Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

Went to see Mark Thomas last night, he was great. He’s launched a company, McDemos, offering as a service, not just applying to demonstrate in Parliament Square (which under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 requires permission to be granted by the police 6 days in advance) but to demonstrate on your behalf as well.

I’m thinking of purchasing a demonstration, partly to support free speech but also to campaign in favour of a DVD release for Mark’s TV series The Mark Thomas Comedy Product. It’s available to download in divx format at his website but the quality’s rough and there’s only one episode at a time. Still, I suppose that’s enough to prevent a popular uprising…

A year and a half ago I posted how I recognised the location of this shot in Ronin.

I mentioned how I suspected a favorite film had also used the location, I can now confirm it: Goldeneye.

I didn’t have it on DVD before, but since I’ve just been teaching projectiles to the year 13s I needed to get a copy… Like Ronin, it is filmed around Thorenc and Greolieres (there’s a shot of the latter); here’s the picture I snapped back then at the same location:

Also like Ronin, it takes liberties with the editing but worse than implying it’s a few seconds’ drive from Vieux Nice, it’s now behind Monaco!

Hugh FW provide pear recipes almost too late. I’ve had a plentiful crop this year, but they’ve almost all been eaten/frozen/given away/blown away. Which is a pity, because Hugh’s recipes look great, especially the fried spiced.
The only reason I haven’t tried this yet is that I’ve been feeling so grotty that I’ve spend 50% of the weekend so far sleeping and most of the rest of the time lying about (The Ambassadors of Death is a great way to take your mind off being ill, but may cause the unwary - me - to add loss of colour vision to our symptoms).

The pear and blue cheese salad also looks very yummy. I’ve already been put onto pears and blue cheese. The potential was apparent with a piece of fairly indifferent Stilton so I went looking for ways of improving on this. The absolutely awsome Cheese Please recommended Cote Hill and Picos Blue. I tried both. The Picos Blue is the kind of cheese that should be kept in a lead lined box and I knew it could stand up to my fairly fruity pears, but to have them both marching around in your mouth is almost too much. The Cote Hill is equally assertive and extraordinarily creamy; I’m going back for more of that but it’s still not quite the perfect pear accompaniment. Hugh FW favours Dorset Blue Vinnie, so I’ll give that a try before the last pear goes soft; I reckon a better bit of Stilton has to be worth a try too.

The BBC’s selection of Podcasts is growing (slowly), but if you want to listen to most of their shows you’ll be glued to your computer because they’re still only streamed in Read Audio.

Unless you know a way to grab Real Audio streams and stick them on your iPod. I’ve used the following method to get “listen again” streams for shows I’ve missed. It’s a two step process: you need to download the Read Audio stream and then convert it.

1. Grab the stream with the nifty CocoaJT. Go to Recorder>Record A Stream. You can find the address whilst listening to the programme by using the Real Player application rather than the browser plugin (click the “Listen using stand alone Real Player” link in the BBC Radio Player window) and then going to Window>Clip Info.
2. Encode the stream to an iTunes format with ffmpegx, having followed the preliminary steps (needed to get it to handle Real Audio correctly) as outlined in this handy macosxhints.com hint.

Happy listening.

One of my biggest gripes when I got my Macbook was the region locked DVD drive.

Today, it is locked no more!

When I got the Macbook it seemed not just that there was no firmware hack, but that it would be impossible to generate one for these drives. This thread charts the unravelling of the saga, and the breakthrough achieved by Ben11.

If you’ve got a Macbook (Pro) and want to give it a try, there’s a decent article at
powerbook-fr.com but please note, interrupting a firmware update will brick your DVD drive and this is not covered by the warranty, Applecare or no.

Running DVD Info before and after will be informative.

“Hospital Drama”.

I used to run a mile if Casualty started. I never “got” ER. Then a colleague persuaded me to give Scrubs a go, comedy, true, but it still took the edge off it.

Now I’m a total addict to House. Almost as good as Hugh Laurie is the music. Why no soundtrack CD? A friend was kind enough to force me to listen to the soundtrack to Grey’s Anatomy. Twice. It’s no where near as good as the music on House, but the final insult was that it’s Volume 2. VOLUME 2! Elvis Costello recorded a special version of Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful for House and we haven’t had a single track. VOLUME 2! Damn…

Since no CD was available I’ve been using the super play.house track list to build up an iTunes playlist of my own (currently weighing in at 72 tracks). iTMS can provide many of the tracks, and the following iMix by a House fan is a great time saver…

We’ve had to make do without the Elvis Costello track, but the exciting news is that the official soundtrack is coming and will include it. (Of note is the fact that the US soundtrack features Massive Attack’s Teardrop, as used over the titles over there, whilst we get the “House MD Theme Song”, which is presumably the end credit music).

What’s puzzling me now is that Sarah McLachlan’s Dear God, and Josh Rouse’s God, Please Let Me Go Back (which Fox were giving away as a sampler) don’t appear to have been used in the show…? Is that right? The other track, which differs from what has been heard in the show, is You Can’t Always Get What You Want. The Stones’ version was used a number of times in the show, but on the CD is Hugh Laurie and Band From TV’s cover.

Wallace and Gromit to are to return to the small screen in a BBC half hour short.

That’s the good news (I prefer the shorts to the feature). The bad news is we’ve a year to wait until it’s shown.