And it was all going so well until the punchline...

Still, if it gets American to vote for the person who might actually change something in the USA (and the world), then why the hell not...!

Gatchaman!

I am soooo excited about this. Once upon a time there was a Japanese animation called Science Ninja Team Gatchaman about 5 super-powered teenagers. Some Americans saw this, and hacked it about a bit (cutting out most of the violence and the sexual imagery and sticking in badly animated bits concerning an R2-D2 rip-off and his flying dog...) and called it Battle of the Planets, the kids show from the late '70s we all know and love. (It was also retooled into G-Force, and Eagle Riders, but that's another kettle of fish.)

Anyway, Imagi, the company behind the recent CGI Turtles movie, have been working away at a new, CGI version of Gatchaman, and here's the trailer. Don't blink, or you'll miss it. (BTW, that's Joe (Jason in BOTP)'s car, and then we glide up to see the Phoenix. Yum.)

On Imagi's website, you can also see some production shots, including one of Jun (Princess)'s booted legs and her yo-yo. No. that's not a euphemism.



If you want to learn more about the whole history of Gatchaman then get over to Home of the White Shadow for all you ever wanted to know. And boy, there's a lot...!

Liz McLarnon - Celebrity Masterchef 2008

Get in, Team Liz! Congratulations to Liz, who was yesterday crowned Celebrity Masterchef 2008. It's not often I make the right call here, but I got it right this time!

Expect Atomic Kitchen, the TV show anytime now. (Can I get a credit for the programme title, please?)

Atomic Kitchen!

Wow, a Sun style pun headline...

Anyway, Liz McLarnon (that's her on the left, looking very slinky), former (or current, can't remember if they've officially broken up) Atomic Kitten is doing very well indeed in the current series of Celebrity Masterchef on BBC One, despite having never cooked anything in an oven before she started on the programme. She's made it through to the final, and was said by John Torode and Gregg Wallace to have improved the most out of all the other competitors! Go Liz, go!

PS. I'm free to come over for dinner whenever you like, Liz...

Dr. Horrible' Sing-Along Blog

Right, read this, and then get your ass over to Dr. Horrible to see Joss Whedon's latest meisterwerk before it's too late (Sunday July 20th, to be precise). To while away the hours while there was a writers' strike on, Joss threw together this internet only (for the time being) musical supervillan story for US! Yes, You! So get over there and watch it. Buy the T-shirt, and quit moaning!

Time's almost up!

Yep, there's less than an hour to go before the final episode of Doctor Who's fourth season (except I'll have to tape it and watch it later...), and I'm getting well excited.

I had a quick hunt round the net to see if I could find out anything, but the Beeb seem to have got this locked down tighter than a tight thing on the tightest day of the week! All I could find were rumours and suppositions - like the Doctor's going to split into two and one's going off to the parallel world to be with Rose; Donna's a Time Lady; Harriet Jones is in league with the Daleks; the TARDIS will die and all manner of other weirdness. What ever happens, I'm sure it's going to be great.

I'm personally hoping for the return of Ace with a Big F'ing Gun!

RIP Stan Winston - Effects God

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film special effects pioneer dies: "Oscar-winning special effects expert Stan Winston, who created the creatures in films including Aliens and Jurassic Park, has died at the age of 62.
Winston, who also made the robots in Terminator, died at home in California surrounded by family on Sunday.
The film veteran had been battling multiple myeloma, a plasma cell cancer, for seven years, a representative of the Stan Winston Studio said.
He had worked with Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Tim Burton.
During his 40-year career, he became a pioneer of merging real-world effects with computer imaging.
California governor and former Terminator star Arnold Schwarzenegger said: 'The entertainment industry has lost a genius, and I lost one of my best friends.
'Stan's work and four Oscars speak for themselves and will live on forever.
'What will live forever in my heart is the way that Stan loved everyone and treated each of his friends like they were family.'
Winston won Oscars for his work on Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park.
He also received Oscar nominations for Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, AI, Predator and Heartbeeps."

