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10,000 BC Review

ScottS-M — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:29:52 +0000

In another adventure in early morning cinema, we decided to go see 10,000 BC. I can report that there are definitely not large crowds in the theater at 10AM on Daylight’s Savings Time Sunday.

So I went into this expecting it to be pretty horrible (Rotten Tomatoes is giving it a 8%.) but I like the theme and wanted to see the CGI animals. Unfortunately, the whole thing seemed recycled from other movies and forced. They really wasted a good theme by not even bothering to accurately portray the animals or the history. That said it did keep me and the girlfriend mildly entertained (then again we still haven’t bought a TV so our entertainment criteria is pretty low).

The movie starts out with what I would assume is a fairly good guess at what life was like in 10,000 BC; huts, fire and hunter gatherers. After a few adventures, the characters reach another tribe of people who are just starting to grow their own crops. Again pretty accurate. 10,000 BC is right around when people are thought to have discovered agriculture. After a few more adventures, the history goes right out the window as the heroes run into a full fledged Egyptian culture complete with writing, pyramids, maps of the world and sailing ships. The movies takes one sentence to explain this anachronism as either aliens or Atlantis. This seemed pretty silly to me since we would definitely have archaeological records of such an advanced civilization. Why not just call it 2,000 BC? (Probably because they couldn’t have mammoths then.) As a final punch in the historical gut, the movie ends with the hero receiving a gift of seeds including corn. Pretty annoying (and completely unnecessary) since corn is from the Americas and would not reach the Old World for another 11,500 years. That’s about all I have to say about the history and the plot.

The movie had quite a few (I feel) bad movie making decisions. First right at the start of the movie, everyone decides to cover their faces in mud (a la Braveheart). I’m sure mud facial decorations were common in many ancient tribes but I really don’t think it’s the best idea when the audience is just being introduced to the characters. Then throughout the movie it continually flashes over to show an old witch doctor lady from the village. Besides her being pretty uncharismatic, I thought this was pretty unnecessary to the plot. (Yes I realize they were setting up the ending but I think the mammoth had that taken care of already). Also, the tribe talks in an assortment of phony accents. I saw in a preview/advertisement that the director wanted to do the whole thing in subtitles (a la Apocalypto). I like subtitles much more than dubbing in foreign flicks but since no one has any idea how they spoke 12,000 years ago this seemed kind of stupid. I guess funny accents were the next best thing for him. If you do watch the movie, I swear somewhere in the first part at the village someone is doing a Scarface impression. Let me know if you catch it too. Also, there was a huge amount of noisy pixels in some of the dark shots. I’ve never noticed this in a Hollywood movie before. Not sure why they’d let that through into the final copy.

Finally the part that let me down the most was the computer generated animals. We only get three types in this movie; mammoths, some sort of giant bird and a sabertooth tiger. The birds seemed animated well enough but you never get a real good look at them. The tiger seemed pretty good in the dark but in the light it really looked fake and didn’t seem to move quite right. Also contrary to what the poster would have you believe, the tiger gets about 45 seconds of screen time. The mammoths are in a lot of the movie and oddly enough are often shown galloping with two front feet in the air followed by two back feet. I’m no elephant expert but this looked completely phony to me so I decided to look through the literature once I got home and it looks like it is in fact completely phony (I’ll post about this ~~tomorrow~~ Update: here). Overall the CGI seemed about equivalent to a Discovery channel show which is sort of a let down when they’re supposed to be a highlight of a Hollywood movie.

Now after all those negatives, I do have to give it some credit. Despite all the shortcomings, I was entertained for the parts where I wasn’t groaning at the accents, history or biology. It’s not a horrible movie, it’s just not all that good.

Rating: 2 out of 5

Scott Sherrill-Mix, March 10th, 2007

Rambo Review

ScottS-M — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:22:20 +0000

We still don’t have a TV so the $5 Saturday AM movies are pretty attractive for us. It’s a little weird to be heading to the movies at 10 in the morning but once you’re inside you can’t tell the difference and you sure don’t have to worry about a packed theater. So I was browsing the movie selection and saw “Rambo”. I figured they were replaying old movies but it turns out they made another Rambo movie (the first Rambo was called First Blood so I guess technically the name is still open). When I saw IMDB was giving it fairly good ratings, I figured we might as well go see Rambo. After all my talk about microformats, I thought I had better start using them more so this is in the hReview format (which actually shouldn’t make any difference to most readers).

As we were walking out of the theater, I asked Xiaofen how she liked the movie. She said “It was pretty fleshy”. After figuring out that she wasn’t saying flashy, I had to agree that that was actually a pretty good descriptor. Rambo went beyond bloody all the way to “fleshy” (but I’d have to say in an enertaining way).

