sure now it had a GPS, but still no way to attach a bluetooth keyboard, or even a way to use the device as a drive over bluetooth, or tethering or....

When finally iPhone OS 3.0 was announced I twittered a sarcastic "Gee, Wow, the iPhone OS 3.0 makes it go from doing 30% of what my Nokia does to 60% of what my Nokia does, *golf clap*"

So now finally we have the gayPhone 3GS, and I'm still fundamentally underwhelmed. With the 3GS, the iPhone goes to about 80% of what my years-old Nokia does (plus it has the compass, which mine lacks). But it's really patently ridiculous not to be able to do things that are standard operation on any non-US cellphone, such as VoIP, tethering, bluetooth file transfers, etc.

Seeing the US centric view ... from the outside

Because this is the funny part: all the news of the iPhone is driven from the homeland of USA, but it is really humorous to the rest of the world how the iPhone made the US population "discover" smartphones and go "oh, look, you can do things on these" - things the rest of the world had known for years. (If you want to be mean, and tease a little, you can say that it is almost like the US absolutely needed a dumbed-down fisher-price UI to realize these things could be used. Sorry but it doesn't exactly reflect well on the perceived intelligence of the US populace .... [Nudge-wink-wink] ... sorry just teasin')

It's sometimes high comedy to listen to thinks like MacBreak weekly or some other Leo Laporte show, and hear them "ooh" and "aww" over things like a little box that can turn a 3G or EVDO data connection into a little local wifi, and then hear them say "Oh just you wait until such a feature is available on smartphones, it will be a GAME CHANGER". I chuckle, because the app "JoikuSpot" has been available since FOREVER and it does EXACTLY THAT. For smartphones (which hence seem to exclude the iPhone).

Look, guys. Here are things I, as a non-US person, expect as standard features on a "smartphone" (this was the expectation level already when the original iPhone was released):

Full bluetooth support. As in file transfer, messaging, keyboard, etc. etc.
Full standard-cell-network feature support, as in SMS, MMS, call waiting, etc.
Multi-tasking/background process
VoIP client. Yes over cell network. No, no whiny operator disablement; I pay for data, I can do WTF I want with it.
Tethering (at no additional cost, as said, I pay for data, I can do WTF I want with it). Bluetooth tethering absolutely should be standard, WiFi tethering a la "JoikuSpot" nice bonus feature.
Big, and exchangeable battery.

Bonus features that I don't consider "bare necessities" are things like GPS, accelerometer, compass, even camera... but if the device has a camera it should naturally do video, anything else is just retarded.

The mystery of the original iPhone being a hit

What puzzled me always was, why was the *original* iPhone such a hit with its original, feature-poor version? I think it was largely the sex appeal in the "slick UI".

But I think also specifically because it was introduced in the US. My suspicion is that the *original* iPhone only could become a massive hit there, because the more "smartphone saturated" rest of the world knew what expectations to have of such a device (and know not go apeshit over standard features and swallow glaring omissions like bluetooth file transfers) and would never as easily bow to the Apple Overlords.

But that's just my theory. :)

Slick UI. I admit that

What Apple really did was to show the world how an UI should be done (APPLAUSE! Or is that APPLE-ause?), and, and I must say "unfortunately", carved out a market niche doing that. Good for them... but bad for the rest of us.

Even being a Nokia user I must say Nokia has been lazy. Not on the device side (the N97 outclasses both the iPhone and the Palm Pre 10-to-1) but on the UI side. While I strongly crave to upgrade to an N97, it is really depressing to see the craptacular old UI, and totally-NOT-streamlined UI of the apps, showing clearly how different guys wrote different apps, with very little "style guide" in between. (Heck, If I'm being mean, I can say there is very little "style" to be "guided" in the 1st place).

