Maybe it is because I came late to the Georgie Pie phenomenon, experiencing it only when they opened a branch in Dunedin while I was at University, but I never developed a taste for Georgie Pie. To my mind they really only had 3 things going for them:

• Relative cheapness, even compared to service station pies.
• A location in Dunedin that was halfway between University and my flat in North East Valley.
• The temperature at which they served their pies, which seemed to be about 750°C. This was very welcome after 20 minutes trudging through icy streets on a dark Otago evening.

Of these points, the first is no longer true, the second doesn’t really apply, and the third probably contravenes modern health and safety practices.

The other side of the ledger only has one point:

• You paid good money for what tasted like a cardboard envelope filled with beef flavoured mucus.

Apparently MacDonald’s is not changing the recipe (except for not adding MSG – that was the best part!), so this will still be true. I will not be rushing along to MacDonald’s to try the new pie anytime soon.

I really enjoyed the first Iron Man film, it managed to be a witty counter-point to the dour hero cliché. Iron Man 2 was weakly plotted rubbish, but Tony Stark was the best part of The Avengers. So it is at least theoretically possible that Iron Man 3 could have been a fine film. Sadly, the film makers seem to have forgotten what made Iron Man so much fun.

First the good parts. Iron Man 3 is well put together and contains lots of fairly well directed action. Fans of things zipping around and exploding will not be disappointed. The acting is appropriate with Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin being a particularly entertaining standout.

The main problem with Iron Man 3 is the plot. The villain is suitably comic-booky, but his plan doesn’t really make a lot of sense and Tony Stark only gets involved for the most tenuous of reasons. This leads to a long sequence where Stark bonds with a kid who teaches him the real meaning of Christmas. Or something. I don’t know, it was pretty lame and saved only the kid actually being a pretty good actor. There are a few laugh-out-loud moments but the film jumps tone so often that it is had to make out what the producers were going for, action comedy or just gritty action. It is a little jarring.

Of course, it all comes to a suitably grand finale which might have been a neat surprise if it wasn’t spoiled in the trailer. At least Pepper Potts gets her own subplot, even if it goes nowhere. Also, Iron Man 3 contains the single most blatantly silly product placement I have ever seen, I hope Oracle paid well because they certainly got some screen time.

Iron Man 3 is not a terrible film, just a very forgettable experience. Recommended only if you like this sort of thing.

Oblivion is a decent attempt at an action sci-fi blockbuster. It is entertaining in all the right ways and gorgeous to look at. The design work is fantastic from the cool house in the clouds that the couple live in to the blasted landscape of the ruined Earth, to whatever process they used on Tom Cruise to make him look 20 years younger. It all looks impeccable.

You may not want to read the rest of the review, so I will just up front say that Oblivion is a decent film if you like this sort of thing, with a few lapses that prevent it from becoming really great. Oblivion really isn’t clever enough to avoid spoiling but if you really don’t want to know anything stop reading now…

There were some things I really liked about Oblivion. The script has a some cunning little nods that hint that all is not what it seems right from the start. Starting a film with a lengthy voiceover describing the premise is trite but I liked the way the characters recite certain mantras later one including the voiceover word-for-word.

The general idea is not original, Oblivion is very similar to the earlier film Moon (which I liked) in a lot of ways (I wonder if Oblivion’s shattered moon is a nod to the influence). But while Moon was a low key character study that gently let the audience discover the premise along with the characters, Oblivion is much more in-your-face, with lengthy action scenes inserted to liven up it. These look OK, but seem to have come from another film entirely or perhaps a video-game.

The acting is fine. Tom Cruise has dialed down his squintacting style. Morgan Freeman shows up as the world’s last surviving black man. Nobody really stands out, but nobody really needs to.

As I said before, the script has some nice touches but there is some terrible dialog at the beginning of the film, and a silly speech at the climax that ruins some of the tone. There are also some pretty big plot holes (how did he build that house without either Vica or Sally knowing? What happened to the other clones presumably monitoring other parts of the Earth? Where did they get the other life pod?).

Oblivion falls into the gulf between a turn-off-your-brain action film and a thinking-persons sci-fi mind-bender, becoming a thinking-persons-turn-off-your-brain-action-bender, which doesn’t quite work. Having said all that, Oblivion manages to be entertaining enough. Recommended if you like this sort of thing.

Today we visited a modest little Chinese place with a modest little name – Xi’an Food Bar on the corner of Anzac Ave and Customs St East. It doesn’t look like much but Xi’an Food Bar has two standout features.

The first is that you sit at your table and order via a strange retro-futuristic device that looks a bit like a calculator. The waiter gives you a menu but rather than place your order with the waiter when he returns, you type in the number that corresponds to your chosen meal into the device. Once everyone has chosen their meals the device transmits your table’s orders to the kitchen. A kitchen which is all of 3 metres away and clearly within sight.

