28 Days Later

You know what my favorite kind of movie is? Virus movies. I think this fascination for viruses started when I first watched the movie Outbreak when I was a kid. The idea that something as small as virus can spread around so fast and give us such a hard time dealing with it fascinates me a lot, especially since it isn’t just a movie story. Take the influenza outbreak we have going on right now, it’s spreading so fast we can’t even keep up with the numbers anymore.

After watching Outbreak there have not been a lot of movies that dealt with the contagious virus idea. At least non that I felt were decent. Then in 2008, game developer Valve released the game Left 4 Dead, which revolves around a highly contagious Rabies infection that turns people into mindless killers. The story is told during the course of the game in the form of wall writings by other non-infected who try to make their way to safety as well as other details integrated in the maps that tell you what happened. Ever since the game came out I have been loving Left 4 Dead. Each time I play through a location I notice new things and a new part of the story gets revealed. Then I found out about the movie this game was partially based on.

28 Days Later

Apparently there has been an awesome movie in existence since 2002 which I had no clue about. 28 Days Later tells the story of the incredibly dangerous Rage Virus. Originally meant as an experiment in primates, the virus is unleashed onto the United Kingdom when animal activists try to set the animals free. From there the virus spreads incredibly fast and within two weeks the government starts a nationwide evacuation. The UK is left abandoned, now home to thousands of infected and just a handful of survivors. 28 days after the initial infection we meet Jim, who wakes up in a hospital after having been in a coma for over a month.

Besides having a story I really like, this movie has other qualities I can respect. For instance the shots of a completely deserted downtown London are creepy to look at to say the least. Especially because there were no sets used for a large part of those shots. They actually sealed off parts of downtown London for 20 minutes at a time to shoot the footage.

Also the music in this movie is extremely good and well placed throughout the movie. It really sets the mood in a lot situations, particularly the mansion scene near the end of the movie. I love it when image and audio come together like that and the director of this movie, Danny Boyle, did an outstanding job on it. I have just found another favorite director.

28 Weeks Later

Obviously I’m not the only one who thought this movie was great, otherwise it would not have spawned one of the best movie sequels I have seen in a long time. Normally a sequel sucks compared to the original, this sequel is probably even better than the original! I will not give away too much of the story for those who still want to go and watch it, but you’ll be pleased to know that the awesome London scenes are still there, the awesome music is still there and the amount of gore in this movie has been increased quite a bit from the original. I loved it and hated it at the same time, haha. The only grudge I had against this movie was the ending, which was kept open and incredibly sucked. When they were making this movie they did not even know if there would be another sequel, so making it that open ended really pissed me off.

28 Months Later

Luckily Boyle is not done with the 28 movies yet. A third movie is said to be in development and is likely to hit the theaters in 2011. What it will be about is unknown up to this point, but Boyle has stated that it will try to move the story forward from where the second left off. If Boyle stays up to his standards then we can expect a movie which is even better than the second one, which should be great.

Trailers

Words can not really describe the mood these movies are set in though, watch the trailers below if you really want to experience what these movies are about.

Robin

The Importance of Back-story

In my opinion a back-story or lack of one can completely make or break a story, be it a movie, game, book or other form of media. Especially if a story is set in fictional or partially fictional universe a lack of back-story can completely shatter something which had the potential to be very good.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because I just had my 12-year-old niece over for two days and she just loves horror movies. She thought it would be a great idea to have a movie night consisting only of horror movies. And I HATE horror movies. I’m not scared of horror movies, I genuinely hate them because the quality of the story in such movies is almost always puke worthy.

If it’s a story about a serial killer there is always a group of young kids who get slaughtered and by the end of the movie we still have no idea who the killer is or, even more important, why he became a serial killer to begin with. There is no real story to begin with, there is no hidden plot, it’s just a group of people who keep getting killed in hilarious ways without any real motive and the movie is over once they are a) all dead, or b) if one manages to survive in which case you can bet your ass there will be a sequel.

