Darin's Vox Blog

The Black Swan Review

Darren Aronofsky's latest offering is for anyone who can appreciate a bit of horror mixed with some pyscho-ballerina drama and a dash of humor mixed in once in a while to keep it from being too taught.

--- Plot spoiler alert! Warning! Don't read beyond this point if you don't want to hear specifics! ----

All sides are falling in around Natalie Portman's character Nina Sayers in this film about a shy, prudish, mother-smothered ballerina who's trying to win the lead role in a stripped down version of Swan Lake and keep her sanity in the process. 

Portman is brilliant as the innocent but terrified, bulemic chum in the shark infested ballet company waters filled with female predators circling and conspiring against her. Combined with her own twisted distortions and hallucinations, a nightmarishly obsessive ex-ballerina mother played masterfully by Barbara Hershey and the company director's prodding to find her darker, more sexual side, poor Nina who just wants to be "perfect", can't seem to lose herself in the role as the devious, dangerous Black Swan in the bifurcated Swan Lake story.

Winona Ryder stars as the company's prematurely ousted prima ballerina matriarch and she's apparently not too happy about her early retirement and Nina as the benefactor of her misfortune.  The scenes between Portman's Nina and Ryder's Dying Swan Beth are some of the most visceral and disturbing in the film, real or imagined.

The scenes between Nina and Mila Kunis' Lily are the most sexually charged and briefly drug fueled. Cassel's character plays Lily against Nina whispering in her ear, "she's not faking it" and eventually tapping Lily to be the alternate to Nina in the Swan Lake role.

Vincent Cassel stars as the lead dancer/company director and Nina's often inappropriate sexual assailant/personal dance assistant in an attempt to get Nina to find the Black Swan inside of herself after he kisses her and she bites his lip making him bleed.  The relationship between Cassel and Portman's characters never wanders much beyond groping and a bit of forced kissing and this relationship seems a bit flat in the overall storyline.

The real sexual tension flares up between Nina and Lily right before the show's opening night and Kunis' character is doing her best to derail Nina with her mother and with alcohol and ecastacy before the first show and almost succeeds.  Kunis is gorgeous and her potrayal of Lily works well as the Yin to Nina's straight-edged, straight-jacketed Yang.

Many of the film's mirror scenes where we see Nina looking at herself are painful reminders of the torment and torure going on within her own mind as virtually every part of Nina's world is trying to get her and from our omniscient perspective, appears to be succeeding. She thinks she's turning into the Black Swan when she appears to pull out a small feather sprout from her own shoulder blade and sees herself in many of the people she passes on the street, dressed in black of course, while she appears in white.

Most of the film's early camera shots are jerky with handheld camera work  from odd angles so we can get close to Nina but we feel a sense of uneasiness as she feels with the world.  The film texture is also really grainy which had my friends and I wondering if there was some intentional grain added or if some of the film was shot on 16 millimeter. Black Swan overall is well acted and directed and there are several spots in the film where you might almost jump out of your chair as this psychological thriller unfolds.  I can imagine Natalie Portman getting the nomination for an Academy Award in this psycho-thriller but I'm not sure the film is good enough as a whole to win the award for Best Film of 2010. It's definitely a must see movie for 2010 though.  It was well worth the $11 we paid at the Metreon in S.F. to see it.

Image EXIF orientation tags can create confusion when referencing images in HTML on the web

Recently, I went to a dinner party the day after Thanksgiving where I took some photos with my iPhone 4.  When I got home, I decided to try and cook up some really basic HTML of the images manually in a text editor, toss the images into a folder on my website and eventually send the link to my friends to see the photos I had taken with links to the original files at their largest size.

While attempting to do this, I ran into a very odd and interesting problem.  Images from my iPhone 4 that I took vertically as opposed to wide angle with the longest side of the camera oriented horizontally were flipped when I referenced them in HTML on my website.

I downloaded the images from the phone using the Mac's built in Image Capture application, used scp via the Mac's Terminal application to secure copy the images to a new directory on my website and created some basic image tags to reference the images. When I tried loading the HTML page I created and saved, all of the vertically oriented images appeared rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise.

This lead me to do some research on how this could be happening.  When I opened these images in Preview, Photoshop or Graphic Converter, an awesome shareware application I purchased some time ago, the images were all rotated correctly but in the HTML references to the files I had uploaded to the website, they were 90 degrees counter-clockwise.  Strange business.

