Category: Reviews

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Reviews Tech

Dodging bullets with Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy ClonerLike many users, I make mistakes when working with my computer. Some of them are easy to recover from (the Undo command is made more powerful every day). Some are not, like when you’re trying to clean up hard drive space with the Unix ‘find’ command. Let’s just say that you should always use the ‘-print0’ flag when trying to run ‘find’ results through ‘rm’.

Anyway, due to some major carelessness, I managed to delete a large chunk of my iTunes music library. Not good, particularly when I’m not even sure how I got some of those rare mp3s in the first place. Fortunately, I am a regular user of Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software.

This nifty bit of Mac donationware keeps me alive with a bootable backup of my entire harddrive on an external USB drive. One of the main selling points of CCC is that it preserves metadata. This is very important because a lot of software (including the operating system) need this metadata in order to function correctly. It can also do backup schedules, incremental backups, and a host of other nifty options.

For those of you not currently backing up your software, I highly recommend the practice. For those of you who are looking for a good backup product for the Mac, I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner. It’s donationware, and regularly maintained.

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Reviews Video Games

A whole new Experience

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that Microsoft released a major update to its dashboard system yesterday.

While some people are experiencing some hiccups, my experience last night with it was generally quite good. I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow because plenty of other sites have previewed it. I did have one issue: it refused to ask me to upgrade on my account, but the minute we switched over to Flip’s, it presented us with the familiar upgrade dialog.

Anyway, once we got through that, we spent at least an hour making our new avatars and taking photos of them. We’re having trouble getting Lego Indiana Jones to play properly, so we installed that to the hard drive, and it works a treat.

One thing I did notice that may give you a shock the first time you encounter it is that it won’t play movies that use the additional codec pack. A quick trip to the Marketplace to re-download the pack sorts the problem out though.

One thing that I find disappointing is that Microsoft hasn’t found a local partner to do video rentals, like they have with Netflix in the US. While I wouldn’t use it that often, I might consider it more seriously if it were available.

So what do you guys think of the New Xbox Experience? Any horror stories yet?

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Music Reviews Video Games

Rock on!

Playing in a rock band as every bit as real as thes guys!
Play rock like these guys

So, after over a year of chomping at the bit, the wait for Rock Band is over. I picked the full instrument pack up last night and gave it all a bit of whirl. I’m not going to review the game because it’s ancient, and there are plenty of reviews on the net. Besides, the sequel is out in North America.

Still, my first experience with each of the instruments has been interesting, and has reflections on the talent (or lack thereof) that I have for each instrument.

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Categories
Reviews Video Games

Fable 2 and consequences

Despite my earlier skepticism, I encouraged P to pick up Fable 2, as it’s probably the only Western RPG passing near the Xbox 360 any time soon. Even though I had just gotten around to getting a second-hand copy of Assassin’s Creed (more on that later), I sat through the intro and some exploration of the earlier parts of the game.

It looks wildly huge. Yes, it’s more constrained than Oblivion in some ways, but the character interactions are much richer, which is in some ways the Holy Grail of role-playing games (at least in my mind). Character interaction is measured on a number of different dimensions which interact to cause different reactions from NPCs.

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Movies and TV Reviews

Fullmetal Review

I’ve just finished watching Fullmetal Alchemist, an anime which was recommended to me in my search for a varied experience with things steampunk. While I didn’t find what I was looking for (while technology is vaguely Industrial Revolution, that’s not the thrust of science), I did come to appreciate FMA as an exploration of abuse of technology, and the importance of human connection.

In brief, FMA is the story of two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, who seek the Philosopher’s Stone, an all-powerful alchemical substance that will allow them to circumvent the Law of Equivalent Exchange and restore their bodies, irreperably damaged when they tried to alchemically resurrect their dead mother.

What follows is an odyssey as they discover that they tread in the footsteps of many others that seek the Philosophers stone, only to be killed before they achieve their objective.

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