Really? Four years in the making, and all they come up with to follow Grammy award-winning, 2009 breakthrough fourth album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, is a Kenwood blender mix of David Bowie, Prince, Sparks and Jam & Lewis producing Janet Jackson?

Bankrupt! (with exclamation mark, like so many West End musicals) is a worrying title. No longer do they stand out from the other ’80s copycats.

The lead single, Entertainment, sounds like a leftover from the WAP sessions, recycling Bowie’s China Girl with chunks of Jean Michel Jarre and Empire of the Sun thrown in. It carries some of their Indie energy, while reminding you that Thomas Mars’s pure, high-register voice can carry much better material than this. Suddenly it’s finished and into The Real Thing, a solid pop-radio play-list filler of very little substance, which also ends suddenly.

S.O.S in Bel Air belts along with a Thomas Dolby / New Order feel; the song is Owl City cranked up to eleven but terrified of it’s own shadow. It’s as if Phoenix are afraid that if they slow down the whole thing will grind to a halt. There are some good hooks, but everything gets lost in the cacophonous racket of synths and drums.

Trying to be Cool tries too hard to be cool. Is that irony or just bad luck? I can never tell. Is it reassuringly familiar or irritatingly non-descript? Electronic wallpaper music or shiny, shopping mall muzak?

The seven-minute Bankrupt tinkles along for two minutes then goes all concept-trance, arpegiating harpsichords, until four minutes twenty when the song proper begins, a Pink Floyd prog-rock album track.

Drakkar Noir and Chloroform are supposedly the one-two combination knock-out punch, but Drakkar moodles about like Mars couldn’t work out how to get from verse to bridge to chorus and rolls into Chloroform with all the subtlety of Georgio Moroder. Lyrically it’s a quirky French beat-poetry lesson with a bit of philosophy, wrapped in a mid tempo ballad and I really don’t know if that’s enough.

Don’t: “just don’t bother.” It’s not a great way to start a fast song. Remember Plastique Bertrand, that cliche of 80′s French synth pop (I know, he’s Belgian)? You will when you listen to Don’t. You might hear more Thomas Dolby too.

Bourgeois. Seriously? A French act and you have to title a track Bourgeois? While they were moodling about sounding like Two Door Cinema Club featuring Owl City (again), I got to thinking about titles they missed: Fillet Mignon, Deja Vu, Petit Filous. “You lost your mind on a cruise ship.” Bowie would be proud.

Finale Oblique City brings us back to where we started, a good bit of rattling pop with nothing memorable until it just fizzles out. I went back to playing ‘spot the synth riffs.’ If only they’d thrown in some Herbie Hancock, we’d have the whole set. RC

Related: Two Door Cinema Club -  Beacon

I know this announcement originally came from a MasterCard press release in November 2012, but given the recent hack of ATM’s in New York and further credit card fraud, perhaps this ‘future of credit cards’ will be brought forward.

The problem with the current generation of credit cards are not well protected. Most of the time, you can get away with just the credit card number, the expiration date and the security code, all of which are shown on the card itself.

MasterCard, is moving on to additional verification to add a two-factor authentication to the card. The slightly clunky Mastercard Securecode demands online purchasers use an extra partial pass phrase on sites that support SecureCode. Verified with Visa works in a similar way, as the merchants have to integrate the feature on their sites.

Now MasterCard Display Card harkens back to an old remote network login authentication that we used to use to access corporate networks in the 80′s and 90′s. Adopting the one-time session authentication token, MasterCard plans to add an LCD display and numeric keypad to their credit card.

This advanced card MasterCard allows holders to generate one-time authentication codes for online banking and purchases. It is planned to add a further option to display the account status or the transaction history.

This is a cunning development for the credit card – the standard credit card functionality remains unchanged, with the additional benefit that the holder does not need an additional device to create secure codes for online banking or transactions – but it does need a version of Mastercard Securecode integrated with the merchants.