Although the movie is pretty “fleshy”, excluding the bloody start you’re pretty much always rooting against the people getting bloodily killed. I think that kind of reduces the impact. That said the beginning was pretty hard to watch since it was just normal people. I suppose the movie was trying to get a message across though and it certainly does bring home just what news stories about genocide actually mean.

The special effects and stunts were very good. I’m not sure if it was the movie theater (you get what you paid for) or the movie’s style (perhaps in tribute to the older Rambos?) but the film seemed a little grainy and low contrast. That didn’t detract from the movie though. I can’t remember if there was a soundtrack or not so I guess that’s the best kind. The plot was pretty good (especially for a Rambo movie) and I have to say they managed to trick me near the end (avoiding spoilers).

The acting was decent although the girl seemed a little stiff at the start. I guess she didn’t have the most natural of lines though. Stallone did a pretty good job throughout I thought. I actually had to google Stallone to see how old he is. Turns out 61. I was guessing 50 at most. I hope I’m in that good a shape at 61 (or now). Although now that I think about it, I think he did manage to keep his shirt on for the entire movie (which I think gave him more chance for acting).

Rating: 4 out of 5

Scott Sherrill-Mix, February 2nd, 2007

Cloverfield

ScottS-M — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:38:24 +0000

I browsing around the internets this morning and came across a few mentions of the movie Cloverfield. I vaguely remembered seeing the preview and thinking it looked interesting. But when I saw the Bad Astronomer (who seems to have a pretty good taste in movies) say it was (and I quote) AWESOME, that was enough for me. So I woke up Xiaofen and we headed off to the theater ($5 off if you go to the 10:15AM show).

After seeing it I have to agree, I really enjoyed it and I was on the edge of my seat through the whole thing. I definitely recommend Cloverfield (in the theater if possible). Just one caveat, it’s possible the camera work might disturb anyone with motion sickness although Xiaofen didn’t have any trouble and she gets car sick all the time. I had only seen the (cryptic) trailer and didn’t have any expectations going in and I think that helped so I’m going to leave it at that and follow Wil Wheaton’s example and leave my slightly more detailed analysis in the comments.

Oh if you’re like me and worry that the director is going to stick a little extra on after the credits, there is a little something but it’s not really worth waiting for (only a couple seconds of audio and I’ll link to it below).

Possible spoilers in the comments

EasyPic4 First Impressions

ScottS-M — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 22:46:23 +0000

As a biologist, I’ve often thought “I could really use an instrument that did X”. Logging temperatures, locations, depth, light levels and other variables, controlling devices like cameras or servos, and communicating with a computer seem like a task for microcontrollers. So it’s been in my head for a while to try and learn a bit about them.

After putting it off for a while, I thought I would try to find a nice starter kit to experiment with. I looked through a few possibilities before finally deciding, including the:

MAKE Controller Kit – This one seems pretty handy and powerful.
Arduino – Open source and cheap.
Gumstix – More of a computer than a microproccesor. Really cool for powerful applications.
EasyPIC4 – Tons of features built-in with no soldering necessary. Lots of example programs.

As is evident from the title, I decided to go with the EasyPIC4. This seemed like the most beginner friendly option. I figured it would be nice to be able to learn how to program without worrying that problems were actually caused by some misplaced solder or mistaken understanding of electronics. Conveniently, the EasyPIC4 comes with a 16F877A PIC microcontroller. It cost $119 plus $17 for a graphic LCD and $15 for a character LCD and temperature sensor with a total cost of $152US for enough features to keep me busy learning for quite a while. So I ordered it from mikroElektronika.

I’ve gotten used to almost instant shipping and I was looking forward to trying the thing out so I was a little disappointed when a week passed and I hadn’t heard anything besides the initial confirmation email. But after an email to the mikroElektronika sales, they quickly and nicely got back to me and coincidentally said that my order had been shipped that same day. The shipping is through the Serbian national post so I thought I was out of luck for package tracking but it turns out I could plug the tracking number into Canada’s own post for tracking.

So it finally came but, since I’m cheap and had decided to not order any software along with it, I needed a PIC program compiler. It turns out that mikroElektronica also offers demo versions of their Pascal, Basic, and C compilers for PIC. I went with mikroC since I have a passing familiarity with C++. I think the demo version has a limit in how big a program you can write but I think that it’s large enough for an amateur like me to play around quite a bit without running into.

