GamerCat (capitalised GaMERCaT) is a webcomic starring a black cat parodying whichever videogame author Samantha Whitten is playing at the time. The comic takes place both inside and outside of videogames, poking stick at the culture of games and the games themselves.

Just a Year Old and All Grown-Up

While only presenting a handful of comics, each panel glows with personality and well-defined art. If you were to pull the first comic from the archive, you could easily beleive the artist had been drawing these comics for years, showing artist Samnthas’ already refined talent.

The main character, the black GamerCat feels is instantly recognisable. I had seen the character in passing several months ago outside the comic and instantly recognised the character the moment I saw again. Throughout the strip a fairy lifted from the Zelda series tags along, playing the part of the neglectful helper.

So Far, So Good!

At this early stage, Gamercat can literally be read over a short road trip (or a bus ride home) without needing to rush over a single panel, clocking in at 16 comics. These comics aren’t overly wordy, so you never feel the urge to skip 7 paragraphs of dialogue to get to some punchline. Every comic seems to hit the mood it aimed for, funny comics give you a genuine guffaw and the single more serious comic captures your interest.

Every comic is packed with the kind of cute that makes you believe the author eats only marshmallows, and the humor pulls no punches when that marshmallow cuteness gets thrown into a blender in an act of fairy-genocide. For having under 20 strips in the entire archive it’s quite amazing that some of my favourite individual comics are part of this relatively small collection.

Moving Forward

The biggest weakness to this comic is only its limited number of strips and what looks like a slightly sporadic update consistency. If author Samantha Whitten can baton down the hatches and get the comic onto even a weekly update interval I could very easily see the comic gaining incredible traction, which it already has with its fast & loose schedule.

When I first found the website belonging to the comic I genuinely expected to see hundreds of comics simply because the strip does have that level of polish. There’s a very good recipe for success here, and the magnetism of the art and design is incredibly strong. Once you read a few strips you really do want to keep going, feeling like running out-of-road on second gear when you run out of archive.

Click Here to read GaMERCaT

A Gallery: Basic Image Editing

The focus for the gallery I’m building is for the system to maintain a high degree of layout quality for the user-side pages, with minimal work on the part of the administrator.

To achieve this, the system offers basic image-editing tools, such as picking the “thumbnail region” in the picture and the crop area after uploading. The system will use all the inputs as cues when generating thumbnails and user images. It will maintain high-quality images in the background to refer to later so the administrator can go back, re-crop or move the thumbnail region later.

WYSIWYG & KISS

The trim-area removed and control hidden, so you can see the image as it will appear - barring only scale.

What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get will be the mantra of anything written for this family of software, along with Keep-It-Simple, Stupid.

While live editing, controls will fade away from the work area to present a clean representation of what the final trimmed image will look like.  Future tools will be built into the interface in a way that is unintrusive and without the use of overcomplicated dialogues.

Stupid Smart Plugins & Apps

The plug-in-oriented nature of WebKernel is being moderately updated for the gallery project, with attention being paid to how the system loads files. Previously, the system had one folder which it would load all files from, and another which it would load one file (depending on the requested page)

This version has a unified plugins folder, with each plugin having its own folder, using the names of files as the indicator to loading them under certain circumstances. It also has some basic security built in, requiring all plugin folders it may target to have a locked permission set so they cannot be modified.

Activities

WebKernel also has budding support for Android-Like “activities”, which may be completed in this revision. What this means is that opening a page creates a “task” for that page, and each “task” may have one activity which is chained along several others passing parameters among each-other. That will mainly be of use in the control panel, where a complex task like uploading, editing and placing a gallery picture can be broken into smaller steps. This has the upshot of making any activity recyclable, so a well-written upload activity could be recycled for uploading documents, videos and other formats.

That Annoying Animation? Grows on You.

In my first review I blasted the dolphin shuffle animation as being almost impossible to turn off, and for being ugly. I’ll still admit, nobody will know where to look to turn it off, but that animation itself has grown on me.

First, the animation has surprised me how it has grown into a slight usability helper. If you have a dolphin window open and a file is moved or copied into the window, that shuffle will serve as a cue just where that file was placed. Anything that stays still is ahead of the new file, anything that moves is below the file. It especially helps because I constantly change how files are sorted. I’ll sort by date, name, type, and regularly refer to that animation to see where in that ordering a new file pops in.

