Awesome band I'd never heard of - The Jezabels

I'm loving Australian indie band the Jezabels 

I'd love to grab some of their tunes but they seem to be Oz only unless you use the evil that is iTunes

Check out some tunes in this nifty player

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<img style="visibility:hidden;width:0px;height:0px;" border=0 width=0 height=0 src=" "/>

<img height="1" width="1" border="0" src="http://a.triggit.com/px?u=reverbnation&rtv=545740wd,Alternative,Folk%20Rock,Indie%20Pop" />

Red 5 Mic

The Red 5 RV8 microphone I ordered just arrived 

So far I'm very impressed. The mic seems well made and it came with a decent flight case and shock mount thrown in. 

I've been wanting to get my hands on a large diaphragm  condenser mic for ages, but I haven't had the excuse until now.

I'm planning to podcast some of my up and coming articles for http://www.easyeartraining.com/ so you will be able to hear the fruits of my labours very soon.

I'll share some thoughts once I try it out.

The Playstation Phone

After much rumour and innuendo it looks like Engadget has scooped a photograph of the upcoming Playstation phone.

 http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/27/the-playstation-phone-is-still-real/

I'm hoping that it's rather less of an unmitigated disaster than the PSP Go. Sony are still more than capable of making devices that press all the correct fan boy buttons (I love my PS3), but the Xperia X10 made me want to stamp on it after a few minutes. Comparing it to the Galaxy S and the Desire (HD or otherwise) it's actually impressive how they have managed to make such an entirely dreadful phone out of almost exactly the same components.

I don't know why I am clinging on to the vain hope that the combination of a failed variant of a long in the tooth portable and a phone that I actively dislike, will be the answer to all my portable woes. My HTC Hero has been an excellent companion for the past year and it seems very likely that the Desire HD will be its replacement when my contract expires, but a device as shiney and pleasing as a PS3 could sway my decision. 

Infamous Review

I haven’t written a review (or indeed anything) on the blog for a while as I have been concentrating my written output on Easy Ear Training, but I recently completed Infamous on the PS3 and got to thinking that it was an awesome game with a few flaws which is the most interesting kind of game to review. Couple that with the fact that it is featured in Sony’s new Playstation Plus promotion and Infamous 2 is on the way and I figured it was ripe for some comments.
I guess if you are reading this you probably have an idea of the plot, but for those of you that don’t you play the part of Cole a courier who has suffered the inconvenience of having the package he was delivering explode destroying half the city and equipping him with super powers. He awakens some time later in a city which has been quarantined by the government and taken over by violent super powered gangs. The city is roughly based on Manhattan and is split into three islands which become available as the game progresses. Playing as our hero you must kick vast amounts of ass in a third person, open world, shooter, come parkour influenced platformer where you complete story missions and optional side missions indicated by flags on the map. “Wait a darned minute” you quite rightly say. Isn’t that like just about every other game I’ve played for the last five years?
Well pretty much, but there’s a twist. Cole has power over electricity but he doesn’t generate it himself he is instead reliant on the power grid of the city for his powers. Initially armed with a peashooter lightning bolt charging yourself up from overhead power lines, generators and streetlights heals you and grants you access to all manner of additional powers such as lightning grenades and force fields. The only thing that stands in your way of a baddy zapping party time is the unfortunate fact that most of the cities grid has been knocked out in the explosion. Arriving on an island for the first time you are presented with violent gangs on every street corner and no power to juice yourself up with. Many of the main quests revolve around restoring the cities infrastructure by locating fixing substations. This is a very cool element of play as the increasing power in the grid provides a very natural way to grant the player new and awesome powers like surfing on power lines or gliding on static which are usually required from that point on to complete missions. The side quests tackle the gang side of the equation. Each mission is given to you by a needy member of the public and completing it marks that area of the map as your territory meaning enemies are less likely to appear there. This is a cool game mechanic, but has one obvious downside. When you get to a new location you are well and truly under the cosh with bullets coming from rooftops all around and few opportunities to recharge, but as you complete missions you become stronger, face less opposition and are never more than a few meters away from life giving power meaning on medium difficulty you can pretty much just stand in the open wailing on your enemies and slurping up street lights as soon as you get shot. This means that the difficulty level is somewhat uneven and even worse once you have completed the game there are so few enemies around it becomes difficult to even find enough targets to practice trophy winning “stunt” kills on. This is made up for by the fact that it is undoubtedly fun to be Cole. You feel pretty bad ass at the start, but by the end once you have unlocked all the powers and upgraded them with the XP you earn for most actions you are a one man army. Tossing people around like rag dolls and blowing up cars and petrol stations with gay abandon. Moving through the city also feels great. You need to get up high to get around without being sniped and the parkour come power line surfing mechanic makes you feel like a cross between Spiderman and Silver Surfer. Unusually for a third person game the camera is nearly always where you want it and jumping into an abyss by mistake is a rarity. The control scheme feels natural and the only real downer is that the combination of a Gears Of War-esque cover mechanic and acrobatic platforming means that often when you are racing away from a hand grenade you will inexplicably stick to a wall and meet a messy death.
The side missions should be singled out for special praise they feel like a part of the core experience rather than a tack on and encompass: Taking prisoners to jail, treasure hunts, rooftop races, protecting citizens, solving murders, deactivating surveillance devices and fixing trains. So much better than the go to place x, shoot 5 guys and collect Maguffin y, repeat until coma that many games think is acceptable.
So far I haven’t touched on the morality mechanic that gives Infamous it’s title and that’s with good reason as I feel it adds pretty much nothing to the game. Blowing up half the city has made Cole public enemy number one and you can choose to use your powers either to change the mind of the populace and become a hero or punish those who rejected you and become Infamous. This mostly manifests it’s self as nothing more than morality based quick time events where you press “X” for good or “O” for bad action, you don’t even have to work it out for your self as a handy red blue chart appears on screen. In addition to this various actions like killing or healing members of the public has a cumulative effect. It would be cool if the decisions were worth a moment of your time, but once you have taken your first good or bad step you would have to be an idiot not to take the same course with every successive action. Extremes of status grant new powers so trying to act in a “realistic” fashion and alternating means you miss out on all the optional powers. This means that far from being a complex game of morality it is simply a linear game that you can play through twice should you wish to. The net result of your morality choice is a handful of mutually exclusive good or bad side missions on each island and two optional powers one of which I didn’t ever use and the other of which is fairly similar regardless of which side you get it from. At several points the game gives the illusion that your actions are having a significant impact on the plot, but on a second play through you will discover that regardless of the decision the game contrives to provide virtually the same outcome.
The final moan is that the game crashed a couple of times and you may find your self sinking through more complex terrain due to some dodgy collision detection.
When it comes down to it Infamous is a lot of fun and I enjoyed playing it all the way to the end though it didn’t offer enough for me to want to start again with an evil play through.
If they can fix the few annoyances that stopped this from being a true world class game then Infamous 2 is going to be an absolute riot.

