November 2007 Archives

I was definitely intrigued by this movie when it came out in the theaters. I mean, who doesn't like horror type movies about the Old Testament? In fact, one of the most contraversial when it comes to interpretation is Revelation. And The Reaping is definitely one of those where it gives you some pretty darned interesting perspectives.

Yes, there is a pretty awesome twist at the end and I won't spill it but it definitely had be in my seat. I thought this movie would be really terrible actually from reading some of the critic reviews. While not as knowing of certain parts of the Biblical symbols such as the upside down sickle being the sign of Satan (which is actually an inverted astrological sign for Ceres), and so on, it was definitely a very interesting look at things.

One distinct note though. I've found that most faith or strange stories about faith usually surround small towns in the South. Why is that? This film's storyline was based in the small town of Haven, outside of Baton Rouge, Lousiana. Strange, isn't it?

For those that are open minded enough to watch and know that this movie is not a criticism of faith, and rather an interesting way to view one of the last books of the Old Testament, I would have to say that this was definitely on the top of my list. For those that are afraid of some Satanic references? Probably stay away from this movie. One thing for sure. Those that have rented the movie from Netflix definitely agree with me.

Go figure. It's a little pricier than I expected and only for the Japanese and Asian Wiis, but it's definitely something on my shopping list.

With the phenomenon of the Wii creating for active gaming, Nintendo has released Wii Fit with the Wii Balance Board. This allows you to do some basic workout type activities based on slower movements and balance initiated postures. What's interesting about this is that this is going along with the new Nintendo mantra of going against the couch potato style of gaming.

It's running close to two hundred USD so I'm hoping that it costs a bit less when it comes States side, but if you're anxious and you have an Asian/Japan Wii, then it's your chance to cash in on something that no one here has .... yet.

Microsoft has just released a compatibility pack for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003 so that you too can create, open, and edit the new Office 2007 documents.

I remember when back in the day, you couldn't do that and was forced into using Microsoft Office 95. Or maybe it was 97 or something. In any case, that was the biggest annoyance. I suppose they released this one because they couldn't get enough people to adopt the new standards. Which is actually great since I personally don't use the new Office anyways. Awesome.

The Eldorado Megamix by DJ Shadow is being provided by Sony for free for the upcoming Playstation 3 game: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.

Have no clue about the game truthfully, but the fact that they have a mix by DJ Shadow? That could be really good. DJ Shadow is pretty well known with the dance genre and has done many big hit mixes.

In any case, it doesn't hurt to go take a look and grab the free MP3.

PrinterAnywhere is a small application that allows you to print from anywhere as long as the shared computers are both running the application. Think of how a PDF printer works, and there you have it, that's how this little application works. It easily detects other PrinterAnywhere computers anywhere in the world and doesn't require you to know how to share your network or anything.
The free version allows you to print, but there will be banners shown, while the $19.95/month version doesn't have the banners.

Pretty useful if you're looking for something to use and don't want to mess around with printer setup and such.

The problem with Black Friday? The gimmicks are getting old.

All these stores have a few number of items to try and attract a record number of customers, and then complain when their wasn't enough sales to beat out the year before. You know what? Using the couple of super-low priced items just doesn't do it. Seriously.

Think about it. Even if the stores covered say, the sales tax completely for one single day, that would not only be a minimal bump in their bottom line but it would increase their sales significantly. It would bring REGULAR customers in all day long instead of bargain hunters ready to pounce at daybreak and to leave your store in a lurch and in the red still.

If there was any store that was slightly on top of this concept, it was Gamestop. They usually have a buy 2 get 1 free for used games sale every so often for a weekend. They just happened to put it on Black Friday's weekend. Brilliant move. From a business perspective, there was no gimmick, but a regular sale item that most customers wouldn't have anticipated.

The main thought here? Gimmicks don't work unless it's an added value. Gimmicks work in bringing more customers but your biggest ratio of sales to people comes from the full day event. Thus, there just has to be an "event" instead of just sitting around trying to figure out why no one bothered to go shopping.

It' really isn't about consumer confidence and how people are strapping down because of recession. Really. If you believe that, you believe in a lot more hokey than I do. Because I had no issues opening my wallet for the Christmas season.... if there were actually decent sales of things I needed to buy. Alas, the brick & mortar stores failed me yet another year. Thank goodness for the Internet.

