So let me start this rather déjà vu review by reiterating a point I made at the start of the Hollow review. It is an absolute fallacy that found footage is an easy genre to tackle, sure it’s potentially cheaper and simpler to produce but these films entirely rely on their ability to convince the audience the events in the film are a matter of document rather than fiction. And that level of believability is not easy to achieve. Hollow failed to achieve that, Monk3ys did not.

So Monk3ys, for those unaware, is a brilliant little found footage physiological thriller that screened at this years Raindance Film Festival. The premise is that two scientists are conducting and documenting a behaviour experiment in which they place three conflicting personalities, each representing the Id, the ego or the super-ego, in a small confined space for 48 hours. The majority of the film is the footage captured by the in-room cameras, allowing the audience to observe the experiment as the documentary makers eventually would after the fact. But things take a turn for the worse when the 48 hour mark passes, and the doors don’t open.

So because I’m not one to bury the lead, I will outright state that Monk3ys was one of my favourite films of the entire festival. The script is utterly fantastic; it’s a simple story told well and its greatest strength is the characterisation of the people involved. It’s a film about people and personalities, and its thin plot allows it room to properly develop complex and three dimensional characters. And while it is a complex film, it never resorts to holding the audiences hand by going for on the nose, elaborate and detailed explanations. Much like a real experiment it simply presents us with evidence and trusts us to draw our own conclusions.

It’s written very naturalistically, the dialogue feels very conversational and genuine, almost as if we really were watching a documentary rather than a piece of fiction, and this adds real impact to the later portions of the film when the situation starts to get out of hand. Even in moments when the characters were spouting what could arguably be described as exposition, it was handled expertly and blended into the story without the audience realising they were being fed information at all. And I think this result is a combination of a well written script, intelligent direction and the amazing performances.

And speaking of which, the acting in this film is nothing short of astounding. The premise is so heavily focused on the idea of exploring personality types and the actors really had to work very hard to ensure the audience believed they fit into those roles. The film explores the gap between the expectations of the people running the experiment, in terms of their subject’s personalities, versus the reality of how the subjects act in the room once they drop the masks as their real, far more complex, personality traits shine through. And while the script does alot of the heavy lifting regards to elaborating on this, the actors are really the key to making this complex notion function and they do a wonderful job of doing so. In my opinion, without these performances it wouldn’t matter how good the script was, these elements would all fail miserably.

The film also avoids potentially boring its audience by mixing in footage of the experiment being set up, which allowed the audience to get out of the room itself. I particularly enjoyed the pre-experiment interviews with the subjects that give the audience a deeper insight into the characters. These moments also contain thoughts from the people running the experiment and while the film never capitalises on this and used it as a chance for them to explain why they did certain things (for example, leaving the subjects in the room for a longer period of time than they were originally told) it does give us insight into their intentions and expectations for the experiment.

I was also impressed with how the film looked. Being more interested in screenwriting, it’s very rarely that I point out the visual style of a film, and even less often that the film in question is from the found footage genre; a genre that doesn’t exactly have a history of visually strong films. But Monk3ys was different somehow, as a result of the documentary premise and the single room they weren’t forced just to use shaky hand cam, and could get away with using locked off cameras cleverly placed; this actually lead to some really strong and interesting imagery that gave the film tonnes of atmosphere. Without going into too much detail the look of the film also benefited from some amazing editing. The last few minutes are particularly spectacular.

But that does bring me neatly on to my only genuine criticism of this film; its ending. Firstly, without giving too much away, one problem with this ending is that tonally, with the film doing such a brilliant job of presenting a believable and naturalistic world, the surreal nature of the climax makes it feel like the ending of an entirely different movie.
And secondly, Monk3ys was far too open ended. Don’t get me wrong here, I am all for ambiguity, I love it when a film has an ending that can potentially mean a multitude of different things that leaves the audience debating their theories hours after the credits roll. Monk3ys attempts to achieve this, but doesn’t leave with audience with enough information to even construct their own theory. The last moments contain so much conflicting information, it’s almost impossible to form an explanation that completely works and makes 100% sense. As a result the audience were confused and in need of closure that they would never receive.