The Fast Loading Dolphin Views are Tricky Sometimes

My new pet peeve is how dolphin manages freshly loaded folders. To speed up, Dolphin will show files as quickly as it can, but in alphabetical order. Once those files are all showing, only then will it re-order them to however you requested them to be ordered (such as date); The idea is that showing the icons before it can sort them is faster, but requires displaying icons that will change places a moment later.

This creates a second where you see a file, go to click it, and have it switch right underneath your cursor. Several times I’d become very confused because I thought I clicked one icon, but launched another. This isn’t a problem for smaller folders as much, but larger folders or slower computers will make this moment of “order lag” apparent.

KolourPaint Gets Alpha-Channels

I may be behind the curve on this, but KolourPaint can now see and manage proper PNG transparency. It’s not perfect and has some very minor qwirks, but for the small edits this is a welcome invitation, far faster and easier than using the cumbersome GIMP editor when I only need to change a few pixels or resize an image.

Gwenviews: 101 Ways to Scroll

Gwenview has a useful semi-transparent “drag tool” which lets you quickly whip around large images when zoomed 100%. This new tool will overlay itself over whichever image you’re working with automatically when able to scroll, but offers no option to disable it entirely. On paper it sounds great, but in usage it’s less than necessary and the inability to turn it off makes the tool less welcome. It becomes annoying when you want to look at a picture and the interface feels it should get in your way.

Muon is a Welcome Addition

Muon a software management suit, roughly mirroring similar utilities found in the GTK software family. It offers a user-friendly software centre and a more power-oriented package manager, and a third tool in development which will be released for future versions of Muon. The tools fit nicely with the general KDE feel and get the job done, but doesn’t yet feel as polished as the tools found in Ubuntu Software Centre.

KDE 4.9 On the Horizon

The future of KDE is fast approaching for regular users, and months after using the refined features of 4.8 I find myself enjoying some features I initially disliked, and vice-versa. I’ve kept reading about new features coming in the future revisions of KDE, and good things are ahead. KDE 4.8 delivered many innovations in a well-prepared package, And I look forward to KDE 4.9.

Below is my work-in-progress, which I hope to have printed and mounted when I finish it. My apartment is lacking in art, and I figured I’d toot my own horn and maybe hang my own work. Because I keep going back to digital graphics, it makes me wish I had the chance to see my work outside of the screen.

It has a long way to go, it still needs 2/3rds of her body to be drawn, and a background. I’m using mirror-mode again, but this time I’m also working without it much more to avoid it looking too much like half the work was multibrush. It’s also going to get a second layer of shading when the background is in place, to reflect the ambient lighting I have planned.

The Lorax 2012 movie is the long awaited cinematic/musical rendition of the 1971 childrens book of the same name. Being born in 1987, I was one of the lucky kids who got to grow up on this book which was already considered a “classic” by the day I was born. While not exactly subtle the book served as a colourful warning regarding the dangers of over-industrialization. This is a book I plan to give to whatever children I eventually have (or kidnap, whichever I get around to first); I cannot say the same for the movie, which maintains the original message but falls inside the shadow of its printed forefather. Sure, this will be seen by a lot of kids, but parents out there should make the book a priority before the movie.

The movie itself roughly follows the story of the book, expanding many things skipped over by the book and diminishing the importance of other pages; In a plastic town where nothing is real a boy name Ted – who is not terribly discontent with himself – decides to find a tree to impress a girl. He travels outside the man-made habitat through the desolate outdoors where he finds the Once-ler, who promises the boy a tree after he tells the story of how he destroyed the forest to make Thneeds. During the story Ted is sent home several times where a profit-hungry mayor named “O’Hare” constantly butts heads with Ted, fearing Ted may devalue the mayors bottled air monopoly should trees come back.

A Tale of Two Stories

Any "pretty" girls are either blondes or red-heads in this movie.

