In Bruges

After a friend’s recommendation I watched In Bruges the other night and I really liked the movie a lot. The story starts with two hitmen arriving in the Belgian city of Bruges where they’re supposed to await further instructions. It subsequently turns out that Ray, the younger one of them (played by Colin Farrell), had accidently killed a young boy during his previous job. After a couple of days his older colleague Ken (Brendan Gleeson) receives orders by their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) to kill Ray. Amidst the unfolding story Ray meets two very interesting characters: Chloë, a Belgian girl and Jimmy, a dwarf actor.

The film works incredibly well due to the interesting combination of very unique people, the excellent acting, the quiet backdrop of Bruges and the three unique main characters portrayed by Farrell, Gleeson and Fiennes. Definitely a well recommended movie, though some viewer discretion is advised as the f-word is used quite extensively (126 times according to IMDB) and there’s one scene towards the end that might be hard to stomach for some people.

The International

I went to see The International tonight after reading quite a lot about the film’s opening during the Berlin International Film Festival in early February. Plus being a big fan of director Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and actor Clive Owen helped in the decision to watch this movie during a time when the list of interesting movies currently in the cinemas is ridiculously long.

Anyway, while the story is off to somewhat of a slow start the pace picks up after about 35 minutes and goes on to include some truly great action scenes and very nice locations for the unfolding plot. The highlight is undoubtedly an extensive shootout in New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The film also makes great use of the locations such as Berlin, NYC and Istanbul the characters visit. Plus there are two relatively slow on-foot chases which are a nice change from the insanely-fast-cut action sequences one sees way too often.

Apart from the slow start the only slight downside of The International are some of the dialogues. Often they look like the actors / characters are trying too hard which makes things look overly artificial.

All in all this was a very enjoyable movie and definitely among the better action flicks I’ve seen in the past year or so.

Base System @ XKCD

I have previously mentioned some XKCD comics that I really liked and this one here is no exception. In fact I would say it’s probably one of the funniest ones I’ve seen in a long time! :-)

William Gibson Quote

I had previously mentioned reading William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” during the Christmas holidays and today I finally managed to take a closer look at his Wikipedia entry. From there I was lead to his Web site where I stumbled across one of the greatest  quotes I’ve seen in quite some time:

“I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”

Wanted: my next laptop

After 4 years my trusted Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M1425W is slowly but surely reaching the end of its lifespan. It’s been a great companion and there have been few days since December 2004 when I didn’t use it.

However all good memories and emotions aside I can’t help but notice that there’s been a fair bit of progress when it comes to mobile computing, all the while my laptop is showing its signs of aging, most annoyingly in the form of a 40 minute battery-life (if I’m lucky that is).

Thanks to the excellent work that Sascha, Steve and Joanna (of netbooknews.de, umpcportal.com and laptopmag.com respectively) are doing of covering the netbook, UMPC, MID and broader laptop market I consider myself quite well informed when it comes to the latest trends and the greatest products in that area.

So naturally I’ve been drooling over devices such as the OQO 2+, Samsung NC10 and CTL 2go Convertible Classmate PC at one point or another. However after some soul-searching I realized that a netbook or other ultra-mobile computing solution wouldn’t cut it for me and that I definitely want something with more oomph.

First of all I feel that my iPod touch and OLPC XO (which I got via the “Spend 90% of your spare time contributing to One Laptop Per Child, Get 1” program;-) combined with the Nokia 6120 smart-phone are doing a pretty good job of supporting me in my digital-life while I’m away from the desktop. In fact I’d go as far as saying that I’m connected enough as it is and over the past few years I’ve come to enjoy the natural downtimes that do occur every now and then.

Secondly, while I do tend to travel a fair bit each year it’s not like I’m constantly on-the-road where every 200 grams of device weight and 10min of battery life count. Though what I do know is that my current 15.4” laptop with its 40min battery life is simply both too heavy and short-lived to do much good when I’m away from home.

Thirdly, while a lot of people are talking about cloud computing, software-as-a-service and all those buzzwords I’m personally still very much about my local processing power and locally stored data. So neither a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor nor a 160GB hard-drive are going to cut it for me.

Now that I’ve established what I don’t want the issue is to define what I do want:

Reasonable processing power: I don’t need a quad-core system but a dual-core >2.2GHz is definitely something I’m looking for. In terms of RAM 2GB are the minimum but I’d rather have 4GB.

The graphic sub-system is one of the more difficult decisions. Most days I’m happy with anything integrated but looking into the future I definitely want a GPU with decent high-definition encoding support. Plus every now and then I do like to play a game at a LAN session so for those moments a dedicated graphics solution would be useful. One way to solve this would be to go for one of those hybrid solutions which are switchable between low-power integrated and higher-power dedicated GPU.