Smartphone wars vs OS wars

If you look from an US perspective, you could make this somewhat humorous comparision between the smartphones and computer OS's:

iPhone is like Windows. Its the "most spread" thing, and "everyone uses it because everyone else uses it", not because it actually offers more features or is "better" in any way. Most people are painfully stuck on it "coz all my apps are here", but they would much rather switch to something else.
Palm Pre is exactly like the Mac. It is slick, shiny, has rounded corners everywhere, and it's just so shiny and pretty and .... shiny. Everything is nice and consistent. Apps behave in a very nice consistent way (but therefore lack any real control or advanced features). The OS feels like a prison decorated by a designer that used to work for fisher price. And there are only 9 apps. And nobody writes new ones.
N97 is like Linux. It's powerful, can do anything you ever wanted, but there is no visual consistency between apps, and you easily end up in a UI that only a command-line loving geek would want to touch. It tries to be "slick" but it's kinda like a spray-on kind of slick. You can still see the gears and sprockets turning underneath, and they can be oh-so-clunky. There are gazillions of apps, but they are almost all written by-geeks-for-geeks, and tend to be buggy.

Okay, the above is tounge-in-cheek, and seen in a "US perspective".

From a non-US perspective, it shifts a bit, because the "iPhone penetration" is much lower (I actually do not know anyone that owns one, for example) and the Pre isn't even available here at all... (at least not yet).

My personal conclusion

So looking around currently, my ideal device would be one that had:

N97 hardware.
Apple and Palm, take note on how the maestros make hardware, mkay? See the 5 megapixel auto-focusing widescreen DVD-quality-video shooting camera WITH FLASH? And that's with nokia not even upgrading the camera at all.
Palm-Pre like OS.
Nokia and Apple, take note how a nice multi tasking UI can look and work! Gestures FTW!
...with the application support of the iPhone
Nokia and Palm, take note how Apple works with developers and gets cool stuff happening? Good. Now do NOT look at how the "needs approval" Apple store works, okay? While it is fine to have an "official" store which may host "approved" apps (or a category of "approved" apps), forcing anyone writing an app to go through some wierd "approval" process is just dumb.

Sadly, device this doesn't exist yet. The N97 is still my personal top contenter because there *is* still tons and tons and tons of s60 apps (without any stupid "Approval" process to make an app). So if you can live with a partially old-fashioned UI, then I still think it's clearly the device to go for.

And while I acknoweledge the "most apps win", and you can say that Apple is currently ahead there (although I'm not sure, there are lots of s60/Nokia apps), both the Palm Pre and the Nokia N97 has understood that programming is "going web", and have widget/app API's that are basically just HTML/css/AJAX, which will cause the application count for both devices to litterally explode overnight.

Those are my thoughts.

Flames and comments appreciated :)

/Z

* = Nothing against gays, many of my best friends are gay. *Smooch*

Review: The Day the Earth Stood Still

2009-01-18T14:25:00.003+01:00

I havn't been using this blog much, so I thought I'd start to randomly drop some thoughts here.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

The Movie

So I was at the movies, and I saw tDtESS. Since I love science fiction, and really crave good science fiction, I couldn't stay away.

It does have some good points; I actually think there was two or three really cool things in there. Keanu Reeves acting was actually very appropriate, especially in the beginning. The "they cleared the highway for us" thing was cool. Little things like that.

Yet the film quickly dives into inanity and insanity. Flying towards the thing that is gonna blow you up? Please. It was just an excuse to get Jennifer in a biohazard suit up close to the thing. Couldn't that have been done much easier by having the object obviously stop/manouver earlier, showing it was a guided entity? Why the meaningless scare of "it's an asteroid, woo".

Another "dramatic" problem I had with the movie is that it totally squandered the wonderful opportunity to update the few flaws the original had. Coz the original, while quaint and a damn good film, really suffered in some cases due to it's low-techness (i.e. lack of f/x technology at the time).

For example, in the original, Helen is told by Klatuu to say "Klatuu Barada Nikto" if anything happens to him. Not 30 seconds later, they are chased out of the car and Klatuu gets shot. Not five minutes later, Helen is approaching Gort, and after a little bit of scare, delivers the line!

This part of the film would be a huge opportunity to introduce some drama. First of all, prolong the time vastly between the declaration of "if something happens to me, say K-B-N" until something actually does happen. The original film it is almost comical in the shortness of time between these two events. There would be ample opportunity for "stuff" to happen between these two times.

Secondly, another huge opportunity lost was that what if the military was trying to stop Helen from getting in Gort's way. We could have had almost a King-Kong style scene where GORT would mayhem lots of things, blow up parts of NYC and do whatnot, until Helen climbs up on some building to get in his eye-height and microseconds before being blasted to molecules able to deliver the "Klatuu Barada Nikto" line, Gort immediately ceasing hostilities and going to pick up his master, to do the whole "resurrection" bit they completely forgot about in the new movie.

