I consider myself to have an interest in films (or is that ‘movies’?). Not so much mainstream cinema fare, but more often than not cult movies, horror, world cinema, older stuff from the 70s and 80s and so on.
Over the years I’ve found some fantastic podcasts that help me feed my obsession, so I thought I’d share them with you.
So, without further ado and in no particular order…
Chris and Phil Present
“A lighthearted look at the world of movies. Insightful, intelligent film reviews and nonsensical chatter from Brighton‘s finest.”
To be honest I listen to Chris and Phil more for the humorous banter than the actual film reviews. They have a great rapport together, with Phil brilliantly coming across as a put-upon, long suffering reviewer, subject to the tyranny and dry wit of Chris. However, far too much cake eating goes on!
Chris and Phil Present
The Empire Podcast
Yes this is a bit mainstream, but as a long-time subscriber to the mag it’s been enjoyable getting to know some of the team through the magical medium of audio. I enjoy the format, comprising of listeners questions, news and interviews. I also like the fact that the team rotate, so there are different folks to listen to each week.
The Empire Podcast
Horroretc Podcast
Ok, don’t be put off by the name. These guys aren’t just about horror and when they do talk about it, it’s always intelligent and interesting. The subject matter they cover really is broad, from Giallo, to Lovecraft, to Hitchcock and even TV shows, such as Dexter and The Walking Dead. Occasionally they even do a book show, which they should do more often in my humble opinion.
Tony and Ted (and sometimes Dug) really are some of the nicest guys you will probably never meet (they’re all the way over the atlantic in Canada - somewhere I would really like to visit one day).
Horroretc Podcast
Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Film Reviews
Another mainstream one, but you can’t really call yourself a film fan and ignore it. Mark and Simon are the Dons of the film review world as far as I’m concerned. They’re like the Homer and Marge Simpson, the Ross and Rachel, the Clark Kent and Lois Lane (you get the idea) of the podcast world.
If you’ve never heard Mark’s infamous Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 rant (it goes on for 10 minutes and I don’t think he actually takes a breath!), track it down now!… Actually I’ll give you a hand - here it is on YouTube.
Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Film Reviews
Mondo Movie
Mondo - Extreme in degree or nature
That definition says it all really. Sadly Ben and Dan are no longer doing the podcast (although apparently it may return), but the back catalogue is still available on iTunes, all 117 episodes! If you have any interest in cult movies, world cinema, horror, exploitation or genre you need to check this out.
Mondo Movie
Yeah It’s That Bad
These guys arrived on the scene a couple of years ago with a fantastic concept - to re-evaluate movies on Rotten Tomatoes and ask “is it really that bad?”. Most of the movies really are a pile of c**p, but occasionally a gem turns up (Constantine anyone?).
However, it’s the brilliant rapport between the hosts, Joel, Kevin, and Martin (other than that their identities remain a mystery…), that makes this worth listening to. Some people (i.e. non-Americans winky face) may find their constant guffawing a bit grating, but I find it somewhat endearing.
Yeah It’s That Bad
And there you have it, my current, favourite film podcasts.
If you want to recommend any that I’m missing out on please let me know. Probably the best place to get my attention is on Twitter, but you can also leave a comment below.
Happy listening!
*Update - You Total Cult
Deserving of an honourable mention is You Total Cult, the ‘bastard love child’ of Chris and Phil Present.
“From a dank dark Brighton basement two groan men chat and argue about classic cult favourites, unmade masterpieces and obscure films that they probably had no business watching in the first place.”
I‘ve only listened to the first few episodes and haven’t been able to form a proper opinion yet, but so far I like what I’m hearing.
I recently created a simple css speed test page to see what the difference is between using a flat background colour, a css gradient, or a sprite gradient: http://playground.mattbailey.co/css-speed-test/
It's not a particularly scientific test as there are many factors involved in perceived page load times, but it seems to give a useful indication.
