Brain Assassin

A few days ago, the sec­ond trailer for the Clash of the Titans remake appeared on the net. For the first trailer -- which isn’t all that dif­fer­ent from the lat­est one -- get to my first post about the remake. The lat­est trailer is a full minute longer and fea­tures a bunch of new scenes. Since the movie should hit the­aters today, I’ll try to watch it this week­end. If you liked the music, look for “The Bird and the Worm” by The Used.

More­turi te salutant!

The trailer for Preda­tors, the lat­est addi­tion to the fran­chise that began with Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger, has arrived on the net. In Preda­tors, a bunch of elite war­riors are kid­napped from Earth and brought to another planet. There they real­ize that they are noth­ing more than prey! In a nut­shell, that’s the plot. Well, this is a movie about Preda­tors so we don’t need much of a story line, right? Oh, the world looks just like the jun­gles in the first film with a few additions.

I still remain cau­tious about the cast­ing but I freely admit that Adrien Brody doesn’t look as ridicu­lous in the trailer as he did in my imag­i­na­tion. Looks like Preda­tors just jumped near the top of my must-​​see list. What do you think? Will the addi­tional ‘s’ in the title make this one a bet­ter movie?

Per­for­mance results for the tested URL shorteners

The guys over at Watch­Mouse did a really inter­est­ing com­par­i­son: The set a bunch of URL short­en­ers against each other to see how good they really are. Watch­Mouse mon­i­tored 14 pop­u­lar URL short­en­ers for a month and took a long, hard look at avail­abil­ity and speed. Inter­est­ingly enough, only goo.gl and twt.tl were always avail­able dur­ing the test­ing period.  In terms of speed, Facebook’s fb.me ist by far the slow­est of them all and goo.gl reigns supreme.

Also, it seems that only a few of the short­en­ing ser­vices opti­mized their DNS servers for inter­na­tional use. If you’re in the same coun­try as some of the ser­vices have their servers stashed, you can look up the IP address half a sec­ond faster than an inter­na­tional vis­i­tor. In addi­tion to these find­ings, Watch­Mouse fig­ured out that bit.ly’s pro ser­vice – a paid ver­sion offer­ing more options – is slower on aver­age than the free counterpart.

Per­son­ally, I don’t use URL short­en­ers because I like to see where a link gets me. There are a few add-​​ons and/​or user­scripts for Fire­fox to keep you on the safe side though, by expand­ing short­ened URLs. Any­way, if you can’t avoid the use of such a ser­vice check out the new web­site the guys from Watch­Mouse have set up: the site pro­vides real-​​time sta­tus reports for URL shorteners.

A very well done poster, I'd say.

The new Amer­i­can poster for The Expend­ables is here. This film stars Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger, Sylvester Stal­lone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lund­gren, Eric Roberts, Steve Austin, Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, and a bunch of oth­ers, most of them known faces. The Expend­ables is about a team of mer­ce­nar­ies hired to infil­trate a South Amer­i­can coun­try and over­throw a ruth­less dic­ta­tor. Of course, noth­ing goes accord­ing to plan and things will get more bloody and action-​​packed than every­one thought.

There are a few test screen­ing reports out in the wild describ­ing this film as insanely vio­lent. Let’s hope The Pow­ers That Be won’t change any­thing and we are going to see the movie in all its gory glory on August 13th this year. I don’t know about you but that’s def­i­nitely a movie I absolutely have to see. There’s no way around it!

A few min­utes ago I stum­bled over an inter­est­ing arti­cle over at Life­hacker. The new beta at Bubbl.us allows users to do some pro­duc­tive brain­storm­ing by offer­ing a free, web-​​based and sim­ple to use soft­ware. You can start to pro­duce good-​​looking mind maps with­out reg­is­ter­ing. If you want to save your mind map though, you should reg­is­ter. It’s free and they don’t want your e-​​mail address.

Bubbl.us is very easy to use and you will intu­itively grasp its options. Most options are very stream­lined and can be accom­plished with­out ever need­ing your mouse. Best of all, apart from print­ing your mind map, you can export it to JPG or PNG. If you did reg­is­ter, you are able to share your mind maps with oth­ers. It’s very speedy although it took me a while to prop­erly save a mind map I created.

It’s good to know that there is a free, web-​​based solu­tion out there that’s easy to use. If you are not into web-​​based prod­ucts, take a look at Free­Mind which is a mind-​​mapping soft­ware writ­ten in Java. Free­Mind offers some attrac­tive fea­tures licensed under GPL. Let’s get to work and sketch out your ideas for world domination!

Finally, we get to see more than just a few screen­shots.  As Eidos Mon­treal boss Stephanie D’Astous tweeted a few days ago a ‘sur­prise’ has come this way. Nat­u­rally, the sur­prise is noth­ing more than a trailer albeit a nice one. I already burn to have a copy of the game in my hands. The first install­ment was spec­tac­u­lar, the sec­ond one I found not that well made. Any­way, have a look for yourself: