It has bugged me (no pun intended) for quite sometime that a company such as Pixar whose complete existance is testiment to John Lassiter’s creative vision and hardwork would team up with Disney in the first place for its distribution and the greater risk of brand and commercialisation stealing Disney would be capable of. But this is now luckly consigned to history.

Pixar have made the great (IMHO) decision to drop Disney and stand on their own in the market place, and I am sure that with great films such as Finding Nemo, Toy Story 1 &2 they won’t have any problem.

I am not sure when my dislike of Disney first started but I really don’t favour what the once great animation house has become namely a bottom line watching monster with none of the vision held by its great founder Walt and the amazing hardwork that was done in the early days of Disney and indeed the early days of feature animation. They pioneered many techniques, ways of story telling and creative realisation of ideas that are still used today – but perhaps they shouldn’t have plagiarized fairy tales of old and passed them of as there own. I don’t believe it is all Eisners and modern Disney Execs faults but a generally slide over the years. Anyhow, don’t forget to check out all of Pixar’s films

In competition with the bigger labels and general bandwagon hangers on (thats you coke-cola) Warp Records have released their own Bleep service. Included are many excellent tracks from forth coming single’s and albums plus classic Warp releases, hard to get releases and more such as AFX – Hangable Auto Bulb, NoW – Smokers Delight, LFO – Frequencies and the great Sabres of Paradise – Sabresonic album.

Cool products from atypyk Have to get me some of those from http://www.magmabooks.com or the other stockists mentioned. Link blatently stolen from the wonderful Carole Guevin curator of the excellent http://www.netdiver.net site.

Microsoft are working hard on a potential iPod killer, the Portable Media Center which can basically be thought of as the Media Center on the move without the recording capabilities. Creative Labs, iRiver, Samsung, Viewsonic are some of the hardware partners working to bring about a good platform for the software aswell as integrating with a Windows Home network with XP Media Center to transfer your PVR recordings so that you can watch them on the move.

Having moved house I now can hear Big Ben but have temporarily lost my internet connection (aswell as a bag of bolts for the cupboards, if you find them please mail them to me!) for the next few days hence posts will be sparse. In the meantime I would checkout the following:

• http://www.dform1.com/ showreel
• http://www.sundance.org/ film festival and Primer
• http://www.res.com magazine
• Plus all the usual places

Also if anyone has a decent clue as to why if I want a BT phone line, which in the UK is what we need for decent ADSL-Broadband services and a basic television service in this new flat I have such a hassle. I can get the phone line no problem, in fact 3 hours after I asked for the activation from BT I had an SMS with notification of it being installed, though I have yet to test it. But television, well this is the problem. The flat doesn’t have a standard TV socket but an old cable and wireless cable socket. C&W don’t do Cable for the UK anymore – NTL have taken over, but I have to have a NTL phoneline aswell to get the television packages, a phone line I can’t use for broadband unless I want NTL broadband which I don’t. I also have to have a TV License on top of this. Why? So I have to have:

• BT phone line
• BroadBand Subscription
• NTL phoneline
• NTL TV package
• TV License

Which is madness…..

Just a short update for now, this is what I have been seeing today:

• Pixel reviews Valentin
• MyDoom Virus targeting SCO

Lego winner

This week Nintendo have been putting the hype about for their latest games machine – a dual screen handheld. Mmmm where have we seen those before? Sarcasm aside, this is a surprise move for Nintendo whom many see as falling behind in the console race behind Sony and Microsoft aswell as the huge online gaming scene that is particularly prevalent in Asia.

The Handheld is said to hold two 3″ TFT backlit screens and two processors, and their main selling point seems to be not what I expected – the design, but you use the second screen for a second perspective of a game which is quite unique at the moment for any gaming machine – but is it enough to compete against the much rumoured Sony PSP? Sony has alot of clout in the gaming world since bring the playstation on board and I would love to be able to predict fully what could happen but the brilliance of Nintendo has always been in the gaming and this isn’t something mere technical specs can foretell. Lets hope there is life in the old plumber and friends yet..

There is more to read over at Cube Europe and at Eurogamer – I will spare you the email blast I got from Nintendo..

Also made by Nintendo is some news Lik-Sa new handheld plug into the TV games where you can download the games at “download stations” throughout China. Not one for the rest of the world market then. If you still fancy getting your hands on one read more from lik-sang.

Like a lot of ‘web people’ as my girlfriend and friends sometimes like referring me as, I have recently become, in the last 12 months a Mozilla Firebird convert. I have been using it as a main browser at home and at work, on PC and Mac and it is almost a complete IE replacement – and it easily betters Safari in many ways.

It of course gets alot of praise for its tabbed browsing, and although it doesn’t seem that useful at the moment to anyone that hasn’t used it, its something of a god-send to those that have. No longer do we have to have windows for each site, but it is neatly organised within the application itself. The only downsize of this is if you have a lot of windows open it can use a large amount of RAM but then again so can IE and anyother Browser.

Its rendering of pages is very impressive and I only ever need to resort to using IE when a site hasn’t been coded correctly ( http://www.dabs.com comes to mind!). In most circumstances it is quicker than most other browsers and handles CSS &XHTML well.

But whats got me writing this isn’t just the core functionality of Firebird but also the extensions that you can put in if you so desire and at the moment these are my favourites

• EditCSS – for realtime messing with CSS
• Dictionary Search – Highlight and then open in Dictionary.com
• ImgTag – put a XHTML img tag onto the clipboad
• IE View – Open link in IE
• Live Headers – see the http headers
• MyCroft – add search engines to the search bar

All these add together to really help what I am doing when I am browsing and there are alot more extensions that could help others to make their browsing experience just alittle better. Edit:And I have found something more that is really useful for developers and is quite hidden: View Page info. Right click on the page and select it, you will get instant information about the page including the page weight, forums and the forum values, links, headers and more. Very Recommended!

Finally, after much sweat and tears our web team has launched the latest and best yet www.digitalvision.com and a mighty fine site it is. The old site was well received but past its sell by date, and this really brings us up to a more useable level as much thought had gone into how to create the easiest experience whilst still maintaining the Digital Vision look and feel and I think that it has succedded on almost all accounts. Well done to our Internal Web Team I think.

me olde mucka Joost is serving up a storm on his site with his new piece attic. I love the direction and the sketched look of the rendering, and unlike other reviewers I think that the audio is quite suited to the reel.

Such a Nice bloke too!! ;-)