If you're looking for a photo editor where it's made strictly for photographs, Photoscape could be for you. Think of a graphics editor that was strictly directed at photographs. You can do your usual red eye removal, but you can also brighten pictures, and create animations as well as all sorts of other types of useful things.

One of the more interesting features is the one where it takes multiple photographs and merge them together at the page frame. You can also create page frames so that it doesn't just look like a simple photograph but one that's in a frame.

Freeware for Windows.

I bought the Intec Wii AV & S cable a while back since I needed a higher durability type cable for when I go traveling with my Wii. The beautiful thing about this cable is that it's it is very well made, and the pins are gold plated.

It has your usual svideo, the left/right audio, and the video outputs. Input is via the Wii regular connector. Don't pay any attention to the description where it says an optical input is included since there isn't one. It's exactly how the picture looks (and you don't see an optical connector or input there do ya?).

The one problem I have with this cable is that when I connected it to my AV switch box, it didn't like it since the pins seems just a tad longer or something so the signal was bad. I checked it on another connector and there were no issues so I assume that my initial thoughts on it are actually correct. Either way, it's never failed and so far I'm happy using it as a portable console cable along with the Wii wireless sensor bar.

i.Mage is a small footprint graphics editor for Windows. It's open source and is there for only simple editing of graphics. The support of graphic formats is minimal but is enough for the couple of more useful formats. It can do grayscale, inversions, alpha blending and most of your more general purpose editing functions.

A great little open source project that loads fast and edits fast, and compiles fast.

I know this sounds crazy but sometimes to sensationalize news, reporters go out of their way.

Almost ridiculously outside of common sense. For example. They were talking about the gas and oil pricing fluctuations on CNBC a while back. The anchor asked why the pump prices didn't reflect the dip in the crude and the reporter claimed that it was because it would take a couple weeks like a delayed pricing.

WHAT?!?!

Yeah, that defies all logic. When crude goes up, the price at the pump goes up almost in sync. To claim this is almost on the side of absurd. Yet, the public just takes it in because someone "said so". Another was the recent interview at a Detroit Chrysler plant with MSNBC. The guy in charge of restructuring gave some PR answers on how agile they were instead of hard facts when the MSNBC anchor asked about competition with the likes of the Japanese manufacturers such as Toyota.

I'll tell you exactly why Toyota can beat Chrysler in manufacturing. If I'm not mistaken, in the span of a day or so, a Toyota plant can be converted to produce pretty much any line they currently make. You can't do the same with a Chrysler plant. That flexibility is what is costing the Big 3. But the anchor just stood by and ate it up.

People need to think for themselves a little bit. The news is there, and the facts are reported, but make a serious effort to link cause and effect instead of standing idly by and just taking it in. I know it's difficult to actually want to do logical reasoning when you're stuck in a zombified state in front of the brain eating tube, but you must.

Must... make... decisions...for...self.

The Unstoppable Copier is a tool for both Windows and Linux where you can copy over files that could have had hard disk errors and corruptions. This tool basically uses multiple styles of recovery to see if it can recover what you have off of a drive.

Pretty useful considering hard drives still go bad in this age.

PrimoPDF is another free pdf generator, but with a few features that could actually sway in its favor.

First, it generates PDFs. Obviously. But it can actually print in different types of quality depending on what it's being used for and take something that is original press quality and downgrade it depending on the use. This is fairly useful for things that need to be ... say... online, but don't need the print quality. It also allows you to merge pdf files together during conversion which is useful for combining documentation. Overall, it's just a pretty good idea and there's no catch, adware, or any of that. Even Vista compatible.

If you're looking for a quick tool for heatmapping your website, Feng Gui seems like a pretty awesome tool to get a look at how users will look and click.

I have to say that the automated link generation is very interesting since it looks like most of the algorithm is based on images and clickable areas and where top is most likely to be clicked and as you scroll down the page, it gets less likely. What's interesting is that for LUX, it actually generates the heatmap for the top area for the title and from knowing from actual heat map data that users actually do not click those areas. Yet, it's a pretty good quick look at heat maps and how people would view the site itself.

Based on the hit manga series, Lunar Legend Tsukihime, Vol. 1-3 is a twelve episode long anime about Shiki Tohno, a teenager that can see deathlines of which if they are cut, will destroy whatever the line resides in. Apparently this was an aftereffect of a terrible accident that he had as a child, and a mage Aoko Aozaki, gives him some glasses that takes away the sight of the deathlines. Unfortunately his past catches up with him, and eventually is forced to confront the accident of his childhood as different people start showing up in his life.

