JontySewell.net

I'm pretty happy to have finally got somewhere with what's basically been a year-long project: turning an old PC I got given into a fully-fledged server and media centre. I knew I wanted to call it Pegasus because it's generally a cool name. I call my desktop Apollo and if I ever get a proper laptop I'll call it Deadalus, so maybe you'll see a running theme going on...

It's gone from a horrible beige case that I daren't take a picture of without stripping it down:

to a lovely, quiet, small black case I got for a bargain price of £27 from eBuyer. Being the techy person I am, I didn't think to take any pictures while I was installing the 1.4Ghz Duron motherboard, but here's one of the new silent fan I clipped on before the case arrived: (Click for larger)

It took a lot of fiddling, but eventually I managed to get it all nicely set up with Ubuntu Server, and all the usual apache/MySQL/PHP you have on a server. I then turned my attention towards mpd. It was easy to copy all my music to the internal RAID 0 array (Yes, don't kill me for using RAID0! It has an 80GB HD and a 40GB HD and this was the most useful way of using them.) and set up the mpd server so that I could pop to http://pegasus/music in any browser on my home network and make up a playlist, using the very nice RelaXXPlayer (http://relaxx.sourceforge.net/) The only problem was, running the sound through the TV was a little energy-wasting because there was no picture, but the LCD screen was still turned on. So I decided to utilise this and set up an X server with a visualisation!

About a week later, and after a lot of searching and deliberating, I gave up on the vis idea because a) all the programs with visualisations in need a keyboard/mouse to activate it, and b) The PC wasn't powerful enough for any particularly epic fullscreen visualisers anyway.
That was when I watched "The Stolen Earth" on TV, and had quite the brainwave! The BBC offer a free screensaver of the patterns that wiggle around Mr. Smith's screen in the Sarah Jane Adventures, and I think it looks über cool, so I decompiled the flash file and recoded the video to loop continuously while music was playing. Add in a web-controller VLC player and a load of TV programmes stored on disk, and it's my perfect idea of a media centre! (again, click to enlarge)

There's only a few little bits that need ironing out now:

• Videos don't smooth very well, because I had to use XVideo extension in VLC. They look a lot nicer with the OpenGL extension, but that runs really slowly due to the 16MB integrated graphics. If I use it a lot I might buy a dedicated AGP graphics card to quicken it up a bit.
• When it's starting up, it looks a tad unprofessional!
• I need to make a fancy script to automatically start the X server, VLC and the MPD OSD. Currently for some random reason I can't have VLC and the OSD in the same .xinitrc file, which is annoying.

Viva la technologie! Oh, and it's also a backup of anything I want, and it has a Firefly Streaming Media server to serve music anywhere in the world. I turned that off, though, because it was slowing everything else down. I don't leave it on 24/7 at the moment because the PSU gets rather warm, but that's another thing I'll look into replacing at the earliest opportunity. Then I can set every computer to share it's music library from there, which'll be awesome.

P.S. I tried to take a video of the Mr. Smith animation, but there's something wrong with my camera and it came out in a decidedly blue hue. :/ Anyway, all I did was sped it up to 200% to make it look more smooth (it was 12fps to start with).

Having all this time after school/exams have finished has made me realise that I've been missing some pretty good films.

In particular, I really want to go and see WALL-E - not only is it a Pixar film, which makes it an instant masterpiece, but according to Wikipedia, it's got almost universal praise from film critics, which has to be a good thing! I shall have to find someone to go with to see it ASAP!

I haven't been to see a normal comedy film at the cinema for ages, and when I saw the Hancock trailer at my last visit (to see Indiana Jones) I thought it'd be a good film to go and see too. I'll wait for a week or so, because although I don't like waiting when loads of other people have already seen it I also hate it when the cinema's really packed and you can hear people talking. Years ago I remember going to see a film that had something to do with catching rats at the cinema with my Mum - and we were the only people there. The security guard came in and watched the film!

