My name is Cédric Bozzi and this is my blog. Mostly, it’s an aggregate of my tweets and Instagram posts, but once in a while you may yet see an actual article here.
See also: my company; a contact form.
On Twitter: @garoo, @garootech et @garooplay — plus @garoodotnet that posts links to any update on this blog.
29 feb. 2008
Lost 4.05 — That wasn't bad, until it went romanticometaphysicalsilly. Both good actors, though; that one scene did work.
Clueless, adjective: "To provide better keyboard navigation, MenuCalendarClock now has an application menu (and necessarily a dock icon)."
28 feb.
Torchwood 2.08 — God I hate that character and actor so much. And, as if that wasn't enough, the writing was more pathetic than ever.
Read that LinkedIn was taking a page from Facebook, so of course I'm signing up.
The UK version of Mobuzz TV is hosted by one of the few female tech reporters with a brain. The French version is hosted by Paris Hilton.
27 feb.
Fixing my Twitterfeed (http://twitter.com/garooblogs). Had forgotten that cedric-bozzi.com expired three weeks ago.
Skins 2.03 — Okay, that wasn't badly done. Besides, I even kinda like Sid: the actor plays him like a human being or something.
26 feb.
C'est un truc franco-français, le digicode ? Je n'ai jamais vu de téléphone proposer un champ pour le noter.
Tell me again, why doesn't iTunes support tags yet?
There'll be a day when Adium's auto-update actually works.
It looks a bit like I was right to think that multi-touch trackpads don't use different hardware.
This is no time for half-assed measures; Abba it is.
Waking up to an "Osama blew us away" reference on Twitter, and desperately searching my iTunes library for something to save my day.
Wonder if the uncanny valley gets wider or narrower over the years.
25 feb.
Ah ben le grand secret de Lost Planet ne reste pas secret bien longtemps, surtout pour un français.
Someone really has to popularize the bento box in the West. Think of the children.
<img src="..." style="max-width: 100px; max-height: 100px;"> does what you'd expect. Cool. (Except for IE, obviously.)
24 feb.
Lost 4.04 — Yeah, okay. I pay so much attention anyway I had to check the web for an explanation of the final reveal.
23 feb.
APB
The creators of Crackdown have finally unveiled their new game, which seems to belong to that fashionable category of action games with transparent matchmaking that abusively call themselves MMOs (like The Agency or, in another genre, Test Drive Unlimited). But I won’t hold that against them, because the avatar customization and realism are unbelievable (the way textures wrap around models puts Forza 2 to shame), the graphics are definitely easier to sell than Crackdown’s, and I don’t have too many doubts they’ll give us more than adequate gameplay.
Adding as a bonus the promise of integrated machinima videomaking (I wonder how that can be managed on a console, but we’ll see that in due time), APB immediately lands very high on the list of my most anticipated games of 2008.
22 feb.
I kinda thought the companion cube would be bigger. Not physically, that is.
Torchwood 2.07 — *** has always been the most unpleasant of an obnoxious cast of characters, how could anyone be expected to care?
21 feb.
Unreal Engine 3 / Gears of War 2
Now that Gears 2 has officially been announced, Epic cross-promotes the game with the new version of Unreal Engine that will power it; watch it without the soundtrack (I can’t believe there are geeks who actually speak like a Sean Elliott imitation — of GFW Radio fame) to see the destructible environments and, most important of all, Locusts invading a Gears map by the hundreds.
That might just be a good sequel.
If I had a MacBook Air I'd have typed up the idea I had for a fiction post last night in my bed, instead of just forgetting it.
20 feb.
Skins 2.02 — Yeah, I just don't like this show. Why can't he be doing porn instead?
Knight Rider 2008 — I guess it doesn't disappoint. Actually... I expected crappy, but not lame-action-show-from-2000 crappy.
What the fuck happened to URL completion in Firefox 3 beta 3? It was so efficient in beta 2!
Flickr is holding my high(er)-resolution pictures hostage. I'm gonna have to look into the API if I want to get them, I guess. Boring.
19 feb.