Windows 7 Review and Tweaking Guide

This is the third and final part in my blog series on my experiences of moving to Windows 7 from my previous set up of XP and Ubuntu Linux.



In my old set up I used my Ubuntu as my everyday machine and kept XP around to use when inconsiderate manufacturers don't provide drivers for Linux (I'm looking at you HTC and Tom Tom) when both of my machines died in quick succession I bought my laptop with an expectation that I would probably dual boot Win 7 and Linux, and once again avoid Windows except when necessary.



Once I saw the very positive reviews of Win7 I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if an Ubuntu devote such as my self could use Win7 without being driven insane. In my previous post I explained some of the long list of tweaks I have to apply to XP to make it usable so I'll be covering some of those issues here along with a few other things that came up along the way.



I guess I should start with the headline news that after a month I'm still using Win 7 and I have to hand it to Microsoft it's pretty good. That's not to say it's all been sunshine and roses. I'll try and use the same headings as my XP article but first the setup process:

Set Up & Crapware

I've always believed that at least 25% of the reason people love Macs and tolerate PCs is the dreadful state that Windows machines are in when they get to a punter. PC manufacturers make on average an extra £50 on every PC they sell due to shipping a machine full of hard to remove trials, toolbars and useless expensive services. On my PC I had: An app launcher, a game download service, online storage, a dell support program, a music download service, MS works and the expected overpriced antivirus. Unsurprisingly crapware vendors don't like to make their applications easy to remove and the standard Add Remove Programmes dialogue isn't really up to it. I quickly found a couple of tools which made life a lot easier. Revo Uninstaller Pro is a superb tool which makes removing unwanted crap a breeze and also cleans up any leftover files and registry entries as well as featuring a number of other useful tools beyond the scope of this article. For this less technically inclined PC Decrapifier is a simple one click solution that finds crapware and removes it.

Set up was in all other respects a breeze. There are any number of nice little touches down to the comprehensive selection of well thought out system sounds and wallpapers which can be selected using a simple personalisation menu.

Browser

I'm going to have to start with a bad one I'm afraid; Internet Explorer is still a joke. Microsoft are going to have to find some way to keep all those crappy IE 6 apps while embracing open standards or Firefox and Chrome are going to eat them for breakfast. I lasted about 10 minutes with IE 8 before downloading Firefox, but to be fair I would probably do the same on a Mac as I'm no fan of Safari.

Media Playback

I use Spotify for my music needs so I can't really comment on Windows Media Player or Media Center for managing your media library, but as a minimalist media player it's very usable and has a very much improved set of codecs compared to XP. In fact I didn't really feel the need to download any other media player software for a month and then only because I needed to work on AMR format audio which is fairly obscure.

