Archive for the 'TV' Category

Best free iPhone apps

Published
by
blogmywiki
on March 10, 2010
in Apple, TV, internet and literature
. 1 Comment


The shame of it… I had my brain surgically removed by a very nice man in the shop and he gave me a shiny new iPhone 3GS in exchange. In case you’ve not heard of the iPhone, it’s a bit like an iPad only it is not only conveniently pocket-sized, but all models come with 3G internet access and it includes a camera and something called a telephone. This is a point-to-point mobile voice telecommunication technology that, due to high take-up, could give Skype a run for its money.

Anyway, get an iPhone, you got to get apps. Five days in, here are my favourite free ones:

Gorillacam - camera that includes a spirit level, zoom, self-timer, time-lapse, anti-shake mode etc.

BBC iPlayer - I got confused by this as it’s not an app, it’s not in the Apple App Store - it’s a web page. But the iPlayer works on the iPhone!

Calendar - okay, this is built-in, but it syncs beautifully with iCal on my Hackintosh and my Google calendar.

iCarRadio lite - it’s an internet radio app. Not sure why you’d pay for a radio app when this seems to work just fine.

Stanza - free eBook reader. Lovely.

FileApp - allows you to get stuff on your iPhone like Word documents and browse them. Needs a computer on the same wireless LAN as the iPhone and an FTP client on the computer. It does not allow you to transfer files by USB (to be fair I think Apple do not allow this). But it’s free and it works.

TVCatchup - like the iPlayer, this is a web site not an app: http://iphone.tvcatchup.com. It allows you to watch live Freeview-type TV. Brilliant! Already used this to catch the top of Newsnight while snoozing.

I also bought my first two commercial apps this morning - the rather stupidly-named iSaidWhat?! (it’s marketed as a toy but is infact a sound recorder and editor) and The Grauniad. The Grauniad app is nice but I was listening to their tech podcast happily on my way to work, about two thirds of the way through, needed to snap a photo and then went back to The Guardian and I seemed to have to start downloading it again - so I’d have been better off downloading the podcast in iTunes and using it as an iPod…

Gaggle and Boxee

Published
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blogmywiki
on February 28, 2010
in TV, internet, media and music
. 0 Comments

Today I am mostly playing with the BBC iPlayer, Flickr and YouTube on the free Boxee media centre software on my netbook and listening to Gaggle… and yes, thank you very much to the person who said I should stick to Pixie Lott. You know who you are…

Perfect Lives

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 26, 2010
in TV, Uncategorized, media and music
. 0 Comments

Channel 4 used to show stuff like this - Robert Ashley’s ‘opera for televsion’ called Perfect Lives. In 1983 this blew me away. I watched every minute. I think I might have to get the DVD - even on YouTube it looks like the remastering has worked well.

Mind you, they also had Countdown. And now, ironically, New Countdown has become a regular fixture on the office TV.

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

Published
by
blogmywiki
on November 6, 2009
in TV, children, family life, media, music and nostalgia
. 0 Comments

Sesame Street is 40 years old, and I did wonder this morning why my children can’t see it. Could this PBS show that aims to reach out to so many people, not be on free-to-air TV in the UK?

But it’s not on Sky. It’s not on Nickelodian. It’s not on TV at all in mainland Britain. I’m stunned.

I love Sesame Street for its humour, its colour… and the fact that it taught me to read before I went to school. And count to 10 in Spanish.

Gowing up in North Somerset was good for something: apparently HTV showed it before anyone else.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8340141.stm

The Wire, season 2

Published
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blogmywiki
on May 9, 2009
in TV
. 0 Comments

Okay, my Humax is still chopping the ends off, but The Wire season 2 is three episodes in on BBC-2 and it continues to amaze me. It truly is a wonderful piece of TV.

Episode 2 contains this gem of dialogue, again from State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman: “Last night you were too drunk to fuck. This morning too hungover. What’s the most useless thing on a woman? A drunken Irishman. Only you’re not really Irish, are you, McNulty?”. This is followed by an admission by our hero McNulty which proves that he is, after all, an asshole.

And many thanks to Stefanie for sending me this fascinating interview with Wire creator David Simon: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/watch.html

Hooked on The Wire

Published
by
blogmywiki
on April 3, 2009
in BBC, TV and media
. 2 Comments

‘Watch The Wire’, says the press, ‘watch The Wire’ says Charlie Brooker - hell, even Claire Bolderson tells me ‘Watch The Wire, you’d love it’, it is - they all say - the Best TV Show Ever Made. And I like a bit of Good TV. So I know I should like it, I know I would like it, only it’s several seasons in, I don’t have the dosh to buy the DVDs nor the time to watch it.

Then BBC2 start showing it from season 1, episode 1. Every night, just to make my life hell like they did with Larry Sanders. Can’t not watch it. It’s free-to-air and too damn good.

