Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

When I heard that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was to be remade as a feature movie, I was intrigued. I had picked up A Perfect Spy years ago, but could not really get into it. At the time, I was more into the Tom Clancy style of spy-thriller.

Reading all the hype surrounding the new movie, and the talk about the book and the old TV series with Alec Guinness, I decided would see what the fuss was about. I read the three books of the Karla Trilogy in quick succession. And then watched the TV series, and its sequel Smiley’s People, in a week.

One of the defining qualities of the TV series was how ordinary everything was. There was hardly any background music to give emotional cues, cinematography was plain, giving a pedestrian’s eye view, no big explosions, no fancy technology. And the Circus, the spy headquarters where Smiley worked, was a dull, poorly lit bureaucracy. Guinness' Smiley was placid. There were no "fireworks" to demonstrate his genius to the audience. I thought this was very faithful to the books. One never got a sense of the complexity of Smiley's thought until close to the end.

The books and the corresponding TV series were brilliant. For someone who loves puzzles and mysteries, the slow exposition of the plot built up tension perfectly. As the pieces came together, I found my heart racing towards the end of the books. The TV series, mini-series really, worked as well.

Coming from that, I found the new movie a little disappointing. Of course, many changes had to be made given the length of the film. Small side plots had to be pruned, or simplified. I think all that was done very well. It was the feel that I did not like as much, especially the depiction of the Circus. The devil was, as usual, in the details. The Circus felt too slick, though I did very much like the isolated meeting room. It felt "modern retro", the deliberate work of a designer, rather than a bureacracy accreting bits and pieces after WWII into the Cold War.

My biggest beef was Control's use of the chess pieces. It was hokey. No organized investigator would do that sort of thing: it's pointless. It doesn't serve the purpose of organizing information to aid discovery.

I didn't mind as much the sweeping exterior shots. Very picturesque. I did mind the very modern way of filming, where the camera is always moving, giving action even when all the characters are doing are standing around talking.

Another minor point was the change of Peter Guillam into a gay character. It seemed a calculated point to accentuate the gay characters: Gerald himself, Jim Prideaux, and Peter Guillam. There were also incidental bits of action in the party scenes to, what, show how many gay spies there were in the Circus? It didn't affect the plot, but it felt forced, to me. And it also means that should there be sequels, there would have to be adjustments made to Guillam.

A larger point is that given the amount of time available, we never got a good feel for the suspects, Alleline et al. One got glances of their faces, and a few words from each.

As for Gary Oldman, he was a very different Smiley. Still calm, though a little less meek, and giving off a hint of a threat of violence. A little menace under the surface. I liked his performance, though he hardly felt like a central character in the movie. There was less of a sense of the milieu revolving around him than there was in the books and TV series.

 

 

Time Machine on a network drive

Stephen Morley has provided instructions on setting up a non-Apple network drive to work with Time Machine.

Apple’s Time Machine software made it easy to setting up incremental back-ups, with one exception: network drives (more formally called network-attached storage, or NAS). Time Machine only directly supports drives formatted with Apple’s HFS+J file system, and will eventually use all disk space on the drive. This page provides an illustrated guide showing how to set up Time Machine on a network drive, using a sparse bundle to emulate a smaller HFS+J drive.

Time Machine on a network drive

Instructions on setting up a non-Apple network drive to work with Time Machine.

Pre-Rat Pack Sammy Davis, Jr.

I had not seen Sammy Davis, Jr. before his Rat Pack days. He was a hell of a dancer.

 

And here’s one of him way pre-Rat Pack, at age 6:

 

Vim on iOS

Your favorite text editor is now on iOS. You know you want it.

Gearlust: Fujifilm X-Pro1

Fujifilm unveils a changeable lens compact camera, the X-Pro1. Similar retro-goodness to the previous X-100. Note the controls: shutter speed dial, exposure compensation dial, and on-lens aperture ring. Also the optical rangefinder.

UPDATE: Gizmodo is predicting body price about $1700.

UPDATE 2: Gizmodo loves it, and a price has been announced: $2400

Pina - Trailer

via www.youtube.com

A 3D dance movie featuring Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch? Count me in! I saw the company perform years ago in Ann Arbor, and they were amazing.

iPhone 4S Becomes Second Most Popular Cameraphone on Flickr - Mac Rumors

Apple's newly launched iPhone 4S has quickly shot up to become the second most popular Cameraphone on Flickr.com. Flickr's Camera Finder page shows graphs of the popularity of both smartphones and Point and Shoot cameras. The iPhone 4S has beaten out the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and HTC EVO 4G, but still lags behind the original iPhone 4. The iPhone made headlines in 2009 when it became the most popular camera on Flickr, even beating out all dedicated non-smartphone cameras. The iPhone 4S still has a ways to go before dethroning the iPhone 4, which remains the most popular overall camera on Flickr. The iPhone 4S introduced a number of significant improvements to its camera, drawing praise from many. Arstechnica recently posted a comparison pitting the iPhone 4S camera against several others, and found the 4S with competitive image quality and the advantage of convenience. Thanks @rogerdodgerTM

Apple has posted a new iPad 2 TV ad on their YouTube page. The new ad is titled "Love":For some it's a lifelong passion, for others, it's something discovered yesterday. We all have...

MacRumors attracts a broad audience of both consumers and professionals interested in the latest technologies and products. We also boast an active community focused on purchasing decisions and technical aspects of the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Mac platforms.

via www.macrumors.com

In 5 weeks, the iPhone 4S has become the second most popular cameraphone on Flickr, behind the iPhone 4. The only non-Apple cameraphone in the top 5 is the HTC EVO 4G

RIP Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has died.

How to Delete (or Archive) Attachments in Apple Mail and Free Up Disk Space

Apple Mail is a pretty decent email client, but it saves all your attachments in a folder deep within your user library, sucking up disk space without ever really letting you know. Fortunately, this is an easy problem to solve if you know where to look. Sort of, anyway. Apple made removing your attachments very simple, but if you want to actually save and archive them it can be a bit more complicated—especially if you're running Lion. But not to worry, we'll walk you through the whole thing. The process can be a little tedious, but it's not too tough.

via gizmodo.com

Some tips from Gizmodo about cleaning up attachments from Apple’s Mac OS X Mail application.

Convert a DMG disk image file to an ISO disk image in Mac OS X

If you ever need to convert a .dmg file to a .iso file so that the disk image can be more easily used in Windows or Linux, there is a simple way to do it from the command line:

hdiutil convert something.dmg -format UDTO -o something.iso

Update to Mac OS X Lion

I bit the bullet and updated to Mac OS X Lion last night. Had a little trouble with Safari at first: it would hang for minutes. So, I just left it alone and it‘s all better. However, when Spotlight first started to index the machine, it gave me a bit of a shock.

UPDATE: And the autocorrect looks familiar: