Author: iandick

Weekly Digest

Life
Finished work for the year last week so I’ve got 20 days off until returning on Jan 4th. Plenty of present buying completed…and I’ve got AirPods on the way too.

Media
Two films in the last few days which couldn’t be more contrasting.

Rogue One – Enjoyed it and it ticked some of the Stars Wars boxes but also did things differently with a sombre tone at times. Looked stunning and considering everyone knew what was going to happen they did well to keep the story interesting. Still not sold on CGI actors and I’d love to know why some scenes from the early trailers never made the final cut. Also loved bitter droid. Need a BB-8 and K-2SO buddy movie.

Suicide Squad – A travesty of a movie. Imagine 20-30 music videos played back to back, with a seemingly connected story, but each one shot by a different director and written by a different writer. In fact that would have delivered a better movie than Suicide Squad. Crap dialogue, a focus on ass shots from the director, a terrible plot and a truly awful joker. Complete shite.

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Weekly Digest

Life
Business trip to Portsmouth last week. Gorgeous day but long and left me tired and playing catchup for the rest of the week. Good news with my camera – there was a dead/white pixel on it but shop I bought it from fixed it and I have it back in my hands. Christmas shopping continues…still quite a bit to do.

Media
Can’t wait for the last episode of Westworld. Such a great show. Watched Suicide Squad – pile of shit. Picked up Tomb Raider for the PS4 and the 4k graphics are very nice indeed.

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Weekly Digest

Life
Busy this week capped by slipping yesterday morning on an icy step. Old duffer. No lasting damage but a scraped arm and bashed leg. Lucky. Also lucky that I didn’t smash my camera and it was the tripod plate that took the impact which gouged a chunk of metal out of it. Shows how easy it can be to have a nasty fall.

Media
Still enjoying Battlefield 1 although some of the rounds can be just brutal. Also spun up Halo to play some old map remakes…wish I could say it was fun but. No.

Started watching Atlanta – very good. Also enjoyed the first episode of The Grand Tour, more so because of the 4K HDR cars than Clarkson and his merry men. It was just a more expensive Top Gear. If thats your thing, great. If you were getting jaded of the old format then there isn’t much different here.

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Weekly Digest

Life
Back to work but just over three weeks until I stop for the Christmas break so not too bad. Had a checkup at the hospital on Wednesday to rule out anything around the heart being an issue with my health. An ECG, ultrasound and 17 minutes on a treadmill and the heart got a thumbs up which is great news. Doctor concurs with others that it is a viral infection and I need to keep fighting and it will eventually pass. Fingers crossed.

Media
2 similar but different shows this week. Westworld is really hitting it’s stride and the last 2 episodes have been terrific. Also excelling in its second season is Humans on Ch4. Good to have some intelligent sci-fi on the TV.

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Weekly Digest

Life
Good week off work and another year older as it was my birthday yesterday. It was also a week for new toys. Finally got a working Samsung 4k TV and the picture is gorgeous. Also picked up a PS4 Pro (cheers Shak) and you can certainly see an upgrade in performance. Titanfall 2 looked great and the HDR/4k on The Last of Us is stunning. If you are interested on my old PS4 then take a look here.

Media
Titanfall 2 is a very good game. It now has a single player story which so far has been excellent, multiplayer as good as the original and a promise that all future map and mode’s delivered for the game will be free. Bravo and highly recommended.

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300

August 19th 1993 saw the launch of Edge Magazine. An adult look at the future of games and I loved it from day one. 23 years later and they’ve just launched the 300th edition…and I still have all of them. I almost ditched the collection when I moved house over 10 years ago but I’m glad I held on to them. I scanned the covers a few years ago and every year update it with the latest covers. All 300 Edge Magazine covers can be found in this Flickr album.

Edge 001

Edge 300

Issue 300’s cover pays homage to issue 1 but is fairly dull compared to some of their better covers. Edge over the years focussed on design and substance unlike so many of their competitors. Arrogant, controversial but always pretty bang on from my perspective.

What’s caused most debate is the game reviews. Edge score out of 10 and over the years there have been precious few 10’s awarded.

[table id=1 /]

Edge have also awarded some retrospective 10’s over the years as well.

[table id=2 /]

One of the repeated debates has been on publishing a score. How many people don’t buy a game because it got a 7 but it was still a great game? I’ll hold my hand up and say a 6 or 7 has put me off a game or three despite reading the review and thinking thats sounds great. I’ve also played and really enjoyed lots of games that got a 6 or 7 proving the text is more important than the score. Despite Edge talking about removing the scores they still publish them while other gaming sites now no longer put a score on a game and the reviews are better for it.

Despite online being the place to get up to date info and paper magazines always being behind, Edge interviews, features and their unique perspective on the industry still make for a must read. Hopefully they can maintain an audience going forward and they are around for a few more years…I need my monthly Edge fix.

Weekly Digest

Life
Jury service came to nothing – wasn’t called, service passed hopefully for another few years. Picked up a new 4k TV which has….some issues. Replacement coming this week, hopefully this one works. Yes, it is a Samsung! Got this week off work so chance for a bit of relaxation and the start of Christmas shopping?

Media
Planet Earth II was stunning last night especially the drama around the racer snakes. Who needs CGI! Dear BBC, please release a 4k version on iPlayer. Thanks.