I’ll be honest, if it weren’t for this ending Monk3ys would have been my favourite film of the entire festival. And while it still easily falls into my top three, it’s a real shame that it fell at the last hurdle like that. But, ending aside, Monk3ys is one of the most intelligent and fully realised films of this year’s Raindance, a great idea executed well that engages and entertains in a way not many other films can.

Thanks for Reading.

The Atrix is a dual-core Android phone running 2.2 (Froyo). Some of the key features include an extra-long life battery, aGPS with Google Maps, a 5 megapixel camera with HD video recording, every kind of connectivity including Wi-Fi and DLNA, 16GB of on-board memory and even a fingerprint scanner. An optional docking station turns the phone into a powerful laptop (who needs the Xoom?), or you can purchase the HD Multimedia Dock and combine it with the Wireless mouse and keyboard to turn your 40inch LCD TV at home into an office.

With prices hovering around the £400 mark, the Atrix needed to bring a lot to the table to justify the cost. It gives us a lot to play with and think about, but seems to leave us feeling a little cheated. For starters it comes with Froyo 2.2. This I don’t get especially as 2.3 (Gingerbread) has been around for 8 months or so now. Reskinning Android is a pet hate of ours, but the Moto Blur UI isn’t actually that bad. It does what it says on the tin and helps you keep up-to-date on your social networks with a ‘Latest News’ feed, amongst other useful tweaks Blur includes. The thing I like about Moto Blur is that it isn’t as intrusive or extensive as the HTC Sense UI. And as with any Android phone you can customise most things in any case. Motorola have promised an update to Gingerbread later in 2011 – probably just as other phones upgrade from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich.

Physically, the Atrix is more plastic than metal and although the back case feels flimsy and delicate, the overall feel off the device is quite sturdy. Weighing in at 135g it is only slightly heavier than the BlackBerry Bold 9900(130g) but much lighter than the newly announced HTC Titan on Windows Phone 7 which weighs in at 160g. Smaller than the Galaxy S2, but hardly petite, the Atrix is a very good size. The display isn’t as big as the 4.3 inches on offer from Samsung and HTC, but at 4.0 inches it’s not small by any means. The resolution is very high too with 540 x 960 pixels and the screen also packs punches in terms of its Gorilla Glass display, touch sensitive controls and the other usual offerings of accelerometer and proximity sensors.

There is one feature that I am still confused as to whether it is a gimmick or a stroke of genius and the sign of things to come. I’m talking about the biometric fingerprint reader you can enable to lock your phone. Motorola claim it’s more secure than a password?

The Atrix is supposed to be fast, after all the advert claims it is the most powerful in the world, the ugly truth is however that even with a Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Tegra 2 chipset; it does seem to struggle under pressure. Luckily it does have 1GB of RAM up its sleeve to call upon to help it out. But all said and done it is just not as quick as we would have liked or expected.

Some other noteworthy features are the 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash and image stabilization which can takes great shots and can record video in HD 720p format. The dual-core processor shows its power here, with near-instantaneous image capture and judder-free video capture.GPS works very well indeed, with full support for all the Google mapping tools including Street View.

Connectivity is on par with other high end smartphones, with Wi-Fi (support for a/b/g/n), Bluetooth 2.1, USB, a 3.5mm audio jack and even a DLNA connection. The amount of memory available can’t be faulted either, there is a generous 16GB onboard and the option to add microSD cards up to 32GB. The battery is a 1930 mAh Li-Ion cell, a rarity as most smartphones use 1500 mAh. The difference in battery life is quite apparent and I was able to use the phone for 7 hours heavy usage and then 12 hours standby before needing a recharge. Normally after 7 hours of heavy testing most Android devices are already begging for more juice.

Conclusion:
Although not the most powerful smartphone I have tested and reviewed, it isn’t too far behind the competition. Moto Blur isn’t as bad HTC Sense and the device does come with some great, albeit expensive accessories.

Dropbox is to announce 25 million users Today! With an amazing figure of 200 million files per day going through dropbox! Dropbox allows users to share and sync files between users and multiple PC’s (including mac ). Its free service offers a hefty 2GB allowance, which is plenty for the basic user.

Now you may be thinking, 25 million, so what. But if you compare it to late february 2010 when they had 4 million users, an increase of 21 million in just over 12 months is, well, out standing.