Listening to David Stripinis vex lyrically (not!) about it on the VFX Show is fun.

The Effects

The film had approximately two really good effects, both relating to the particle-destruction bit. Fantastic stuff.... but the rest made me pretty much bang my head against the wall.

First of all, most annoying of all to me, was the lack of a sense of "exposure" in the effects. A glowy sphere was exactly the same amount of "glowyness" when hovering in the pitch black midnight between some trees, or when shot in blazing desert sunlight hovering over the pyramids!!!!

Anyone who has actually photographed or filmed a glowing object understands the vast dynamic range of outdoor ligting, and that a thing that is a blazing glow at midnight, might actually not show up as a lightsource at all in sunlight!

The same issue existed with Gort, his "eye beam" having the exact same anamorphic lens flare streak disregarding if it was midninght, outdoors, or indoors in a bunker. As a matter of fact, most of the Gort CGI, most of all the outdoor shots, looked very poor, and the animation was way to simplistic, in my opinion.

Other more "incidental" CGI looked fine, so why the problems with the big Hero character? I can only imagine someone actually wanted him to look and move like that. Wierd :/

But honestly I think the "lack of exposure" is what bugs me most. And this is not only tDtESS that is at fault. I can actually only think of a handful of films not at fault here. I.e. Transformers and Iron Man come to mind as "correct" in this regard.

And in contrast, we have major offenders of the low-dynamic-range look like anything "Lord of the Rings", which just looks painterly unrealistic with all the sky replacement and "we can see everything in the shadows" look.

Alas, I ramble. But rambling is fun, sometimes. :)

/Z

Taxing taxes....

2007-09-09T13:12:00.000+02:00

Don't you love it when you get a letter from the tax guys saying "Give a complete account of absolutely every foreign income you had in 2001". MMmm.

I spent the weekend in Archeology mode. It was interesting, to say the least. Perhaps partially due to how much you FORGET in so few years.

The fact that this was back in the day when I got money from mp3.com (and anyone who was on THAT ride knows which total mess those guys made of anything involving money) didn't make it easier.... but luckily, I'm of the "never throw away anything" persuasion. (Although I was scared for a while when it turned out that the only copy of a particular Excel spreadsheet only existed on a laptop that was sitting in a pile I was planning to take to electronic recycling.... *eek*)

/Z

I think hell just froze over....

2007-03-01T12:54:00.000+01:00

Yes, there is now a Mac Mini in my house.

I thourh that would n e v e r happen.

But it did.

And as a gadget, 'tis spiffy. Connected to an HDTV and the surround system, and my in house network, and it's a kicker assery little media device.

As a *computer*, though? Well, under all that fisher price glitz is an actual unix kernal, so it's not all bad.... if things could only stop whizzing, wirring and have bevveled glitzy edges. *eeek*

/Z

Awrighty then.... right?

2006-10-27T08:51:00.000+02:00

Okay...

It seems my webpage is back in business. I've re-engineered it for the new server, although the boys and girls over at Lysator are still tinkering under the hood... so... with my luck.... the minute after I post this "the site seems to be working" announcement, it prossibly isn't. LOL ;)

Anyhoo....

The site should now work. So if you DO find something that don't woik... let me know, please.

Also, if you find old junk that needs tidying out, let me know. It's time for a spring cleaning, methinks.

Alas, I ramble. And don't I always.

Next time I may blog about something actually interesting.....

Until then... *knock on wood*

/Z

So Zap, Whats Up With Your Webpage?

2006-09-02T11:39:00.000+02:00

Here's the deal on my webpage.

It's hosted by Lysator, an "academic computer society". Back in the day, being in an "academic computer society" was one of the few ways to get to actually touch a computer... or to get online at a reasonable price... or get nice bandwidth at a reasonable price...

...well, those days are kinda gone. Everyone has megabits in the wall and multiple computers in the house.

So Lysator membership is kinda down. And most importantly, the people who "run the ship"
all tend to be the "old foxes", some 35+ guys w. kids and a job who used to go to that university and has kinda inherited some "root" privileges to handle the machines.