If the story features monsters it’s even more stupid. Often you get the same type of scenario but instead of a serial killer the group gets to deal with unnatural monsters of all kinds. What these monsters are, how they came to be, where they came from or why they are attacking the group remains unknown for ever, they are just in the movie to make it scary and not to support some sort of  interesting plot line. Again the movie ends when either everyone is dead or if the last person makes it out alive.

This brings me to the movie my niece brought over; The Decent. When we started watching I was pretty skeptical about the story since the description on the cover didn’t leave much room for interpretation. Group of women in a cave, scary monsters, the end. I was surprised however when the story started to climb to an okay level at some point when there was still no sign of the monsters 45 minutes into the movie and small signs of back-story and subplot started showing up. But it soon dropped back to the ’stupid’ category as soon as the first monster showed its face.

Spoilers!
The monsters in this case were blind cave dwelling creatures who hunted based on sound, much like bats. When one of the women finds an old piece of cave exploring equipment, while the cave is supposed to be new and unexplored, the suggesting is made that the creatures are actually evolved humans, evolved from the explorers who set foot in the cave over 100 years ago.

When that theory is first told in the movie you are left with a lot of questions. Why didn’t the explorers starve to death? How can something evolve in just 100 years time? With any other movie you’d laugh at the theory itself, but because up to this point the movie had a pretty solid story, you tend to think that you’re going to get an answer to those questions as the story progresses. But from the moment the monsters show up the movie drops down to a classic ‘hunt down and kill’ scenario. No back-story of any kind is given about the creatures from this point on. The creatures simply serve as the means to killing the victims and nothing more while there was plenty of potential to tell more about these creatures and the explorers who came before.
End of Spoilers

Like with any low grade horror movie, though, this movie also gets a sequel which will be released (or has been released) this year. It will offer the original writer and director of the movie a chance to fix his early mistake, though from what I’ve read so far I doubt the second part will be any better than the first part. Most importantly, I think the writer created an impossible scenario to create an explanation for which is something you should at all time avoid. If you’re going to create something, at least make the back-story something that could have happened in that particular universe.

I will be watching the sequel, I want to find out if the writer is going to make any effort into explaining the things he left untold in the first part. But like I said, I suspect it’s going to suck just as much.

Robin

Review: Asus R1E Tablet Laptop

The following entry is a post I wrote a while ago on an old blogger blog I had. At the time I had just bought a new laptop which had a tablet feature built in so I decided to review it. While it doesn’t have much to do with media percé, I thought it would be nice to have the review available here as well.

When it comes to computers I’m set on brands for some reason. Some brands I like for quality, like Nvidia and Enermax, others because I’ve been using that brand for an eternity and never had a problem. Asus falls in that last category, I have been using the Asus brand for years now in most of the desktop computers I have built over the years. Motherboard and video card both tend to be of the Asus brand simply because they are often the first with new gadgets and functionality and, like I said, have never ever failed on me.

When I started looking for a tablet PC specifically I quickly found that although a fairly wide variety of brands and models is available, most of them seem to be an ordinary laptop with a touchscreen slapped onto it. Obviously when you’re looking for a laptop for an advanced piece of hardware on it you can expect the laptop to be modified for it here and there. And while not all manufacturers live up to this expectation, some do stand out. Among which is the R1E.

Going tablet, yes or no?
Before we dive into anything else about this laptop I want to cover a small issue I have with tablet PC’s in general and if you’re the right person to buy one.

Tablet PC’s were originally (and 95% of them still are) aimed for the traveling business man. They are supposedly a great replacement for a notepad, you can bring it with you where ever you go without having a bulky looking laptop on your lap. The argument for a tablet PC in the office is that taking notes (during a meeting for example) becomes so much easier. However you need to consider if writing on a screen is really that much of an improvement over writing in a notebook and typing it in Word later. Especially since you won’t be using the tablet function of the laptop for anything else, is it worth the extra cash? I’m not a business man, but I’d be inclined to say no.