It works by using javascript to compare the difference between the download complete time and the render complete time, the result being the window paint time. It then records these results using localStorage and generates an average window paint time. Obviously the more times you click a test the more accurate the average.
When I run the tests myself in Chrome the flat background colour has consistently the fastest window paint time, followed closely by sprite gradients, then css gradients, but there's really not much in it - less than 10ms between the fastest and slowest. I suppose this isn't very surprising, but I'd be interested to know whether others get similar results.
Dropbox: re-sync symlinks that fail to sync a 'deep' folder structure
I use dropbox for many things, including keeping sites I'm working on synced across various machines.
If the root folder of the site actually resides in your Dropbox folder and you symlink out of it you generally won't have any problems. But if the root folder of the site is outside of your Dropbox folder and you symlink in to it, you may notice that the contents of some of the 'deeper' folders don't get synced.
I'm not sure why this is, but there is a manual workaround - you can change the modification date of the symlink, thereby causing a re-sync.
Simply open your terminal, navigate to the location of you symlink(s) and run the following command (replacing symlink-name with the actual name of your symlink):
touch -h [symlink-name]
It's not a perfect solution, but it goes some way to helping.
Having just read David Bushell's article on [frontend] automation I thought I'd have a go at installing Grunt myself and setting up a project. However, I found the process and documentation on the Grunt website a bit 'meandering'. In an effort to keep a record for myself, and to help others, I thought I'd write a simple step by step guide.
All the Grunt documentation can be found here: http://gruntjs.com/getting-started
At the time of writing the node.js and Grunt versions are as follows:
You can use grunt-init to scaffold a project from one of the templates you just installed, or create your own project from scratch. Full templating instructions can be found here: http://gruntjs.com/project-scaffolding
5a. Using grunt-init to scaffold a project
Create a project based on one of the templates you just installed.
Example - Run the following command in the root directory of your project:
grunt-init jquery
This will scaffold a jQuery plugin project, including QUnit unit tests (at the time of writing trying to install the QUnit Grunt plugin as outlined in section 5b1. below will throw up an error - this is a known issue).
In your project directory you should now see a number of folders, including node_modules, plus package.json and Gruntfile.js files.
5b. Or create your own project template
Create a folder for a project. For the purposes of this tutorial let's call it myproject.
Inside myproject create a folder called src, a folder called build, and a README.md file (or you will get warning messages when you install some of the grunt plugins).
Inside the src folder create a file called myproject.js.
Below are basic examples of package.json and Grunfile.js files.
5b1. package.json
Create a package.json file in the root of your project:
{ "name": "myproject", "version": "0.0.1" }
Grunt and any grunt plugins you want to use will need to be installed.
You can either install each plugin individually from the command line... For example:
npm install grunt --save-dev
npm install grunt-contrib-nodeunit --save-dev
npm install grunt-contrib-uglify --save-dev
The modules will automatically be added to the package.json file, which should now look something like this:
Or, if you already know the versions of the plugins you want (you can find this out on the github repo of each plugin) you can create the package.json file with the devDependencies pre-filled, and then from the command line simply run:
npm install
5b2. Gruntfile.js
Create a Gruntfile.js file in the root of your project:
If you now look in the build folder you should find a minified version of your myproject.js file, called myproject.min.js.
Congratulations, you've set up and run Grunt successfully for the first time!
Taking things further
Naturally this introduction only covers the very basics of a Grunt install and project set-up.
Using the methods above and, by following some of the other examples on the Grunt website, you should be able to introduce new automation features, such as 'linting' your javascript code, or compiling your .less into minified .css, or setting up a 'watch' script to automatically run a new build when changes are detected, and so on.
To learn more I would highly recommend reading through the Grunt documentation. Hopefully if you've followed the steps above things should make a bit more sense: http://gruntjs.com/getting-started
If you have any questions or comments about this article, or if you found it useful, please let me know :)
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