Piano-pop music (a bit similar to Ben Folds). Really like the album, but the incessant repetition of some of the lyrics goes on my nerves, as do the Hallelujahs.
Stand-outs: Dance Anthem of the 80’s, Eet, The Calculation.
Other music I’ve recently picked up:
65daysofstatic – The Fall of Math
The Tings Tings – We Started Nothing
Anna Ternheim –Â Seperation Road
Laura Marling – Alas I Cannot Swim
While solid-state drives (SSDs) seem to be all the rage in net-/laptops at the moment, most of their advantages (mostly negligible access times) also make sense for a desktop system, whereas their disadvantages (price / small size) are not as constricting as you can have multiple physical discs in a desktop system.
I’ve bought a 64GB SLC SSD drive in a 3.5″ SATA version for my Mac Pro and use it solely as an OS and applications drive, while my home-directory (where the bulk of my data obviously sits) is still on a normal, spacious hard-drive. The speed-up (in spite of Mac OS X’s already quite fast boot / application start-up times) is very noticeable.
The OS migration from the HDD to the SDD was very painless. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything but my username’s home directory, rebooted from the SSD, logged in as the user with administration privileges (which your everyday user account shouldn’t have) and changed the home-directory for my non-admin user (under System Preferences – Accounts – Right-Click on the account – Advanced Options – Home Directory).
Almost all applications (baring Xcode) cold-start approximately half-way through the first Dock-icon bounce and World of Warcraft flies with this setup. 🙂
If I didn’t need more than 64GB total space on my MacBook Pro, I’d also fit it with such an SSD drive without hesitation. But as it is, I need more space. Alas, when the next laptop is on the horizon I can definitely see myself shelling out for an SSD upgrade. Maybe mainboards should come with something like 64GB of on-board flash for use as operating system and application drive…
PuzzleManiak €3.99 – includes a lot of Nikoli puzzle games (in fact most of the ones from here are in there), all are randomly generated with different difficulty levels and includes a daily Web Challenge where you compete against other’s times. Worth it alone for Slitherlink.
Vexed €0.79 – Good port of the Palm OS game including all level-packs.
I’m still looking for a version of Sherlock (Windows) or Hercule (Palm OS) for the iPhone…
Fairly short book, and about 3 quarters of it feel like exposition (although there’s plenty of things happening) and build-up, but it covers a lot of ground; a fair amount of it in flashbacks. Nevertheless, it ends in a nice, satisfying climax. It’s fairly unflinching in both its violence and sex (homo- as well as heterosexual).
If you like Morgan’s SF books, you’ll enjoy this as well.
This is gonna be a bit of a rant…
Still, the Hyperion Cantos (which I enjoyed quite a lot) had similar faults.
As usaul, hard SF-ish. Gives a very good impression of time- and space-implications of galaxy-wide colonisation using relativistic travel. There’s a reveal about two-thirds in (complete with “sit down for this”) which on first thought is a bit “meh!”, but nevertheless has very far-reaching consequences which only become obvious a bit later. Also, I don’t quite see the point of the Palatial side-story. Nevertheless, an enjoyable and gripping read, but not quite as good as Reynolds’ other books IMO.
An amazing movie. Very enjoyable, but slightly fragmented (with many fades to black separating scenes) and very surreal.
I’m a bit sad that many people won’t bother with the film because it seems to make very little sense in the beginning (and not too much more explicit sense in the end); it’s more like a collage of emotions at times.
The art style takes some getting used to, it is similar to Ping Pong from the same mangaka — which also has an excellent live action adaptation which I cannot recommend heartily enough; it evokes many of the same feeling that Tekkon Kinkreet does.
Technically, the 2D animation has a rather low frame-rate at times (and I’m not sure I like the motion-blur post-processing in that context), but the excellent backgrounds and superb 3D animation (which managed to never feel separate) are more than making up for that.
Last but not least, the soundtrack (although sparse) by Plaid fits perfectly.
Truly a high point for animated films this year!