Opinion Road

If you’re looking for a good set of in-ear headphones for your phone or music player, avoid these! Good Flexible flat siliconised chord volume slider Bad sound quality: woeful: muffled treble: non-existent / bass: mild volume: low long stems    

★★★★☆ Quentin Tarrantino can still make solid films. Christoph Waltz, who was mesmorisingly good in Inglourious Basterds, also commands your attention in this one. Jamie Foxx is brilliantly cast, insomuch as his inability to match Waltz’s acting talent is well masked by good direction. Unlike Tarrantino’s other work, Django follows a single storyline and doesn’t [...]

I recently decided to publish (merge) my Outlook Calendar (Exchange) to my Google Calendar as a discrete calendar – that is, as a fifth calendar on top of my existing four calendars) – doing so would allow me to see my combined commitments at a glance. Since my iPhone gets its calendars from Google Calendar, they would all be [thus] available in-turn on my phone … I thought I’d share some notes and experiences.

“Well rounded” doesn’t even start to describe this movie. Jackie Weaver’s much-celebrated role as the matriarch of large family of criminally-inclined ‘boys’ is not the award winning role that the movie’s PR company has decided to promote, but her role is pivotal and mesmerizing. Ben Mendelsen, Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton and newcomer James Frecheville excel themselves in their roles and a dysfunctional and yet highly effective armed robbery team (of sorts). “Team” kind of overstates the organic nature of their level of organisation, as you’ll see.

4½ / 5 stars

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams do a stellar job. See it with someone you love.

4½/5 stars

Cold (literally), suspensful, gritty and harsh. A story told with such a sense of honesty and sympathetic and balanced pace that you wonder where the hour and a half went.

4½/5 stars

Great to watch, but certainly not a good ‘date night’ for you and your brain. Whilst there’s a fairly heavy expectation placed upon the watcher to know something about the original story, it was probably fairly thin in the first place, so this installation feels [curiously and perhaps aptly] just like another frame of a meaningless, albeit visually stimulating and interactive, console game.

3/5 stars

Downey Jr puts in a solid performance (not exemplary though) and Galifianakis puts in his usual curious and comfortably ‘wrong’ repartee. Whilst the movie is well paced and general curious (though not hilarious), the director or writer seems confused about what he wants it to be – a comedy, a drama or a romp – complete Ultimately it’s fairly well balanced mix of the three.

3 / 5 stars

Following the migration of a number of my websites from physical servers to virtualised hosting, many of the sites experienced worrying outages. I subsequently went in search of a decent web server monitoring service that could shed some light on the actual downtime. The following is a review of the top 3 of those services, along with screenshots and recommendations.

HD, SD, 720p, 1080p & Upscaling – wheat from chaff I once penned an email to my friend (Sarah) extolling my perspective on the relative quality a range media and TV hardware resolutions.  The data was far from scientific, but it’s based on a reasonable exposure to a range of media and output formats.  The [...]