also.known.as “spvn”

So I just watched Toy Story 3 a couple of days ago. And damn is it amazing. It’s one of those few movies that make me want to pay to watch it again. It’s been so long since the last Toy Story movie, and I really couldn’t fathom how they could tell another story based off these same old characters again. But then again I had forgotten one crucial thing: it’s Pixar.

Unprecedented

Ever since their first Toy Story movie in 1995, Pixar has had an unprecedented record as far as movie studios go. Producing hit after hit after hit, there has yet to be a Pixar movie that I didn’t love. It really is eerie to think how they have never made a “bad” movie. Meanwhile other directors and producers just can’t stop screwing up when it comes to filmmaking. Pixar films on the other hand have always had a very high level of quality to them, so much so that when you sit down for a Pixar film, you know that you’re in for a treat. It’s more or less a given nowadays that anything Pixar touches will turn to gold.

Best Pixar Movie Ever. Period.

But I have to say, with Toy Story 3, Pixar has outdone themselves.

I’d probably consider Toy Story 3 to be my favourite Pixar movie of all time. And that’s saying something, considering how contenders for that title include precious gems such as Finding Nemo, Ratatouille (a highly underrated film in my opinion) and The Incredibles.

The first half of the movie really set up the premise well – Andy’s been growing up and neglecting his old bunch of toys. They eventually find themselves unwittingly donated to a daycare centre where hilarity, drama, action and suspense all ensue. In fact, the major action set piece spans half the movie, and it doesn’t feel forced unlike some of the other action set pieces included in other Pixar films. Every single moment of the huge action set piece was so enjoyable to watch and thoroughly creative throughout. While the final scene of this movie is probably the most emotionally stirring scene in a movie I’ve ever watched.

And this was all told through an animated film, with a bunch of plastic toys as the characters. No wonder Pixar rules.

What’s next?

I’m pretty excited for Pixar’s next few films. The only qualm I have is that I gotta wait another year before I can get another Pixar film. All 11 films they’ve produced to date have been absolutely astounding, and I just can’t wait to see more. Cars 2 is coming next year, sequel to 2006’s Cars, widely considered to be Pixar’s worst film. Though being “Pixar’s worst film” translates into “pretty awesome movie” when compared with the junk other animation studios are putting out.

2012 is going to be awesome. We’re getting not just one but TWO Pixar films that year. A sequel to Monsters Inc. in November and a new film, Brave, in June. Brave is supposedly set in “mystic Scotland” and features a headstrong girl, something about her father’s kingdom and royalty, and “unpredictable forces of nature, magic and a dark ancient curse”. Sounds pretty Disney-ish to me, which makes me kind of tentative.

Though knowing Pixar, everything they touch is gonna turn to gold.

Once again, the announcement of a new iPhone by the venerable Jobs is upon us. But the release of the iPhone 4 is particularly stinging for me.

In the past, I at least had the glimmer of hope of “Maybe I can get one of these!” But being in NS now means there’s absolutely no way I can get an iPhone. No way am I going all Frankenstein on it and plucking out the camera, especially not when it can now even record HD video (720p, 30fps on a mobile phone camera!). I’m just going to have to sit on the sidelines patiently, watching as everyone else snatches up one of these. I’m going to have to sit through another new iPhone announcement next year (assuming Apple keeps to its current trend of refreshing the iPhone hardware every year) without being able to actually own one of them. One thing’s for sure though, my next phone is going to be an iPhone.

As for the announcement itself, I have to say this 1.5 hour long keynote is probably the most entertaining one in recent times. Packed with pretty meatty announcements (thought there was that lull in between of inviting developers up on stage at one point), it sure was entertaining when Jobs essentially went “TURN OFF ALL YOUR WIFI, NOW!!!” Poor live-bloggers.

However, this occasion’s “One More Thing…” sure was disappointing, especially compared to the announcements that preceded it.

Now I’ve watched some Apple keynotes that date back to the 1990s (wow we’re actually in the ’10s) and Steve Jobs’ “One More Thing…” announcements back then were usually mind blowing to say the least. Or at least they were genuinely exciting or intriguing. This time though, their “One More Thing” turned out to be nothing more than video calling.