What I eventually learned from searching the web for info on this issue is that there's an orientation tag that gets written into the image's EXIF metadata (that's Exchangeable image file format, or EXIF, for those keeping score). The EXIF data includes the camera's make/model and additional information that varies with each image such as the orientation (rotation), aperture, shutter speed, focal length, metering mode and ISO speed. The EXIF data is written to the file as metadata when the photo is taken.

Additional info like whether or not the flash fired and the geo-location info may also be included in the EXIF data set.

It turns out that all of these apps (Apple's Preview, Adobe's Photoshop and Lemkesoft's Graphic Converter) were knowingly but silently rotating these images based on the orientation tag's value of "6" for all of the images taken vertically;  This was the problem with the images on the server.  The web browser and the HTML know nothing about this special rotation tag in the EXIF data and as such, were ignoring it and showing the files without checking the orientation tag in the file.  Now, to find a solution.

The page below provides more information on the EXIF orientation values and what each one means.  There are graphic representations of what each value does to a letter on the page depending on which value is saved for the orientation tag:

<http://sylvana.net/jpegcrop/exif_orientation.html>

I set about looking for a way to remove the tag from the EXIF data but that turns out to be more difficult that I had anticipated.  Finally, I searched the Graphic Converter docs and found a setting in Graphic Converter's extended preferences in Graphic Converter 6.x under: Graphic Converter menu > Preferences > Open > Formats > EXIF Rotate image depending on EXIF orientation, or in Graphic Converter 7, under: Graphic Converter > Preferences > Open tab > Metadata under the EXIF section:

This box was checked when I first visited it so, I unchecked it (like in the screenshot above) and when I opened the files I'd imported from the iPhone again in Graphic Converter, the orientation tag was ignored and the images appeared as they did when referenced in the HTML on the website.  That was step one. 

 The next step was to rotate the images 90 degrees clockwise and resave them as JPEGs so that the images appeared corretly on the website.  Once that was done, I re-uploaded the files to the server and set a 75% height attribute for the image tags so that they wouldn't appear too large on the page.  I add anchor tag links to the actual full size files on the web server that appeared below the 75% images on the web page and voilá, the fix was in.

The only issue now was, when someone downloaded the large image versions, the images would be rotated 90 degrees clockwise, or so I would assume.  I sent an email that attempted to explain this scenario to Thorsten Lemke, author of the amazing shareware image editing app Graphic Converter, mentioning that an EXIF editor might be a good thing for someone to create. Thorsten, who personally replies to all posts sent to him, replied less than 24 hours later with an email that included a movie attachment showing how to use a feature in Graphic Converter's new Browser window's Actions pop-up that addressed this exact problem.

All you have to do is launch the shareware app Graphic Converter 7, which is free to try and way cheaper than Photoshop to buy, open the image browser from the File menu, select the files to convert in the browser window, click the Actions pop-up and choose Metadata (EXIF, IPTC,...) > Rotate Depending on EXIF (JPGs only) for the selected images and it's done. 

Here's a screenshot of the command in the sub-menu of the Actions pop-up in Graphic Converter's Browser window:

There's also another menu item right below the Rotate based on EXIF tag called Change the Orientation Setting that provides a method to set the orientation value manually. There are eight possible values for this tag.

Browsing around in the Graphic Converter app's Browser Window Actions pop-up , I found tons of other EXIF edits are possible from the pop-up menu as well.

I hope this answers someone's question in the future when they run into the same issue I did and are puzzled about what's going on and how to go about fixing it.

 

 

 

AT&T's 3G MicroCell: 5000 square feet of five bar 3G cell service for up to ten AT&T phone numbers

I've been an AT&T customer since I purchased my first Nokia cell phone at a little shop around the corner from my old employer.  AT&T's TDMA network back in the early 2000's was top notch in the Bay Area for years but when they switched over to the GSM cellular protocol, something didn't translate well in the transition and AT&T's service got considerably worse as time went on.  AT&T's continuing cell phone service woes have been ridiculed in the press lately and have even been the butt of the joke with comedians like Jon Stewart from the Daily Show on Comeny Central and others for months or even years now.

According to press reports I've read recently and some first hand reports from people I know who live in San Francisco near the Castro district, the build-outs to improve AT&T's network are occurring right now across the country including places like New York, San Francisco and many other large and small cities but I'm personally sick of waiting for the upgrade to happen here in East Oakland.

I also know a secret that some people don't.  AT&T released a device called a MicroCell recently that connects to your home DSL or Cable internet service to upgrade your slacking 3G and cellular service to a wicked awesome five bars of 3G within a range of about 5000 square feet of the device.