I have no statistics to back up the following claim, but I think that tablet PC’s are more popular in the art community than anywhere else. Being able to draw on the screen is much more significant then being able to write on the screen and it might be worth the extra cash for an artist as opposed to a business man who can just as easily grab a notepad. For artists, it’s a very big leap forward if they are able to sketch in their favorite graphics software.

Before I bought the R1E I read the blog of a business man (which unfortunately I lost the link of) who tried out working on a tablet PC during meetings and such. He came to the conclusion that the process of learning the laptop your handwriting and having a bulky machine with you all the time did not come in as handy as you would at first believe. Of course it had it’s benefits, like being able to check your e-mail on the spot and quick access to notes, but he found that when he was in a meeting he rarely referred to his e-mail and hardly ever had to look at previous notes. Eventually he got rid of the thing and went back to a good old notepad. Moral of the story: think very hard about why you want to get a tablet PC and how you will be using it. The touch screen alone makes any tablet PC about 50% more expensive than their normal counterparts so be sure you will be using it when you decide to get it.

The basics
Let’s get some of the basic stuff out of the way first, such as the R1E’s specifications.

OS: Windows Vista Business Edition
Harddisk: 160GB
Internal RAM: 2GB
CPU: Intel dual core 2200MHZ
Screen size: 13,3″ (widescreen)
Wireless: Built in wireless network connector and bluetooth connector.

Other than those specs it has what you would expect on a laptop. Audio plugs, a DVD rewriter, VGA output and a nifty fingerprint scanner which I will talk about shortly.
Another cool part about this laptop is the swappable drive bay which originaly houses your DVD rewriter but can be swapped for a second battery (included) or a second hard disk (not included). The drive is apparently hot swappable (though I have not yet tested this) so you can just switch things around while you are working.
Just one other thing that is worth noting is the e-SATA port you can use to hook up all your external SATA devices.

User experience.
One thing that immediately came to mind when looking at the specs for this laptop was that 2GB of memory seemed rather low, especially since it was running Vista Business. On top of that you also get a trail version of Norton Internet Security 2008 which isn’t exactly memory friendly. So after installing most of the programs I used I was kind of expecting a significant drop in performance, especially when working on Photoshop but I was pleasantly surprised when the laptop seemed to hold it’s own against the large memory strain. I experience little to no lag when the laptop is booted up completely although I must say that the actual boot process can take quite long. If you need your laptop in quick bursts every now and again I would avoid shutting it down completely and just let it hibernate when you don’t use it.

Safe for the long boot time the rest of the laptop seems to work pretty smooth. As with any laptop these days you get a shitload of free programs and trails pre-installed on your system which you can then decide to keep or not. Internet surfing is not a hassle at all and the built in wireless connector does it’s job just fine at finding and connecting to the right networks. This laptop also has the ability to manually turn the wireless options on and off with the switch of a button. The response time of this switch is excellent and turns your internet connection on or off pretty much directly (depending on circumstances of course).

One slight issue that caught my attention was that the power LED on the laptop blinks softly when the laptop is in sleep mode. Normally there wouldn’t be a problem with this but the various blue LED’s on the laptop are rather bright. You won’t notice this at all during the day but for those of you who keep their laptop in sleep mode during the night will suddenly see a blue glow in their room fading in and out. This can be quickly fixed by just putting something on the LED’s, like a book, but it’s an annoying little detail non the less.

Tablet Style!
On to the important part! The Asus R1E has the awesome ability to flip the screen 180 degrees and then close the screen backwards, this leaves you with something that resembles an oversized PDA. When the laptop is in this mode you will lose your keyboard and touch pad but gain the ability to use your pen to select, click and write. When you flip the screen around the image on the screen automatically turns 90 degrees, forcing you to hold the tablet in a ’standing’ position. Luckily, for those not so keen on this little feature, you can flip the image back to normal with the push of a button and start working.

Because you lose your keyboard and touch pad when you’re in tablet mode, everything you need to do is done by using the included pen (which is nicely hidden in one of the corners of the laptop). Clicking is done by tapping and writing is done by writing on a little magical post-it note that will make an attempt at reading your poor handwriting. Especially at first it will have trouble but the more you use it the faster it will learn that those hieroglyphs are actually letters and numbers.

