Stanley Kubrick's One-Point Perspective



A great video by Kogonada that shows the mastery that Stanley Kubrick had composing his films with the  use of symetry and the one-point perspective.

Neil Armstrong dies at age 82



NASA' tribute video to Neil Armstrong the first man in the moon who passed away today.

R.I.P. Scott & Scott



I discovered this classic thanks to the soundtrack of Forrest Gump. Today, the announced  that Scott Mckenzie died last Saturday at home.

Rise of the Video Game



Yesterday I watched a five series documentary called Rise of the Video Game produced by Discovery Channel. The series aired originally on November 2007 and depicts the history of video games from the fifties to this days. Here the editorial review:


The video game revolution has been under way for decades, progressing from simple amusements created in the 1950s to an all-pervasive force in today's popular culture that rivals — and will perhaps soon surpass — film and television. What began as a subculture pastime has evolved and transcended genres to become a unique form of expression impacting everything from modern warfare to interpersonal relationships.
Rise of the Video Game is a comprehensive and progressive exploration of the past, present and future of video games and video gamers. From the early days of Pong to today's ever-popular Halo 2, and from Atari 2600 to Nintendo to PlayStation,Rise of the Video Game tells the story of the people, the ideologies and the technology behind video games and how they have exploded into a cultural phenomenon. The evolution of gaming has seen the pendulum move from the days of games replicating society, to society replicating games. Featuring interviews with giants in the gaming industry of yesterday and today, this five-part series examines the evolution of the video game and its cultural impact on the world of entertainment today.

William Moggridge Dies at 69



Bill Moggridge, director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and an outspoken advocate for the value of design in everyday life, died September 8th, 2012, following a battle with cancer. He was 69. Designer of the first laptop computer and co-founder of the renowned innovation and design firm, IDEO, Bill pioneered interaction design and integrated human factors into the design of computer software and hardware.

New Dragon Ball movie coming soon



Akira Toriyama himself has written a message to introduce the latest Dragon Ball animated movie that will be released in march 2012. What's exciting about this new movie is the involvement in the script by the original author of Dragon Ball. It seems that after the disappointing Hollywood live action version of Dragon Ball, he decided it was about time to return to his characters and present them the way they were meant to be seen. It's soo nice to read some words of the original author promising us some good old times.

Dragon Ball as envisioned by his author ended with the final chapter published in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine back in 1995. Since then, the series has keep on growing as successful franchises do. Shortly after its conclusion, the animated series continued for a while with the adventures narrated in Dragon Ball GT and video games have continue to hit the modern video game consoles for al this years too, buut it was a long time we didn't have a brand new Dragon Ball movie.

Say tunned in the official website. If you really want to dive deep into Dragon Ball, check out Kanzenshuu a website born from the recent merge of Kanzentai and DaizenX two of the most complete Dragon Ball english sources out there. I recently discovered this topic about animation directors involved in the original series aired in the 80's and the 90's. Fantastic.

Lebron James: More Than a Game



Yesterday I saw the 2009 released documentary about the journey of Lebron James and his team mates starting in their school days and ending up becoming national High School  champions playing with the Irish from their hometown: Akron, Ohio.

SIDE BY SIDE directed by Chris Kenneally


Directed by Chris Kenneally comes a great documentary that deals with the transition from analog  to digital film that is taking place in the film business. Director such as James Cameron, David Fincher, George Lucas and David Lynch among others offer their point of view of this technological revolution that started a decade ago and still is on debate. Tribeca is showing a daily video series featuring clips that didn't make the final cut. The movie is due to release theatrically on August 17th and on video on demand on August 22nd.

New Solid State Drive for my Laptop



Some days ago, I came back to my hometown and I took some time to make some changes in my HP6710b laptop. I decided to change the 500GB Hard Disk Drive with a modern Solid State Drive. SSD prices are still high compared with and standard HDDs and as my laptop it's already pretty old I didn't wanted to invest too much on it, so I chose to buy a  OCZ Agility 3 SATA3 2.5" 120GB SSD  for about 100€ (for this price you can have a 1TB regular HDD). Therefore, the storage capacity of my laptop has been reduced from 500 to 120 GB so I externalized all my data and projects and sterted using the new SSD drive for just the OS and all the programs. As I'm always dealing with big amounts of data I'm used to carrying around many external USB HDDs so it's not going to be a big change for me anyway. In the case I buy a new  laptop soon, everything important will already be in external drives, making the migration less painful. I must say the leap to solid state drives it's worth the money. Everything goes smoother, both Windows and demanding programs such as Adobe Photoshop  and Premiere boot much faster than before. 

While doing this process, I started to think on how much data I'm actually dealing with. I'm used to work with small portable HDDs that are more expensive but need no external power. I already have them labeled from 1 to 9, four of which are 1TB, and I'm already running out of space. I also thought on back ups. I should be doing a backup of all my content just in case a Hard Drive crashes, or gets lost or stolen. To do so, I will need at least another 4 HDD of 1TB, which adds 400€ to my budget.

I hope we will all have less storage problems in the future. I just discovered a site where HDD prices and storege capacities are collected and I make this estimation: In the year 2000 a 15GB HDD's price was 150€ approx, that's the equivalent of almost two DVD9 (8,5GB DVDs) and the price per GB was 10€. In 2010 a 1TB (1000GB) HDD was 100€ that means that each GB of data cost 0.1€ and the storing space was equivalent to 125 DL DVDs or 20 Dual Layered Blu-rays. So if this progression continues I have calculated that by the year 2020 we will have 67TB Drives for about 70€ that means 0.0001€ per GB and the equivalent on 8.375 DL DVDs or 1340 Blu-Rays storing capacity. All this in a device that fits in the palm of your hand. That would happen in just 8 years. We will see...