Best. Case. Ever.

PC case modding, even though it’s never been something that interests me, can be quite cool when it’s done well and be really crap when it’s not. I suppose it’s a bit like car modding where it’s impressive when you build something unique from scratch but slapping a spoiler and neon lights onto a shitty little Micra just makes you look like an idiot. I’m not saying that my car’s not shit, but at least I don’t feel the need to draw attention to that fact that it is.

But like I said, case modding can be great when it’s done right, and this is a case where it’s done right. Not only is the idea amazingly cool but it’s very functional as well, acting as a desk in addition to the case. It really shows up how ugly those Star Wars cash-ins of cases that Alienware put out are.

I Must Have It

When the first images of the Xbox 360 surfaced a month or so back we all speculated that it would be a good amount smaller than the current Xbox, and now it seems that we were right. It’s perhaps not as small as we might have been expecting from the size of the disc tray in the original photos, but it’s certainly nice and svelte compared to the old monolith. I never found the Xbox excessively big – it’s not like we carried it around all the time – but any size reduction is nice and shows what some bespoke hardware can do over off-the-shelf stuff.

Sin City Impressions

If I’m honest I was probably genetically programmed to love this film. Dark, noir setting, beautiful visual style, Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba in very few clothes, brutal and stylised violence? Plus who can forget that it was directed by both Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, as well as Frank Miller (creator of the original comic)? I’d honestly have been more surprised if I’d turned out not liking it and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed it.

Bruce Willis as Hartigan

As someone who hasn’t read the graphic novels in any great depth I have to admit that it could be slightly recondite in places, but it was still great fun. It’s structurally fairly similar to Pulp Fiction in that it’s made up of several stories which might cross paths in small ways but are otherwise independent, and timelines are not something that has to be adhered to as characters who died can turn up later on. Tarantino’s influence is probably most obvious there.

Ratings boards get a lot less squeamish about violence and content when it isn’t completely realistic and that’s obviously what happened when this was let through as an 18 in its uncut form, because some of it is absolutely brutal. In no particular order I came out of the cinema having seen (skip to the end of the paragraph if spoilers aren’t your thing) a man being eaten alive by his own dog having had all his limbs cut off, hatchets to crotches, swastika-shaped shuriken attacks, genitals shot off, genitals pulled off by hand, guns backfiring through foreheads, and men being turned into “human Pez dispensers”. Not what you could call a date movie, but since most of the blood is either white or brilliant yellow that apparently makes it OK.

It’s the best thing that Robert Rodriguez, Bruce Willis, and Mickey Rourke have done in a long time, but even if that’s not particularly high praise it’s a good movie by Tarantino’s standards too. I had great fun watching it and it will be a worthy purchase on DVD as well. Watch it, take in the style, and just enjoy some good old bloody rampaging – the best since Kill Bill.

Consider my Star Wars demon exorcised.

Adblock Plus

Any Firefox user probably knows how absolutely invaluable the Adblock extension (couple it with these filters and it’s doubtful that you’ll see an ad again) is, but it’s still missing some key features and development seems to have all but ceased – I haven’t seen a new version since I started using it and the last development news was posted in October 2003. Despite this it’s been one of my main reasons for sticking with Firefox over Safari, since I’ve yet to find another ad blocker with the same combination of simplicity and potency. It would get the occasional false positive that would make me pine for a whitelist and some annoying white space left behind that I couldn’t block would crop up occasionally, but the few ads I saw really didn’t bother me.

No more! I just came across Adblock Plus, a development branch straight from the community which adds those features that I wanted and should make it possible to block any ad. First of all, creating a new filter and prefixing it with “@@” will whitelist it so that anything matching that filter won’t be blocked, so that puts an end to the few false positives that I don’t want it to block.

The other important addition that I hadn’t seen in the official release is the ability to block divs, the subdivisions of a page used to apply different styles and properties to different sections. That eliminates the problem with white space being left where your blocked ads once were, as they’re almost always contained within their own div. There are other nice features like synchronisation so that you can keep your filters updated over the Net, but those two are the big ones that I’d wanted for ages.

It’s well worth checking out if you’re an Adblock user, and if you’re on Firefox and don’t have it I heartily recommend the download.

68 Days…

That slightly cryptic title is how long there is between the US theatrical release and the UK theatrical release of Sin City. When they’re making potential customers wait over two months for what could be one of the best films of the year it almost makes you wonder how they can be audacious enough to blame people for casual piracy. I’m not piracy advocate – far from it – but if someone wanted to see that movie really badly I wouldn’t blame them at all for downloading it and then going to see it in the cinema for the big screen experience when it comes out.

When a movie as colossal as Star Wars can be co-ordinated enough to come out everywhere on the same day (I even remember X-Men 2 coming out here a day early but otherwise simultaneously) I can’t really see an excuse to delay it here by over two months. Even if this was a small indie flick with a budget so low that we were getting the same reels as the US there’s no way it should take this long to come out.

Moaning aside, I’m going to see it when it’s released on Friday night and I’ve been waiting for it since I saw the first trailer. Hell, I’ve been waiting since I first heard the buzz about the amazing visual style and saw the cast that were signing up for it (I think it would be quicker to name the major actors who aren’t in it). I just need something to excise Star Wars from my memory as the last new film I saw.