a film a day.....

I am trying this year to watch a film a day, with my overall goal being to watch 365 films in 2015.
at first I thought this would be quite easy as I spend more than that on my computer after I get in from work (2 hours) but, if I miss a day with other things in TV and general life getting in the way I have to make it up quite quickly as as the days tick on the number of films to watch increases day by day. after about a month of being one 'plus one' I quickly went negative and I have only today balanced it out again.
things to watch are not ever going to be a problem as I could go over five years never rewatching the same thing again.
we are not half way through the year yet, but I hope to continue until the year is out, we shall see..

if your interested, here's a link to this years films:

 ultraviolet's films in 2015

you can have everything the web has to offer but, you have to use a certain product [My Personal Browser Wars]

Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, which one do i use? 

every so often i have a change of heart and change my browser.

for a long time i used Opera, well, up to version 12 that is, after that they switched to using the Blink engine [Chromium] and for over a year the browser was a shadow of its former self; with new management came new ideas which didn't go down well with a lot of the old crowd and it seemed their simplified interface was more at home on tablets. because there was no syncing enabled i wasn't really a fan, so, i moved over to chrome and everything was synced up between devices, i loved it.... 

for a while. 

you see, i'm a massive tab whore and and where non-chromium based browsers excel is that most are single process. with twenty or so tabs running in chrome my low-end machines just run out of memory. so, 

over to Firefox then.

everything Firefox does is great; use can sync your settings, add-ons, history, cookies, its not very resource hungry on lower machines, pages load-up fast. all good. 

or, so it seemed. 

running Linux means flash is not being developed any more for the platform and and only way to get a fully updated version is to use chrome, so i disabled flash and everything plays in HTML5, you see i'm a big youtube user and i love my 1080p video playback, which is not available [at time of writing] in the stable release of Firefox, plus the playback is very choppy even in 720p.

guess what?
the best browser for youtube strangely enough is chrome, so, i bit the bullet and started using chrome again and the browser doesn't even use flash for their website its all in HTML5, all was ok then came 1080p60 which my computer doesn't run as it needs faster hardware and quite alot of my subscriptions on the site use it.

so, back to Firefox and a third party youtube player on linux.

then, i heard Netflix was finally streaming HTML5 content and is moving away from silverlight,

great stuff! 

oh, 

the plugins are only available in chrome no other browser, so what we have now online is people using other browsers and being treated like second-class citizens: you can have everything the web has to offer but, you have to use a certain product. and with more people using that product more sites are going cater for it and before long we will have almost a one browser internet. to my limited knowledge we only have three engines right now. which doesn't seem nearly enough for the amount of users and with the massive power of google chrome will probably always stay on top for the casual user as all of google's great web apps like docs, drive, youtube, calendar and keep work best in chrome, just as i would of thought outlook.com works best in explorer, well, they would do wouldn't they :-)

then, just as i was reading about the latest opera release in the opera blog i find out there is a new guy in town; Vivaldi is made my the former CEO of opera [when it was good] and it came out today, lots of functions promised and i'm liking it, a lot. ok its chromium-based, but unlike others this one has lots of functions even in its first testing release, plus doesn't seem to use up to much resoures, shame its only 64bit right now [like opera]

we will see how i feel about this one in a few weeks time

[update]

on the Vivaldi forums someone mentioned the Maxthon browser from China based company Maxthon Ltd, i've now seemed to of found my perfect browser: yes its a chrome-clone, but, it plays HTML5 video far better than Vivaldi does at the moment and its available for 32bit systems. video play-back is noticeably better on slower machines as well. seems to use up a little less memory which is always good 

so i'll stick with this one for now..... well.... until Vivaldi gets a stable release

my short 2014 in review

well, according to my letterboxd.com profile i've only watched 219 films in 2014. which is lower than 2013 [242] and my aim last year was to watch more films than the year before! 

