Over the weekend I went to see Toy Story 4 at the Star Cinema Grill in Richmond, TX. The main driver to see it here was that this is the only theater in the Western Hemisphere and the second one in the word to have the new Samsung Onyx Cinematic Screen
This screen and experience boasts of the following
46 ft. (14m) wide Samsung Onyx p3.3 Cinema LED
Enhanced HDR Colors and true blacks
Expanded sweet spot for audio
Experience
What Worked
As you walk in you notice the sheer size of the screen, the modern look and feel of the theater and the openness of the theater - so much space. The scale of the room and the screen is almost like IMAX, though IMAX is a larger screen but Star Cinema has the larger space.
When seated it feels like you are about to take off in a space pod via tunnel due to the way the walls are angled with the vertical purple lights running down the walls, there is a even a hum that makes it feel you are in spaceship. The seats are comfortable and there is so much leg space that you don’t have to worry about hitting the seat ( or person ) in front of you when the seats are reclined.
Once the movie starts, you instantly notice the screen. Everything is different about it and in a good way. The colors are vibrant and popping, the crispness of the image is unlike Ive ever seen on the projection based screens. The Toy Story red and yellow truly stand out and I’ve never seen such a shade on screen. There is a scene in the beginning involving rain which is just stunningly real looking and this screen renders it perfectly, its truly one the stand out moments tech wise in terms of animation work and screen quality. There is also a black out scene and the regular darkish grey, semi lit black look is not present at all. Its black and the screen looks off.
The sound is nice and there were moments where the surround set up really take you by surprise. There is clock chime during the movie and I thought it came from outside. Overall I felt the Dolby atmos set up was better sounding than this.
The Dolby Atmos experience at AMC 24 Sugar Land has been the gold standard for me in terms of screen quality and sound. The Samsung Onyx definitely puts that screen in second place.
What Didnt Work
When you have a screen and set up like this that enhances the movie watching experience, you want to be engulfed by that experience with few distractions, that take you out of the movie.
First , from the image, those cool looking purple lights on the walls are on throughout the whole movie. I’ve been to other theaters where food is served and don’t remember that much light during the movie playback. I wonder since this was a children’s movie, the lights were on so that small children wouldn’t be afraid, but it was quite distracting. Maybe another movie viewing can help confirm. Since the screen isnt projection based there is no beam of light running down the middle, so it has the potential to be very very dark.
The screen is huge but it feels far away from the audience, so you feel disconnected again. When seated in an IMAX or Dolby the screen curves around you a bit, drawing you in to the experience. This screen is bit flatter and at a distance so it takes you out.
Overall
You have to see this screen in action and Toy Story is the perfect movie to showcase it. The colors, crispness of the image is unlike any other I have seen and makes it a true joy to watch. I only wish I could have seen a movie such as Avengers Endgame on it or Spider-Man in to the Spiderverse ( which had some crazy visuals ). It feels like the future of screens in the theater and it will be interesting to see how I feel about the Dolby Atmos screen when I go to see Spiderman in a few weeks. Whether AMC remains my default option when picking a theater remains to be seen after I view some more movies (especially to see if the lights issue is still a problem).
I had installed Flatpak on Ubuntu 19.04 some time to run some photo processing software. Once I was done with I removed the app and removed Flatpak using
apt remove flatpak
When i booted up the machine the next time, I was presented with this error. The machine was stuck, it wouldn’t load the GUI and I couldn’t even escape the modal window with the keyboard or mouse.
Error found when loading /etc/profile:
/etc/profile.d/flatpak.sh: line25: flatpak: command not found
As a result the session will not be configured correctly.
You should fix the problem as soon as feasibile.
The Fix
From the Grub menu I selected to run Ubuntu in recovery mode and opted to drop in to the root shell, which loaded everything without the GUI and the following took care of removing Flatpak properly and then was able to get back into GNOME on subsequent reboot.
After a long time it was finally time to move off Blogger (my first post was in 2002!!) and move it to a platform that I fully controlled.