So once I had the right software, I plugged in the EasyPIC4 into my USB port. It immediately started flashing LED’s and displaying a countdown on its numeric display. After having images of the ticking bomb in every Hollywood action movie flash through my head, I realized that mikroElektronika had preloaded the PIC with a demo program. That seemed like a nice touch since I could immediately tell that things were working. So now it was time to try my hand at programming. Luckily the EasyPIC4 comes with a bunch of demo programs. I count 23 sample programs plus a whole bunch in the extra_examples folder that I haven’t even gotten a chance to look at yet. LED_Blinking.c seemed like a good place to start. It took just a few seconds to compile the program and, since mikroC connects easily with the included flash memory loading PICFLASH2 program, load it onto the microcontroller. After seeing the little red LEDs (each labeled with the pin that it connects to) start flashing and looking through the source, I made my own sequence of flashing LEDs within half an hour (sorry about the jerkiness I hadn’t really thought of making an animation out of it until later).

So to wrap up, the EasyPIC4 lived up to its name. Things went easily and well right out of the box. It seems like a really good way for a novice to experiment with microcontrollers. It was really enjoyable to see the tiny computer making real world things happen. I’m looking forward to trying out more of the features.

Locosystech NaviGPS BGT-11 Review

ScottS-M — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 04:43:27 +0000

This summer I needed a GPS logger for some field work. After looking through a few different possibilities, none of which were particularily satisfying, I finally found the (ununiquely named) NaviGPS GPS from GPS Central for $200 Canadian. At the time, there weren’t any reviews of it online. I’ve come to depend on reviews whenever I buy something so I figure I’ll do my part and post my review of it. While digging up the company link, I noticed on they’ve changed the name to a ‘GT-11′ and redone the layout of the website. Looks better now. I’m not sure the name is any better though. Sounds like a car. Anyway, I also noticed they have drivers for Mac, XP and Linux so that’s a plus if you need that. 1/18/2007 Edit: It looks like the name has changed again. It appears to be called an Amaryllo Trip Tracker now. Not sure what has changed but the picture sure looks the same as my unit except the big A logo.

So the main reasons I bought the Navilink were the:

Rechargeable battery
USB Cable (more convenient than the more common serial cable)
Automatic data logging with adjustable interval
Accepts SD Card (also has it’s own internal storage of ~2 Mb). It seems to take about 20 kb per 100 records with NMEA data (which you don’t really need) and 7 kb without. I could have messed up the decimal but I think that translates into 100 continous months of 10 second interval data on a 2 Gb card.
Waterproof (Almost all the handheld GPS’s are though)
Bluetooth real-time communication (can make a PDA into a powerful GPS)
USB real-time communication (can make a laptop into an even more powerful GPS)
Screen (unlike most data loggers)
Car, usb, and house power charging
Fairly cheap

Now so I don’t sound like a total shill, I did have a few problems with it:

I never tried the bluetooth so I can’t vouch for that.
The USB connection to a laptop worked easily and well. Except for one time when the mapping software decided to plot it’s location about a minute off from the true location being displayed on the GPS. I assume this was some sort of input setting in the mapping software that got messed up because it only happened once.
It doesn’t like fog. Any thick fog caused it to lose it’s signal. I haven’t tried enough GPS’s to know if this is a common problem. The boat’s GPS did not lose its signal.
It really needs to be in a window. In a boat cabin it lost signal pretty quickly if it wasn’t right next to a window. Perhaps a car would have better luck though.
It went crazy a couple times and decided I was moving 999 miles per hour to an incorrect location. Turning it off and on did fix this immediately and it appears that the recorded log did not show this.
The battery only lasted about 14 hours for me (10 second logging if it that mattered). I didn’t test this rigorously though since after the first failure I kept it plugged in. It’s also possible the non-Bluetooth version would last longer. This could be a problem for real wilderness applications since the battery is internal and you can’t carry spares.
It can’t display maps. I didn’t buy it planning on that but I thought I better mention it.
A minor annoyance is that if it loses signal, it no longer displays your track or last know position. This could be bad if you were say lost in the fog.

So overall I was very satisfied with it. I was just looking for a GPS logger and all the extra features were icing. After three months of almost daily logging on the ocean, it still appears to be working perfectly. I would be worried about battery life if I was going for a long outdoor adventure but it’s great for boat or car trips. It also works very well as a USB plug in for a laptop with mapping software but can still function independently. And the logged track looks very good. I can see where we stopped to do some work and see the path we went through the islands. So if you’re looking for a very basic handheld GPS combined with a very good logger and Bluetooth and USB connectable, this is your gadget.

1/21/2007-Edit: There’s another NaviGPS review up and if you’re looking to use the NaviGPS with Linux it looks like he’s put some work into that too.