I wrote all this here so that I wouldn't have to explain myself. Whenever someone asks me for an explanation, I can just refer them to this page! :p
To the average reader it probably looks historically long, but bear in mind it's a review of Turn Left, The Stolen Earth and Journey's End all in one. I didn't get caught up in the tide of squeeing until last Sunday, after TSE. :jawdrop:

First, I shall give the final three episodes each a score out of ten!
Turn Left: 9/10
The Stolen Earth: 1337^42/10!!!111one!one
Journey's End 7.5/10

Next I shall make a table of contents, so I can remember what I want to write about:

1. The lead-up to the episode
   
   1. Turn Left
   2. The Stolen Earth
2. The companions
   
   1. Jack Harkness
   2. Martha Jones
   3. Sarah Jane Smith
   4. Mickey Smith
   5. Jackie Tyler
   6. Gwen and Ianto
   7. Luke Smith
3. The Doctor(s)
4. The ending

And now, let the ranting and raving begin! (*nerd*)

Number 1: The lead-up

I think the rest of the season previous to 'Turn Left' has rather turned into mush in my brain. Turn Left and The Stolen Earth were, to me, the best two episodes of the season, and quite possibly of the revival altogether. Looking back I was just a bit too young to properly take in the finales of the first two seasons (Ecclescake and Doomsday), and now I want to watch the whole thing from the beginning again in a way. But that's another story.

I've only actually watched Turn Left once, because I honestly don't know if I'd be able to watch it again. It's a very emotional episode in that it shows you what happens when everything goes wrong:- and the bad side of the Doctor. He needs a companion to keep him from losing it like he did with the Racnoss at Christmas, and without her he went and got himself killed. It revealed lots of tidbits of information and piqued the viewers' interest.I think a particularly sad bit of that episode was the fleeting TV broadcast where the newsreader was talking about the disappearance and subsequent reappearance of the hospital from 'Smith and Jones' - and mentioned as an aside that Sarah Jane, Luke, Maria and Clyde had all died in there. Why they'd mention that on the national news when everyone else except weird-medical-student died I don't know, but the fact it was only lightly touched upon made it even more powerful. I wouldn't have thought Martha would have given the last of the oxygen to weird-medical-student (you'll have realised by now I can't remember his name) when there were suffocating kids and so on. (Unless, as nabusan on the Doctor Who Forums pointed out, they died from other causes) Anyway, I won't pursue that any more, the fact that I could talk about it for about an hour shows how well it was written.

Onto The Stolen Earth. Ever since I saw the trailer at the end of Turn Left, which showed a roughly equal share of time alotted to each spin-off programme (wow, that does sound geeky) I was very excited about it. I really like the idea of the spinoff shows being spawned by the Doctor himself directly, and then them all going about their business for a while, and then them all coming back together again to save the world from some great evil. They certainly seemed to do this in TSE, and that alone made the episode brilliant for me. While it was sad to see the end of Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister (who certainly did her part for the human race in the end) the way whole crew banded together instantly to reel in the TARDIS and the Doctor was admirable, and also one of the main reasons I disliked Journey's End. It was also nice to have Sarah Jane and Luke in because they'd already recycled Jack at the end of the last season, but not any of the characters of the Sarah Jane adventures. Arguably they couldn't have Sarah Jane without Luke anyway, him being her son and everything. I suppose they could have explained it away by saying he was camping with Clyde or something silly, but that would have been more annoying.

Number 2: The Companions in Journey's End

a) Jack Harkness
Why did he leave Gwen and Ianto in the Hub when they all knew the Daleks were bearing down on its position? Considering he really does care about them both I found it the second-most-hard-to-believe-character-interaction; see below for the first.

b) Martha Jones
She was rather good while she was in the Doctor's company last season, but ever since then she seems to have turned into some sort of single-facial-expression war machine. When she first revealed she'd joined UNIT I thought that was a good thing, but considering her actual self (not the evil clone thing) was only in the Sontaran double-bill for about 10 minutes we didn't get a good view of her character development until this episode. Now, comparing her to the other companions I think she's rather rubbish. However, that said, she wasn't bad in Torchwood so now she looks to be joining them full-time maybe I'll grow to like her again.

c) Sarah Jane Smith
She would NEVER leave Luke on his own! About half an hour earlier she was crying her eyes out (a sad scene, by the way, and excellent acting from Lis Sladen) and now she's just running off to find her precious Doctor. If I was her I still wouldn't trust Mr. Smith completely, looking back to the last episode of SJA and the revelation that he had been pretending to help her all along while really he was just trying to destroy the world...

d) Mickey Smith
He was only in this episode to introduce him as a new cast member for Torchwood, that much was plainly obvious.

e) Jackie Tyler
I don't know why she was in this at all. Did she do anything? Maybe it would have been a bit more powerful if she'd been disintegrated by the neutrino-whatever thing. Then again, one universes' version of her has already died.

f) Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones
The way they were saved was rather pathetic. The classic intruder-alarm triggers a previously unknown time-field that they're protected by? I don't know about you, but if I was Tosh I would have at least told someone about that before I died. Again, they didn't do much in the second episode.

g) Luke Smith
I'm sad he hardly got mentioned. There were so many possibilites to explore his vast intelligence and while I knew he wouldn't be particularly instrumental in saving the day it would have been nice if he could have at least helped in some way. As it is, he just got up, said "lol, who's there?" and then K9 butted in and did everything. I'm sure he'd be able to figure out the TARDIS base code quite easily, he's already fixed an energy capacitor that can handle the whole energy output of the sun itself.

