Tag: Internet

Manasarovar

I’ve been contacted by Anup Kurian who is the writer director of Manasarovar asking for a plug…so here goes:

Manasarovar was made for about 30000 pounds on a 16MM camera bought from EBAY and has won many awards and participated/selected in prestigious festivals.

– Aravindan Puraskaram for Best Debut Director in India
– Gollapudi Srinivas National Award for Best Debut Director in India
– Official Selection – London Film Festival 2004
– Opening Film, Indian Panorama, International Film Festival of India, Goa, 2004
– Best Film and Special Jury Prize, International Film Festival of Mumbai, 2005
– Fukuoka International Film Festival, Fukuoka, Japan, 2005

If our film attracts a good crowd in Glasgow we can get more theatre bookings in UK. It would be great if you can mention the film and the screenings in Glasgow in your blog.

– Sunday February 27, 2PM and Monday February 28, 8.45PM at Glasgow
Film Theatre.

Needless to say we do not have a marketing budget and the only marketing is contacting bloggers like yourself and requesting reviewers from main stream media to watch the film. Later the film continues at Dundee, Brentford, Kilburn etc. In April Manasarovar will release in India and later this year hopefully in USA.

WoW

I vowed never to buy an online game that a) charged per month, b) involved Orcs and Elves, c) made me worry about levelling up and the skills that I learn and d) consumed more of my time than is already spent on Xbox Live

But I gave in and bought World of Warcraft. Quite simply the most enjoyable online game, if not most enjoyable game I have ever played. Graphics and sound are good if not ground breaking. Half Life 2 put paid to that. What’s astounds is the sheer scale of the gaming world that is available to you and it’s non-linearity. The community aspect is second to none. Although the game doesn’t come with voice support Yahoo messenger with a headset soon gives you the ability to talk with your fellow players. There’s just so much to this game – different races and classes, so many occupations and skills available, an in game e-mail system as well as auction houses and some astounding set piece moments and this is a game I’ve only scratched the surface with. Recommended although only if you’ve got the time to spend on it. The WordPress upgrade will have to wait.

Spyware

I helped out a friend from work today. “I’ve got adverts popping up from time to time and it’s starting to annoy me”. I cannot believe the amount of spyware I found and cleansed from his machine. Unbelievable. I started thinking…how did you let it get like this but after a while it was more…the majority of folks pc’s will be like this – spyware and spam are ruining the internet for the casual user. Therefore what follows is my quick guide to stopping spyware.

Firstly, use a firewall and a virus scanner. Preferably a hardware firewall but software will do. Win XP service pack 2 comes with a firewall but I would still recommend installing a separate program. As soon as you install windows make sure the firewall is up and running. Next install an anti-virus package. I still can’t see past Nortons Anti-Virus and probably Zonealarm but Nortons Security Suite will do both. PC Pro also recommended F-Secure Internet Suite as their recommended net security tool so that’s worth a look too.

That’s the pc secured but it won’t stop spyware from being installed and taking over your machine. The next best step is to install an alternative browser to Internet Explorer. You could try Opera but Firefox for me is faster, offers more features through extensions and is free. By doing this many of the spyware tools that takeover your browser will be eliminated from ever running on your machine. This however is still not enough.

Next I would download and install three different spyware detection and removal tools. They are Microsoft’s Spyware beta, Ad-Aware and Spybot. The reason why I suggest all three rather than one is that they all seem to detect spyware to a greater or lesser extent. The advantage of Microsoft’s tool is that you can have it running in the background so that new spyware threats can be trapped before they are installed. Ad-aware and Spybot are recognised as industry leaders when it comes to spyware – I would recommend running them at least once a month and deleting anything that they find.

The above should lead to a clean pc free of any nasties that are downloading in the background while you surf. However the key to hassle free pc is to make sure all the signature files and virus updates for the above software are downloaded as frequently as possible. It’s a pain but there’s no point having a virus scanner whose signatures are a year old.

Once final brownie point goes to the Microsoft Spyware beta. It has a couple of nice features that make it easy to track and remove other problems. One is the System Explorers. From here you can easily see what is currently running on your pc and what is started up each time you reboot your machine. In fact using this tool today I found a search bar that wasn’t automatically detected by any of the above tools but could easily be disabled and then removed from the System Explorer screen. The second feature is a tool to restore the default IE settings in case your browser has been hi-jacked by another search engine – very nice.

Proxy at work

Sigh – the work proxy is blocking more sites than ever – almost every gaming site has been blocked over the weekend. It’s only a matter of time before Google gets the treatment (they did ban Google groups a few weeks back but that was quickly reveresed). Guess I’ll need to do some work to fill in the day now.

XBMC

xbmcI’ve mentioned Xbox Media Center (XBMC) before but the new updates are top smart. First up is a new web radio interface. Makes browsing through hundreds of Internet radio stations a breeze. Second is a link into Apple’s movie trailer site which means you can stream and watch trailers on the TV with ease. Finally there’s a link to game trailers at Microsoft.

Linking into the pc is easy and means I can browse the all my music (and album art finally works well) and select play lists at will. Can then easily switch to movies stored on the media server pc, the Xbox itself or slap in a dvd. If you are into home entertainment in any way, a chipped Xbox and XBMC really are worth investigating.

 

Spread Firefox

Looks like the browser wars are back. Spread Firefox has been launched to promote the Firefox 1.0 preview release. Even the previous owner of the domain firefox.com has handed it over. Using Firefox is a joy compared to Internet Explorer, but I can’t see them overhauling IE. It really is only the geeks and the tech-savvy that are using Firefox at the moment – it will be a while before the average user downloads Firefox and understands the difference.

IEBlog

It had to happen. The IE dev team (newly re-created again after thinking they had sewn up the browser market) have a blog. Looking at the list of popular requests, it looks like most folk want Firefix bundled with XP as the default browser if the feature list is anything to go by.

People want people to download Mozilla Firefox

It also looks like the dev team have a sense of humour.