Dropbox itself is an innovation,with its great use of bandwith and storage. Only unique files are uploaded, if say user 1224 uploads unique_song1.mp3 and user 6574 uploads the same file on their end, dropbox wont re-upload, it will simply use the current file uploaded. Now the process can’t be explained in a simple paragraph as this, but that’s the jist of it.

Personally i love Dropbox, i could promote it all day (as long as i get free space, i’m upto 8GB woo!). I use multiple computers, working on multiple projects, sharing films, music, images and documents throughout everything i use. Most recently my Windows Phone.

With its funding of $7.2 million from several investors i cant wait to see where Dropbox will go. Check out our low down on Dropbox from earlier last year.

Heres a few interesting things to check out about Dropbox

• Download Dropbox
• Dropbox Cribs Tour (source: techcrunch)
• Dropbox Blog

There was a quip by the late great Bill Hicks that drugs don’t make a good time, they just take a good time and make it better, (his words were probably funnier than mine). That seems to be the ethos here with Limitless as it shows a ‘life enhancing’ drug that doesn’t come without its price. This has always been one of those ultimate fantasies to make everything better with one simple pill, (or just something to take away the incessant screaming which refuses to just shut the hell up). Anyway, enough about me and my flashbacks to ‘the incident’ and on with Limitless.

We begin with hapless writer Eddie Morra, (Bradley Cooper), bumbling along as he’s attempting to overcome a creative block. It’s then he bumps into old friend Vernon, (Johnny Whitworth), who’s quickly bumped off but not before imparting wonder drug NZT to him; a super pill that will fully realize all your human potential turning you into a superhuman genius who’s not to be messed with. Obviously this goes to out heroes head as he attempts to reach the top echelons of power much to the interest of CEO Carl Van Loon, (Robert De Niro), whilst dragging along ex-girlfriend Lindy, (Abbie Cornish), for the ride. Soon he realizes the drugs not all it’s cracked up to be though as the side-effects take a dark turn.

First and foremost this is a complete Hollywood take on the whole ‘Adderall’ phenomena in what is ostensibly a science-fiction thriller. The issue of pharmaceuticals is a fairly big one at the moment and this seems to be the big budget response to that. It’s a fairly good film though, (not great mind), but is enjoyable enough. It’s a pretty straight-forward script at times getting from A to B but its premise and set-up was a cool enough fantasy to keep me intrigued throughout. Some of the style could seem a bit over-bearing at times as MTV visuals took over in the way of plot. This also worked in its favor though with Hip-Hop styled sampling over the fight sequences which was pretty fun. It was a fast paced frenetic narrative that was a bit like having a hyperactive kid bouncing around on e-numbers. The over-ambition motif is played well though as the ‘power of the mind’ leads to potentially getting carried away with greed. Ultimately though this is a straight-up science-fiction parable and, whilst it’s not as in-depth as it could be, it’s still effective as an entertaining movie all round.

The beginning of 2010 i wrote an article on a little app called RocketDock, which was preceded by another about the Docklets you can get for it. Almost a year on and im still using RocketDock for quick navigation on my Windows 7 laptop.

Heres how it currently looks.

Now all you might see if a bunch of icons. These are my most used shotcuts that were on my desktop. My desktop is now clutter free and allows me to marvel at my ever changing wallpaper. Mostly of my girlfriend i might add .

If you’ve seen this article, or my previous ones and been to RocketDock’s website, then you may just think, surely i can use desktop shortcuts and Windows sidebar widgets? Ofcourse you can! But personally i find their widgets rubbish and badly designed to match the ‘Windows theme’ and ofcourse, your desktop ends up looking like this.

With RocketDock you have everything sat on one side of your screen, i find top is best unless you like removing your taskbar (there are start menu docklets available)

By now your surely thinking, he’s just here to plug this so called amazing application. So yeah, i do like it. It does have its issues though, before the last release i think i BSOD about 15 times (anger!) and alot of the themes i tried using caused errors. The latest release is the most stable and as of yet i havent heard of any plans to release a new version, but its surely on the developers list – http://punklabs.com/whats-coming-in-2011.

So where can i get RocketDock?