I must say that this particular anime was pretty good, but very slow. I didn't miss out on much as it progressed and it took much of the twelve episodes to explain what was going on. By the end, it was getting a lot better and then the anime ends. Action wise, it could have used a little more push and moved forward just a bit more quickly.

In case anyone is confused as to if this has to do with the game Lunar Legend, I can tell you that it doesn't. The storylines are fairly different. From a vampire perspective, it gives a spin on how vampiric lore came to be and why certain people had different powers. Actually it is in this part of the plot that I was more drawn towards since the high school drama parts were yawn driven. All in all? A good anime series, but not a great one.

VSO Image Resizer does exactly what the name says it does. It resizes images. Very easily. It even allows you to set it up so that you can save a new copy or not and can interact with different types of raw image files from certain cameras.

That makes it incredibly useful. Personally, if I wasn't using a Mac, this would be the tool that I'd use for blogging since there's always a need to resize screenshots, pictures and photos. Optimized for Windows and free, you really can't go wrong with this if you need a really quick fix.

One other thing... this tool allows single or batch mode resizing. Also allows for direct import from memory cards. I can hear the clocks turning right now.... that's right. You can manage multiple files and resize them in one fell swoop. Awesome.

Much of the Internet is based on traffic patterns and how to generate more revenue based on targeted advertisement. Google makes its living off giving accurate information to its advertisers as well as the rest of the search engine competitors.

Well, Microsoft adCenter Labs has come up with a demographic prediction tool that basically looks at different types of queries and URLs and through their algorithm, determines which gender would go to your site and which age group is more targeted for it. It's based on a month's worth of MSN search data and all queries are using adCenter's predictive model.

While it's not as detailed as something like Analytics, it's still definitely a useful tool to check out every so often to see if indeed all the numbers jive. Based on the gender and type of products you're advertising, this could be very useful in tweaking your site to maximize the traffic and/or profits.

Karen's Replicator is much like a lot of backup utilities... it copies a duplicate copy of your data to another target area.

What's interesting about this product is how old it is, but also the features. You can designate different times that different files are copied, or not copied, or copied when changed, or even progressive copying. There are many different features of just backing up data that could be useful depending on what you need to do.

One significant note is that due to the age of the program, this is written in Visual Basic. Yes, that Visual Basic. 6.0. Crazy isn't it. I actually wrote a couple VB programs ages ago, but I haven't seen 6.0 code for a long long time. That should give you a pretty good idea that obviously people find this pretty darn useful to have kept it around for so long.

It's been a while since I've purchased a tablet. The last one was a Wacom Artpad II, and I can tell you that I don't believe there's much that supports serial ports anymore.

In any case, I needed something that worked with my Mac well and I could flow freely. Since the Wacom Graphire Bluetooth 6x8 Tablet was wireless, it was a perfect match. The price was a bit more hefty than I would have liked but for the size of the tablet, it was definitely worth every penny.

The package comes with a charger, the tablet, a Graphire pen, pen stand, Graphire mouse, and manuals and software. Software is both the Mac and PC edition so that was nice. The Graphire mouse, I hardly use mainly because I use my Macbook Pro for most things and only need the tablet for design work.

The one thing that I love about this tablet is the size and that it's wireless. While there's some range on the device, you really don't need to be sitting too far away anyways unless you have such a massive monitor that you might as well be purchasing a Cintiq.

For those that are considering to buy a tablet but have never used one before, this is just some advice on how tablets work. When you draw, your screen is proportional to your tablet. So therefore, the top left corner of tablet is the top left of your screen and so on so forth. Thus, if you are getting a smaller tablet, you will be making a lot finer changes for details than a larger one. Obviously the best would be a Cintiq since it's a 1:1 ratio of drawing to tablet since you're using a monitor sized board, but outside of that, to each their own. I chose the Wacom Graphire BT because of both size and wireless and so far I have been extremely happy about it.

Ever have a hard drive go bad? Had many photographs or something where a corrupted memory card or disk is just not the answer you wanted to hear?

Hey, you might be in luck. PhotoRec to the rescue! PhotoRec is open source, and can be used with your major operating systems (DOS, Windows, linux, Solaris, MacOSX, BSD), and basically looks at corrupted file systems and copies over whatever is there onto a working system. It's best for its namesake, but it recovers many other things by looking at the mediums' filesystem.

But why take my word for it? Just take a look at Kent Brewster's story.