As you watch the movie, you’ll almost feel the divide between what screenwriters Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul got to run away with, and where they were “tied down” by the original material. Everything directly or indirectly lifted from the book has a quaint imaginative charm about it, while anything not influenced by the book feels nothing like Seuss and more like control-group-tested puddy. This is a pattern found very routinely in the Dreamworks renditions of the classic materials, but this particular book should have had more careful hands craft the overarching story.

When you watch the new scenes added to the movie and you look at what’s been removed, some scenes really feel bang-on to the message, while others feel off-the-mark. The movie confuses environmental impact, corporate greed, and legal corruption – sometimes melting them together. It gives a very misguided message on occasion because of this, sometimes making success look like a very bad thing to strive for. In the book, the message was clear, construction should not require destruction. In the movie, business is bad, commercial products are bad, it even makes a brief remark about our legal system being wrong when the Once-ler rants “I’ve done nothing illegal, I have rights!” after the Lorax tells him the animals are leaving. The message of the book is environmental, the message of the movie is also political.

Characters, From Paper to Picture

The main contention is newly created characters, especially the O’Hare antagonist who serves as a “modern” Once-ler. Unlike the Seuss characters who tend to have more thoughtful designs, like the Once-ler who always had a small amount of dimensionality to him, O’Hare is a very 2-dimensional character who in every way feels like he popped out of the hollywood “evil-businessman” mold.

The writers did pull up their pants and brilliantly execute several characters directly from the book, especially the young Once-ler beginning as a young entrepreneur whom is genuinely likeable. This makes watching the Once-lers initial troubled but enthusiastic start quite refreshing. Despite his initial feud with the Lorax the Once-ler did also try to strike a balanced relationship at one point, which makes the sting of his eventual pilfering of the forest biting on a personal level, and his late epiphany more emotional.

The Once-lers' welcome sign

Often The Lorax will do several things very right, but drops the ball and spoils them by taking good things too far. An example is the Grandmother character who made me think to myself: “I like her, she’s kind of cool.” Not the “forced” cool  but the kind of cool of a character has when they exert confidence, cleverness and poise. I promptly scratched this opinion when the writers decided at the end of the movie she should steal a snowboard and tackle a hill better than most professional boarders, while all the other characters literally shout “she’s so cool!”. On an interesting side-note, the Grandmother the only character in the movie that repeatedly steals.

The expansion of the Once-ler character was also two-steps forward and one-step back. Several elements that were introduced should have been expanded even further, such as his efforts to avoid cutting trees down. The eventual deforestation of the area was cut down to a nightmarish montage which turns his character from “environmentally aware” to “scourge of the Earth” far too quickly, divorcing a good deal of emotion the audience had invested with the otherwise relatable young Once-ler. Where in the Original book the animals were sent off one-by-one showing the impact of the Once-lers actions, the movie sacrifices several very potentially powerful scenes to the aforementioned montage. It would have been better to see the Once-ler struggle against his early efforts to avoid deforestation, watching as the Lorax explains why certian animals had to leave, while gradually succumbing to the pressure to produce more Thneeds and expand. They didn’t need to make him temporarily evil, they just should have shown him for what he was: a young entrepreneur under pressure, who would have justified to himself why his actions were O.K.

A Sight to Behold

The Lorax is a beautifully rendered experience. The plastic city has sharper, harsher lighting. Deforested plains are dim, cold, lifeless.  The flashbacks of better days are warm, sunny and vibrant. Your eyes never feel like they’re becoming tired of the same pallet, as a good alternation between bright and dark areas keep the movie visually fresh. Wall-E, which also portrays desolation from commercialization didn’t have the same impact as The Lorax, visually; Where Wall-E introduced you into desolation, The Lorax starts you in a very clean, very “perfect” looking city, several scenes culminating to the first shot of a barren harvested forest. It’s quite a shocking moment. If Wall-E gives you positive reinforcement for saving the planet, The Lorax would be the equally-needed negative reinforcement.

Flashbacks to the Once-lers beginning are very energetic. As much as the book would describe the creatures of the forest, the movie simply shows you. The singing fish steal the scenes they are found in, and the other forest inhabitants are beautifully animated.

The city has a huge range of visually unique citizens, and it’s likely you won’t notice the same person twice unless you look for them. You might spot the same cars a few times, but otherwise the world feels very well presented, and the city doesn’t feel “small”.

