As Christophe Courtois cleverly noticed, the people in the film industry rarely bother to come up with an original poster for their movie. He organized similar posters in groups to show us the most common clichés in poster design.
Apparently, this is helpful when picking a film, because you can guess the movie content pretty accurately.  Artsy drama? pick the one with the most letters written over it. A big staring eye gets you a sci-fi movie, and if you’re in the mood for an action thriller, go for the blurred running silhouettes in either blue or orange. The last piece of advice – if you see Adam Sandler on it, just run and don’t look back.

I bought one of these from Asda Direct when they dropped the price to a very cheap £15 (this was after the one I ordered from eBay never arrived.) I have been looking for a small clip device for running, mainly mp3 players to listen to podcasts (I find music boring when running), but found this which I thought would be great to listen to talksport or radio 5 live in digital quality.

I’ve had a Raspberry Pi lying around for a while. I ve done a few thing with it, but nothing worth any interest to me or are better served by something else, e.g. my xbmc on the Pivos Xios DS. I thought I should really get some use out of it, so I started looking around as to what interesting projects are out there. One that really caught my eye was making it into a retro gaming system. Now who doesn’t want to play classic games, especially if you are adult of my age who got bought up on 8 bit and 16 bit gaming.

If, like me, you have looked to move into a diskless household, no more dvds, blurays, cds, you have endeavored to look for the perfect solutions for your media. For movies and TV shows, there seems to be a raft of different options, but for music, there were limited choice. To have a centralised music location on a NAS and the ability to stream them to a device or multiple devices via a user interface.

Finally my search for the living room media player may have come to an end. For years I have had a HTPC, a PC hooked up to a TV to watch my collection of digitally backed up films and tv shows. It was sufficient but had many draw backs. 

Firstly I could never manage to get suspend to work correctly, which had it wake, what seemed to me, randomly throughout the day. It led to me keeping it shutdown and have it boot up (slowly) into windows before launching my media software of choice as and when I used it. Also, like any PC, it has fans, on the CPU and power supply. My build was to be quiet as possible, but it was never silent.

I have been on a look out for a new Android tablet since selling my Asus Transformer TF101 several months ago. 

Since the arrival of the first Android tablets, there has been an emergence of cheap tablets coming from China. These interested me as I am not a heavy user of tablets and still prefer my screen and keyboard on my desktop.

In most operating systems and NAS’s you can chose to have your hard drives spin down if not in use. It’s a way of extending the life of the hard drive.

If, like me, you have your media collection saved on a separate source to your xbmc install (linux box networked to a NAS), you may find that, when accessing your movie/episodes, xbmc doesn’t give your hard drives enough time to spin up before thinking that the location doesn’t exist and asks whether you would like to delete it from the library. If you say no and retry it loads fine. It’s a bit of a pain.

Well, there is a quick fix.

I do wish Sir Alex Ferguson exercise more common sense when making his comments, but yet again, it’s another example of the xenophobic belief held by English football and its press and media. Blame the “Dirty Foreigners”.

If diving is a foreign import, then way did was it always said that “Franny Lee always dived”, a footballer plying his trade in the English league in the 60’s and 70’s?

It winds me up no end when people use Lucas as a template as to why we shouldn’t criticise some of the Liverpool players, such as Downing, Adam and Carroll. The more educated of us who backed Lucas at the beginning of his LFC career did so as we noticed key fundamentals that outlined what a player he could become.