It can be downloaded from the publishers website @ http://rocketdock.com. Downloads include the main application, skins , icon sets and widgets. There is also a set of how to guide for you developers wishing to customise and create Docklets for you to share with the world.

Developer: Singhisoumya
Format: Windows Phone 7
Genre: Tool
Price: Free
Release Date: 01/02/2011
Website: http://www.pcremoteserver.com/

So, whats this app all about. The quote above from their website pretty much says it all, but what can it actually do?

Version 2.0 has the ability to;

Control your mouse: Your phone will act as mouse. You can move cursor and click from your phone. I personally havent found a good use for this yet, i use my laptop with an attached extra monitor but havent found a need, maybe i will one day

Control your Keyboard: Your phone will act as keyboard. You can type from your phone. This i love, especially when searchign for music in itunes

Adjust Volume: You can control PC volume from your phone. This feature is great if your lazy You can control the full volume of the system.

Audio and Video Player: You can control songs and videos running on multimedia softwares like Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc. I also found this works in several other players, still with its little bugs however (play doesnt yet work in spotify), but we have been informed it will be working in the next version.

Windows Media Center: You can control Windows Media Center from your phone. Now if your rich and have a 60″ television with your PC connected, and you do use Windows Media Center. Then this feature is what you need. WHy look around for the remote, or buy one infact for Windows Media Center, when you can use this little FREE tool!

Power Controls:You can shutdown, restart, sleep, hibernate, logoff PC from your phone.

“The next version of app (2.1) will add the following two major features apart from bug fixes. We have already completed implementation of this version and we are doing its testing.

PowerPoint: Allow user to control presentation using phone
Extend Media Apps: Add support for different media players – Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, VLC, Spotify, etc.

There is lot of scope in this app and we are looking for more ideas to improve this app. We can do anything remotely from phone which user can do at PC.”

This looks like the Remote PC app has lots of potential. I asked if it was on the cards to develop for blackberry or Xbox Kinect but at this time they arent, sorry BB fans.

So how did the developers come up with the idea?

How did you find the Windows application submission process?

Overall i rate this app very highly, its increasing potential gives it alot of room for development. Id love to see what else they can come up with.Visit their website http://pcremoteserver.com/

Guess what. Its on PC!

Developer: Rovio
Publisher: Rovio
Format: PC Title
Genre: Puzzle, Action
Price: $4.99 Intel AppUp
Release date: December, 2010
Website: http://www.rovio.com/index.php?page=angry-birds

That’s right, the popular birds that everyone loves is on the PC. iPod, iPad, iPhone and now PC, only for $4.99.

For those of you that don’t know about Angry Birds, then i) you’ve been missing out on hours of pointless fun, and ii)Angry Birds is a global hit and achieved the highest grossing app in 2010 from the apple app store.

In terms of the game play, its the same as the version for the iPhone, from what i could see, the restart level button is now in-game next to the pause button, instead of on the pause menu. The levels are the same from what i can tell, with the same cute characters as the iPhone version.

Having played it on both a touch screen mobile, and on a PC with mouse control. I can honestly say the PC version is much more fun, you can get better accuracy, allowing you to get higher scores.

A great bonus to playing on a PC is the screen size, allowing the higher resolution means a better viewing experience. The detailed levels are more noticeable and you can see how much time has been put into the game.

Keep your eyes peeled for a competition to win a copy of Angry Birds for the PC!

Buy/Download Here

There right, it is easy peasy. Just think, your on your phone, laptop, and you wanna show everyone something, a photo, a song, even a word document. Currently its JPG, GIF, PNG, PDF, Word and Excel files as long as they are no bigger than 20MB. But as its only in beta im sure it will change.

This is one of the many new ways to use twitter. Its hard to do what you want in 140 characters, TwileShare; and many others, are changing this, bending the rules

Its a 3 step process

1) Login! – Now TwileShare is still in beta so you may have to register your interest.

2) Upload – Pick a file and go!

3) Share – Done and Done

You may be thinking, why a i reviewing this? theres plents of file sharing websites which i can use. TwileShare had over 20,000 visits, rave reviews and 24,000 search results on Google – all in an incredibly short space of time. Social media has allowed websites such as TwileShare to go viral over night.

File sharing is something people will always do, combining it with a popular social communication tool and you have a recepie for success.