stand out highlights film wise for me have go to: X-Men: Days Of Future Past my most re-watched film. 'The Machine' a great UK low budget Scifi film, and, 'Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning'

i think this is mainly because of binge-watching TV shows more last year, although TV shows are not counted on the website


Music wise my Last.fm account says my top music artists of 2014 where: Nine Inch Nails with 475 plays and Orbital with 451 no surprises there then :-)

joint first place in single tracks most played go to Adam Freeland's 'Borderline' and Stakka & Skynet's Clockwork with 16
second place goes to Resonant Evil's 'Troubleshoot' with 15
joint third with 14 goes to Overseer's 'horndog (dylan rhymes remix)' and Burial's 'Rival Dealer'
i could listen to all of those songs forever. its strange though that my favourite song only got 9 plays last year [Orbital's P.E.T.R.O.L.] weirdness


this year i hope to find some new music, 'new' meaning different bands / DJ's to get into.

plus i would like to watch more films, this is becoming a problem as i might have to start re-watching more as i normally watch everything i'm into as soon as i can, maybe more documentarys like the terrifying one i watched a few months back about Wall Mart 
which has just reminded me i need to pop out after this a get a copy of 'Deliver Us From Evil' which is out today and looks stunning


Video game wise 'Resogun' has been my highlight of the year it might of come out in 2013 but i didn't have a PS4 then, the best arcade shooter i've played in quite a while, love streaming it on Twitch. now that its come to PS3 and PS-Vita on cross-buy i have another chance to play it again. great game

Yoga and cycling

after doing a few bits of research i find out that the main reason for some of my back problems  has come from my love of cycling.
cycling shortens the ham-string muscles that are directly linked to the back thus making bending over and such like hard work. I thought I was just getting old, but, it turns out I will still forever.
I never thought I would be saying this, but, i've taken up yoga to cure the back stiffness [and I must say right now; I am rubbish at it!] we where rubbish at most things  that we start new, but that never stops us from getting better at it.
After just my first sequence I could feel the improvements .  Just 30 minutes or so every other day is nothing in my day, and is a great come-down after a caffined-highed  late night gaming session.
My very small aim is a be able to touch my toes [legs straight], small steps lead to bigger ones

"What do you see?" a short badly writen film review

'Sunshine' [2007]
 

This went out in the cinemas at the same time as '300' and with all the hype to that film no one really bothered with it, which is such a shame.

On paper the story sounds like main-stream rubbish, but, its so much more than the sum of its parts. just like Danny Boyle's previous work '28 Days Later' ["just another zombie film right?" nope]
The budget was quite low for a film like this, but every penny is put to good use.
The main character of the film is the sun and it has never, ever looked quite so good as this. totally believable in its visual execution, it just looks simply stunning.light doesn't make any real noise but there's some great sound effects for the sun burning into every part of the ship, almost creating a monster with its sound design alone. your just over-powered by its brilliance of light and sound from the outset and you are humbled by the scale and power of the sun which the film conveys, very much like the crew of the Icarus 2.

Never have I come out of the cinema feeling so 
complete as after watching this, it was perhaps my perfect cinema experience to date.

at home turn up the sound and sit as close as you 
can to the screen and you will be belittled by the sunshine

finishing a old job, starting a new one

After feeling for sometime that i was getting stale and part of the furniture in my last job, i finaly found a new one.
Leaving a any job which you've been in for over ten years is never going to be easy, but, the job i had was also i very fond hobby of mine: cycling, it will be intesting only working on my own bikes from now on, and talking to like mined people about cycling rather than people who want a bicycle to last forever and will only pay the same price as a cheap blu-ray player.

About my new job: its quieter than the last, and not forward facing so i don't deal will the public on a daily basis. Which is good as i feel that my speech is getting worse with my old age, or maybe it was just my body's way of getting me to find some place new.

Only time will tell....

a link to my film collection

here's a link to the few films i have. all of them are stored memories of good times, each one a little Pandora’s box ready to be opened once again [except one]


http://www.imdb.com/...f_=nv_usr_lst_3