Under this heading I will also mention that the photo viewer application is also really rather good even when viewing photos on a remote server.

Taskbar

This is one of the obvious big changes from XP/Vista. The taskbar is a huge improvement. Quicklaunch and the main application area are merged and applications with multiple windows are neatly handled with Aero Peak which shows a thumbnail of all that apps open windows when you hover over the icon. The system tray also looks a lot cleaner and has a really nice interface for hiding icons or restricting popups. Hopefully the days of the irritating popup frenzy system tray are over.

Overall I still think the OSX doc is tidier but I didn't really feel any urge to install Rocket Dock

The Start Menu

The start menu is also a big improvement over XP (Though perhaps not Vista). The main plus is that its fully searchable so when you hit the Windows key you simply start typing the name of the app and it instantly takes a guess at the app or folder you are after as you type. It doesn't offer all the functionality of a dedicated tool such as Launchy, but again it's good enough that I don't feel I need anything else.

File Management

Explorer has a few nice tweaks like breadcrumbs and better support for zip files.

A couple of gripes would be that Explorer lacks tabs and support for ISO disk images is very limited.

Window and Desktop Management

Ok here is my first serious beef. No virtual desktops. I my opinion this is totally unacceptable. Even XP had a powertoy which gave you 4 desktops. It also makes very little sense because I have been very impressed with Win 7s ability to handle multiple screens and surely it can't be a big jump from one to the other. The only reason I can think of is that the feature was vetoed by the Office team as Office 2007 works both appallingly and inconsistently with virtual desktops.

The worst thing was I couldn't find a tool which worked well with the Win7 toolbar. This was the first issue that nearly caused me to reach for the Ubuntu disc but luckily someone pointed me in the direction of the new beta version of Virtuawin which works seamlessly. It's still a big black mark though.

In general window management is very good. The new Aero Snap features which let you maximise and split screen windows with a gesture are excellent and I find myself trying to use them on other operating systems. The window switcher is also improved with life snapshots and an optional groovy 3D window fly though feature.

Software Updating

As I mentioned in my XP article the ability to seamlessly update all of the software on my machine with one simple automatic interface is something that is only available in Ubuntu. the same is true of the Ubuntu software store which provides a great source of trustworthy free software.

Windows updates seem less obtrusive but no great improvement from XP.

Security

My biggest tip to anyone using Windows is DON'T PAY FOR VIRUS PROTECTION!!!!

Microsoft have a free antivirus product called Security Essentials which integrates seamlessly and outperforms all of the commercial applications. It's a terrible shame that people are being screwed by charlatans like Symantec when MS would probably include it in the OS if they didn't fear a lawsuit from the EU.

I get the impression that Win 7 seems pretty secure and as a Linux user I don't mind having to give permission to allow an administrative action. My wife has been freaked out by malicious popups on websites claiming virus infection. Of course the computer was in no danger, but it's easier to laugh it off if you are using a Mac or Linux.

Media Sharing

OK here is my other big bitch. Out of the box my laptop could not access the shared folders on the Linux server on my home network. The problem is due to Windows requiring authentication which most versions of Linux don't support. Fixing this required a lot of messing about with registry settings and lots of rebooting. This would be galling enough, but moves to the realms of infuriating when you realise that if I had Win7 business I could use a built in app called Secpol to fix the issue with a single click. Mac and Linux users don't have to make do with crippled operating system versions and I don't see why I should have to either.

Now you might say I'm a geek and this is a geeks issue which I knew how to fix, but lots of people buy network drives to backup photos and these nearly all run on Linux. For these users their photo back up drive becomes a brick.

On a positive tack my Laptop automatically appears in the menu on my Playstation 3 and seamlessly streams HD video to it without a glitch. Very impressive.

Other Thoughts

Overall Win7 seems very customisable and user friendly. I've been impressed by the audio stack which allows you to change between the internal soundcard and a USB soundcard while Windows Media Player is playing and have it seamlessly switch playout without a glitch (XP would require an app restart). Lots of people think the Aero Glass window theme looks tacky but I think it looks very clean and adds some candy without getting in the way.

One omission is that seemed a little bizarre is that Win7 supports customisable log in screens but requires a reg hack to make it work.

The start up and shutdown speeds are acceptable but not amazing and of course with Windows you are limited to a DOS Window rather than the power and elegance of a Bash shell.

Conclusion

Overall I think Windows 7 is a huge improvement over XP and Vista. I think I still appreciate the power and flexibility of Ubuntu and if I didn't need Windows 7 for drivers and such it would be a hard decision which I would use as my main OS. With today's announcement of Windows 7 phone it seems like after a few years of getting an whipping in the technical stakes from Apple, Google and the open source community. Microsoft might finally be getting their act together.