The incident that lead to this was a few weeks ago I was wanting to see if I had written a post about the earlier Marvel movies when I saw the first Iron Man. I went to my blog and noticed that any time I tried to access a post that was written before 2006 I was presented with this bizarre error
Figuring it was some site issue, I logged on to Blogger and tried access older archives and was presented with an weirder, obscure error
Fearing I had lost access I tried a back up and even that failed !!! Quick google searches of the errors yielded nothing on Reddit, StackOverflow and even Googles own forums. This was catastrophe because it meant I lost years worth of writing some all the way to high school.
I then remembered that Google has their Takeout service which lets you download all your data that is housed on their platform. Luckily, that export worked and I was able to download everything, along with the comments. The only problem was this was an atom file and none of the importers written for Wordpress would import it properly. The blogger importer also wouldnt work because my old posts on blogger were bored…..the RSS importers for WP were however very robust.
I found an XLST file to convert ATOM to RSS and using MSXML I was able to get a proper RSS feed and import all my posts ( 350 of them) in to Wordpress.
This was great news because I had everything backed up. Sans the comments however, since majority of them were spam and it was too much work to get all linked together to the correct post, so they just remained in my back up.
I wanted to host the blog something light and not have the overhead of a database, keeping PHP and wordpress patched, so I decided to go with a static blog. I went with Hugo because Im a big Golang fan. Hugo has an exporter for Wordpress and it easily imported everything over.
At the end of this, I have all my files backed up, the posts are published as HTML and I plan on using Google Firebase to host it along with Github. Thanks Blogger for all the years of free hosting, but the thought of losing all my posts with basically no support was more than enough to convince me to move on. More on the tech stack later.
I recently got the excellent NVIDIA Shield and quickly hooked it up in to my existing Home Theater Set up (Shield -> 4k Receiver -> 4K TV) . I noticed that whenever I increased/decreased the volume on the receiver, the Shield would lose the video signal for a good 2 seconds or so and this would happen whether there was a video playing or not. After a lot of searching on Reddit and the shield forums I learnt that there is a HDMI handshake issue with Sony receivers and that nothing could be done about it other than replacing the receiver or just setting the volume before playing any video.
After some days I plugged my HTPC back in and noticed it was doing the same thing !!! So I turned off the last thing that I turned on the Samsung TV which was UHD Mode. That did the trick, no more loss of video when I changed the volume. Switch over to the shield, the issue was still happening so I went in to the display settings. This is where I remembered another thing : I hate the soap opera feel on movies so I had set the refresh rate of TV at 4k @ 24fps . The shield was set was 4k @ 60 hz, so i lowered it down to 23.976 hz and no more flickering, everything was working fine !!
So if you have the NVIDIA Shield with a Sony Receiver make sure they are set to the proper settings for the display.
I wonder what took them so long. This was such an obvious thing for them to do esp with the always listening feature on Nexus and Moto devices. They really missed a huge opportunity with the onHub routers but im hoping this is a surprise release during IO
Its stories like these that make the case for Nexus phones even stronger. It does seem like Android N is trying to get a grip on the “fragmentation” issue but till that is truly fixed my recommendation to family and friends is the Nexus line of devices
Ive been using Hangouts for years but have felt that over that same time it hasnt gone anywhere. In terms of features it seems years behind the current crop. For the past week or so I have been using telegram and absolutely enjoy using it. Something as simple as link previews just makes the sharing experience between friends that much better……Google better whip up something fast for messaging else they wont have a race in this horse at all
Going by the video from Android Central LG has the winner here. The phone looks different and in a good way. If this phone is a preview of things to come from Project Ara then Google has a real winner with the modular phone concept.
It should be interesting to see what Samsung reveals in a few hours with the S7 series but LG has done something innovative here
As you walk in you notice the sheer size of the screen, the modern look and feel of the theater and the openness of the theater - so much space. The scale of the room and the screen is almost like IMAX, though IMAX is a larger screen but Star Cinema has the larger space.