But brad its invite only – Head over to TwileShare’s blog (http://blog.twileshare.com), they often relese invite codes!

http://twileshare.com

How did i find this little bundle of joy you might ask? Well before i moved out i had 2 PC’s in the same room, side by side. One was a server, and one was my personal PC.

I did have two monitors but it was alot of desk space to take up, yay CRT screens . Put that with 2 keyboards and 2 mice and well, you get the picture. First i bought a switch for them, YAY one keyboard, mouse and monitor between the two. Downside, im lazy and had t push a button to change it over. And, you couldnt see both screens at once. Hence Synergy was born!

Synergy is the baby of Chris Schoeneman. It is re-creation of an older program called CosmoSynergy. It allows a user to share one keyboard and one mouse with multiple computers. The computers don’t even have to be running the same operating systems. And the best part? It’s free! It’s developed under the open source GNU Public License (GPL).

All you now need is 2+ monitors and one keyboard/mouse combination.

Synergy works with Microsoft Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP; Mac OS X 10.2 or higher; and Unix, Linux, Solaris and other variants. Personally i ran, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 7 on my laptop. All you need is to be on the same network under the same TCP/IP range.

Now, ontop of being able to use the same keyboard/mouse, you can cut and paste text, images, and code between the different computers. It’s like having a common clipboard. You cant drag and drop, thats far too complicated as of yet.

So how do i use it?

Synergy is a client/server application. So choose the main pc you wishto handle the communication. Any really, just the one you use most.

Head over to the synergy website (http://synergy-foss.org/) and download your distro for the correct OS. When its installed on all the required PC’s, on the server just choose ‘host’ when you setup. On the client, put in the ‘host’ ip and click connect. Your all set!

All you need to do is arrange the location of the monitors on the server side. So PC2 is to the left of PC2. PC3 is above PC1.

Then you can seamlessly use your keyboard and mouse between as many PC’s as you want!

http://synergy-foss.org/

So Last.fm. Im assuming most of you technos know it and some of you may actually use it, but what about those who dont know about the great pearly gates of music hiding behind Last.fm?

There are plenty of ways to listen to music online these days, radio compromises of an Internet radio site, allowing the streaming of individual tracks. Merged with a website and sister called AudioScrobbler.

Scrobbling is where Last.fm knows what music you listen to, in any player, Itunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player are common examples. It then reccomends music to your taste, from 1000′s of tracks. Last.fm isnt far off Pandora if anyones ever used that.

When you first arrive at Last.fm youll notice a very snily sleek red and white ‘interface’. Looks nice but well, its not that useful as it does nothing . Where the fun lies is when you register and have access to the 1000′s of reccomended tracks and playlists.

So now youve registered, now what? Well you need to download the Last.fm scrobbler, its only about 3mb and works on all Windows OS, not sure about linux or mac now i come to think of it (runs off to check), yes it does, and linux!

So youve got scrobbler, your just chilling in itunes and you run scrobbler for the first time. It runs through all your songs, gets information such as playt count, track names, artists ect and sends it to home (Last.fm). They then analyse it and give you several radio stations to work with.

Your Library Radio – Your music, randomised into a radio station playlist.
Your Mix Radio – A mix of your music and new music with similar genres and artists based on Last.fm’s predictions.
Your Recommended Radio – All new music based on last.fm’s predictions of what they think you will like.

Ofcourse they arent always correct, so they have a like dislike button in the last.fm player to fine tweak what your hearing.

Ofcourse I haven’t covered every single feature of the site as that would take all the fun away of visiting it yourself. Other features include mobile versions of the site, ipod, iphone, windows phone, android. All different versions are avaliable for while your on the move. Although recently last.fm announced the mobile services are no longer free on most platforms. A £3 subscription (monthly) is the price for using it on your mobile device, or if you have the latest Windows Phone 7 device, its still free!

Now i love listening to new music, anything thats different, old, new, different genres. Thats why last.fm is ideal for me, i use it at home and on my Windows Phone 7 device. I cant say it will be for everyone, there are people who have specific music tastes. There are those who listen to the same 25 tracks over and over and know every word.

Maybe one day it will become much more mainstream with the likes of spotify. I have to strongly recommend the site and suggest that you give it a try.

http://last.fm/