Seriously? Video calling? My SE Z610i from 4 years ago could do that. Sure, the iPhone 4 does it better. But 4 years on it had jolly well do a better job. Even worse, Jobs didn’t even bother trying to show off any hidden features of video calling. All the iPhone did was simply that, video calling, and nothing more. Yet the way he sold it was as if video calling was something completely new to the world, which it is obviously isn’t. I’m still mystified as to why they decided to market video calling (and seriously, calling it FaceTime doesn’t make it cool) as something that’s “revolutionary”.

Apart from that though, some of the stuff is pretty revolutionary IMO. Can’t wait for 2 years later when I can finally actually get an iPhone. Oh wells.

Can you imagine this on your wrist at all times! The possibilities for a device like this are endless. Using it as a phone would be awesome, just for the sake of being able to talk to your watch. Of course I’d never do that, at least not in public, you’d look like a complete idiot talking to your wrist. Though it’d be quite cool to be able to make calls using a watch which was paired with a bluetooth headset!

Oh but of course, LG has already demoed a watch that doubles as a phone as well. Multiple times at that. No, I’m not kidding. Of course, in typical LG fashion, it is extremely clunky. You gotta navigate through all the menus via 3 small buttons that are squeezed onto the side of the watch-phone. Ridiculous if you ask me.

When is someone going to create a touchscreen-watch-phone? Hopefully it’s done by Apple though. Most other companies would just completely screw up the user interface and make it clunky till the point where it’s almost useless. Say what you will about Apple, but they sure do know how to design amazing user interfaces.

Actually, I just googled “touchscreen watch” and it seems like such a device has existed since 2002. Doesn’t seem as appealing as the idea of having an iPhone on your wrist though. *shrugs*

Oh and in case anyone reading till this point is still confused, the above image is a mock-up…

… unfortunately

It seems like OnLive is going to be released to the general public pretty soon despite all the skepticism towards it. Of course, when I say “general public”, it really means “the American public”. And as I said, there’s a bunch of skepticism as to how well and compelling this will really be. Personally, if I had the chance, I’d sign up for this service on day one. My computers are always so outdated (I’m typing this on a 3 year old iMac now, that takes like 10 seconds to open up Firefox mind you) and I don’t have a console (because my TV doesn’t even have a HDMI input), meaning there’re a bunch of games that I can’t play. Or rather every single game that’s been released within the last year can’t run on my computers. If only I had OnLive, everything would be so much better.

I have to admit I was pretty skeptical about this service when it was first announced, because it sounded too good to be true. Even now there arre people commenting that something like this can’t be fully realised for at least another 10 years. However, after watching the video below, I truly believe something like this is actually going to be possible within the next year or so. Reason being they’ve done so much technical stuff to surpass the current limits, not only that but they’ve also thought about the problems they’re facing from a new perspective.

For example the way OnLive basically works is that the game itself will run on they’re uber fast servers that can even run Cysis at max settings. Then, these computers will process whatever is supposed to be shown on screen, apply a video compression algorithm and what the user ultimately sees on his or her screen is essentially a video of what happened after each of their button presses.

Now such a thing would have been impossible in the pass due to current video compression techniques. Reason being they’re built to make each and every frame of the video look the way it should look. Meaning that if you pause a movie, the frame will show all the details perfectly, since a video is basically a bunch of images displayed one after another so when you pause a movie you’re basically staring at a single picture.

It would have been impossible to use such techniques to conduct live streaming of a video game, because the video would be too damn big. So what they’ve (somehow) done is to use a completely new video compression technique that makes the video look good while it’s in motion, reason being one would never actually “pause” a video game. Thus, while the game itself will look good when it’s playing, if you went and paused the video that’s being streamed to your computer screen, the resulting frame might or might not look good, as there’ll be packet losses along the way and stuff. However, this isn’t a problem at all since the video of the game will never actually be paused, thus solving the problem.

Pure genius honestly.

