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The BBC has announced that Sir Michael Gambon (of The Singing Detective and lately as the second Dumbledore) will be appearing in this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special. Word is it’ll be some play on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Even though it’s less than a month since I scrubbed Windows 7 from my Macbook Pro, the infestation has returned thanks to those devious bastards at the Steam store.
(My language is harmless hyperbole. Mostly.)
A minor thing that was disproportionately bothering me was the difference between the colo(u)r profile under OS X and Windows 7. Under OS X everything looked beautiful. Under Windows 7, everything looked blue. Fortunately the Internet was invented in order to solve this exact, precise, specific problem (and can now be packed up and sent back to the manufacturer for dismantling and recycling).
Some kind soul named Simon on the NeoWin forums has laid out some instructions here for how to share a colo(u)r profile between OS X and Windows 7. It worked a treat.
When you’re talking about a series of films based on a wildly popular series of books which, when the producers ran out of books to make films of, decided to simply split the final book into two films, complaining about their decision to also screen these final two films in 3D is perhaps being a bit rich. I won’t let that stop me however.
Warner Brothers has released a trailer for the final two Harry Potter films, and it looks great. They seem to really be sticking to their cover story for the two-film trick, and including as much of the book’s set-pieces as they can. Though this is the first I’m hearing of it (also the first I’m paying the slightest amount of attention to it), the announcement that the films would be in 3D came in January, as Hollywood was shitting itself over the insane amount of money Avatar was pulling in.
While I enjoyed that film (less so the headache it gave me), it was a native 3D production. Unless they were just sitting on the announcement throughout the two films’ 54-week shoot, it seems a safe bet that Deathly Hallows will be a victim of the 3D conversion process that studios are going nuts over at the moment. So while I hate 3D exactly as much as I hate month-long headaches, there remains the strong possibility that when I go to see it in its original (correct) 2D presentation, I won’t be subjected to shots that serve little purpose but to show off a 3D effect.
I repeat the acknowledgement that yes, I am complaining that a couple of films that are already incredibly commercial are falling victim to more crass commercialism. But barring the first two lifeless efforts from Chris Columbus, it has been a very enjoyable (if highly nonsensical) series of commercial products.
I can not be bothered looking at a calendar, but it has probably been over a week now since I switched to Safari 5. Its release coincided with my formatting my MBP, and that always gives me the urge to change how I use my computer. Here are my impressions:
Speaking as a consumer, extensions are excellent. Safari finally has a viable ad-blocking solution, and thus is finally a viable browser. I spent about an hour browsing the web prior to installing AdBlock and the level of obnoxiousness web ads have reached is astounding. Perhaps as a user of AdBlock I’m partly to blame for this. I think there’s a better solution. There are sites I place on the AdBlock whitelist. Good content, good ads - I have no problem supporting that.
Some kind fellow has set up a Safari Extensions blog, which takes all comers. Until Apple gets their act together with a gallery of their own, this is incredibly useful.Stability is a huge plus. I’m coming from Firefox, which did not lack for add-ons and features, but which crashed regularly. I have had one crash since switching, and no prizes for guessing which plug-in was involved there.
Tabs are still a pain. It is my own fault that I have too many of them open, but I’m not wild about Safari’s solution to the problem. Or anyone else’s, really. Firefox ends up scrolling through tabs. Chrome just keeps squashing the tabs together until it can squash them no further, and the tabs just disappear off the right of the window.
The solution is clearly to not open so many damn tabs. I’d love to see something similar to MobileSafari’s take on ‘tabs’ in a desktop browser though.