Life of Pi (2012)

The ANU film group solicited short reviews for the semester 1, 2013 programme. This is my review of Life of Pi for them.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

The ANU film group solicited short reviews for the semester 1, 2013 programme. This is my review of Bonnie and Clyde for them.

Portable Virtualbox with Alpine Linux

Introduction:

I have a need for a small yet functional, portable, virtualised Linux system with a graphical web-browser, so I set-about finding one.

Firstly I needed a portable virtualisation environment (Hosting on Windows is all I need) and a small linux distribution to run on it.

I decided on using Portable-VirtualBox for the virtualisation, because it's free-of-charge, easy to download and configure (Although it seems to claim to be more portable than it actually is).

I used Alpine Linux for the guest OS distributions because it's about the most microscopic distro I've found with a moderately easy to configure GUI capability.

The install's not perfect, but it's "good enough for me". Here's the basic steps involved in this installation:

Bat-Slap Retro-vectored

I was always impressed with the dynamic impact of this popular panel from World's Finest Comics #153 (1965). It just irked me how bad all the scans of it are. It was crying out for an SVG do-over, so I've finally done that!

Here's the original Inkscape SVG (With no text). Here's a "Plain" SVG, which might be more compatible with other applications: Batslap-plain

I should add that this was done using the magnificent Inkscape tool and the sample PNG uses Neale Davidson's nice Comic Book font.

Beware debugging Java 1.3 synchronised sections!

Single-stepping through interlocking Java threads in JDK1.3 can result in irresolvable deadlock. Specifically if one thread is blocked stepping-into a section synchronized on an object and another thread that already holds the lock steps-over a wait() on that object.

Use MEncoder to remux a DVD image to a single MPEG2 file

OK, This is really just another "note to self", but someone might find it useful:

% mencoder {PATH}/VIDEO_TS.IFO -ovc copy -oac copy -of mpeg -o {OUTPUT FILE}


That's it (It runs quite fast due to the lack of any transcoding). This assumes your DVD only has a single title, but I suspect it's possible to select which track of a multiple-video image somehow (I might update this article if I ever need to do this).

Multitouch drivers for Dell Mini-12 Synaptics touchpad

This is really just a "Note to self" (For next time I have to reinstall the blessed OS) that the Synaptics drivers that enable the multitouch functions for my Dell Mini 12 are the HP ones referred-to here:

• Windows XP (Google docs mirror)
• Windows Vista/7 (Google docs mirror)

It's still a bit clunky, but works more-or-less.

That is all.

(Source: http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?p=44505922#post44505922)