It Makes My Day
Errant has written a very nice comparison of CI and Kohana, touching on almost every feature that I think makes Kohana great. It’s good to see an honest and down to earth review from an outsiders point of view.
Music Review - Daft Punk “Alive 2007″
Daft Punk’s latest release, a live recording from their latest tour, is a lot of things to a lot of people. For most, it’s the latest DP offering since Human After All was released in 2005. It’s much more for fans of the group in Paris, Daft Punk’s hometown: it’s the first live show performed in the city in a decade- sort of a strange fact. Either way, the album release is from their (naturally) well-received Paris performance. Read more
Flock (mostly) Rules.
So I have switched from Firefox to Flock recently. The reason is kind of interesting and ultimately ironic. See, I use(d) Netvibes as my start page for something around two years. Customizable, integrated podcast player, and handy widgets were the main reasons. I’ve heard people dismiss Netvibes as “too busy,” but for a guy with little-to-no life, I liked the busy feel. However, Firefox has some kind of bug or something- while Netvibes is loading the 50+ feeds across five tabs, if I try to do ANYTHING during that time, Firefox would crash. This includes clicking a feed item, changing tabs, marking any feed as read (something I started to do as I had less and less time to read all the feeds that I used to watch like a hawk when I was able to sit on the internet until 5 in the morning), opening a new tab separate from Netvibes, etc. It was lame, and it got on my nerves. On top of that, the memory leak problem (or fragmentation, or whatever) slowed my poor 1.4mhz Pentium M with 512MB of RAM to a crawl, and trying to do pretty much anything else after Firefox has been open for 15 minutes was unbearable.
I had tried Flock a while back and while I liked the idea, I didn’t think it was that great. But when I heard that the 1.0 beta was coming along, I decided to give it another shot. It had some new features, was supposedly more stable, and so on. So after using it for around two months, not only am I not going back to Firefox, but I don’t even use Netvibes anymore. Flock has managed to integrate almost everything I do into its interface. Here’s how/why I became a Flock convert: Read more
Opera Mini 4
Opera just released a new version of it’s mobile phone browser, Opera Mini 4. While Google itself does a pretty nice job of automatically adapting webpages to a mobile view, a couple of the features and user-friendly interface kept me returning to Opera Mini for certain webpages. The new features in Opera Mini 4 have already convinced me to use it for my full-time browsing, save for Twitter and Facebook, which already have great standalone mobile versions of their sites. So I thought I would go over some of the new version’s features, as well as old features that are still great. Read more
Music Review - Arctic Monkeys “Favourite Worst Nightmare”
The Arctic Monkeys follow up their hit debut CD with Favourite Worst Nightmare. The high points of Whatever I Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not were off-kilter hooks, subtle pop culture references, and an decidedly snarky attitude mixed with energetic hooks and catchy rhythms. Unfortunately, these are the kinds of things that are difficult to reproduce while still feeling fresh, and Favourite Worst Nightmare’s fatal flaw is that it has to follow such a solid first effort.
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Nintendo Wii Junior-Reviews
So when I’m not doing homework or watching Heroes, Dexter, Weeds, Stargate Atlantis, or Jericho, I’ve been playing my new Wii. I figured in an effort to get some content on this blog I would write some quick thoughts on what I’ve been playing, since I have been extremely irresponsible and picking up games left and right. Check’em out. Read more
Movie Review - The Host
Acclaimed South Korean director Joon-ho Bong is behind Gwoemul, the original title of The Host, South Korea’s most successful film of all time. Read more
Movie Review - The Last Mimzy
The Last Mimzy is the first great family film I’ve seen in years. It is well-written, has enough adult themes to keep parents interested, great special effects, and a fantastic team behind the cameras from the writers to the sound design. The story focuses on two children, Noah and Emma (played by newcomers Chris O’Neil & Rhiannon Leigh Wryn), who find a mysterious box on the beach filled with “toys” and stuffed rabbit. The twist? The toys are from the future, the rabbit (named Mimzy) talks to Emma, and it’s here to save humanity.
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Review: Melodrama by Vibe Tribe
I recently had the pleasure of getting a copy of Vibe Tribe’s first album, Melodrama.
The first few seconds of Melodrama, “Vinyla Sky”, start the album off with a nice ambient psy feel, and quickly progresses into sacred Vibe Tribe territory, flowing, liquid rhythms, composed of a wide range of synth and filtering. In the same fashion as Wise Cracks, there are no lyrics, just a constant ebb and flow of pure psychedelic sound, with a few key samples. Read more
Movie Review - Hot Fuzz
“Hot Fuzz” (2007) is one of those movies that is destined for B-rated classic humor, in the same way that Office Space, The Burbs, or Mystery Men are destined to be forgotten “those 2000s” movies.
Music Review - Queens of the Stone Age “Era Vulgaris”
Josh Homme and friends bring the ruckus with a gritty followup to Lullabies to Paralyze.
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