Month: May 2024

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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

I went to see a film at the Cineworld cinema in Rochester yesterday. As we drove alongside the river I noticed that the tide was very low. I really should, at some point, learn about spring and neap tides, or at least the timing of them. I understand why they occur I’ve just not investigated when they occur. After the film I rated this on IMDB. You should see the ratings system on within this communication. I can’t get the code to share my rating because it used to be on Twitter and I left that hellhole many years ago. So, below is the average user rating from IMDB. I rated this film 6/10.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) on IMDb

I didn’t hate this film. I didn’t really love it either. It kept my interest for its entire 135 minutes runtime. I did find myself constantly thinking why apes were the main characters and whether this film would be any different had all the cast been “human”. If it was set as ginger haired people against the rest of the world would it have made a difference? Is it ok to watch this as the apes being lead characters makes it ok rather than problematic. I do get that the whole premise is apes rule the world. That makes sense. But this was just a film with characters and their development. Maybe people wouldn’t see it if this was a human based story.

I quite liked it I guess. I am still thinking about it and I guess that makes it a good thing. However, I am thinking more about an episode of Dr Who, 73 yards, and trying to get my head around that more than I am this film. Like, why was the name of that episode in imperial units? Couldn’t they have made it 73 metres. There are bigger issues with that episode and so I will have a look online to see if there are answers.

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These Were A Surprise

Not much more to say than I was travelling my Minecraft world when I came across these beauties.

Ice columns in Minecraft
Ice columns in Minecraft

I was surprised as I hadn’t expected to see things of such amazingness.

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The Portal

I have and have not wanted a PlayStation Portal since I saw they were released. There was a period of time that I had a notification from a stock checking site to try and buy one but I was always too late to the party. I nearly managed to order one from Currys but then the order got cancelled as they had run out of stock. So, I gave up on stock checking sites and just thought I’d be ok without one.

So, I had settled myself to not owning a Portal, I can always use remote play on my iPhone if I wanted to even though I really hate using screens as controllers. Then, one day, EE sent me a text message saying they were selling Portals in their shop. Even though I had mentally settled on not owning one, I somehow went through the entire order process and ended up having a Portal delivered to my home.

Playstation Portal
PlayStation Portal

The above image is a poor photograph because you can’t see the main features of the Portal which would be the controller part of it. But you can see that I am logged into Fortnite. I have found that the Portal works really well on my home network. I haven’t tested it fully on another Wi-Fi network yet, but I am going to do so this weekend. So far it seems a great little device, as long as you have connectivity. If you don’t then it’s just a lump of plastic and electronics.

One of my main methods of connecting to my PS5 will be via my phone’s hotspot. I figured that I pay for quite a bit of data so I might as well start to use the allocation. However, when I first tried to connect to my iPhone the Portal said it couldn’t connect. I tried again and I still got an error message. I spent a little while using Google and I found a number of pages where they said it was not possible as iPhone doesn’t support the particular NATs or whatever. I was somewhat upset at this.

Then, through a random Reddit post I saw that someone had connected to an iPhone using manual settings in the Portal and so I tried that. It worked!!! I now have the best of all worlds. I am a happy chappy.

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Portal Gateway

This communication should come after the next one as I have some writing to do about my new toy. I bought a PlayStation Portal and have been using it to play from somewhere that isn’t my lounge. I was quite worried when I tried to connect to a hotspot from my phone because the Portal refused to connect. What would be the point of having a Portal if I can’t connect wherever I get mobile service?

I spent some time googling and there were many pages saying that “nope, it’s an iPhone thing” and also that the wrong type of NAT is supported or something like that. So, I started looking into a wifi device just for the Portal to use when I am not in wifi range.

Then . . . . . today I stumbled onto a Reddit post that listed the manual wifi settings to connect to an iPhone hotspot. I tested it and I am very happy to announce that it worked, so I am now able to connect and play via my iPhone hotspot. I have decided to write the settings here, mainly as a reminder for me in case the Portal resets itself or something. Also, maybe other people will find these settings if they need them.

SSID – whatever your iPhone is called
Password – WPA2, and the password is whatever your iPhone says in the “allow other devices” section.
IP – 172.20.10.10 [the last number you can change from 02 to 15.
Subnet Mask – 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway – 172.20.10.1
DNS – 8.8.8.8

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Faderhead – Electrowerkz

Last night Smith and I went to the Angel and our favourite little music venue in Torrens Street. I drove into the big smoke and parked in some driveway using the Just Park app. Now, let’s be clear, the app doesn’t park the car but it allows you to find a space that is convenient and, normally, quite local to your destination. It was a much nicer drive than on Wednesday when I met up with the Fulham Five for a leaving party – one of our number is heading to the US to live. There are now three of us in the USA and three and a half in the UK. Back to the gig.

First band on were Machine Vein. I spent most of the gig thinking they were j:dead because I wasn’t aware there were three bands on. While driving in to the gig I thought it would be funny to see Biomechanimal again as they have been support for many bands I have seen. It turns out that Machine Vein have some of the same members of Biomechanical. I quite enjoyed their set. It was heavy bass with tiddly sounds over the top. I had a good time.

Second band were j:dead and I thought I had seen them before somewhere, sometime, but now, having seen them I suspect not. I also thought I had some of their music on my phone but that was also not a correct thought. I think they pop up in a lot of the social media I have because of their close links to the EBM – Aggrotech genres. I didn’t find their set as much fun as Mechanical Vein but they were definitely a more polished live band to see, you could tell there was plenty of experience. I was also surprised they were British. Not sure why that surprised me but it did.

j:dead at Electrowerkz
j:dead at Electrowerkz

Then we were on to Faderhead, a singer I had seen before twice at a music festival and one whose shows were great. I’ve even helped fund their albums at times and there are communications somewhere in this site. I’m quite happy to pay for things that make me happy, hence I even pay for free podcasts, I will recognise that being able to do that is from a position of privilege. So, Faderhead. I really enjoyed the show. It was great to see him in London and the crowd was pretty darn good. He has a load of songs that are really good for singing along with. Some of my favourites are “No gods, no flags, no bullshit”, “Destroy, improve, rebuild”, “Fistful of fuck you”, and “Swedish models and cocaine”.

Faderhead @ Electrowerkz
Faderhead @ Electrowerkz

Earlier in the day Faderhead had said that he wasn’t feeling well and that his voice was struggling. I think this showed in the early songs and he clearly didn’t feel healthy-well. He sounded better about halfway through the gig and then his voice declined more towards then end. They had decided to put some extra ballads into the set to ease his voice and I didn’t mind this. Overall I really enjoyed the show. It was great to see them play a smaller venue and I look forward to seeing them again sometime.

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