Given that not all merchants have implemented Securecode, there remains a big ‘security lag’ to be plugged so that there is still a loophole to make payments without the code.

This won’t eliminate credit card theft entirely, but it may reduce the credit card black market as the physical card itself will be needed to make purchases. AJS

Related: How-to: Avoid Common Security Mistakes On-line Part2

One Billion Dollars!! If, like me, you were surprised to hear that this is not Dr. Evil splashing the cash, but Internet dinosaur Yahoo, your first reaction might have been: wow, Yahoo has still got a billion dollars?

Second surprise; they just spent it on a cash acquisition. Yes, cash. This is not one of those debt-laden stock-for-control deals we got used to in the tech sector.

Third, Yahoo just bought tumblr.

tumblr is the vowel-deficient blogging service that all the cool kids use. I don’t. I am not a cool kid. All the lively Internet memes and viral pictures that tumblr hosts have passed me by.

tumblr users view themselves as cool, a bit edgy, a bit subversive. They are in the 18-25 demographic.

tumblr has made no money to speak of.

Yahoo is a huge corporate entity. It is desperate to make money. In Internet years (like dog years) Yahoo is aged about 108.

Yahoo buying tumblr is a bit like your Dad buying the local youth centre because he wants to hang around the cool kids and sell them some cool stuff. Your Dad’s idea of cool stuff is not theirs. A lot of the cool kids will leave as soon as they hear your Dad just bought their youth centre. Your Dad’s very presence at the youth centre guarantees that most of the youth will stay away. Especially when your Dad’s friends turn up.

Your Dad’s friends will start asking him to take down all the pictures and grafitti that offends them, either because it’s inappropriate, or the cool kids stole it from them and defaced it, turning it into something they don’t approve of.

So more of the cool kids will stay away. In fact, they will go set up shop somewhere else your Dad and his friends never heard of. That’s not up for sale.

At some point your Dad will realise he’s not making any money out of the few cool kids who are left (the apathetic ones who weren’t really in the cool set to begin with) and will transform the youth centre into a latte-drinker’s coffe bar with baby change area and Coldplay on the sound system (the cool kids’ music gives him a headache, anyway).

This is what happens when your Dad’s generation try to buy into ‘cool.’ Especially when they think they can make money out of it. By the time you can bottle it and sell it, it is no longer cool.

This is what will happen after Yahoo completes the acquisition of tumblr.

Don’t believe me? What happened to MySpace?

Exactly. RC

Related: How-to: Widget Visibility and You (Re-post)

Time travel is possible and it’s here as a working scientific phenomenon. That’s the only explanation I can find for Vicious, ITV1′s latest situation comedy, which is barely a ‘sit’ and contains no ‘com.’

Starring Britain’s two foremost theatrical knights, Sirs Ian McKellen (The Hobbit, X-Men) and Derek Jacobi (Henry V, Underworld Evolution) as an elderly gay couple, with guests Frances de la Tour (Hugo) and Marcia Warren, Vicious is based on the idea that two high-camp gay pensioners can be as waspish and bitchy as they like and everyone will scream with laughter.

Sadly the high-camp bitchiness in Vicious is less American sitcom Will & Grace (from which writer Gary Janetti graduated), and more a horrible travesty of limp 1970′s sit-coms such as Are You Being Served. It’s false in every note and gesture, made worse by the inexplicable laughter track, the gales of laughter merely blowing the tumble-weed across the screen at high speed. Unlike the gags.

This is fossilised comedy from a different era; the overt homosexual couple is the only modern thing about it, but completely undercut by gross queeny stereotypes, pensioner jokes and supposed quick-fire lines that fall off the diving board, banging their heads on the way down. What were Ed Bye and Mark Ravenhill thinking when they took on this dinosaur? That it was going to compete with sharp US sit-coms with genuine pace and wit?