Rest in Peace, Stan, you were a legend, and I thank you for bringing so much wonder into my life.

Oh Brother...

Yep, summer's here, and that means the return of Channel 4's Big Brother. This year there are 16, yes 16, wannabees, I mean, contestants, and to be honest with you, I got fed up with watching them all traipse in after we'd had about half of them.

The surprise thing is how "normal" most of them appear to be, as if the producers have finally given up trying to shoehorn as many "diverse" (ie. irritating) people in there as they can, but it's still early days.

The first four housemates have already been given their first secret mission - the two people that are a couple (Mario and Lisa) have got to pretend they're not a couple, and Mario has to pretend he's having a relationship with Stephanie, a 19 year-old student. If they succeed, they all are saved from the public vote, but if they fail, they face the vote along with their co-conspirator, Luke.... Thyey're bound to screw it up.

Here we go again...!

BBC NEWS | In Pictures | In pictures: BB9 housemates arrive

Indiana Jones and The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

Yes, I finally went to the cinema again! I think the last time I went was probably to see Casino Royale, so it's been a while...

Went to see the new Indiana Jones movie - can't be arsed to type all that again - and it was... okay. I thought some of the fight and, ahem, tomb raiding sections were fun, but I did think that the whole crystal skull malarkey was a bit ridiculous. Was it me, or did the Russian bad-lady (played just this side of evil Bond-villain by Cate Blanchett) already have an alien skull, and said there were two more in Russia already? In that case, why were there already twelve skulls in the temple/spaceship at the end? (Probably should have put a spoiler warning on this..) And what the hell actually happened at the end? (Well, I know, but, what the hell?)

Still, Harrison Ford was back on form as Indy (although he's aged gracefully, he can't quite manage as much action as he used to...) and the scenes he had with Shia La Beouf (silly name...) and Karen Allen (back as Marion Ravenwood) were fantastic. It was quite obvious that they're setting it all up so that Mutt (Shia) can take over his father's mantle (oops...)

It was nice to have Indy back, but it would have been nicer to have given him a better story. (Do things stop being magnetic just because they're in a sack?)

Happy Birthday, Uncle Roo!

30 today, how the years have flown by...!

Come to Sunny Harlow...

AND GET YOUR BLOODY WHEEL NICKED!

I'm Hijacking My Audio...

Gonna get all geeky on yo' ass now and say how much I love Audio Hijack Pro! You see, it allows you to not only hijack any audio stream on your Mac (DVDs, internet radio, anything with an audio stream really), but it's also the easiest way of recording old vinyl LPs and tapes that I've found.

I used to have to record the audio as one long file and then edit it, which took forever, but Audio Hijack Pro allows you to chuck the audio at it, it then listens out for suitable silences in the music and slices it into separate files ie. songs!

It also encodes it as either an MP3, or AAC file - whatever you want, so you don't have to encode it when you've finished. And then it chucks it into iTunes for you as well!

I had one long file with two songs in it (the silence wasn't long enough), but then I chucked it into AHP's sister program Fission, and sliced it and named the files in a couple of minutes. Brilliant. (As Danny Dog would say...)

I'm not paid by Rogue Amoeba the creators of Audio Hijack Pro and Fission, but I wholeheartedly endorse them!

I knew ITV1 shouldn't mess with these things...

So, ITV1 buys the rights to screen Pushing Daisies, the new series from Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls creator, Bryan Fuller. They showed the first episode last Saturday and it pulled in a reasonably respectable 5.7m viewers. I loved the show, and look forward to seeing the rest of the series...

...except we won't get to see all of it, because ITV1 only have 8 slots to show the programme before Euro 2008 coverage starts. Therefore they've taken the decision to drop Episode 2, as they figure it was the one we could live without - after all it only shows the early life of the main character, Ned, and how he discovered his resurrection power - nothing really important, I'm sure...

I wouldn't mind, except no home nation is taking part in Euro 2008... Oh, wait, I still wouldn't care!