The next - and maybe most important – decision is the display-size which obviously also impacts the general form-factor. Anything below 12.1” is too small and once you go above 14.1” the devices tend to become too bulky and heavy. Also in terms of resolution I’m torn between 1280x800 and 1440x900. The one thing I do know is that the display should really have a LED backlight, I honestly don’t understand why anyone still uses CCFLs. Plus I still prefer the non-glossy displays even though in this day and age one often doesn’t have that option anymore.

In terms of battery-life anything over 3.5~4 hours of typical use would make me happy. Other interesting would-be-nice features are bluetooth and a 3G option. Oh, and the laptop should also be relatively quiet when not pushed too hard.

With these requirements in mind and after looking around for a bit I’m currently quite interested in Dell’s XPS M1330. Lenovo’s X200 and Lenovo’s T400.

My final decision will also be influenced by what the u:book - an initiative by universities around here to offer high-quality laptops with often impressive student rebates twice a year – options are in late February.

I’ll keep you posted on my decision and please do let me know if you know of any products that might be of interest to me.

My personal Macworld 2009 highlight…

While everyone seems to focus on the relative lack of news coming from today’s Macworld keynote I’m personally quite intrigued by one of the things shown off there: the Keynote remote app. This small app allows you to control Keynote slide-shows via your iPhone / iPod touch.

[photo via Engadget]

I’ve done a handful of presentations about OLPC in 2008 and have therefore spent some time thinking about the best way to give these kinds of talks. One thing that personally always bugs me when watching presentations (mostly at university) is the person giving the talk being hidden behind his/her notebook. The most popular alternative, walking around and then returning to the notebook to switch to the next slide, isn’t all that great either. Plus I’ve given at least one presentation where my notebook had to be hooked up to the beamer all the way in the back of the room which would have made switching to the next slide a real pain in the rear.

Remote controls to the rescue! While the Macintosh owners out there have been able to use the small Front Row remote included with their computers for this purpose for quite some time the majority of users (myself included) have to look for alternatives elsewhere. After some research I stumbled across the Nokia Wireless Presenter which gives me some basic controls over my slideshows via my Symbian S60 mobile phone connected to my laptop via Bluetooth.

However looking at the photos  of the Keynote remote app I can’t help but feel somewhat jealous. Having things like the notes to the current slide on there for example is a really nice feature. Other useful information I can think of would be a timer to tell you how long you’ve spoken and some of the other things you get to see when you use the presenter’s mode on Keynote or PowerPoint. Because what’s the point of having a remote if you have to walk back to look at your laptop’s screen for all that other information?

So, Apple, please also make the Keynote remote app work with Windows and PowerPoint. I’d even pay for such an app!

It's a Free World...

Boy, do I hate it when I go to the cinema and see a movie that really disappoints me…

I went to see It’s a Free World… and I can’t for the love of God understand why that film has an IMDB rating of 7.1. At best I would give it 5-something. I’ve seen a bunch of not-so-great movies over the past 12 months or so but I’ve hardly ever been as disappointed as when I walked out of the cinema tonight.

Seriously, on how many levels can you mess up a movie? The main character was simply appalling and superficial, the acting was less than impressive and even if those two things had worked the core of the story remains utterly questionable.

The basic story is quite simple and does have potential (IMHO): a young woman called Angie losses her job working for a British employment agency hiring Polish men and women to work in the U.K. Then she decides to start a similar business together with a flat mate, subsequently turning into a real a**hole on oh-so-many levels. She neglects her son, doesn’t take meaningful advice from her parents and, worst of all, treats the workers she hooks up to job like s***. The consequence of her actions is a serious mess of a life to say the least.

Oddly enough the movie is somehow based on the premise of the viewer connecting with the young women, yet I can’t remember ever seeing a character in a movie that was so unsympathetic. As one of my friends with who I watched the movie put it: Vito Corleone from The Godfather was a nice fellow compared to her. I’d go as far as saying that Nicky Santoro from Casino was portrayed  as a more likable character.

The thing is that even if “Angie” had been a character to connect with  the focus of the movie would have been questionable to say the least. Foreign workers (both legal and illegal) being abused by European individuals, companies and the (often informal) structure set up to support said abuse in itself is a very interesting and important topic. But why-oh-why focus on a small fish in the sea and her shallow excuses for profiting of other people’s misery? Should that be some sort of grand excuse or justification? Why not tell the story of one of these workers and their families instead? Or look at what the life of Karol, a Polish guy Angie grows quite fond of, is like instead of merely using him as a support-character of some sort.

At the end of the day I can’t help but feel that at least part of the description on the movie’s German Web site is accurate in that It’s a Free World demonstrates some of the worst kind of the Old Europe way of thinking that’s unfortunately still prevalent and therefore a “current yet timeless story.”

*sigh*