The Once-ler was never actually shown in the books, only ever showing his hands. During the movie, the young Once-ler is a main character with an equal share of camera-time to Tod, so it’s understandable his face was in plain-view. The old Once-ler, who tells his story is still shown as a shadowy figure up until the end of the movie, where he walks out of his house. Any scene showing the old once-ler could have been done without showing his face – possibly with greater impact. While it’s a very minor nitpick, it was one of those things which illustrated disregard to the source material.

Stop the Music

Throughout the movie there will be moments when you wish the pace would have slowed down and given a more thorough interpretation of a scene – all of these scenes happen to be musical numbers. While it’s important to keep kids interested in the movie, the musicals which litter the movie do nothing for anyone. Even the introduction of the movie is a musical, and it hastily spits out “This town is fake, people buy air here, and were all insatiable consumers”.  With the beautiful designs of the city and forests coupled to the fanciful styling of the Seuss illustrations, if a child also needs frantic musical numbers to keep interested – they’re probably too young to be interested, or have the attention span of my cat.

The musical numbers are really used to avoid anything that might be considered “boring”, and often can get close to feeling a little offensive as they beat your head in with their messages. The musicals are so over-the-top every time they really kick you out of the movie, at one point, the corrupt mayor O’Hare tries to reverse the lyrics in a musical and nearly shatters the fourth wall by doing so, in a scene which would have been far more tense and emotional if they hadn’t done a musical at all.

The musicals in this movie need to be stripped out, they just ruin the scenes they are in by sacrificing any atmosphere. Its as if the movie is thinking every audience member has an attention deficit disorder and needs to constantly be “reminded” the movie is playing.

So Full of Colour, but Only Sees in Black & White

The young Once-ler and the Lorax, with Danny DeVito aptly voicing the Lorax

The Lorax is, as its own stand-alone entity, very good. It’s thought-provoking and has genuinely funny moments. When compared to the materiel its based on, it does show its weaknesses, but it also has its strengths. A great amount of backlash directed at the movie was the bastardisation of the meaning because of various product tie-ins and commercials. Very rarely is product placement noticeable during the movie, and in the end I know the marketing guys have a job to do – the movie won’t pay for itself during production. Also, tie-ins like the ill-fated SUV campaign aren’t in the movie itself – the Lorax never drives up in an SUV in the movie.

The Movie itself is good, and it has several aspects added that really do well. Sometimes the go-green message of the movie is irritatingly blatant, also attacking profiteering and law on occasion. The “making money is evil” argument is unbalanced, which is saddening because it also argues against sustainable methods as well (by making them look impractical);

For a movie with so much colour, it can only see in black and white with good but sometimes misguided messages. The Lorax is entertaining, and I’d watch it again simply because it is a fun movie. My final recommendation: Solid rental, if you have a pack of kids this would be a great theatre outing. Don’t worry about more political messages, as the environmental message will still be what kids would leave with – and it’s still a good one. Think “Wall-E”, but for a younger audience.

Killing my Older Work

Original Attempt, visually similar to the original logo.

Unlike the other icon I created, this one isn’t a full attempt to mimic the titular logo. The background, always implied to be a moon was swapped for a CD, and in lieu of the blue outer rim I added a green note similar to the ones on music mimetypes in KDE. Hopefully, if I can ever get this thing compiled into an installation it will blend better with the system than the original or my first attempt.

Fitting the Pallet, Purpose

Click either icon to view

The other icons, both mine and the cannon logo severely lacked colour, they were just white and blue. I chose the CD specifically so I could add a splash of colour, and the music note again differentiates from the wolf colour-wise. The music note was also used because the program is a music player, and nothing about the icons made any reference to that.

Finally, I just made the icon more saturated. My original attempt didn’t have that sheen Oxygen icons tended to have, which didn’t really match. This time around I tried to keep more in line with the styling of the Oxygen icon set by making it look slightly less dull. Over that, I also used standard-issue wavy lines to add some level of texture to the wolf without going crazy trying to draw hair.