Today, I dropped in to the AT&T store on Lakeshore Ave. near Lake Merritt here in Oakland, CA and was put on a list to speak to a representative because the AT&T stores are still hectic from the iPhone 4 launch a couple of weeks back.  The iPhone 4 is still not widely available to the general public and all of the people coming in to the AT&T Stores to order the phones have made these stores very busy and I guess it's necessary to have a waiting list just to get someone to help you.  I waited about 15 minutes today before someone was available.

Once my name was called, my representative snatched a MicroCell from the back of the store and we registered it with AT&T using his computer terminal.  He had to enter the serial number of the MicroCell device and to tie my cell phone number to it as well which we took care of right there in the store.  It took a couple of minutes for me to remember my password to log in but we eventually got it all sorted out.  (While I was there, I bought a case for my iPhone 4 made by iFrogz too.)

Once we got the device registered, it was time to take it home, unpack the sucker and plug it in to the home high-speed Cable internet network.

The package included the MiroCell, a manual and quick start guide for the device, a convenient side pluggable wall wart-style power supply and an approximately six-foot yellow ethernet cable for connecting the device to the modem or switch in the house. 

I had to peel off a sticker that covered the ports on the device to plug in the cables to the MicroCell. The sticker had instructions on it to visit: http://att.com/3GMicroCell for more info on set up and configuration.  There are some useful videos and tutorials on that site for those who are interested in checking out what this thing does, provided this blog post doesn't answer all of your questions about it.

I plugged one end of Ethernet cable into the MicroCell and the other end into my switch/router device that provides several ports of ethernet access to various computers in the house and then I plugged the MicroCell in to the power supply and dug into the User Manual and Quick Start Guide that came with the MicroCell.

When I first plugged in the device, the GPS and 3G five bars lights on the front of it were flashing with short blips from time to time and later the 3G five bars icon flashed very quickly and repeatedly for a few seconds and the GPS light was blipping from time to time as well. This is apparently all normal and a part of the setup process that can take up to two hours to complete.  More on that later.

The GPS information that the MicroCell provides to AT&T is used to locate your device for E911 service on your cell phone.  If you move, the device needs to be re-registered and re-configured for the new location for this emergency service to function properly. E911 is for emergency response service over cellular and regular phone networks.

The user manual and quick start guide both said that the configuration time for the device could be up to two hours and that I should check back in 90 minutes to see how the configuration was progressing.  About fifteen minutes later, I got a text message stating that my device had been properly configured and I was ready to try out the MicroCell with my cellular phone.  The last step was to turn off and back on the iPhone 4. Once I shut down and restarted the phone, the iPhone 4 showed the text "AT&T M-Cell" in the upper left corner of the display where it would normally say 3G for 3G service, or E for EDGE speeds.

(In the iPhone 4 active call screenshot above, you can see the AT&T M-Cell text in the upper left corner).  Once the device was configured, I tried making a call and walked all over the warehouse where I live to see how the signal was affected by roaming around; the signal was great all over the house.  I never had any problems hearing my dad on the phone, the call was not dropped and it wasn't at all diffuclt to understand the caller on the other end.  We'll see how this goes as time goes on but so far, so good.

I know many people think that AT&T should be giving these devices away and that $150 is a bit steep for this luxury but the cool thing is, you can add up to ten numbers to the service, although they must all be AT&T cell numbers, and you can use up to four mobile devices simultaneously with the MicroCell.  If you sign up for the unlimited calling plan for $20 a month, the price is only $50 for the device and you only have to keep the $20 a month plan for two months and you can cancel it and the device is still yours to keep.  If you don't sign up for unlimited calling, the minutes you use with the MicroCell are deducted from your normal cell phone plan minutes.

I opted out of the unlimited 3G MicroCell calling plan as I have tons of roll-over minutes accumulated already and don't need to have another $20 ATM unit a month dropping out of my paycheck and into AT&T's coffers.  They've made enough money off of me today and over the last 10 years I've been with them.  At least I won't miss phone calls at home anymore.

it's important to note that data you download over 3G is also counted against your data plan totals so, if you've got a plan that's limited to 2GB, this could be an issue.  My plan was grandfathered in as an unlimited data plan for $30 a month and I decided it was worth it to keep the unlimited data plan.  Use WiFi instead of 3G at home if you've got it to avoid incurring data hits on your plan if it's not unlimited.

