I’ve always been a fan of the Simpsons, but must admit that I found it most appealing when I was younger. Recently, I’ve preferred cartoons like Family Guy as it’s just a little bit more ‘intellectual’. Maybe not the right word to use, but it does appeal to a slightly more sophisticated sense of humour. When news of The Simpsons Movie leaked out, I was fairly indifferent - obviously hoping that it would live up to the phenomenal success of the cartoon.

I went to see it last week, and was suitably impressed. There weren’t all that many laugh out loud moments, but I definitely had a good chuckle all the way through. As I hadn’t seen the cartoon for a while it brought back lots of memories and was almost a little nostalgic! The animation was as ever excellent and they also introduced a 3D element which I’ve never seen in cartoons. It gave the movie a unique twist which it deserved.

The plot of the movie centers around the environment, pollution and recycling. I can almost imagine the brainstorming session where they decided that the plot needed to be relevant to the problems of today - environmental management was an obvious choice. That said, it worked well and the story flowed well in the essentially wacky Simpsons format.

It’s a great movie for children and adults alike, and certainly lives up to the cartoon. It won’t go down in history as an earth shattering success, but it’s enjoyable and will make you laugh. I was humming the “Spiderpig” song for quite a while afterwards…..

For many people, iTunes has one major flaw - it’s only possible to organise and play TV shows which were purchased from the iTunes store. For people over in America that’s no problem, but TV shows haven’t made it to Europe yet and that means showing them on your iPod or Apple TV isn’t quite so straight forward. I had several TV shows in the form of DivX AVI files - Scrubs, Friends and Lost to name a few - which I wanted to be able to play on my new Apple TV. This is the process I go through to convert them to the appropriate format, and tag them with season information and artwork:

Step 1 - Convert the files

iTunes isn’t happy with handling DivX or AVI’s, so we need to convert that file to one that is compatible with iTunes - MP4. There are several ways to do this, one simple on is using Quicktime and exporing the file to Apple TV. However the best method I’ve found is a program called Visual Hub. It’s about £10 but really is well worth it for the quality files it produces. These are the settings I use:

These convert video at a good quality resolution with fairly high settings. For me, filesize isn’t really an issue - quality is more imporant - so these work well. It generally takes a little less time to convert the file than it would to actually play it, that’s on a Macbook with 2gb RAM, you may find the time varies.

Step 2 - Tag the files

Once you’ve got your nice MP4 file, we’re nearly there. At the moment, if you drop that into iTunes it will think that it’s a movie which is fine if it’s a movie you’ve converted, but if it is a TV show you need to alter it’s embedded data to give some information about the TV show name and series etc. A great program for doing this is called Lostify. This is completely free, and lets you tag a TV show with all the relevant information - it’s really easy to use. This is a shot of the interface:

Once you have run your files through this tool, just drag and drop them into iTunes. You’ll have a great collection of TV shows in no time, all of which stream to and look great on your Apple TV.

There’s nothing better on a cold winter’s evening than a great heart warming Christmas film, and The Holiday really delivers in every area. Four great actors/actresses help to turn a fairly cliche’d love story into something funny and uplifting - I never looked at my watch once, unusual for me in a film of this genre!

The film is a romantic comedy about two women who swap homes for Christmas. Iris (Winslet), a journalist on a London newspaper, is stuck in a dreadful relationship with a colleague who won’t commit to her. She lives in a tiny village and in a fit of desperation agrees to swap her house with Amanda (Diaz). Amanda is a hugely successful film industry executive who owns her own company, having found out that her long-term boyfriend is unfaithful, she needs a holiday.

I’m sure you can piece together how things unfold from there… Could both ‘romantically doomed’ women find love in a country far far away? Could they live happily ever after? If you’re looking for a film that with challenge and test you, this definitely won’t fit the bill. If you’re after a Christmas classic which will leave you feeling like everything is right with the world - look no further!

This is definitely my favourite advert on TV at the moment, and I think the concept is really, really cool. It’s also lead me to the music of Jose Gonzales, which is incredibly simple and completely accoustic. I watched a behind the scenes making of the commercial today, and it’s really worth a couple of minutes of your time:

Check it out

I’ve read a few articles today, and managed to get Apple’s great Front Row software working on my Mac Mini. I’m pretty pleased, to say the least. It’s fantastic - everything Windows XP Media Centre should have been. This is a quick guide, taken from here on how to get it up and running:

STEP 1.
Download JacksonBrown’s patched Front Row STW.

http://rapidshare.de/files/6669514/Front_Row__k_.zip.html

His brilliant patching work makes Front Row run under 10.4.2 without having the iMac’s remote present.
There are three files inside this .ZIP
- Readme.txt you may now ignore, as it is out of date.
- Front Row.app copy to the Applications folder
- BezelServices.framework copy to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ (if this is already present, you don’t need to copy it)

STEP 2.
Open Script Editor.app (located in Applications/AppleScript) and paste in the following code.

tell application “System Events”
tell application “Front Row” to activate
key code 53 using {command down}
end tell

Once you have done this, save it as an application named openfrontrow.app in your applications folder.

STEP 3.
Now go to macupdate and download the program named Xkeys. It is freeware.
Once you have the file downloaded, install it and then open it up. Inside the program, configure your F8 key to run your openfrontrow.app file you created in STEP2.

STEP 4.
Now go into System Preferences. In the Accounts preference tab set up front row.app (the one you downloaded, NOT to be confused with openfrontrow.app that you created in STEP2) to be a login item.

STEP 5.
Logout and log back in. When it turns back on, press the F8 key and hopefully you will be experiencing Front Row! Pressing F8 again (or a lot of other keys on the keyboard) will close Front Row.

Make sure nothing else is mapped to F8, or this won’t work

For me, everything except the DVD playback works. I’ve also written/modded a Salling Clicker script to get it working on my K700i. I’ll post that in a bit. I hope it works for you, it’s really breathtaking!

If you’d ever taken the time to browse through my portfolio, you may have noticed that one of the projects I have worked on is a website for a film production company - North Country Pictures. They specialise on creating films set in the North West of England, in the 1960’s.

One of the perks of designing for a company such as this is that you are given the opportunity to attend the premiere’s of new releases. Last night, their second film The Jealous God was premiered in Rochdale - where it was filmed. I went along, and had a really enjoyable evening. Red carpet, press, lots of actors, it was a great experience. Among others, I saw Jason Merrells of Cutting It fame, Denise Welch and Roy Walker.

If you get the chance, I would really recommend going to see The Jealous God. It should be showing at many cinemas across the UK (particularly in the North of England), so there’s no excuse not to! You can read the synopsis here, but I promise you it would be worth watching whether you think you would be interested or not.

I’m in a position where I really appreciate the amount of work and effort which has gone into producing something on this scale, and it’s no mean feat. It has taken over three years to create and the logistics of trying to find all the 1960’s equipment, vehicles and props has been a mammoth task. I feel proud to be a part of such a great production.