Open Source, of Course

The icon will be licensed under the GPLv3 for those who want to use it for Amarok, or for the Amarok team itself if I manage to reach them. If you compile this into an Amarok installation for 64-bit Kubuntu, please forward me a .deb!

SVG Source

I was very impressed by the brushes Krita has to offer, instead of fighting them, they just do what you want them to do, and usually better than you expect them to do it. Click for the full-sized image.

Visual effects & speed

When I opened the desktop environment I was pleasantly surprised; Unity ships with a fallback mode if you don’t have access to all the effects, and for a moment the fallback was so good I thought I -was- running with effects. Drop shadows, blurring and smoothly animated windows were all running. Clearly effort was put into the fallback, and I wondered why environments like KDE – which are based on the same technology – didn’t do this. Unless you know what to look for I’m fairly certain most people would never know they would be working in a mere fallback.

Suffering from its roots

Nautilus looks almost broken with the Unity look & feel

Unity is based on an existing desktop environment known as “Gnome” which has historically been weaker than KDE in the style department, and it shows. There’s a real clash between some of the fine work done by the team at Canonical and the far less polished work by the Gnome team. Anything done in-house tends to have a soft monochromatic style which builds a strong visual identity, while anything kept from the Gnome side of the pond is more sporadic in quality and cartoonish in character.

The applications don’t fare much better in visual styling, turning out inconsistent levels of polish. Some applications have clearly had more love than others, and it makes it feel like a first-grade effort. Important applications like the file-browser are ugly, while less-used applications like the software centre have clearly been fawned over (be honest with yourself, do you spend the majority of your time on the computer installing things?). Canonical seriously needs to go over its core applications and start asking itself “is this really good enough, visually?”, and they can’t be afraid to say “this app needs to be scrapped and rewritten in-house” when the answer is no. The worst offender is the file manager Nautilus, which drops the ball so badly it should just be taken out back and shot; It’s just ugly, and it is actually detrimental to the styling by Canonical.

A misleading new direction

Unity has a terribly misleading user-interface. In trying to sport a sleeker simplified look and feel you will often find that controls are hidden but still functional, or sometimes interface elements that are visually present completely mislead you as to their purpose.

For example, you can re-size some (but not all) windows, yet none show resizing controls of any kind. The only way to know you cannot re-size a window is by going to re-size it and either failing to perform the action or noticing the mouse cursor doesn’t change to the resizing-arrows.

In another case, clicking the Ubuntu logo on the top-right will show the dashboard which is surrounded by what looks like a gripper, and it also has a window-like maximize/restore button. When I clicked the restore/maximize buttons implying it acts like a window, it acted like a window either taking the full screen or just a small portion of it – but attempting to click the gripper-frame only dismissed the dashboard. At a minimum, I would assume that clicking the gripper would do nothing, but it hid the dash and I really couldn’t answer why they would make it behave that way, instead of resizing the dash.

A dashing launcher

This particular build of Ubuntu doesn’t include some enhancements that are rapidly approaching, but I can already tell you the Unity dashboard is everything a launcher menu should be. The first thing it does very right is using ample space giving nice big icons to click on, with generous space for anything else you might click on. This makes flying around the dash easy, since you do not need to aim for small buttons to navigate.

When clicking a dock icon with multiple windows, those windows will be shown with an expose effect.

Search in the dashboard is pervasive, and I found myself using it as the preferred method to find apps. It was extremely fast, and pulls up exactly what you want it to. If the upcoming “HUD” system which uses search-based menus is half as good as the search here, it will be a very powerful and elegant tool.

Another thing I was surprised at was the “Apps Available for Download” section included in the dashboard. It essentially features apps related to what you are looking for, and it’s an ingenious way to expose novice users to the broad spectrum of programs available. No opening app installers, no software centres, no .deb files… Just right there ready for you a click away.

The design of the dashboard has the minor annoyance of not making it painfully obvious exactly what filters and selections are being used, compounded by the fact that it seems to remember your settings on a section basis. There were several occasions when I didn’t get to the results I expected, and it didn’t really show me it had some different options selected. Also, the icons used in some places don’t really tell me what they mean, so when (for an intents and purposes) one hieroglyph on the bottom is slightly whiter than another hieroglyph on the bottom, it’s neither noticeable or obvious what its doing.