Using the pen to draw is remarkably accurate. The R1E is a Penabled tablet PC, meaning it implements the famous Wacom tablet technology and makes it one of the few tablet PC’s out there that supports pressure sensitivity (although you do need to download the drivers from Wacom.com first to enable the pressure sensitivity). Artists will be very glad to hear this I’m sure.
As far as actual drawing goes, to be honest I first expected a tablet PC to be a little off, sorta speak. Especially the small space between the pen and the actual ‘paper’ had me worried that I’d have to learn to use it properly. It surprised me that when I did some test drawings, the results were about as accurate as when I would do it on real paper. Another plus for the artist tablet user!

Last but not least a small detail our dear Asus friends didn’t forget (this is why I like them). As most tablet users know, the tip of a tablet pen will wear off in time and will need replacing. Asus is nice enough to supply you with 5 replacement tips and a nice tool to get the old one out. That should keep you drawing for years to come.

Fingerprint scanner
Biometric security measures are slowly being integrated in everyday life and are no longer a thing for top secret government buildings and James Bond movies. Today you can even get your front door to open with your fingerprint if you really wanted to.
In computers this development has been mostly reserved for government agencies but in the past few years we have seen fingerprint scanners popping up on USB sticks and phones for example.

Asus is one of the few companies to bring this technology to a laptop, together with HP who is exploring the same path, and it’s a good idea.
The fingerprint scanner on the R1E works exactly like it should without any major flaws. A pre-installed program lets you program your fingerprints into the system and from that moment on you can use your fingerprint to log into Windows, applications and websites. The only thing you have to look out for is how you swipe your finger when you’re teaching the program. If you swipe your finger with a curve of some sort you’ll have to duplicate that exact curve again to get a match in the future. It’s best to take some time when programming the scanner so you get the easiest positions to scan. For most people this will be the left thumb and the right index finger but take some time and figure out what you like best.

Battery life
An issue with the R1F (the R1E’s big brother) was it’s crappy battery life. User complained about the battery running low way to fast and that it’s durability only decreased after every charge. Unfortunately this problem was not fixed with the R1E as a closer inspection of the battery reveals that it’s the exact same model (R1F model).
My experience is that a fully charged battery will last you about two hours on average and a mere 1 hour and 45 minutes after the first few recharges. Compared to any other laptop this is pathetic and it also makes it the single largest downside of this laptop. Some people I know draw on their laptop for hours on end and having it plugged in to a power socket all the time isn’t nice for mobility. Luckily the previously mentioned hot swappable drive bay offers a solution as it can be used to store a second battery which offers an additional 1,5 hours of battery life bringing the total to 3,5 hours of battery life. That wouldn’t be a problem except that you have to sacrifice your DVD rewriter for it.

So far I have not encountered a battery that can replace the crappy thing Asus put in there but I hope to find it somewhere at some point soon because the current rate of decay will leave the battery useless in a year or so.
Users in the United States apparently can contact Asus about the battery and have it replaced if they really want to.

Conclusion
The Asus R1E is a very decent tablet PC that has all the extras you would expect from a tablet PC. It can handle pretty much all the basic stuff you throw at it like Photoshop and Word without a glitch but mind you that it’s not equiped for gaming.
The tablet part of the laptop works magnificent as does the nifty fingerprint scanner.

The only real downside to this laptop is the battery life and wear. You’d expect to be able to work for a few hours on a laptop without an electrical socket nearby but apparently 2 hours is all you’re getting at most from the original battery which is kind of disappointing but not a huge disaster for most users I’m sure.

Non the less, the R1E is something I can personaly recommend for artists looking for something more then a normal tablet and happen to be looking for a new laptop at the same time. Also for those doubting between a Wacom Cintiq or a tablet PC, go with the tablet PC. Not only is it cheaper (in case of the more advanced Cintiq models), you also get a lot more worth for your money (tablet on screen: $2500,- / tablet on screen + laptop: $2000,-. I rest my case).

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