Links

Fireworks

Last year I tried to get some photo’s of the Glasgow Green firework display with mixed success. Wind didn’t help and where we pitched our camera’s was very busy and the locals were not often….friendly. So this year with a clear night promised I tried Queens Park with Shak. Surprisingly it was really busy but then again the view was pretty great.

Glasgow Fireworks 2016

I’d hoped to do a long exposure and capture lots of fireworks as they were set off over the city and I’m pretty pleased with how it came out. The rest of the pics were fairly standard firework photo’s but do capture what I was seeing.

Glasgow Fireworks 2016

Glasgow Fireworks 2016

I was let down by a couple of things. The Triggertrap I was using for long exposures worked occasionally rather than every time. No idea why but something I need to investigate. Not sure if it’s the lightning to headphone jack dongle.

The biggest let down though was me. My lack of knowledge was poor last night. No prep, don’t know my gear and it was only thanks to Shak that I got some pics later on with some great advice. Must try harder!

Weekly Digest

Life
Busy week ahead. Work is super packed all week and I’m potentially on jury duty at the High Court in Glasgow from Wednesday. Better than twiddling my thumbs I guess. End of the week will see new 4K TV and amp delivered – cabling ahoy!

Media
Battlefield 1 is the real deal. Still enjoying it.

PinOut on iOS and Android is worth picking up. Endless pinball with tron like graphics and sounds. Addictive.

Links

Mojo

I recently wrote about being 10 years on a Mac. It’s been a remarkably stable time with access to a lot of great software and hardware. However there’s no getting away from it – Apple have been stagnating when it comes to Mac’s.

Going back 10 years and there was a marked difference between buying a Mac and buying a PC. Apple owned the software and hardware process and there were very few product lines compared to the hundreds of PC’s available and the crapware that afflicted every PC from Dell to HP, Dan to Acer. They all did it and it stunk. No virus or malware issues either. And for me the difference in how the hardware was designed was massive.

PC or Mac from 2006. Which would you have rather had?
PC or Mac from 2006. Which would you have rather had?

This was also the time of the Mac vs PC adverts that went on for a few years. How times have changed.

This week saw Microsoft and Apple launch new desktop and laptop products. The difference between then couldn’t be more stark and shows that Microsoft have got their mojo back…and Apple are looking a little lost.

The problem for Apple is iOS. It’s a great problem to have, but Mac and iOS are two very different platforms that share quite a bit in common. iOS is the rising platform, dominant in sales and very much the future of computing. Mac is much loved amongst the Apple community but sales in the desktop and laptop market are going down. Global PC sales have declined for eight consecutive quarters. End users aren’t upgrading their PC’s as often – my desktop and laptop are over 5 and 4 years old respectively and still going strong.

However iOS is Apple’s touch driven environment and Mac’s have been left behind in that regards. Is it the right approach? Well Microsoft don’t think so and having messed up so much in the past on mobile they’ve bet on having a unified operating system. So Windows 10 works anywhere, mouse or touch driven, so you can take advantage of your hardware depending on the situation you are in. They are also hitting their stride when it comes to hardware. A few years ago the Surface Pro was a nice device but version 4 is great and with the Surface Book and now the Surface Studio there’s a real wow around Microsoft’s hardware from a design perspective.

Microsofts Surface Studio
Microsofts Surface Studio

Microsoft are courting creatives. IBM have rolled out Macs across the enterprise. Microsofts new devices are not cheap unlike Windows products of the past. Good design costs money and the small creative market are willing to pay to get the best devices. Software is not really locked to platforms. Adobe allow you to work on Mac or PC and the experience on both is pretty much identical. The Mac App Store hasn’t done the Mac platform any favours. Equally the emerging VR market is a Windows exclusive right now. Apple hardware isn’t powerful enough to drive any of the VR platforms and they’ve yet to show their hand when it comes to AR or VR apart from Tim Cook verbally favouring AR.

Whats frustrating for me is that Apple look to be slowing down. Stagnating. The Mac market is getting smaller so is the ideal market to innovate in. In contrast last weeks announcements were pretty snooze worthy. Pricey laptops, confusing naming strategy coupled with a lovely new Touch Bar. The laptops aren’t using the latest chips and the RAM looks stingy. Add to that a greater than three years old Mac Pro, and ageing iMac and Mini. What’s going on?

Worse for us in the UK is that all Mac prices rose last week thanks to Brexit. While I can understand the rise for the new MacBook Pro’s and the iMac’s, it’s a disgrace that the ancient Mac pro rose by £500. Poor decision Apple or don’t you care? Seeing as the Mac Pro website still references Aperture, a product that Apple killed over 12 months ago, I’m thinking they don’t care.

Or has Apple got too big? The video above from Steve Jobs is prophetic and could describe todays Apple. This years iPhone is undoubtedly a great phone but it’s safe. Compare it to the Xiaomi Mi Mix which is a gorgeous new Android device and shows some true innovation with regards design and materials.

Xiaomi Mi Mix - stunning new Android phone
Xiaomi Mi Mix – stunning new Android phone

Apple for me right now feels conservative. Undoubtedly making bundles of cash but hedging bets and not as exciting as they once were. However the likes of Microsoft, Google and Samsung have some great products out there. As a tech lover I’m spoiled for choice. Earlier in the week a colleague said they were worried at Apples approach. I’m personally not worried as it’s easy to move platform so I’ll always have access to the best hardware and software…but that should give cause for concern for Apple. Over time if people start to move away, especially developers and creatives, then it could be the start of a slow decline. Hopefully Apple will prove me wrong in 2017. They need to find their mojo again.