Trying to mimic the OSX dock

Unity attempts to recreate the famous OSX dock, only on the left-side of the screen. It feels cheap compared to it’s cousin, and equally undercooked or just half-hearted when compared in just about every way. Almost like they would begin copying the mac dock and finish halfway-though shrugging “good enough!”

Right-clicking on icons will always give you some basic options (closing, quitting), while other apps which hook into the dock give you app-specific options. I was a little taken aback when one of the options that hard-drive icons displayed was “format”, probably the most dangerous options you can casually expose. It has some other useful icons that show up, like the virtual-desktop pager which shows all your spaces. Clicking a program icon with multiple exposed windows cleverly show you an expose of the windows, which is the first really good way I’ve seen to cleanly group all windows together into a single icon.

Any colour you want, as long as it’s black

Unity isn’t the most flexible beast if you customize your environment to work around your flow. While I can safely say Unity has an effective and thoughtful work-flow, I can’t say its one that will fit everyone. At a bare minimum I would hope to be able to move the docks and panels to different edges of the screen, but the developers have decided that these slight customizations are at the bottom of their to-do totem-poll.

You have some colour choices, but its simplified and you don’t exactly get every colour on the rainbow: you get brown, beige or high-contrast. They do a fine job with these colours mind you, but it still feels incredibly limited.

Unity needs to evolve, but it’s well out of the pond

The Ubuntu Software Center looks very good compared to Nautilus

Canonicals Unity has quite a few rough edges, most of which can be attributed to gluing very unique components to a very vanilla framework. Canonical needs to focus on the fine details, and right now they appear to be focusing on broad brush strokes. Everything they themselves have put together shows a good pedigree in design, but the moment you begin using applications not built by Canonical it becomes apparent who are second-class citizens.

The quest for elegance has also stripped functionality from the system too. It’s hard to tell what you can do and where you can do things unless you actually inspect everything as you go along. In some places, the icon-only labels can be confusing.

I was quite surprised that it ran various graphical effects in fallback mode. Unity was surprisingly capable and attractive when there’s no proper drivers. It ran smoothly, and never stuttered.

Unity has a five-star launcher-menu, and it has clearly been designed with an expert eye. It exposes what needs to be exposed, and does what it needs to do very well.

As high as Unities highs are, the severe inability to do even simple customizations is a deal-breaker. The poor integration of key applications also feels sloppy, along with the style-before-substance approach to the interface.

Unity would be very good for newer computer users. The de-cluttering of the interface makes everything less intimidating. Users who don’t care or don’t know how to customize their environments will likely find Unities work-flow to be very good for average web-browsing or office work. The overall speed of the environment was zippy, even without a proper installation. Power users will certainly find the interface lacking but may be wooed the extremely versatile dashboard launcher, even more so when the “HUB” system arrives in upcoming versions.

I’m going to be remaining on KDE, but using Unity has reminded me that KDE still has area in which it can improve, launchers, a more capable fallback mode.

I would recommend Ubuntu and Unity for those with slightly underpowered computers, or those who don’t need customization. Anyone who wants a simple, clean environment may also enjoy Unity. People who may want to avoid unity includes more advanced users who like to customize their own workflow, or those who otherwise prefer PC to Mac but prefer free and open software as Unity is out-of-the-box the most mac-like environment in terms of behavior.

This is going to be a 3-or-4-part guide. Part 1 is going to be purchasing everything necessary to build your own media centre, what to look for, and some reccomendations.

Mini Bare bones-PC

Zotac ZBoxHD

A mini-PC will serve as your media “box”. These are just tiny computers that tend to be “lower-end”, but pack enough punch to play high-definition movies in 1080p. For the purposes of my media centre, I’ve chosen the “Zotac ZBOXHD-ID41-U Barebone”, and I’ll write this guide for the Zotac – although it should apply to other barebones mini-computers. If you choose a non-Zotac model, ensure it has “Nvidia ION” graphics; ION graphics cards are powerful enough to pump out 1080p video, while others tend to lag or stutter. The Zotac is a small dual-core mini computer with a reasonably high-powered graphics card, and wireless internet, which will also be a huge asset in an entertainment system. It has HDMI out, so it can plug right into your TV.