This manner of ordering is completely silly and quite wonderful. It feels like you have walked into a cheap 80s scifi movie. I plan to go back on a rainy evening and pretend I am hunting replicants.

The other great thing about Xi’an Food Bar is that they make their own fresh noodles. The service is very quick, and in a couple of minutes you will have a fresh bowl of lumpy noodles covered in tasty sauce. The flavours are strong but well balanced, and the texture of the noodles is very appealing.

The first time I went I made the adventurous mistake of ordering the sliced pigs ears. It wasn’t the worse thing I have eaten, but even the best sauce in the world couldn’t make a silk purse out of that. I think it is probably meant to be a side dish.

So long as you keep the pigs ears to a minimum, Xi’an Food Bar is worth the walk. Get there early though, it gets busy.

It turns out that this is a common problem with the Arduino Ethernet hardware. The fancy pants W5100 TCP/IP chip just goes on strike and needs to be reset. Using the Arduino’s watchdog interrupt to software reset the CPU isn’t enough, the W5100 needs to reset as well.

Reading the schematic provided a clue. The W5100′s reset line is connected to the normal Arduino reset line (via a small reset controller IC), so resetting the Arduino by pulling the RESET line low resets the network chip as well.

There is a right way to do this that involves a bunch of extra circuitry, and a wrong way that involves a piece of wire.

Connecting the reset pin to one of the Arduino’s digital IO pins is not recommended. The CPU requires that the reset line is help low for a certain amount of time to reset correctly and it can’t hold the line low and reset simultaneously. That wouldn’t make sense. Except that when I tried it the CPU reset every time and took the network chip with it. There is a capacitor between the RESET pin and GRD that I think helps out here, but my electronics is very weak.

I am still making use of the watchdog interrupt but instead of letting it reset the CPU, I handle the interrupt and bring the RESET line low using the digital IO pin.

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#include <avr/wdt.h>
 
#define RESET_IO_PIN 3
 
void setup()
{
	//  Some people recommend setting the IO pin to HIGH on start up
	//  but it is better to leave it floating as INPUT. Pulling it HIGH interferes 
	//  with the normal reset mechanism, and the pin is held HIGH by a pull-up   						  
	//  resister anyway
	//  digitalWrite( RESET_IO_PIN, HIGH );
	//  pinMode( RESET_IO_PIN, OUTPUT );
 
	noInterrupts();
	wdt_reset();
	// these cryptic lines set the watchdog timer control register
	// to trigger an interrupt (not reset) after 8 seconds. The normal
	// Arduino function assumes you want to reset, so we can't use it here.
	// See the ATmega328P Datasheet section 10.9.2 for the gory details
	MCUSR &= ~(1<<WDRF);
	WDTCSR |= (1<<WDCE) | (1<<WDE);
	WDTCSR = (1<<WDP0) | (1<<WDP3) | (1<<WDIE); /* 8.0 seconds */
	interrupts();
}
 
ISR(WDT_vect)
{
	// The watchdog timer has fired, pull the pin low
	digitalWrite( RESET_IO_PIN, LOW );
	pinMode( RESET_IO_PIN, OUTPUT );
}
 
 
void loop()
{
	wdt_reset();
	// do some stuff here, if you don't call wdt_reset() more frequently
	// than 8 seconds the Arduino will reset
}

I spent weeks trying to figure out what was going on, hopefully this post will help somebody in the same situation.

Let me know if you see anything that looks (unintentionally) weird.

I decided it wasn’t visual enough:

(click to view montage)

This little project used Paparazzi! to grab the websites, ImageMagick to wrangle the images, a few lines of Python, and an evening’s work.

The books are crazily ambitious but the pace has been slowing with each successive novel. I suspect that the next book will cover in detail what each of the 85 characters did between the hours of 8:30am and 11:30am on a particular Tuesday morning, including what they had for breakfast, if anything scary made their bowels turn to water, and if they saw any nice breasts. It is these colourful threads that the novels’ rich tapestry is woven from.

(Axis of Awesome also have this unrelated but amusing song which is worth a look.)

My ingredient list was slightly adapted for metric measurements and local supplies:

½ cup of golden syrup
85g of softened butter
Tiny pinch of salt
1tsp Vanilla essence
2⅔ cups of icing sugar
Bag of dark chocolate bits
Yellow Food Colouring
Coconut Flavouring
Toothpicks and Potatoes

It took about 3 hours from start to finish but a lot of that time was waiting for the mixture to cool down in the freezer to a workable consistency. I completely messed up tempering the chocolate, but that just makes them slightly harder to eat.