I'll admit a certain liking towards end-of-the-world movies. For me there's something irresistible in seeing what happens when everything goes wrong and Bruce Willis doesn't manage to save the day. It was with delight that I watched 28 Days Later, a 2002 movie by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland about a horrible blood-spitting disease that strikes Britain. Maybe it was the bleak London vistas, maybe it was the unrelenting music and in-your-face video, or maybe it was just the fact that it was a great budget movie that packed a big punch.
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Most of us have a good selection of electronic gadgets gracing our home. TVs, DVD players, TIVOs, home theatre systems, the list goes on. Almost all of these will have an individual remote control requiring not only a home (just where did you put that remote?), but batteries and in many situations the ability to navigate a particular action (such as watching a DVD) across multiple controls.
With this in mind I set about reviewing the Logitech Harmony 555 Universal Remote Control.
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The other week I managed to watch a pretty bad series of horror stories, all wrapped together in a film called The Necronomicon. I knew it was going to be a bad movie even before it started, but I was still looking forward to it because it’s based upon the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
For those unfamiliar with this author, he was a reclusive American writer who wrote in the mid-1920's. His specialty was horror writing, but a horror unlike almost everything else in the genre. If you have any familiarity with Edgar-Allen Poe then you'll know the style. We're talking dark brooding horror, focusing on insanity and the human mind. Lovecraft managed to create his own shadow world which looked like ours, but contained unimaginable evils waiting to break free.
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I've been churning through a lot of books recently and so I thought I'd talk about some here.
First up is Dr. Zhivago. I'll admit a distinct liking for Russian literature, ever since Crime & Punishment blew me away. The country is so big and has so much history. I just wish I could explore it all. As I do not possess an unlimited budget I have to make do with whatever books I can get my hands on, and this was provided by Boris Pasternak.
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A recent escapade in hard drive recovery made me realise that I wasn't doing anywhere near enough to keep my system safe. Forget all about viruses and spyware and all the other computer-based threats; if your hard drive goes kaput then you are seriously screwed.
I looked into various backup software programs, but they all required me to spend considerable time burning DVDs. The best backup routine is one I don't need to think about. My attention then moved on to a secondary, and larger, hard drive that could be used to make an exact copy of my primary drive. No hassle, no fuss, and painless recovery should anything go wrong. That's the theory.
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I've been trying to learn Chinese for over half a year now and, well, it's kinda tough going. Not only do you need to learn a whole new way of speaking, but you also need to learn two written languages: pinyin (the English transliteration of Chinese words, so you can actually read anything), and Chinese characters themselves.
The spoken language is difficult in its own right due to tones. These are like the accents found in other languages, but more complicated and unfortunately much more important - getting the wrong tone in a word can change the meaning completely, to the extent that you could call your mother a horse by using the wrong inflection.
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I watched several movies over the weekend, courtesy of my flat mate making a bumper trip to the video rental store. His tastes could easily be described as eclectic - old romance, sci-fi, and Benny Hill are not an average choice.
Movie one was Woman Of The Year. This is a very old black and white movie starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and it falls squarely in the 'romantic comedy' category. Normally I make a quick retreat from such movies, but this was a lot of fun and certainly a lot better than most modern varieties.
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I watched two movies at the weekend and I still don't know what to think of them. The first was Roman Polanski's The Tenant. I've not watched many Polanski movies and even though I enjoyed my flat-mates story about meeting him at a wedding last year, he was always someone I heard a lot about, but never quite managed to see.
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While I appreciate the cultural significance1 of a band such as New Order, I was never much of a fan. Their music often sounded like it was made on a cheap Casio keyboard, or was the recorded drone from a tinnitus patient. There was never any incentive to investigate further, and this was reinforced by many years of suffering World In Motion - some say the high-point of English footballing music, but as I do not care for football then it just compounded my distaste for the whole subject.
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So what can be said about Apple’s latest product that hasn’t already been said in a thousand other reviews, and hasn’t been dissected in essays and dissertations across the world? Love them or hate them, Apple have managed to create a modern religion by fusing technology with style, and setting a price point high enough that it forces people to part with their money. People will, it seems, pay almost anything for something when it looks good, and when their friends have one.
The latest incarnation is the iPod shuffle, Apple's first flash-based player.
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