1408 – A failed film review

So, I’m currently sitting through the end credits of 1408 and I thought I would share my opinions on the film.

tl;dr – Worth watching, not immediately scary but leaves you with that skin crawling effect any good psychological horror should.

Overall the film is quite good and I enjoyed it, I can certainly see people finding the fear factor they are looking for from it. The film uses little of the sudden fright scare tactics a lot of films use to purvey fear and instead merely documents the protagonist’s decent into madness providing a more psychological thrill.

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Dry spell

Successful blogging… yeah. So I’ve not really had anything worth blogging about lately, I’ve not had any enthusiasm for anything. I was looking at writing a Minecraft server/client, but the latest update implements a load of stuff I was planning on implementing to make my server worth using and it’s kinda killed what little drive I had to do it. The Gamecube project kinda got rail-roaded by my getting pissed off with using my laptop on the floor and having no furniture in my house so I have no where to do it now due to the level of crap on my only table.

In better news though I have a new job to start next week, beaming films into cinemas from space! At least it sounds more epic like that, I’m moving to another form of support, but hopefully more enjoyable and with a much bigger pay cheque which is not half bad. This weekend I’m being taken to look at houses which is a bit of a weird thing for me. My Dad’s bank pension is being paid out and he’s giving me some money towards a house which is awesome and mortgages work out much cheaper than rent it seems.

Hopefully after this week I’ll be able to do something constructive in my spare time, rather than playing Minecraft. Our server is pretty epic though even if I do spend far too long on there. View a map here!

Some thoughts on layout

So bread took up most of today. Scratch that, sleep, not being arsed to get out of bed and bread took up most of today. In that order. Decreasing order.

But, I did do some thinking about how I’m going to lay out this portable GameCube. My vision of what it should look like is something like this image on the right, and I think its going to be pretty close.

Some rough estimates look like I should be able to get another 2 battery packs in there so 9.6Ah * 3 = 28.8Ah? Should be good anyway, the GameCube power supply says 3.25A at 12V so should be looking at around 8-9 hours battery life, which in all honesty, is pretty good but that doesn’t take into account the LCD.

Still it is going to be pretty bulky and these extra battery packs are really just there because there is going to be space. Issue is, I really want it to have the disc drive central on the back. Sorta like the… well completely like the PSP did, essentially this is what I’m aiming for. That’s what takes up the space, clearly if I put the disc drive to one side and just had the one battery it’d be only just bigger than the screen.

Anyway as you can see from the photo it’s going to be a little… wide, especially with the controller halfs on the sides. Not too bad though, its about 2 inches either side of the screen before the controller and it does allow for the extra batterys. Biggest bonus though is its going to be pretty thin… comparatively, not much more than the controller, this was my biggest fear initially that you’d have the controller and about 3 inches back from that as more case.

As an aside of sorts I found a while back something I’m really not trying to make: The Ccube. The successor to that actually looks pretty swish, if a bit pricey at 800-1000USD (I assume US) seeing as you can pick up everything I’ve got for under 100 quid and my battery life is going to be excessively more than that one’s.

Putting a Bun in the Oven… and 7 more

Had to.

Anyway, I baked some rolls today, and learnt some important lessons.

So, pretty epic eh?

Anyway, I wanted to make rolls because I cannot find, anywhere I’ve spent the time to look, crusty rolls. They always sell these nasty, solid, soft outer rolls that I don’t like. My issue with rolls is theres too much bread, so a nice crusty shell sorta breaks it up a bit, that and light and airy inside is good too.

Unfortunately these rolls didn’t go super well. Well they are pretty epic, I just had some kitchen equipment issues. So lessons learnt:

Lesson 1: I really need to clean my oven… its not that its really dirty, theres just some oil/fat/something at the bottom that vaporises when I cook anything in there, probably because I never really use a baking tray, which leads onto…

Lesson 2: I need baking trays if I’m going to keep baking stuff, also for pizzas and other things too. I spent maybe 30 minutes today cleaning the wire racks in the oven because I don’t have baking trays to put the rolls on, and it’s not the best thing ever to use for this reason:

Yeah, so bread dough on a rack tend to sorta fall through and re-form on the other side, I had to pull some of the rolls off and push others back through the gaps… good thing i cleaned them pretty well.

Lesson 3: Ovens get really hot, my right hand is killing me from stupid burns. I managed to get one at work when i decided to catch a soldering iron, but that wasn’t too bad, in the fleshy bit of the palm by your thumb. But picking up a hot wire rack with a tea towel, not good. The tea towel was damp, folded up lots and I still managed to quite badly burn my middle finger and thumb on my right hand.

Lesson 4: My cooking is amazing.
Well not so much a lesson, I already knew this, but it can be a lesson for you. Don’t be taking me on in the kitchen, my food is epic even when I fuck it up… maybe even especially when I mess it up… maybe not that last one.

What is up with internet providing companies

I’ve spent the last 2 hours trying to get this to work how I want, a job that if i had direct access to the machine in any form would have taken 10 mintues. From 1&1’s bastardised admin tools to BT blocking my site for some reason it’s been a nightmare. Whilst I can understand why they make this stuff hard to do look at 123-reg, its a shitty form ok, but it’s direct access to the DNS registration you’ve bought, and at the end of the day, you’ve paid for the domain, why can’t you access the proper DNS record information.
And BT, don’t even. Seriously, what is with blocking sites at random… I can’t even connect with FTP or SFTP it’s ridiculous, that and they put their own fake 404 response, so if they want to block a website from you, they just throw their 404 page at you and there aint a thing you can do about it… except tunnel through an external computer of course, which is what I’m doing now.

Oh, I was going to post some lovely pictures of disassembling the GameCube but BT fucked that one in the ass, going to sleep now instead.

Socks, WTF

Seriously, WTF is with socks. They never pair, I have a pile of unmatched socks and there’s no second sock to go with any of them. At all. It’s not like I’ve found an odd sock and thrown it away, that’s what the pile is for. Still, every month it gets bigger even though there’s nowhere for the socks to have gone. I’m always having to buy more socks so I have pairs but since I don’t throw any away where are the others going?

I can only assume there is an evil cartel between sock and washing machine manufacturers to have the washing machine completely destroy socks on occasion so you always have to buy new socks and so endlessly fuelling the capitalist machine, or something like that anyway. So after I’ve done my washing tomorrow and searched this entire house/flat/duplex thing for any sock I can find, 20 odd socks are going in the bin. I will have only pairs, and only socks without holes in. More than likely I will be buying a new pack of socks by the end of the week when I run out.

On anther note, successful blogging here, 6 months between posting. See you in August I guess!