Number 3: The Doctor(s)
While the method used to create the DoctorDonna was rather crude (and you'd have thought the Doctor would know it could happen) I think it worked really well. Lots of people were saying that leaving it with Rose was a horrible resolution to the plotline, but I disagree. It's kind of like in Star Trek : Nemesis when they have to teach the 'new Data' aka B4 all the things they've already been through with the original paranoid android. It's also nice that Rose accepts him, and the Doctor accepts the loss of Rose finally. Technically, he finally got to tell her what he never got a chance to last time they met on that fateful beach. It also closes up that line of enquiry (although that's what they said after Doomsday, admittedly) while leaving the possibility for...something, I'm not sure what...maybe a Torchwood in alternate universe special?

Number 4: The Ending
When I first wrote up the table of contents on Saturday, I had a generally negative view of the episode. Here I was intending to write about how all the companions just wandered off their separate ways, and how they should maintain their special lil' Outer-Space Facebook. I still think they should, but fortunately something's changed my attitude somewhat. Murray Gold's music. This morning everything was a bit of a fuzzy haze, which was partly because I had woken up at 5am and finished reading Garth Nix's Superior Saturday (only one left in the series, woo) so I decided to flick through the episode on the DVR again. This basically meant flicking right to the end, and watching the tow-the-Earth-home bit. This is another thing that people say was the downfall of the episode, but I think it was brilliantly ingenious. I've gotten used to the entire programme being completely scientifically inaccurate by now - I mean, Z Neutrinos negating electrical charge?! Neutrinos are called so because they have no charge and almost no effect on physical matter, dumbos! - so it was a welcome and rather funny ending.

The music for this section was simply brilliant. It's right at the top of the 'Murray Gold awesome list' with 'Doomsday' in a close second, 'This is Gallifrey, Our Childhood, Our Home' third and 'The Face of Boe' fourth. I can't wait to get my hands on the season 4 soundtrack! The music made the whole 6-pilots scene bond together perfectly with the characters' brilliant acting and made it a scene I will remember happily for a very long time.

As a last note, I hope that the events of this episode translate somehow into Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures! It'll certainly be fun when they return later in the year to see how everyone's changed.

This is the longest post I've ever written, and over the summer I hope to write reviews and things more often.

And after about an hour of edits, rather conveniently spread out over the day, that's this finished! I'd be interested to see what people think of my writing style, I've never revied anything in my life before but now I've finished my GCSEs, and English as a subject along with them, I feel I'm going to somehow miss the analytical essays I always complained about in lessons. I've noticed I tend to use brackets a lot, I get easily off-track! I also start sentences with 'I' a lot. Just look at this paragraph: there's 11 Is in there I think.

OK, I lie.

Exams, School and Work
Fortunately, the exams are out of the way. I think I did fine in them all, or, rather, there weren't any where I walked out thinking "OH SNAP". Last time I blogged I'd done about ¼ of the exams, and looking back I think they were the hardest ones. Having Statistics stuck out right at the end was annoying, but it wasn't as hard as I had feared. I'm sure they deliberately make the practice tests harder to scare you into revising more:- which is certainly a good thing!

It's definitely nice to be able to sit here and not have to get up at 7am to be dressed up in uniform and out the house by 8am, only to return at 4pm and do the whole cycle over again. I can generally find things to do, and I've got a nice batch of work to do at home on PetPortrayal.com - there's not much there now, but when I fix the remote desktop link to the Small Business server at work I can fix it up nicely.

Docteur Qui?
So it's the series finale of Doctor Who next Saturday, and I'm not sure if I can wait all week for it. I was distraught when I couldn't watch The Stolen Earth as it was broadcast (see below), but watching it from the DVR at 11pm actually added a bit of an edge to it. It was nice to see all the shows crossing over, and while you know none of them are actually going to die (Well, Sarah Jane can't die because she has a son and that would be sad!, and lots of people already died from Torchwood) it's still fun watching how they manage to get out of their seemingly doomed situations. Mum put forward the interesting proposition that Rose was actually evil, and just pretending to be on the Doctor's side. I don't know whether this is believable, but it would certainly be an interesting twist.

I watched all the Sarah-Jane Adventures during last week, which probably implies I was quite bored. In fact, it did help on Saturday as I expect most people who hadn't seen it wouldn't have a clue who Luke was, and he certainly has a rather different past to most kids.

