Posted by Ub3rG33k on Nov 30, 2010 in Apple, iPad, Tech
As with most things Apple, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an iPad since I knew of their existence, however was always put off by the lack of multi tasking, however the recent release of iOS 4.2.1 has fixed that problem.
In the recent tech news, there are already a lot of rumours flying around about the iPad 2, suggesting it will have a USB port, a front facing camera, a rear 8 Megapixel camera, carbon fibre back, etc etc. With all these reports, and the release of the new OS, the iPad is back onto my radar.
Tonight (thanks to Tony Lunn), I bought one !….now don’t start saying, “Ooo, did Tony buy you one, what a nice guy ?”, it was due to him I couldn’t resist and bought one.
So here’s how it happened, Text from Tony around 6ish “I’ve been offered a iPad for x amount, what do you recon ?”, I then spent the next 30 mins googling to see what prices they were going for……somehow ended up with one in my basket, then checked the opening times and the nearest store with stock (turned out to be the Leicester store of Comet), jump in the car, drove to Leicester, got lost, spend 20 minutes running through Leicester trying to find the place…..and finally walked out of Comet, 5 minutes before it was closing with a shiny iPad and case.
So, how is it ?…..it’s bloody lovely !
As you know, I’ve got an iPhone 4, had the iPhone 3GS before that, before that had the iPod Touch 2nd Gen….this is the next step up the evolutionary chain.
It does, (as you would expect) everything any other iOS Device does, but just on a bigger screen. To be honest, seeing the difference between the iPhone 3GS screen and the iPhone 4, I was a little worried how this screen would look in comparison to the retina display, but have to say I’m very impressed !, It’s sharp, bright, and everything you would expect from an Apple product.
The model I went for was the 16GB Wi-Fi model, as I plan on buying the next gen when it comes out. Not wanting to scratch it, I also bought the official iPad case thingy with it, which as you can imagine, fits like a glove
When I’ve had a good play with it, I’ll update the post, but for now, it’s play time
Well, I’m honored to say, that I have finally seen the one of my most anticipated films of this year. This film is brought to you by the guys over at the Suckcast podcast. Just a little history before we start on the film, I was made aware of the Suckcast podcast when they tweeted the RedDwarfForum twitter account saying they were liking the ScutterCast podcast, back then we were getting quite a lot of flak due to poor editing, poor preparation, and just generally doing a poor podcast. I initially assumed that it was somebody else taking the piss out of us, especially with the name of Suckcast, and our podcast being called Scuttercast (there was method in my madness).
After doing a little bit of googling, I found that they also did a podcast, named “The Suckcast“, and decided to give it a listen, What a podcast !….I’ve downloaded every episode since and each episode makes me laugh out loud, a number of times.
The podcasts hosts are Man Guy (Dan Guy), The Herman (William Stendeback) and Cory (Cory Eskkridge Okouchi), each week they discuss their week, and discuss a movie they have watched that week and just generally have a laugh while doing it, you can tell by their synergy, they enjoy each others company, and enjoy doing the podcast.
At the beginning and end of each podcast they mention their sponsors, Ninjas Vs Zombies. Again after a little googling, I found that the movie is their own baby ! How awesome !, unfortunately they are still waiting for a publisher to take them on, so the chances of me ever getting to see their creation was starting to look bleak. Out of the blue a couple of episodes ago, Cory said that if anybody wanted a copy of the movie, to email in and he’s try to sort something out, so obviously I emailed in.
Anyway that’s the back story out of the way, now lets get to the film itself !
Is this film going to win any Oscars ? Nope.
Does this film have mindblowing visuals that make Avatar look like the first episode of the Simpsons ? Nope.
Does this film have martial arts that would show Bruce Lee a thing or two ? Nope.
Is this a fun, easy watching, laddish film ? Hell Yeah !!!
How do I know ? Because my other half sat playing on her Blackberry all the way through it, asking how long it had left, because she was bored
The basic movie plot is that Randall (Dan Guy), is interrupted while attempting to bring his brother Eric (PJ Megaw) back from the dead by Herman (William Stendeback), who is banging on the comic book stores (assume that Randall works their), as he’s want to play their weekly game of Dungeons and Dragons. This results in a botched resurrection that does brings back his brother, however he suck the souls of the living to survive. Each person he sucks a soul from, turns into a flesh eating zombie.