This is depressingly like watching a 70′s British end-of-the-pier show (now we know why the pier shows ended) as McKellen and Jacobi telegraph their performances to the empty upper circle at the Barbican. Even de la Tour seems to have forgotten the laser-precision of the intimately squalid farce Rising Damp which made her name as Ms. Jones.

Contrast with the The Office-style comedy The Job Lot scheduled straight after; nothing new, but painfully funny.

Not Vicious. Squandered. SC

Related: Review: The Thick of It – The Inquiry

With Windows XP support coming to an end and many older PC’s, laptops and net-books struggling to cope with newer software, you might want to think about going Open Source and switching to a free upgrade: namely Ubuntu versions supporting older processors.

You may have read that from version 12.x onward, many Ubuntu users thought they had hit the end of the line on their older hardware; the newer versions appeared not to support older processors, which put new versions beyond the Celeron and Pentium chips.

But you can install a version of 12.04 -namely Ubuntu on non-PAE capable hardware – remembering that’s an LTS or Long Term Support release that has another two years life in it for software patches and updates.

Let’s unwind that: Physical Address Extension (PAE) is a feature to allow (32-bit) x86 processors to access a physical address space (including random access memory and memory mapped devices) larger than 4 gigabytes. For that you need a PAE-supporting processor.

Ubuntu 12.04 and up uses the PAE Linux kernel by default on 32bit images, so old computers that don’t support PAE can’t boot this latest Ubuntu version. But there is a way to install Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) on computers without PAE support. One boot image, the non-PAE ‘netboot’ Minimal ISO uses the old kernel.

The non-PAE netboot mini ISO is a small 25Mb image that boots a non-PAE kernel, allowing you to install that and any officially supported desktop – or server – environment you want.

Since it is a minimal boot image, the text-based installer takes you very quickly into a boot menu with install options for server and desktop packages. You can choose to install the LAMP stack, DNS stack and other options: select to install the Ubuntu Unity Desktop Kubuntu KDE, LXDE and so on.

Be mindful that the minimal netboot CD contains next to nothing on the install CD itself; it downloads packages from online archives at install-time, so you need a working Internet connection during the installation.

You can download mini.iso, write it on a CD or USB stick and boot from it like with regular Ubuntu ISO and select “Install.”

The text-based installer goes through the usual questions regarding the locale and time-zone, keyboard, and so on – the TAB key moves through fields on screen, SPACE bar selects the options and the ENTER key confirms each screen.

Like the regular Ubiquity installer, the mini ISO runs through country selection, encrypting your home directory, and partitioning the hard disk.

After partitioning the hard disk, the installer starts downloading the core packages. It will also ask you to select the Linux kernel you want to use – select “linux-generic.”

For a desktop installation, make sure to select a desktop environment; skipping this will give you a core system without a graphical desktop environment, just a command line.

Finally, make sure you install the GRUB bootloader (selecting “Yes” when asked), otherwise it won’t boot into Linux when you restart the machine.

I’ve used this method to update my ancient JVC-mini pre-netbook netbook with its’ Celeron-M processor to non-PAE Ubuntu 12.04. With the LXDE desktop, effectively turning it into a Lubuntu machine.

I’m also using this method to perform my virtual server installs in virtualbox. It’s so much easier than downloading the full 750Mb+ of standard disk images.

You can get the 12.04 Precise net-boot mini-ISO on this link and the 12.10 Quantal net-boot mini-ISO on this link. RC

Catapulted into a near-disastrous adventure at the beginning, the zippy pace is set, although I found the level of violence coupled with the extraordinary amount of crying a rather uneasy blend.

Chris Pine (Unstoppable, People Like Us) is the young action hero personified, and in certain camera angles he is Kirk – maybe it’s the nose – and his performance is heartfelt, energetic and entirely true to the character.

Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) is all splendid villainy and pathos, bringing an unfamiliarly pumped-up physicality to the role and dealing with finesse with a script that all too often resorts to the monologue.