Here's another important explanation of how this device works when leaving or entering the range of the MicroCell.  Calls originated on the MicroCell device will remain connected to it until out of range of the MicroCell.  When the range limit is reached, the call will be bounced to the nearest regular AT&T cell tower that's in range.  Hopefully, there is a tower within range of your MicroCell and the call will continue without interruption. 

If you originated a call outside of the MicroCell's range and you enter the range of the device say, by calling someone on your way home from work and you enter the range of the MicroCell when you get home and you're still on that call, unfortunately, the phone won't switch over to your MicroCell network.  Once you end the call that was originated outside the MicroCell range, the next call from within the device's range will use the MicroCell.  This is an important caveat of the device's performance as a cellular networking extension device.

It's also worth noting that when you leave the MicroCell's range and the call is bounced to the nearest tower, the iPhone currently doesn't correctly change the text in the upper left corner of the screen when the change over from the MicroCell to the regular cell phone towers occurs.  This apparently, is a known issue with the iPhone.

The MicroCell also has a 12-month, limited warranty.

Use Rowmote for iPhone as a QuickTime Player remote control...

I recently purchased an app called Rowmote for my iPhone that basically mimics the functionality of an Apple Remote only using WiFi, not Infrared (IR) signals.  One of the minor drawbacks of the installation process is that you have to run a little companion app on your Mac so that Rowmote can communicate between the phone and your computer. 

Once this is done, it's really very useful to be able to run Rowmote and turn down the volume on the computer from across the room.  You can control the iTunes level slider via the Remote app that Apple released for the iPhone but there's no way in the Remote app to change the computer's volume; Rowmote handles that too.

There's also a handy Applications tab in Rowmote that provides more useful remote control over lots of applications that reside on your Apple computer.  Rowmote can control Front Row, Airfoil Video, DVD Player. eyeTV, Firefox, Hulu Desktop, iPhoto, iTunes, Keynote ’08/‘09, Last.fm, Logic Pro, mPlayer, Pandora, the Desktop, Powerpoint 2004/2008, QuickTime Player, Safari, Skim, Songbird, Spotify, The Tube, VLC, XBMC and many others. Rowmote can even sleep and wake your computer as well.

One of my favorites of these applications is the remote control of the QuickTime Player when we're watching a movie on the big living room TV that's also connected to my MacBook Pro's DVI port.  I can pause the playback from my phone of the movie we're watching on theTV screen.  I've just scratched the surface of what I can do with the Rowmote software but I learned a lot about it just while writing this blog post.

Safari 5 extensions...

New to Safari 5 which just came out recently are extensions that will be fully enabled later this year.  To preview them, you have to enable the plug-ins in Safari.  To do this, launch Safari and visit the Safari menu's Preferences Window.  Once there, click the Advanced tab and check the Show Develop menu in menu bar checkbox. Once checked, a new Extensions tab appears in the Preferences Window's toolbar (see image below).

Screen shot 2010-06-17 at 11.44.41 AM

To find a running list of Safari Extensions, visit this site until Apple releases its full-fledged Safari Extensions Library later this year.

Some Extension highlights include:

Create a new email with all of your open Safari tab links pasted into the body (link)

An Amazon search menu item (link)

Add a duplicate button to your Safari 5 Toolbar (link)

Add a Search for "string" on WIkipedia pop-up menu item (link)

Add a YouTube video downloader (link)

Add a stopwatch to Safari's toolbar (link)

Add Alexa site stats in the lower right corner of the current page (link)

Safari Developer plug-in (link)

W3C Validator Plug-in (link)

Netflix Queue Sorter plug-in (link)

And there are many more with new extensions being added every day.  Check them out and comment here on this post with your favorites.

Album links on iTunes...

Here's the web links to my albums via iTunes.

EPROMs

Eponyms

Epigrams

I took the photos for the albums myself in various Oakland locations.

Please add some comments on my albums if you get a chance.

iPhone Tip: Stop iPhoto from launching automatically when you connect your iPhone

Here's a quick tip for iPhone users attempting to save some sanity when attaching the iPhone to the computer.  If you don't want iPhoto to launch automatically every time you connect your iPhone to your Mac, here's how you can disable this behavior.

Snow Leopard:

1) Connect your iPhone to the computer with the USB cable

2) Search for the application Image Capture by going to the Finder and typing Command + N to open a new window and then Command + F from that window to start a search.  Enter "Image Capture" without the quotes and you can choose Kind is Application from the pop-up to narrow the results.