Costs around $200-$350.

Memory

DDR 3 SO-DIMM Ram

Getting a barebones mini-PC means it won’t work out-of-the-box, so you’ll need to get some extra parts and install them yourself, otherwise it won’t even turn on. The Zotac uses DDR3 800 SO-DIMM memory, and you want 2 2GB sticks. The Zotac has 2 slots, and a maximum of 4gb of memory, so it’s the most you can use – and for a media centre this is more than enough. Brand doesn’t matter, if its DDR3 SO-DIMM it will fit. Simply put, you can ask for two 2-gig sticks of DDR 3 notebook memory.

Costs around $15-$20 / Stick, or $30-$40 for both.

Hard Drive

The MyBook 4TB External Storage Drive

This is what the software will go on, and you have two choices here, depending on your needs. There are 2 directions you can go with your hard-drive, and they will affect how you use your media centre

Method 1: Store everything in your media centre. You pay a little more and get the highest-storage drive you can put into your media centre. The advantage of this is that you don’t need any external storage, movies and media just go into your box; your box holds your movies, TV and games. If you do this, get a SATA hard drive for notebooks, and find one thats 1TB of storage – the most you can get for a hard-drive of that size. You can hold hundreds of movies or dozens of complete television shows with this. It has the downside that it will eventually fill up, and you may need to get an external drive later. But even if you just store movies, it could take years to fill.

Costs $100-$150

Method 2: Get a high-performance “Solid State” hard drive (SSD). These are more expensive and hold far less information, but are incredibly fast, meaning your media centre will turn on in seconds instead of a minute. You can store some other things on the solid state disk, such as games you’ll play frequently – making them load almost instantly. If you go with a solid state drive, you will also need to purchase a larger “external storage” drive to actually hold your video, as Solid State drives don’t hold nearly as much data yet (External sotrage is covered in the next section). I would recommend the Corsair Force Series 3 60GB model for $100-$120, as it is extremely fast for the price.

Costs vary anywhere from $80-$500; Just pay attention to the “read speed”, which is the whole point of using an SSD.

Method 3: Get the cheapest Hard Drive you can find. If you plan on using external hard drives but don’t want to sink large amounts of money into an SSD, you can get a cheap hard drive.

Cheapest I found: $70.

External Drive

External drives aren’t necessary if you’re using Method 1 from the previous section. External drives are extremely high-capacity drives which can hold just about anything you throw at them. If you purchase a 4TB Drive, you’ll have a hard time filling it. External drives are very handy because you can connect them to different computers, meaning you can copy from your main computer and then simply re-connect it to your Zotac box.

Costs $300-$450

Note that 1TB = 1000GB. So when you want to compare storage, remember a DVD is ~1GB, A Blu-Ray quality movie can range from about 10GB to 20GB.

•  Internal Storage (Method 1) holds 1000GB or 1TB.
•  Solid State Storage holds 60GB (you can get SSDs with more storage, but it’s not worth it)
•  External storage holds about 4000GB or 4TB.

Thumb Drive

You’ll need a thumbnail drive to install software onto your Zotac box. You can be cheap here, but try to get a 1GB stick. These are cheap as dirt. If you have a spare, use that. It will only be used once.

Cost: $10-$20

Remote Control

The NYXboard Remote

Here you have options. If you have an iPhone or an Android phone, you can use that as a remote control. If you want to use a traditional remote, you can use just about any USB windows-media remote, which will work. But for the creme-de-la-creme you can order the Motorola NYXboard remote control, which is tailor-made for the software I’m about to recommend It has a keyboard on the back with traditional controls on the front, which will both turn on and off automatically using an internal gyroscope. The NYXboard remote is about $70-$80 ordered online.

Costs $0-$80USD.

USB Game Controller

Optional. Use it if you want to play retro games. The Zortac only has a couple USB ports, so you may need to get a USB extension.

Costs $25-$50

What this all gets

For about $345 you can have a nice little setup, with internal storage on your drive using your phone as a remote control. The only thing you’ll really miss out on is some extra speed and storage.