Karl Urban (Bourne Supremacy, Lord of the Rings) is pitch perfect and seriously underused as Doctor McCoy – it’s not about impressions, but he’s nailed it. A shame then that the script mostly left him trotting out well known McCoy-style sayings. Here’s hoping that a third instalment allows him more to do.

Along with some background artists there are only two main female characters, and in true Trek tradition we get one in her underwear, plus two in bed with Kirk and a rather creepy camera up-an-actress’-skirt shot during an action sequence. Yes, it’s true to the original series’ approach but I was disappointed that with so much else re-imagined here they couldn’t have moved on a bit from sixties thinking.

Costumes are a mixed bag – Harrison’s almost Regency elegance contrasted with the remarkably Nazi-looking Starfleet dress uniforms, complete with big grey peaked caps. Great make-up, including a remarkably sleek Klingon and a diverting blue-eyed android I’d have liked more from.

It all looks superb (even allowing for that bloody lens flare effect again); future London and San Francisco are hyper-realistically evoked and the alien planets, space scenes and post-911 imagery are visually fabulous.

Yes, it’s a bit of a re-run of a previous film. I’d avoided spoilers and didn’t see it coming so was genuinely surprised (although how one man could manage to get seventy or so pods into a high security weapons array without help or being spotted – never mind: spoilers), and with a cameo by Leonard Nimoy and the filling in of another little bit of Trek history with the arrival of Dr Marcus, it’s a satisfying, funny and exciting addition to the canon. PH

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
Director: JJ Abrams
Writers: Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci
Certification: PG-13
Running time:  2 hr. 3 min.
Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-fi
Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Pavel Checkov, Peter Weller, Alice Eve, Bruce Greenwood

Related: Review – Source Code

• Gmail integrated Google Wallet lets you send money right away to scammers (Ghacks)

• When Will Humans Upload Their Brains to Computers? (Mashable)

• BlackBerry Porting Popular Messaging App to Android, iOS Platforms (TheVarGuy)

• Congress Asks if Google Glass Will Be a Privacy Nightmare (Mashable)

• Microsoft to Offer Free Windows 8.1 Update, Preview June 26 (TheVarGuy)

• Nintendo Will Get Revenue From All YouTube Videos Featuring its IP (Mashable)

• Is Ubuntu really the promised land for Windows 8 refugees? (Digitial Trends)

Click on the icon and you get a Show all downloads button. Hit that and the Library window opens onto your download queue and history.

I hardly see how Mozilla believes “you can monitor, view and locate downloaded files without having to switch to another window…” since that’s exactly what you need to do!

While this is an improvement over the previous version – the embedded indicator and time estimate being useful features – as you can see it is still rather clunky in use.

The Firefox Download Manager as it comes out-of-the-box remains a very basic utility; don’t compare it to fully featured download managers. Pause and resume don’t work as well as third-party tools and other options are limited.

The new Download Manager does make downloading files with Firefox easier, but it’s an incremental improvement. RC

Related: How-to: Use Firefox Password Manager

Originally posted by Christopher Finke, on the official WordPress.com blog Wednesday, May 15th, 2013

Since the dawn of time, humankind has yearned for control. While we can’t give you more control over most of your life, we can give you more control over your widgets. And today, with the new widget visibility tool, you can configure your widgets to be shown or hidden only on certain pages.

Widgets are a way to add new content (like your Twitter stream, a tag cloud, or a link to your blog archives) in the sidebar, header, or footer of your site. To see the widgets you have available to you, log in to your WordPress.com dashboard and click on Appearance » Widgets. To add a widget, simply click on it and drag it up and over to the right of the widget screen, into the Default Sidebar, Header Area, or Footer Area section of your site. Then, to control visibility, expand the widget and click the Visibility button next to the Save button.

For example, if you wanted the Archives widget to only appear on category archives and error pages, choose “Show” from the first dropdown and then add two rules: “Page is 404 Error Page” and “Category is All Category Pages.”