How do I know all this? From the presentation the CEO of OnLive gave to a group of students at the University of Colombia. It’s 48 minutes long, but it’s really informative about the service itself, and shows you how the many obvious problems they faced were ultimately solvable.

So I saw the app Rising Card make it to the “What’s Hot” list on the iTunes App Store and thought the description of the application sounded pretty cool. For those who don’t know, Rising Card is a magic application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, created by magician Chris Kenner. For those who dabble a little into magic, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that this guy invented Threefly (coin trick) and the Sybil cut (card flourish). For those who don’t give a crap about magic, meaning the only name you know in magic is David Copperfield, well this guy has been David Copperfield’s executive producer for the last 16 years. Seriously.

Obviously, this guy is no small-time magician. But I still wanted a few opinions on what the app was like or at least a hint as to how it worked (set-up time, difficulty, etc.) but I couldn’t find a single thing about it. Just official video demonstrations about the app which aren’t exactly the most reliable source. Besides, they didn’t even provide much useful information. Regardless, I eventually got it, hoping that it’d be good. Boy was I not disappointed.

For those of you who’re hear searching for the secret to Rising Card app, you’re in the wrong place. I’m not going to give out the secret. I hope no one does. This blog post is more for people who are thinking about getting this app but aren’t quite sure yet.

Anyway, on to the app. For those who don’t know the effect, I’ll briefly describe it here. Spectator thinks of any card (or chooses a card out of a deck, etc.) and tells you. You then take out your iPhone (or iPod Touch), unlock it, open the Rising Card app upon which you should see a hand holding a deck of cards face up. From here, you can either shake it yourself or hand it over to the spectator and tell him to shake your device. Either way, the named card will rise out of the deck.

It’s a really simple effect, but still pretty mind blowing. I’ve been pretty busy with school stuff recently, so I haven’t used this app with a particular routine or with any form of presentation yet (my bad, I know). But I’ve been getting pretty good reactions. Just to be clear, all I do is tell someone to name any card, I then take out my iPod Touch, open the app and hand it to them, tell them to shake it, and they’ll see their card rise out. Simple as that. I’ve gotten all kinds of reaction. A few of them smirked or sat there in (stunned) silence before asking how it was done. Most of them were completely shocked when they saw it rise out of the deck (I did not tell them what to expect beforehand), their jaws just dropped and they stared at me with huge eyes asking how the hell I did it. Then there are those who just freak out when they see the card. One of my friends almost tossed my iPod onto the table as if it were burning him. Not to mention he enquired as to how I did it with a significant number of expletives. All in all, I’ve gotten really good reactions for a trick that I never practiced beforehand and didn’t even bother to add ANY presentation whatsoever to the effect itself (please don’t do that )

Anyway there are certain limitations that anyone considering purchasing this application might want to know. First, you have to know the card (either they tell you, or force, or they pick a card and show you, etc. you get my point). One more thing is that really observant spectators might notice something amiss, but whether that happens really comes down to how well you’re able to present the trick. Other than that, I can’t really think of other limitations.

The trick itself is really easy learn and requires little practice to master the moves themselves. How you present it is obviously a different thing altogether. Even if people spot the secret move you’re making, they can take your iPhone and try it out for themselves and even if they copy your actions it won’t work for them (that happened to me once, it’s when I realised how awesome this app is). The sacred rule of magic that states “never do the same trick twice” can actually be bent slightly, at least from my experience. I’ve done this trick five to ten times on one of my friends and she never could figure out how I did it even when I did it in slow motion without any patter. Even for say groups of five people I can do this trick at least twice without them realising how I did it. In fact I’d think doing this trick at least two or more times makes it more effective because then spectators will stop thinking that you somehow set it up the first time. Yes, this trick is that strong.

The unfortunate thing about a magic app on the iPhone is that people automatically think you’re cheating the moment you pull out something that has a computer in it. Even if they don’t figure out the secret to the Rising Card app they’ll just chalk it up as you doing something fishy with a device. Unlike sleight of hand or even gimmicks where their brains just can’t think of any logical explanation for a trick. However, as far as iPhone magic apps go, this is most probably the best one out there right now.