The Curse of Facebook

That's it, I've been sucked in... Facebook has grabbed me and dragged me under. I'm even writing this blog entry in Facebook....

Must check profile, must look at friends' photos, must add applications, must... play... Pirates!

Must see if there is a Facebook addict group...

Matinée Club

Once upon a time, there were a bad called The Modern, and I thought they were rather good, when I heard their song "Suburban Culture" which was given away by iTunes as their Single of the Week. Eighties electro-pop, very Human League, with a diva-esque front woman called Emma (who once played the young Pat Butcher...) and a bloke with an odd voice called Chi.

Time went by, the band released a couple of singles, but the album never appeared, and their website seemed frozen. "Oh well," I thought, "another great band down the dumper before they've gone anywhere..."

And then today I checked their website to find that it had disappeared altogether. So I Googled them to find out what had happened, and it turns out that they've renamed themselves Matinée Club and have a new website (except it's a lot like the old The Modern website) at www.MatinéeClub.co.uk!

Not only that, but they've finally got around to releasing their album on iTunes, called Modern Industry. It contains most of their tracks as The Modern, plus some new ones (and a cover of David Bowie's "Modern Love")

There's more to the story, which you can find at Wikipedia if you're interested, or check out their MySpace page.

Back in Business!

The kinkyMachine is back!  Yes, I've got a brand new MacBook, and I'm gonna use it (for good and possibly for naughty, but probably not for evil.  That'd be wrong.)

It's soooooo cool!  I mean, my old iBook (500MHz Power PC) was about 6 years old, and compared to that, this new MacBook (2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo) is like hot poo!  Everything's so quick, from something simple like System Preferences, to the speed it took to import umpteen thousand photos into iPhoto (which is so much better than the older version I was using).

And the built-in Bluetooth actually works with my RAZR, so that's an added bonus.

Plus, I managed to set up a wireless network without even really trying.  Still not sure how I did it...

Plus Photo Booth is a laff!

Aargh!

Sorry everyone, but my iBook has finally died! I'm writing this at an Apple Store, so I've gotta be brief. If there are no more updates for a while, or you don't get emails from me then that's the reason. I'll try to be back ASAP!

Why can't things just work?

Time for a Dilbert-style "Gaaa!" I got a new mobile phone for Christmas - a Motorola V3 RAZR, mainly because my old Nokia was just embarrassing, a camera phone would come in handy every now and then and because I really wanted the theme to Battle of the Planets as my ringtone. So I thought, OK this phone looks good, it does MP3 ringtones, Bob's your uncle.

So I got the phone and thought, I'll just hook it up to my iBook with a USB cable, and transfer the files across. Nope. The phone is recognized as a USB device, but doesn't mount as a volume on the desktop. iSync sort of worked - it dumped a few random phone numbers on the phone with garbled names attached, but that wasn't too much of a problem, as my address book on my iBook is so out-of-date it's got Abraham Lincoln's IM name in it. The internet basically said that wasn't going to work, so I thought I should try the Bluetooth route.

I went to Argos and bought a cheapie Bluetooth-USB adaptor and plugged it in, thinking that that wouldn't work, but the little B logo appeared in the menu bar and the Bluetooth Set-up assistant did its thing. The iBook recognized the phone, the phone recognised the iBook, they paired up like Kylie and Jason, and everything seemed to be fine. And then I tried to send a file to the phone, but apparently the iBook was "Unable to Validate Device".

Bizarrely, I can send stuff from the phone to my iBook, but not the other way around...

No one on the internet seems to know the answer. I've even tried a program called Moto4Lin, which theoretically should allow access via a USB cable, but I keep getting a "phone is busy" error message (?).

And so the only way I can work out to get stuff onto my phone is by sticking it on the 'net and then using WAP to download it - at a cost.

And hence my "Gaaa!". But it's alright, 'cos my son Joseph has decided he'd like to eat my Bluetooth dongle...