It's sort of suspicious when the NSA champions any standards.

But when independent researchers found that the random number generation by the DUAL_EC_ERBG needed a fix set of numbers to generate the elliptic curve that in turn generates the random number? It became very intriguing on if this was not only a weakness but a backdoor.

Basic idea? Anyone that owns this set of master key numbers can take anything generated by this algorithm and decode it. From a cryptography standpoint, this is a big no-no, and screams of strangeness.

Am I surprised if the NSA holds the master key? Not at all. After the hoopla from the recent domestic spying incidence with the whistleblower, it's really shouldn't be. But there are some things that you just have to be a little more coy about if you're going to hold the keys to the castle (assuming they do). Either way, you can view it in two fashions. One is that the NSA is doing their jobs and keeping track of information that could potentially protect our state of government if they do indeed hold the cards. The other is that, it's good that independent researchers found this flaw in the algorithm since it would have been exploited somewhere else down the line if it wasn't an actual NSA backdoor.

I can't really say that I'm surprised. But in a study conducted by King Research, 90% of IT professionals refuse to push Microsoft Vista due to stability, cost and other issues. What's interesting about this is that Vista supposedly is much more stable than XP although I have yet to see this proven since XP has been around and been smoothed out.

Having seen some of the tests done with Vista personally, I can say that it's even more of a resource hog than XP ever was and XP was bad when it came out. That along with MacOSX becoming more than a fad, and linux finally getting easier with easy to use distributions such as Ubuntu, Vista has a lot more competition on its hands.

Just take a look at what's sold at Walmart. Linux computers?? Yeah. The high-end is dominated by Macs now. I have even moved to a Mac after years of Windows. It's just part of the shift in ideals. Microsoft came out with a product that was just as, if not more, bloated. Users now have more choices. It's the way of competition. Unfortunately, these studies don't help at all with Microsoft's case.

This bugs the hell out of me. When the charity Child's Play first started, I was so excited. Finally a charity for children that I could get involved with... especially being a gamer.

And a gamer at heart, I thought that it was tragic that we didn't have anything similar at Brenner's Children's Hospital which is the closest Children's Hospital to my area. So I contacted them. Again. and Again.

And again, this year it's amazing that there's not a single children's hospital in North Carolina that is signed up with this charity. Gamer's supported! There is absolutely no cost to the hospital. Yet, they just won't take up the offer. And I don't now why.

Sorry kids. I'm pretty beat. The first two years of absolutely no response basically has me canned. I'm hoping that someone else picks up this effort since there's absolutely no reason to NOT SIGN UP. It's an extra effort to help rehabilitation and those that are caught during the holiday seasons. Should there be any reason for the denials? And why? I never got a response either way so I assume that no one at Brenner's cared at all since the first year, not even the lady in charge of these issues bothered to even return a call.

Pretty sad. A great charity that North Carolina gamers will once again miss out on supporting something close to home. So to you kids, I apologize on behalf of all NC gamers that no one in those hospital administration seems to really care if you're stuck there.

7zX is a file archiver that uses the 7zip format. It currently supports tar, zip, gzip, bzip2, UNIX compress, 7z, s7z along with some other different types of archiving.

Free for MacOSX, it's never bad to have another file archiver. Especially one that uses such a higher compression ratio (7z).

Before people get all huffy about this, no, I am not promoting the awesomeness of censorship. But quite on the technical side of it, the Golden Shield is actually a pretty brilliant design. The Golden Shield Project (金盾工程) is the routing and firewall project more commonly known as The Great Firewall of China.

In doing some research for my 8Asians post on the Great Firewall, I realized that the Chinese are incorporating some tactics that is more well known to the hacker underground more against what security firms defend against instead of using as a means to keep things "inside". And in doing something like this, it's using what is usually used as an offensive tactic as a defensive one.

I mean seriously. Who uses DNS poisoning against your own network? The blacklists and IP blocks used is common firewall practices, but some of the ways being used is totally unconventional. Even the fact that 8Asians itself is blocked in some places and not others means that the site hasn't made it to the master blacklist, but is being routed differently and blocked by different means at different places within China.

It might be used to keep its people in check, and censor its users, but the technology behind Golden Shield? Still a pretty dang interesting one.

If you're not sure what drivers you have installed on a Windows box, there's a really simple way to tell. Open a command prompt and type: driverquery

This will display all of the drivers that are installed, and information such as the name, the description, and the date of the driver. What's also interesting is the help shows a lot more information that you can show or filter. Pretty useful considering you don't always have a clue about these things in the actual Windows environment.