So - aside from the fact that my Humax box cuts off the last 2 minutes of everything on BBC2 when I use series-linking - I start watching (thank you bbcredux for restoring my missing cliffhangers). And I am getting hooked, even if I occasionally have to switch the subtitles on. It does require full attention and hence it does make The West Wing look like In The Night Garden.

The episode I am watching now (number 3) has - as far as I’m concerned - attained the status of genius TV with the following scene: McNulty makes a wonderfully clumsy, and rebuffed, pass at State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman, which immediately cuts to unexpected but somehow inevitable sex. The entire dialogue of the sex scene runs like this:
‘You? You? You?’
‘As if you give a shit. You’re an asshole, McNulty.’
‘What the fuck did I do?’

Timelords behaving badly

Published
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blogmywiki
on December 27, 2008
in Doctor Who and TV
. 0 Comments

I have a sneaking suspicion that David Morrissey is Britain’s Greatest Living Actor. And as such I thought he’d make a cracking good Doctor Who. On the strength of the Christmas special though, I’m not so sure. Okay, I admit I missed the first fifteen minutes and I kept nodding off, but I was not impressed.

My wife was on the phone to one of our friends in the North, and I told her to mention my idea that he’d be a good Doctor. Only she mis-heard me and said that I thought Neil Morrissey would be a good Doctor Who. Which maybe isn’t such a bad idea. Martin Clunes could be his side-kick and they could turn the Tardis into a micro-brewery - hey, maybe not so micro! - and travel the universe getting sloshed on weak lager. Just an idea. My Christmas gift to you, BBC.

Word association football

Published
by
blogmywiki
on November 3, 2008
in Dennis Potter, computers, literature and nostalgia
. 0 Comments

I was doing a bit of writing this evening and ended up at one point including the phrase ‘ee-ay-addio’ which had me wondering about its origins. Via Private Eye’s football reporter E I Addio, I ended up looking at football chants and then back to the nursery rhyme ‘The farmer in the dell’, where it comes from. The rhyme itself is alluded to in The Secret History by Donna Tartt (a book I love), and I’m pretty sure it’s referenced by Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective. It is also the source for the title of the book I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. For some reason I’ve been thinking about Robert Cormier recently, even though I’ve not read any of his books since I was a teenager. I went looking for any surviving Cormier books and found a long-forgotten copy of the screenplay to Jules et Jim. 6502 wordsThat and After the First Death are stacked up as the next books to read. And back at my writing - it’s a story about a computer - I finished a second draft, did a word count and discovered I had written 6502 words. The very first computer I used was my brother’s KIM-1, basically a development kit for the 6502 processor, and my introduction to computer programming was 6502 assembly language.

I love Steven Moffat

Published
by
blogmywiki
on May 21, 2008
in Doctor Who, TV and children
. 4 Comments

Who?! The man who is talking over Doctor Who from Russel T Davies. The seriously cool man who wrote the Best. Episode. Ever: “Blink”. He also wrote “The Empty Child” (’are you my mummy?’) which is the SCARIEST. EPISODE. EVER. I only have to say ‘muuuuuuuumy’ in that voice and my five year-old son flinches and runs to find cushions, which is frankly a useful weapon to have in one’s arsenal, and for that alone respect is due to the scare-meister Moffat.

He also wrote Press Gang, but I’ll forgive him that. And the new Tintin movie which might not suck after all.

NOTE: Just read this on Wikipedia and - if true - I like him even more now:

During production of the second series of Press Gang, he was having an unhappy personal life after the break-up of his first marriage. Producer Sandra C. Hastie was secretly phoning his friends at home to check if he was alright. His wife’s new lover was represented in the episode “The Big Finish?” by the character Brian Magboy (Simon Schatzberger), a name inspired by Brian: Maggie’s boy. Moffat brought in the character so that all sorts of unfortunate things would happen to him, such as having a typewriter dropped on his foot.

Bugger Bognor

Published
by
blogmywiki
on March 22, 2008
in TV and cinema
. 2 Comments

Flickr is down, so I’m forced to blog.

Ashes to Ashes is getting better and better. Two highlights this week: Gene Hunt looking at one point exactly like Martin Fry out of ABC (memo to self - get screengrab off AutoROT). And the line - which I have to say I saw coming - “Bugger Bognor”. These were supposedly the Famous Last Words of King George V, which I only know because Peter Greenaway used famous last words as a theme in Drowning by Numbers, hence the names of the Bognor bothers in the film.

By the way, I read somewhere that Moe Sizlack in the Simpsons is based on comedian Rich Hall. They do look identical, but this has to be a joke? Isn’t it?

Great movie double-bills that will never happen: Drowning by Numbers and Bugsy Malone. Alan Parker once said something about leaving the country if Peter Greenaway ever made any more films - always a bad move, threatening to leave the country. The words “don’t let the door slam you on the way out” always spring to mind. But I love both these movies.