Remember people, Apple are the nice, friendly computer company. Not like that nasty Microsoft.

So, Apple have followed through on their threat to kill any iPhones hacked to work on other networks. God forbid their customers should get a choice in their provider. If they’re willing to sacrifice functionality in order to choose their own provider, then why not let them?

Of course, the really worrying thing about this update are the stories of non-hacked iPhones being killed as well. Not to mention the stories of the update adding extra encryption to the iPhone which prevents 3rd party software.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7017660.stm

Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t quite understand, my AJAX image enlarger plugin started mucking up today.

I did really like it, but I’d rather have a consistent look for my posts, so I’ve switched it off for now and reverted to HTML links where a larger version of an image is available.

This has been doing the rounds for the last week or so, and is now pretty much guaranteed to get a truckload of hits after it was singled out by Geoff Johns himself in a recent Newsarama interview.

The guy who made it did an incredible job of manipulating the comic panels.

This is just cool. Some nice piloting by the owner as well

Picked up a good few comics this week, but my top comic of the week has to be the second issue of Countdown to Adventure. Its only issue 2, but its already got me hooked.

I was never big into Adam Strange or Starfire, and Animal Man completely passed me by. I didn’t get into their storyline in 52 (but 52 is a discussion for another time), but this series is really clicking for me. Having read Planet Heist, I now really like the Adam Strange character, and his storyline has me gripped, with his life on Rann going down the toilet. Can’t wait to see what happens. The central mysteries of the virus infecting people, and Animal Man and Starfire’s powers being wonky are really engaging as well. Kory trying her hand at a normal life is a really interesting story.

Kyle popped up again in the Challengers section of Countdown. I’ve always enjoyed the Earth-3 stuff in the past, so I enjoyed this sneak peek, and look forward to picking up the special next week. Still not buying the Donna/Kyle/Jason love triangle though. Its not been as believable in Countdown as Ron Marz made it in his Wildstorm special.

On a related note, I re-read the “Under the Hood” trades the other day that reintroduced Jason. He was so much more interesting in them than anything I’ve read him in since. I really enjoyed the story up until the “Superboy Punch” annual. They really ruined his whole comeback with that.

It does seem odd that the heroes are letting him run around as well after what he did in those stories.

When I was originally into Linux (say around 1998/1999) one of the things that kept coming up was running Wine to get some Windows applications running. I tried it a couple of times, but it really wasn’t for the faint-hearted.

However, seeing talk of people running games on it the other day got me to thinking how much had it improved over the last 9 or so years?

Quite a lot is the answer. I booted up Synaptec, searched for Wine and installed it. From there it was an easy matter of putting my Baldur’s Gate disc into the drive, and running the autorun.exe from the Wine Explorer window. It installed no problem, and ran fine as well. Only tweaking required was to set the size of the Wine Desktop (rather than run fullscreen), and set the sound to use Alsa. All done through a config GUI.

I’m well impressed I must admit.

That’s another blog update done. Hopefully everything survived as it was a more major upgrade. I’ve already noticed some admin plugins that will need updated or replaced, but nothing major.

I got sent this video this morning. Its a really impressive piece of kit, the way it tracks the guy’s face as it moves around. Its range of movement is incredibly realistic.

Probably only a matter of time before it turns evil and builds an army of itself

Well, we’ve moved into high gear now in the Sinestro Corps, with titles pretty much every week for the next month or two.

This week’s is the Parallax one-shot, written by Ron Marz. Its a nice issue, although doesn’t really move the story along. Instead we get Kyle, trapped in his own head, looking out on what Parallax is doing, and facing off against the bug itself.

I suppose the first thing to say, is that this issue doesn’t really move the larger story along much. While it does act probably as a bit of setup to Kyle eventually getting free, its largely just about taking a sidestep and letting us see exactly what’s happening with Kyle at this point.

The really interesting thing is how removed Kyle is from events. Although his body is out there, killing GLs, Kyle himself is very much separated from events. This issue seems to underline a fundemental difference between the two Parallax-possessions we’ve seen. Hal was very much being influenced by Parallax, but still aware of what he was doing. While Parallax takes most of the blame for Hal’s actions, Hal still feels a measure of responsibility for them.

Kyle on the other hand is very much controlled by Parallax. He has no say in what he’s doing at all, being isolated in his own head from exterior goings-on, only able to view. From what we’ve seen here, Kyle should come out of this all blameless. Parallax is obviously drawing on Kyle’s subconciousness from some of what he says an does, but Kyle himself is very much fighting against Parallax. This partly will explain how Kyle is running around Countdown acting as if none of this has happened. Unlike Hal, he has the luxury of knowing he’s blameless.

Once again Kyle’s track record with women is brought up, but its nice to see it doesn’t really work against him. Parallax tries goading Kyle about his girlfriends ending up dead, but Kyle is really past that at this point.

We also get the first sign of Kyle shedding the Ion identity and reclaiming his Green Lantern self. One thing this scene underlined for me was a key problem with Ion. No two artists draw the suit the same, and it really bugs me. The only version that ever really worked for me was when Ivan Reis draws it. In this case, I hope Kyle’s new GL suit is drawn more consistently (although its off to a bad start, with his logo changing colour, and crab mask vanishing - infact this week’s Countdown he appears in Hal’s suit for no reason whatsoever).

It was nice seeing Kyle in the Banks suit again. And interesting that that’s the costume Kyle went back to, rather than his Jim Lee suit (although not a surprise perhaps, since that’s the suit he used when written by Ron Marz, who also wrote this). I wonder if there’s going to be anything symbolic referenced in the Ion one-shot about that choice.

The issue ends with Kyle walking towards a green light in a painting made by his mother. I like the idea that his artistic side came from his mother. Its something that was never touched on in the series, and it gives him something tangible to remember her by. The significance of the green light will be interesting. Obviously Kyle is now not as lost as he was.

What can I say about the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special? Well, I really like Amanda Conner’s art. It was great fun in the Power Girl arc in JSA Classified, and its great fun here.

The comic itself isn’t bad. But what annoys me is that the whole Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding has just been a lot of style and no substance. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s been a lot of fun stuff. The Wedding Planner issue was a hoot. But I’ve not seen anything yet that’s waylaid my fears that Black Canary’s going to come out of this a worse character.

As for the wedding itself? Well, I don’t want to spoil too much, but there are various things in the book that are grating on me.

1. Black Canary’s wedding “dress”. Ok, so I know the wedding had all the guests in costume. But still, I can’t be the only one who’d have liked her to have a proper wedding dress instead of that outfit.
2. The wedding dress is spoiled both on the cover, and in the preview that came out a couple of weeks ago. The bride’s first appearance in her dress should be a big shock, “oh wow!” moment. Of course, given the “dress” itself…
3. There’s no wedding. So, I’m reading a comic called the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special. At the start of it, they’re not married, and at the end they are. Ummm, shouldn’t we have seen some “I do’s” in there? Just a thought…

As I said, some fun comics came out of this, and I loved Amanda Conner’s art. But ultimately, it was a bit of a gyp for those people that were actually wanting to see a wedding.

Next “Wedding Special” DC puts on the stands, I think I’ll wait for the spoilers.