Iceland
There's only four weeks left until I'm off to the land of Sigur Rós! On Saturday night I dressed up in my finest garments and waited on two sittings at the Barn Bistro - the fancy name for a garage at my Scout Leader's farm that he converted into a mini restaurant. It was quite fun managing all the food and clearing up and so on, but it affirmed that I don't want to be a waiter in the future. :P
It's all going towards raising money for the trip, which now includes lots of exciting additions. We're going to the Icelandic Jamboree in Akureyri for a week, and then going on our own to Reykjavik and the surrounding area for a few days afterwards. It's certainly going to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

The slightly scary part is that we only have a 20kg weight allowance on the IcelandAir flight there and back. That includes all the tents, cooking stuff, etc! And bearing in mind we'll probably pick up loads of souvenirs while we're there we'll have to make sure we don't overload the baggage. While I'm there I'll have to take a picture of myself spending some ISK - Icelandic Krona, not Interstellar Kredits as you EVE-Online players are used to. Maybe I can get a free lifetime subscription if I visit the CCP offices! I doubt they have many visitors. ;)

So yes, it's going to be quite busy for a while. If there's any more rubbish I remember I'll have to post more.

I paid for this, so I should use it.

What's happened since the last time I posted?

• I've finished school
• I've started my exams
• I've been on a short holiday to Cambridge

And probably a lot of other stuff I can't remember right now.

Finishing school was quite strange. Right up until the last day we just went around like it was completely normal, and on the last day itself we just came in as usual in the morning. Everybody had shirts to sign and etc. from our year, and nobody did any work!

It only really dawned on me that a part of my life was ending in the final assembly. While I'm not sad that I won't see people in the future (well, I've seen them all through the exam period and most of us are going to 6th form at the same place) I did realise I was sad that I wouldn't have the same school life anymore.
It's funny, really. Everyone spends their whole life complaining about how much school smells and they don't want to go, but after that final assembly, where you were free to go off into the world and do whatever you want, nobody wanted to go. The teachers had to usher us away in the end because we were distracting everyone else (who weren't leaving school).

Since then, I've realised I need to own some more trousers than just jeans, as that contravenes the 6th form dress policy, and it's going to be very different from now on. Apparently the holiday from the end of GCSEs until I start again in September could be the longest I ever have until I retire, which is kinda scary.

Speaking of holidays, progress towards the Iceland trip is going well. I've been reading a lot about the country and while it seems boring on first look - cold, desolate, hardly anyone there, etc - it's actually got a whole bunch of pretty amazing things there. During the summer months of May - July the temperature regularly goes up to 20° C and it's not nearly as windy as some people say. I could go for a swim in the pools of geothermally-heated water, or walk on warm rocks heated by magma underneath. Apparently there's also a place where you can walk along a boardwalk surrounded by molten lava, which sounds rather scary. There's also spectacular waterfalls, glaciers and mountains not far from where I'm staying!

It's come slightly later than planned but a load of us are also planning to go to Soul Survivor again this year, to Week C down in Shepton Mallet. There's a lot more than last time who have been enthused by our reports after last years', which is great, and our youthleaders have just bought a caravan, so they can come down and enjoy the fun as well!

As for the exams, I think they've gone pretty well so far. French Speaking was the very first one, which was very nerve-racking, but I'm definitely glad I got it out of the way. Maths was next, which I was also nervous about, but that also seems to have gone fine. I was scared that out of the 20 or so topics, it'd test me on the 2 or 3 that I was worst at, which thankfully didn't happen. English Lit is something I don't think you can revise much for, as the ability to write well is either a skill you have or you don't have. ICT was predictably simple - although the final question, always the longest and worth the most marks - proved difficult, and I had to sit and think about it for a while. Biology's my weakest science, and I think I did as well as I did last year (I remember coming out of that exam worried about some of the questions - but the grade at the end was fine).
Finally, the Systems and Control Core exam (mainly about mechanisms, manufacturing processes etc.) wasn't too bad, but the last question was rather confusing and involved designing a pedal-opening system for a bin.

This week's a bit of a breather over half-term before I get plunged back into Electronics, Maths 2, English Language, Geography, Chemistry and French... which means I need to do lots of revision! I can't wait until June the 18th, when it'll all be over.

All that remains is to ask; if you find anything that's suddenly stopped working on this site, send me an e-mail at me@jontysewell.net - the domain's been moved to a new server recently which seems a whole lot faster than the old one. (Well, Yoda is more agile than Dumbledore, isn't he?)

Phew, that was long.