Free Open-Source Ghost, or FOG, does exactly what you think it does. It imitates the product Norton Ghost, and images clients to a FOG server so you wouldn't have to back it to CDs. This creates a great way to backup through a network and everything is accessible through an easy web interface.

You can break it down and run it on different machines, or you can run it on a single machine. It runs on any distribution of linux, and can do everything from remote memory testing, to disk wiping, test disk, and file recovery.

Very useful open source product for enterprise level support without paying the enterprise price.

Marky Mark. No one ever thought that he of all people... would actually become a decent actor.

But yes, the guy from the Funky Bunch actually made it to the big screen. And does a really good job there too. In Shooter (Widescreen Edition) [affiliate], he is a USMC scout sniper who left the Marine Corp after a traumatic experience that left his best friend dead. A shadow government tries to string him along for a ride, but little do they know that he's the one in charge until the end.

What's interesting about this movie is that while it was your action thriller type, it really does go into detail how snipers go about their business and how many know the ins and outs of even building home-made type devices and how their bullets will fly given the environment. These are more Special Forces based, but they definitely know their stuff.

What's more interesting is the tidbit of information such as the fact that Wahlberg actually had to learn to shoot with both his left and right hands and was trained by a former USMC scout sniper. I would be curious to know if someone that actually knows how to shoot would be able to tell if it was accurate.

All in all, it's a great action flick. I definitely recommend it for for a late Sunday afternoon when you're just itching for a good sniper movie and there's just nothing on the tube. It beats any of the B-rated movies by far, but I'm not sure if I would have seen it in the theater.

AP Grapher is a free program for MacOSX graphs out the strength of wireless signals. This is useful for determining the pattern of signal strength and if the pattern needs to be optimized.

AP Grapher also has a scanner to determine which access point you want to graph. This basically allows you the determination of whether or not the access point or your client is in the most optimal wireless position. You can also configure most of your preferences including refresh rates and where the application shows up.

macam is an interesting driver project for MacOSX and is open source. It basically allows you to access some older webcams based on some drivers that were derived from linux. macam tries to support most of the webcams that are not supported by their manufacturers or Apple. This is another great thing provided for by the open source community.

That's right. iTunes, unknowingly to myself, has somehow or another added Gackt?

I mean seriously. This is the best find I've had in a while when it comes to jpop and jrock music.

Gackt, now in his solo career, is the idol of many Japanese fan girls. His persona is of a 400+ year old vampire of which he has kept up for years. The androgenous singer was lead singer for Malice Mizer, and now S.K.I.N.. His deep voice is probably one of the most gorgeous ones I've heard from many male singers in the Japanese music industry and definitely rocks the charts. He now does a little of everything, from acting to his usual singing. Such is that of the asian celebrity industry.

So if you were looking, look no further. Just click iTunes button to open up the vast treasure that awaits us all in the world of jpop/jrock.

Photo Credit: (Mullenkedheim)

Disk Inventory X creates tree maps to show where and how your disk space is being used so you can better manage your disk resources. Released under GPL, this MacOSX application is open sourced and ready to give you all sorts of pretty data for you to go.. "Ohh... I forgot about those home movie files..."

From a mini-game type Wii game perspective, Ubisoft's Rayman Ravin Rabbids has to the cake. Like seriously. This game is way more fun than any Wario game that I've put my hands on, and enjoyable to the Nth degree.

Controls: While it wasn't the biggest of deals, one of the annoying things about this game was the lack of thought on user controls. There was no way to flip the Remote and Nunchuks depending on which your dominant hand was (so that left handed users were out of luck). Fortunately, there wasn't much movement that anyone thath as played a bit of first person shooters on the PC couldn't handle. Otherwise, the whole switching back and forth really could drive one nuts since there was no wrist strap involved.

Playability: There is definitely some replayability here. The whole game is based on mini-games, so you can come back and re-play them to unlock more content. Some of it is ridiculous since you don't want to replay some of the minigames again and again, but overall, it's actually not bad. On a whole though, I beat the game and just wanted to re-play the FPS ones since those were the cutest but more interesting ones that I liked. Personal preference I suppose.

Synopsis: This game is definitely on my list of hot ones to get for the Wii. It's worth every penny and I can't wait for the second one to come out. If that's not a ravin endorsement, I don't know what is.

