The Simpsons in Game of Thrones!?

Nah, just kidding. What I meant to say is that The Simpsons show had an opening sequence parodying the Game of Thrones opening. I'm a big fan of the Simpsons and Game of Thrones. I absolutely love the Simpsons for their parodies and seeing their version of the Game of Thrones opening just amazed me. They did a great job, making the animation with great similarity and homage to the original sequence, right down to using the original score, the flaming rings transitions, buildings rising from the ground, the spinning gears and machine parts, the aerial view of the map, the growing tree and even some of the names (eg. Burns Landing a parody of Kings Landing). You have to see the videos together to appreciate the amount of effort they've put in. It's stuff that this that keeps me addicted to the show.

I've embedded the Simpsons opening, Game of Thrones opening and just for fun, a rock-violin cover of the highly cinematic Game of Thrones theme. Enjoy.

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Opening Sequence of The Simpsons - Season 23 Episode 15 - 4 March 2012





Opening Sequence of Game of Thrones





Game of Thrones Theme Covers by Jason Yang and Roger Lima

iPad 3? No, it's the New iPad.

A simple meme comic I made regarding the New iPad name.

After many, many rumours of a new iPad for months after the release of iPad2, Apple has released their new iPad and named it, well, "The New iPad".

The internet has been abuzzed with rumoured names like:
1) iPad 3 - a direct sequel to iPad 2.
2) iPad 2S - following the naming sequence of the iPhone 3G-3GS and iPhone 4-4S.
3) iPad HD - following rumours of a Retina Display screen.

Apple officially unveiled their new iPad and just called it that, The New iPad, showing everyone time and time again that Apple rumours are what they are, rumours. This new iPad is essentially the iPad 3rd generation, going by the same naming convention as their iPod, iPod Nano and iPod Touch lines. It'll probably just be released as iPad, further adding to the confusion.

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With that out of the way, here's just a quick summary of what the new iPad is all about:

1) 9.7" Retina Display (3.1million pixels, 2048x1536 resolution)
2) 5 MP BSI camera
3) Dual Core A5X processor w/ quad core CPU
4) 3G/4G LTE antenna
5) 652g (heavier than iPad 2)
6) 9.4mm thick (thicker than iPad 2)
7) iOS 5.1
8) 10 hr battery life (claimed by Apple)
9) 16/32 GB storage (non-expandable)

And that's about it. If you're wondering, what's so special or ground breaking about this new tablet, the answer is nothing, or unless you want to count the Retina Display. It has a nice screen, good colours though artificially saturated by the GPU, high resolution display. It is a worthy upgrade from the original iPad but it hardly warrants the upgrade from the iPad 2.

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With Apple setting the benchmark (whether good or bad, you decide), the competition will find ways to try to best it. Android tablets are coming out strong, with some tablets already better than the new iPad specification-wise. In terms of performance, Android is not as smooth or may not have the same eye-candy as iOS, but apps on Android are more stable and crash less often according to a recent study. Furthermore, Windows 8 tablets are just about to show themselves later this year and are already looking pretty good themselves, as can be seen in the demo below. Also Windows 8 has the advantage of being able to run in both a tablet mode and a desktop mode on the tablet, thereby allowing more flexibility and possibly heralding the true tablet PC though this still remains to be seen.

In the end, tablets are still a new commodity and their future is still yet unpredictable. It will still be as exciting to see how they will turn out to be a year later as it is now, 2 years after Apple released the first iPad.

wrath of the titans trailer

my week with marilyn trailer

michelle williams my week with marilyn





Early summer of 1956, the American film star Marilyn Monroe set foot in England for the first time. For the honeymoon with her ​​husband, Arthur Miller, Monroe came to England at once for the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl which unites him with the flick of Sir Laurence Olivier, legend movie theater and the England players legend has it that he directed and also played in the film

The same summer, Colin Clark, 23, was assigned to the kalianya for the first time on film. He had just graduated from Oxford, Clark was inspired to work as a director and the crew of the Prince and the Showgirl. Forty years later, he recounted his experience, six months, wrote in his diary, entitled The Prince and the showgirl

But not a week newspaper has disappeared from his diary
Less than a year later, Clark reveals the reason. In a report entitled Through Sunday told me that it tells the true story of a special week to spend its own with world class stars .... week with Marilyn

ACTA will kill online privacy and civil rights (Video)

Now that the SOPA fever has died down.. Let me remind everyone that there is another more dire bill coming up in the European Union and this is the one to watch. This bill will not only destroy the web, but also the individual, you and me. It is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The supposed reason behind ACTA is similar to SOPA, to protect intellectual property. It was first drafted in 2008 and has gained many signatures including from Singapore on 1 October 2011.

Now this is what ACTA does:
1) forces Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Singnet and Starhub to scan and track every single data packet to and from every internet user.
2) any counterfeiting of copyrighted materials detected will allow the ISPs to deny internet service to the user
3) furthermore, the ISP is required to inform the publisher of said copyrighted material, who will then decide if the user will be charged in court

You may think you're safe but wait.. ACTA gives permission to all ISPs to monitor every single user. Everyone will be under constant surveillance. There is no more privacy, every single website you visit, facebook posts, tweet, youtube video, etc etc, will be under scrutiny. ACTA grants so much power that even if you were to buy a single MP3 song online and transfer over email or MSN to a friend, BOTH you and your friend will be prosecuted.

Some examples that will get you prosecuted under ACTA:
1) Sharing copyrighted material online, through MSN, Skype, Dropbox, etc.
2) Uploading copyrighted music, videos or homemade videos with copyrighted music on video sites like YouTube, Facebook video, etc
3) Quoting a line out of a copyrighted song, novel, newspaper article, etc. 