If you went top-of-the-line with everything, you’re probably hitting around $800-$900, which will give you a little speed-demon which will store a decades worth of movie material, and a remote-control that will just about walk your dog.

A good middle-ground is about $400, which will give you good storage, a decent remote-control, and maybe a controller.

My next guide will be about assembling the components, and taking all those pieces you bought foolishly following this guide and putting them together. I may or may not cover installing “XBMC”, the media center software (which is free).

101

Tin Tin is a about a journalist of the same name, following his exploits and good deeds while he not so much observes news as he makes it. Before the opening credits are even over, it makes one thing clear; despite being on the young side, he is adept at adventure and is well known for his prowess. Throughout the movie we are gradually introduced to most of the wider cast of the comics the movie is derived from, in addition to their quirks and personalities, ending the movie with just enough loose ends to justify a sequel.

Stunning set pieces

Tin Tin sports a highly-detailed world and a wonderfully crafted rendition of its characters. At times, the realistic details of a character will clash with their more cartoonish profiles. Tin Tin himself is an exception to this, with a more traditional design compared to the outlandish silhouettes the other characters cast. This can be off-putting because you’ll get used to “human” proportions, then a character with a nose the size of a shoe-brush will step into frame. The animators knew that occasionally their realistic designs on cartoon frames were offsetting, and several scenes were ultimately removed from the final movie for it.

Other than the occasional moment of uncanny valley, the world the characters inhabit feels almost as real as our own, and represents a technical monument. Dust is kicked up by cars, water splashes as it tears through a town, and vehicles bounce and rock all the right ways. If something in the movie has weight, you can almost feel it, if a ship tilts, everything in the ship tilts, leans and crashes too. Not once in the movie did something feel like it wasn’t part of the world.

Kids will appreciate the quirks, but miss the deeper meaning

Tin Tin has some content which was questionable for a movie geared at a younger audience, and watching the hero shoot several henchman throughout the movie made me wonder if kids should have been in the audience. There’s also other serious matters, such as Captain Haddocks personal drinking problems. At the same time, these vices made the movie feel much more “real” compared to other similar movies; Yes, Haddock is a drunk, but for every minute it serves as comic relief, there’s another minute where you can see there’s serious pain there.

Incredible cast, but Tin Tin is less interesting than his dog

Just how Tin Tin is physically designed to be more plain compared to the eccentric cast, so too is his character surprisingly plain. Tin Tin is simply a device to move the plot forward, but he never really evolves nor does he have any real distinguishing personality traits. Generally, he stumbles into something and exposes a plot point for the more interesting characters to explore; otherwise he could be replaced with a sign that says “that way”.

On the flip-side, every other character, even minor ones, tend to have incredible personality clearly drawn from decades of comics. Captain Haddock steals the show, Thomson and Thompson show dedication with a lack of common sense, and even sleeping henchmen have more going on in their lives (which makes for an entertaining scene).

Well-paced plot lead by the nose

Tin Tin has a plot that feels lead by the nose. Tin Tin might get a cryptic clue about something, explained not two minutes into the next scene. While this makes the plot itself feel somewhat shallow, it’s kept at a brisk pace with well-timed action sequences that make you forget the occasional obviousness of what’s coming next. You know the bad guy will be the first one to collect all the pieces of the puzzle, but the 10-minute-long single-cut chase keeps you on the edge of your seat while it happens.

Great movie… Just shy of excellent

The Adventures of Tin Tin: Secrets of the Unicorn is a great movie, but it suffers the pinpricks of a few needles. The clash of realistic and cartoonish character designs will pop up when the camera focuses on various characters. Tin Tin himself is a bit of a flat lead character, and the plot is predictable as it goes along. But barring those minor points, Tin Tin is a drop-dead gorgeously sculpted and animated feature bursting with personality and very well directed action sequences. It deeply explores characters in insightful ways (that younger audience members will not likely appreciate) and wraps their stories up neatly. It leaves some loose ends to justify a sequel, but nothing that will leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Overall, I give this movie 3 out of 4 stars. If you like action with quirky characters, it’s a buyer. To everyone else, it’s definitely a solid rental. Even if you aren’t into the Tin Tin comics, it easily stands on its own, and thoroughly but subtly explains its characters.