As the film goes on, Eric gets a taste for the soul sucking, hence resulting in an army of flesh eating zombie terrorizing the neighbourhood. With no way, and no hope of defeating Eric and the zombies, Cole (Cory Eskridge Okouchi), Kyle (Daniel Ross), Fitz (Daniel Mascarello), and Randell are granted super ninja powers to help defeat Eric, and rid the world of the zombies.
From this point on, (and without spoiling the film for anyone) it’s essentially a fight between Ninjas and Zombie !
So how was it ?…well it was a fun movie, when I initially saw the trailer, the first thing that came to my head was one of Peter Jacksons first films “Bad Taste“, an overly gory film with just so much heart and soul, it’s one of those films you just don’t get bored of. I’m glad to say that Ninjas Vs Zombies didn’t disappoint, the film had a decent story, decent acting, and to be honest really good special effects as this seems to have been made on a shoe string budget. The “soul sucking” scenes, and the fireballs that Randell can conjure really wouldn’t look out of place in a Hollywood blockbuster !
Was the film predictable ?…well it was a good guys vs bad guy film, and there are very few where the good guys lose
I have to say, the homages to the great films out there were amazing, it felt like a little game after a while, every few minutes I was turning to the missus and saying “ooooo, look, that’s the Turtles”, or one of the other films they paid homage too. I’m not 100%, but I seem to remember thinking a lot of the fighting moves were either from Mortal Kombat, or Street Fighter…I may be totally wrong, but that what they reminded me of.
Did it have any nudity ?…Yeah, but only for a split second, if anybody has listened to the Suckcast, you’ll know why I was a little shocked to only see a split second of nudity
Would I watch it again ? Already have, and it gets more enjoyable with each watch, it’s going to be one of “those films” I think ?
Would I have changed anything ? No, not really, there were a few points in the film where the comedy timing was a little out, apart from that much fighting, much gore, loved it.
All in all a great movie, if your looking for Hollywood blockbuster, with great depth and millions of pounds of special effects, then this movie isn’t for you, if you are looking for a low budget, gory, fun moving, then this is the film for you.
I think the current score on IMDB of 6.7/10 is totally justified, I just hope a publisher takes them on, so the rest of the world can see this great movie.
I’ve decided to give Windows 7 another go, as there have been a few driver updates. This time in changed my SATA2 drive to Native mode instead of AHCI, and the install went flawless.
Once up, Windows downloaded 5 updates, and had 4 additional drivers for my Bluetooth dongle, Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit LAN, ATI 2900 Graphics card, Razer Copperhead gaming mouse.
The spec of my machine is as follows
ASUS M2R32-MVP
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
4Gb OCZ 6400 Memory
ATI 1Gb HD2900 XT PCI-e
1 x 500Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drive
2 x 250Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drives
1 x Pioneer 112 DVD-RW (Again wiped out the Pioneer 212 SATA drive as this again caused issues)
Onboard ADI 1988A Soundcard (Wiped out the SoundBlaster Xtreme Gamer sound card, don’t ask !)
Acer AL2216 Monitor
Acer AL1916 Monitor
Razer Copperhead Gaming Mouse
Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard
Creative 5.1 Surround speakers.
Windows 7 now works fine, with the new driver updates, and the download of the Logitech G15 driver and utility, everything seems smooth. I did however have a problem where every 5 minutes or so, Windows would give me a BSOD with a tdx.sys error message, however after a little bit of googling, it seems Windows 7 has a problem with AVG Free anti-virus.
Granted I was only up and running for a few hours last night, but I did a little bit of testing.
Steam, worked fine, all games apart from World of Goo seemed to work ok, apart from all games being at a status of “Download Started…”
Warcraft worked fine, infact better than fine, I saw an increase of over 20 frames per second.
Itunes, worked flawlessly
Left 4 Dead work, and worked very well, without a glitch
Gadgets I’ve tried, and worked.
WhetherBug
Multi Meter (D)
Network Meter v2.1
GMail Checker
Utorrent Gadget
Now this is running fine on my main machine, I will create further blogs as I decide if I love/hate Microsoft’s latest operating system. So far I think it’s quicker, uses resources better, is stable, however it’s still early days.
I would like to point out that I have a lot of 720p content on my NAS drive, and without installing any video or audio codec, it played the videos straight out of the box, very impressive