Friedbeeftech has a great little review of of a freeware tool for Windows that backs up any sort of file or folder to email. Backup to Email is a cool tool that allows you to ... yes, back files and folders to email.

What's nice is that you can change the attachment size, and if you attach bigger than what you set, the attachments will be split by the set size (10M default). You can also manage multiple email accounts to run the backup on, and supports SSL authentication and non-SSL. Overally, it's the whole schbang for backing up to another account.

As a young American, I hear all the time about how Social Security won't exist by the time I'm old.

Why is that? Because middle class America would front the bill and it happens to be a flawed concept. Why should working individuals pay for healthcare of the elderly of society? Shouldn't it be a "put it away for when you're old" concept? In any case, we're probably in it for the worst.

Now there's all this talk about universal healthcare. Again.

First, let's take a look at who benefits from this. The pharmaceutical industry along with the insurance industry. What better way to get people hooked on their products, than to mandate a universal policy. Big Pharma? Benefit. Big Insurance? Benefit. Illegal immigrants? Benefit. Low income? Benefit. Middle class? Eh. What benefit?

The fact is: you'll be paying premiums that would probably double what you do now, for the same care. Mainly because there just isn't enough money to go around so the biggest group of payers will pay the most. That's us. Middle class America. And frankly with my premiums having raised in the last five years probably 50-75%, I'm not looking to shell out anymore to the insurance industry when there is no benefit to me at all. And to boot, I have probably one of the better corporate healthcare plans out there. I hate to see what others have been paying in the last five years.

So how is this any better than Social Security? I'm paying for other people that does not directly benefit me. In fact, it doesn't even indirectly benefit me. It's a very poorly thought out plan that on paper, is ideal and wonderful but in reality, has plenty of loopholes for big businesses to reap in billions.

I really can't see this as a good platform to stand on for politics. It's happened every four years, and I can't see it ever happening here unless you want to destroy the middle class as we know it. Perhaps that's the goal. Who knows. In any case, all I can say is that based on what I know and what I pay, there is no way I'd support anyone that campaigns for it.

MacDaddy is this brilliant free application for MacOSX. What does it do?

Well first off, don't be fooled that the Mac part of the name has anything to do with Macs. It just runs on one. The second part is that it does have everything to do with MAC addresses which are hardware identifiers for network cards. What the program does for you is it spoofs the software driven MAC address (not the hardware side of things). This way, you can fool connections and protect yourself from actually putting your MAC out there for everyone to see.

Reason why you don't want to broadcast your MAC? Anyone that knows your MAC could basically sit on the network and sniff whatever comes to you just by spoofing your MAC. Crazy isn't it.

Showtime is an interesting application (free) for MacOSX in the fact that it's a desktop sharing application. Literally show you an image of your desktop... via a browser window and a special port.

It's even accessible through Bonjour. It's an easy way to share your desktop without actually setting up a more resource intensive desktop share. And did I mention it was free? Easy tools are great when you're just looking to do something quick.

Boog is... well... not exactly that useful.

It's just an application that allows you to play with some parameters that allow you to watch the bugs and how they react and their behaviors.

It's free, and it's for MacOSX.... but you might not really want to go there. But then again, some people have that extra time on their hands...

Incredible psychological thriller.

Frailty itself is about a story of a family where the father was "chosen by God" to destroy demons on this earth. Both his sons were to be agents of God also and fight this war. What was interesting is that the whole movie has you in suspense although I pretty much called what was going to happen in the end after the first twenty minutes or so.

I can definitely tell you that there are many twists and plot thickening type areas in this movie without throwing it all away. Based on my initial reaction, it just wasn't as good a movie but after finishing it, it was definitely way better than I originally thought it would be.

There really isn't gore although the subject matter is pretty brutal and dreadful, and some potty-mouth language that little kids shouldn't hear if you're even thinking about allowing them to see this. It was definitely interesting since the storyline is based in a small Southern town. What I love about movies such as this one is that it's not based on the gorefest to actually keep you on your toes but instead, gets you to think about what could be going on and where it might change and if the supposedly good guy is the bad guy, and vice versa.

Definitely worth the rental.

Winclone is a cloning application that can take your Bootcamp partition and clone it into an image. So in case you need to restore your Windows partition... no sweat.

This baby can restore 10G partitions in less than 10 minutes. That's faster than a Windows install! And you can do it straight from the boot drive!

Nice. Free. For MacOSX.