NO ONE IS SAFE 

If you had thought SOPA is bad, ACTA is worse. SOPA only has the power to shut down websites that are suspected of copyright infringements. ACTA attacks websites AS WELL AS goes straight to the individual, removes privacy and freedom of speech by constant surveillance. Like SOPA, ACTA also allows censorship of audio, video and text. Governments that signed ACTA can leverage its power to censor anything it desires such as politics. This results in the individual losing their civil rights. Any offenders can be prosecuted. What this means that in future elections such as the General Elections 2016, government critical tweets, facebook and blog posts can be censored.

This is just a very quick summary of what ACTA is about, there are many more underlying regulations that will be enforced. It also does not help that further discussions on the bill are kept secret. Bills such as SOPA and ACTA are favourable to governments since it can be used as a weapon. SOPA may have been denied after last week but ACTA has gained momentum and quietly.. As of now, countries such as Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and the United States have already signed the bill. The bill will be negotiated after 31 March 2013 by the European Union. If the bill should pass, get ready to be very afraid.

PS: We can't do anything since Singapore has already signed it. We just have to wait till next year to find out the future of our online privacy and civil rights. In the meantime, all we can do is keep each other informed.

iPhone 4S Siri and Samsung Galaxy S2 Voice Talk.. (Video)

Just some thoughts on the new iPhone 4S Siri. While many people are won over by the new iPhone 4S personal virtual assistant, it should be noted that there have been similar apps and implementations on Android phones at least a year earlier. Voice recognition technology is nothing new but it is now set to gain huge momentum with Apple joining the race and popularising it.


With smart phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) merging, people have been using their phones to perform countless tasks. It soon made sense that the phone is sort of like a personal assistant to you. However, unlike a real assistant, you can't just talk to a phone and tell it what to do, at least until the last couple of years. Apple has introduced Siri on the iPhone 4S and Samsung has made Voice Talk on the Samsung Galaxy S2, both of which can take your commands and perform tasks for you. Meanwhile, Google has Voice Actions for its Android OS.

Here's the introduction video on Siri for iPhone 4S by Apple.

Clearly Siri is an advanced voice recognition tool implemented by Apple. Although Apple did not came out with the technology (they bought the Siri company back in April 2010), they certainly improved it drastically and integrated it well with the iPhone, allowing people to perform tasks such as web searching, sms-ing, writing notes, emails and more on the phone just by speaking to it.

While Siri is only available for the iPhone 4S (a key feature for drawing more sales), there have been similar apps like Vlingo on Android for years. Google Android has also introduced Voice Actions last year, where you can tell the phone to call, send sms, do map navigation, web search and more. But one thing that Voice Actions disappoints is that it does not "talk back" to the user, making it less than pleasant to use. Most people would like a human touch like vocal response, after all, you would like an assistant to at least reply when you give an instruction.

However, mobile phone companies like Samsung has also experimented with the idea of a talking personal virtual assistant by having it integrated into their latest phone, the Samsung Galaxy S2 with Voice Talk, which by the way came out four months ahead of iPhone 4S, and sparking a growing interest in voice recognition technology.

I have embedded 3 demo videos of the Voice Talk in action.

Voice Talk on Samsung Galaxy S2 - go to 1:03 for demo.



Another demo of Voice Talk on the Samsung Galaxy S2


A more comprehensive demo of Voice Talk



Based on what we have seen so far, Samsung's Voice Talk can answer your questions and perform tasks for you and talk back to you. One thing that sets it apart from Apple's Siri is that it can be voice activated by saying "Hi Galaxy", whereas you have to long press the home button on the iPhone 4S to activate Siri. There is also an option to turn on "Driving Mode" where the user can control the phone solely by speech, without ever having to touch it. Very impressive. Siri may lack such functions, however, Apple takes it a step further by actually having artificial intelligence. Siri has the ability to understand what you are actually saying and come up with various yet appropriate responses. There is no more need to memorise specific words or commands for the program to understand.

Of course, both implementations are not 100% perfect and they still fumble when they cannot recognise the voice due to accents, languages or the environment. However, given that voice recognition is the direction we are heading, it wouldn't be long before these hurdles will be overcome. There have been lots of research and developments done on voice recognition and the results are unimaginable, but they are still out of reach of the consumers.

It is welcoming to see companies like Google, Apple, Samsung, Vlingo and even Microsoft pushing such technology to the consumers. While Apple now has the upperhand with an advanced Siri, Google is reportedly throwing their own version in Android Ice Cream Sandwich, which will debut on 19 October 2011 (tomorrow!). How will the future of "talking to electronics" turn out?


One thing for sure, our phones will be able to make us laugh..


Funny Siri Answers 1


Funny Siri Answers 2

New Trailer: The Avengers

 

 Title: The Avengers

Date Released: 1st May 2012 (Singapore)

Synopsis: When an unexpected enemy emerges that threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, Director of the international peacekeeping agency known as SHIELD, finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins.

"Read more" for the trailer and a trailer analysis clip from IGN to find out who the enemy is!

The Avengers Trailer

The Avengers Trailer Analysis

Note: The main enemy is Loki (Thor's brother). So looks like the bulk of the movie will be about Thor confronting his brother, yet again. How did he survive the fall in the latest Thor movie and how did they come back to Earth after having their portal destroyed is beyond me. I did not read the comics so I have no idea. But no matter, I believe this is going to be an explosive movie. All the previous Marvel movies have led up to this Marvel superstars show.