You can also hide widgets based on the current page. For example, if you don’t want the Archives widget to appear on search results pages, choose “Hide” and “Page is Search results.”

Visibility is controlled by five aspects: page type, category, tag, date, and author, but each visibility rule is handled separately, so there isn’t a way, for example, to only display a widget on posts that are categorized as “Summer” and also tagged with “Picnic.”

The visibility panel is available today in every widget for every user on WordPress.com; visit Appearance » Widgets in your blog’s dashboard to take control. Or, to learn more about using widgets on your blog, check out our recent Introduction to Widgets series: Widgets 101, Widgets 201, and Widgets 301.

Originally posted at Catling on Film

I’ve been watching movies as long as I can remember.

Silent clowns Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton; classic Westerns (all of them!), visionary science fiction from Forbidden Planet to The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I thrilled at Errol Flyn as Robin Hood and the Sea Hawk; Jimmy Stewart maturing from honest everyman to gritty cowboy. I was captivated by Connery as Bond, touched by John Mills in Great Expectations.

I laughed at the sublime Gregory’s Girl and Ealing-comedy inheritor The Tall Guy.

I remember becoming aware of great directors; Kubrick, Coppola and onto International films with Kurasawa. I am not Spartacus and the thought of a Space Odyssey gives me travel sickness, but I will watch them over and over.

Working on the fringes of the film and TV industry, I sometimes get to be on set with some of the most Internationally renowned film-makers; Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Martin Scorcese. My list goes on; Mike Nichols, Ralph Fiennes, David Yates, Stephen Hopkins, and some of the rising stars like Regan Hall and Noel Clarke. Seldom, barring one director I won’t name, a disappointment.

I still get through a lot of movies, both on the big screen and on those shiny silver discs, now spurred on in my addiction by Victoria.

I still get excited at the prospect of a new high-concept, big idea movie, a thought-provoking bit of sci-fi, the latest literary adaptation, or anything with a Western show-down in the finale.

Too many movies, not enough time. RC

Related: Review: Great Expectations (2012)

Image: Ramon Novarro, Francis X. Bushman, Ben Hur, 1925

Originally posted at: Random Subjects Made Simple No. 57 – Hay fever – Not something to sniff at, by Educare, Tuesday, May 14th, 2013

As many of us know, hay fever is more than just an excuse not to mow the lawn, in fact, with 20 per cent of people in the UK suffering, it’s the country’s most common allergy. So who or what is responsible?

Allergic rhinitis is an allergic inflammation of the nasal passageways. When caused by any plant pollen the condition is called pollinosis, but if caused specifically by grass pollens, it is known as hay fever. It occurs when an individual with a sensitised immune system inhales an allergen – such as pollen. The allergen starts a bit of a chain reaction: the body reacts to the allergen by producing antibodies, which binds to mast cells. This kicks off a release of histamine, which is what causes the sneezing, the itchy and watery eyes, and all that mucus.

The pollen responsible for hay fever varies from individual to individual and from region to region, however, it is generally the small pollens of wind-pollinated plants such as junipers, birches, willows and beeches. And although hay fever is commonly a spring and summer issue, it can be suffered throughout the year.

If you’re a sufferer then, statistically, you developed it during adolescence (although it can crop up at a later age). It will get better over time (not a promise), although no doubt you’re probably sick of squirting intranasal corticosteroids up your nose every summer. A recent study has suggested regular acupuncture may offer some relief, and other sources suggest that eating local honey and even stinging-nettle tea could help out, but the general opinion is that you’re stuck with the Beconase and Piriton.

If it’s any help, the BBC website offers a daily ‘pollen risk’ to keep you clued-up, and to tell you when to stay indoors.

Related: How-to: Be ‘Twitterate’ [Re-post]

Image credit: View through rape field towards Westbury cement works – geograph.org.uk – 424300