These guys deserve all the credit, but they are volounteers. And when a catastrophic failure happens.... it's really hard to get stuff up again. BUT IT IS NOW UP.

So, zap, if the server is UP, wft isn't your webpage running?

Well, I have a problem. You see, some guys from Lysator wrote their own webserver... roxen (see www.roxen.com for details) and I always used the RXML extensions for it to do "cool stuff" on my webpage.

Some years ago I made a major overhaul, and wrote the entire webpage in RXML templates. GREAT. But... I wrote it for Roxen 1.3, which, admittedly, was kinda outdate already then. Silly me, because Lysator was planning to run the 1.3 compatibility module... so I was okay... right?

Well, now, three collapsed web server machines later (total hardware meltdown), they have finally set up a machine that runs... but ONLY Roxen 4.5 ... so my pages use ALL the wrong types of incompatible macros and stuff. So my pages are kinna dead.

When I find time... I'll work on it. I don't have time now.

/Z

The Host.. is Toast

2005-05-17T07:58:00.000+02:00

NEW: There is an alternate torrent for the Revelations DVD download HERE

NEW WORKING TORRENT

I have personally verified this one and is also re-seeding it (although my bandwidth aint too grand).

See Information below about using FTP to download the film.
--

Weeel... Lysator, the host upon which the Revelations DVD's and the BitTorrent tracker for the revelations files reside, is down. Down down down. Frankly, I do not know exactly why, but the talk is that there was a massive hacking attempt. Vanity dictates that I think the interest drawn by the hosting of Revelations and little things like USA Today articles, MSNBC coverage and CNN featurettes drew the wrong kind of attention, and some zitty teenager with nothing but destruction on his mind (get a girlfriend, kid) got to it.

But frankly... I dunno! Since all routes for me to actually do know are locked within a downed network segment. Spiffy, that!

The ACC mirror is still up (Thank you, Umeå University), and I recommend going to it through anonymous ftp if you plan on getting the DVD iso files.

Be aware, though, that the files are 3.5GiB and 4.3Gib respectively. Lots and lots and lots ftp software have problems with that big files. There are two limits, 2Gb and 4Gb. Some software get past the 1st hurdle (i.e. you can grab disk #1 and it works) but a good 95% of the software can't grok the 2nd hurdle, i.e. disk #2 won't work.

Most notably Internet Explorer itself handles neither of the limits well. It thinks Disk#1 is 0 MiB and disk #2 is 237 MiB due to this problem! You CAN NOT use plain old explorer to get the DVD images (all the other files work fine, though).

Stuff I do know work include, but are not limited to:

Unix "wget" for getting the files (plain command line ftp on one unix variant did NOT work)
Windows XP's command line ftp
CuteFTP client handles 4Gib+ files

Beond these you are on our own. Try to figure out if the ftp software handles 4GiB+ files. Then you

Connect to ftp.acc.umu.se (using anonymous as login, anything as password)
Go to directory mirror/media/StarWars-Revelations/
Get revelations-1.iso or revelations-2.iso
Optionally, get the revelations_dvd_art.zip for printing nice labels
Use your DVD burning software and the "Burn image" or "Burn disk image" or "Create DVD from disk image" or whatever it's called on your particular software to create the disks.
Grab a cold brew, slip down in front of your 62" plasma, right in front of the subwoofer, and hit "play"!

Anyhow.... I'm currently getting about 50 mails a day asking about this stuff. Phew. Be patient, folks.

/Z

Long day

2005-05-08T22:08:00.000+02:00

It's been a long day. Finalized the carport that had been half finished for some months. My what a bit of panelling and paint does ;)

Bought the Firefly series on DVD, and the Battlestar Galactica. Kinda laughable how they both were being "innovative" by using "handheld cam w. lots of smash zooms". Man, that's gonna look about as dated in ten years as a gated reverb on a snare drum yells "1985" to anyone with ears. LOL.

Lots of cool stuff happening at work. Wish I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. And that gets so darned MESSY. I hate that.

More later. As always.

/Z

Welcome

2005-05-08T21:00:00.000+02:00

Welcome, to Zaps blog.

Some day, this blog will be full of stuff. But, as Aragorn yelled, "that is not this day" :)

/Z