3) Launch the Image Capture application by double-clicking on its icon

4) In the main Image Capture window, click on the iPhone item located in the upper right DEVICES section

5) Click the pop-up in the bottom left corner called Connecting this iPhone opens: and select No application

Once this is done, you can quit Image Capture and from now on, when you connect your iPhone, iPhoto won't launch by default.  You will have to manually launch iPhoto when you want to sync photos from your phone to the computer while No application is selected.

To re-enable iPhoto as the launch by default application, repeat the same steps above but in step 5, select iPhoto from the pop-up.  Observe that there are several other options available from the pop-up including launching Image Capture, Preview, AutoImporter and Other where you could specify Aperture if you have it installed.

Please note that if you use Image Capture instead of iPhoto or Aperture to import your photos, selecting the AutoImporter option in the pop-up will automatically import your photos to the default directory, Pictures, in your current user's home directory. 

The AutoImporter default import location setting, and several other preferences can be changed by navigating to: /System/Library/Image Capture/Support/Application/ImageImporter and double clicking the app.  Once the app loads, you can choose Preferences and adjust the various Auto Importer settings including the default path for the auto import.

Nude Photo Music DJ Pool...

Nude Photo Promos going out soon...

DJ's, get on the Nude Photo Promo list!  From the Nude Photo website:

"If you’re a Dj, sign up for our promo pool! We’ll send you early copies of our tracks before they get into stores, and all you have to do is give us some feedback. You’re free to chart them, use them in mixes, anything except distribute them.

Click here to join our DJ promo pool!"

Unfurnished House draft...

The Unfurnished House Draft has been posted on Soundcloud.  Check it out here:

http://soundcloud.com/darinmarshall/unfurnishedhouse-sng

The arrangement on this one took a long time to finish but I think it's pretty close to done.  There's some stuff I could do that might make it a little bit better but at some point, you've gotta say, that's it.  I'm very close to that point with this one.  I hope you enjoy it.

Starbase Lounge Music video draft...

A friend of mine sent me a link to this video which is for a song I wrote and completed just after 9/11.  I had been working on it up until that point but after watching TV for almost 48 hours straight after 9/11 happened, I had to do something else and I finished up this song.  Here's a video for it that is a lot more upbeat than the description of the timing of the completion of this song:

Youtube video link for the song Starbase Lounge Music from the album Eponyms originally released on Magnatune Records in 2003.

The synth horns in the background of this song were played live over the top of the arrangement. I found a patch in Reason I liked because it reminded me of the gorgeous horns in The Matrix movies that I really liked when I was working on this tune.

I hope the whole Starbase Lounge Music idea makes sense.  The original concept was called Summer Madness II because there's an amazing song by Kool & the Gang called Summer Madness and it features a fat Arp synthesizer sound that rises to ear-piercing pitches by the beginning and again at the end of the song, after a couple of solos on the synth and guitar.  Summer Madness is just such an amazingly brilliant piece of music that it defies description.  If you haven't heard it, you must seek Summer Madness out and listen to it now.

The idea for the song title came from an artist I like called Visit Venus.  They had a space jazz, down tempo album out in 1995 that I caught up with much later called Music For Space Tourism that I adored and I liked the concept of making music for the future or that was thinking about what music would be like in the future.  So, the name Starbase Lounge Music came from the idea that this is what Summer Madness would sound like in Aldous Huxley's dystopian Brave New World future where people used artificial, synthetic substances to alter and enhance their lives and everyday experiences.  As always, your mileage may vary.

On a side note: I've been trying to get my artwork, artist name and remastered music replaced and updated on websites and music services like Last.fm, iTunes and Magnatune.com for some time now and so far, no luck.  The artist name on Magnatune.com was initially introduced as Belief Systems but this is actually the name of my record label that doesn't really put any records out anymore.  The artist name for Darin Marshall is Mantic for all of the music released on Magnatune.com and soon on Nude Photo Music. 

Apparently, it's fairly difficult to change the name and artwork of the music you've released after it's been propagated to various online services because it's been a long time since I talked with my distributor friend at Magnatune and the new music with the new artwork is still not updated on iTunes, on the Amazon MP3 store or any of the other places where my music has been aggregated.  I hope this gets updated soon but until then, the old artwork and older versions remain on the web.

There's an entire new album of music called Epigrams made up of stuff that was released previously as well as some new songs that I cooked up and there's one additional song on each of the original two albums.  All of the songs on the two albums that were originally available on Magnatune.com have been remastered and reissued with new artwork so, I can't wait for this stuff to get published.