It pisses me off to no end that you can't exclude podcasts from last.fm/iScrobbler.
How many hours has the store been offline just to discount the shuffle? That one-Tuesday-a-week strategy is gonna backfire before long.
Woo, clean clothes. How fancy.
The laundromat is flooded but my laundry is unharmed for now.
18 feb.
Le coeur a ses raisons S3 — Ils se sont arrêtés un an trop tard (ça vaut mieux que jamais).
God how I hate being in a place where seeing four envelopes from my bank in my mailbox stresses me out for the whole evening.
Autant pour moi, j'ai commandé genre 4000 RIB sur Vidéoposte la semaine dernière. (Oui, j'écris "autant" et je vous emmerde.)
Nothing my bank has to tell me can justify sending four thick, scary envelopes on the same day.
Damnit, it's still early. By my boredom clock it should be around 6pm by now.
Dirt 2.01–2.02 — Okay. I love that she bought a brand new Audi coupé while in a coma, but the Paris Hilton thing feels real cheap.
17 feb.
Housewarming party. Pff, I want to move in with my significant other, too.
16 feb.
I'd like a racing sim to take into account the fact that drivers look into the turn, and not straight ahead.
Poussée de misanthropie dans les animaleries des quais de Seine.
Lost 4.03 — Nice. Against all expectations, the switch to flash-forwards is actually paying off.
Torchwood 2.05 — Who the hell wrote this? It was like an episode of a good show.
15 feb.
Buffy 8.01–8.11 — Not so bad, not so great. Too comicy for my taste, but it would make an okay Buffy season... with a billion-dollar budget.
My iPhone hasn't rung once since I got it. It's totally got to be defective, then.
Dear Mr Weather: would you mind picking a season and sticking with it for, I don't know, two weeks?
PGR4 Challenge Packs (360) ★★★
The two downloadable packs for Project Gotham Racing 4 are online, and… well, they’re online.
I was very disappointed, after downloading the free pack, to find out that the new “tourist mode,” which lets you roam the cities freely (it’s often been said that Bizarre Creations usually models an entire city area before deciding where the tracks will be, so all the data is in there), is only available as an online mode. I tried to plug a second controller, but the mode doesn’t seem to be available in local games; I tried to launch an online game by myself, but that didn’t work either.
I got over the limitations, though, when I finally tried it: once you’re dropped into the empty city, you’re mostly glad that there’s up to 7 other players in there — and it even makes sense as a game mode (the winner is determined based on the kudos score). I guess it’s okay that it’s online only (although it means non-Gold members won’t be able to take advantage of it at all), and it’s okay that it’s time-limited (to a maximum of 15 minutes), because… the cities are boring, really: unlike Test Drive Unlimited or Burnout Paradise that let you drive just about anywhere (well, not so sure about Burnout), the tourist mode is limited to the streets and roads that have been coded as track-able by Bizarre, and they’re all still enclosed in barriers — you’re not going to venture into parks and drive up a building’s stairs or down onto the beach. Which makes sense, really, because the game engine hasn’t been designed to handle the collisions between cars and the landscape, and changing that would have required a much bigger amount of reprogramming.
There are other game modes and challenges in the free and non-free DLCs, which I don’t care much about, and there are cars, too — the only one I really wanted, the old BMW M3, is downright ugly, and most of the other ones are in the low classes, so who cares really.
The lingering impression after I downloaded both those packs is definitely disappointment; the contents only get three stars because most is free, and the rest is cheap.
(There would have been an illustration if pgrnations.com hadn’t eaten the screenshot I uploaded from my console.)
14 feb.
Aren't chips affordable enough that console games could be released on USB sticks and have zero loading times? Even just as an option.
Firefox 3 beta 3: "Scripts may not move or resize existing windows." And that's a label, not a checkbox. WTF?
Labyrinthe Wallpaper
If you’re not thrilled with the results the wallpaper can be wiped clean with a damp sponge allowing you to start from scratch.
Firefox 3 beta 3 opens a new tab in the main window when you click a target=blank link in a popup. Clever.
13 feb.
I can't look at Karina Lombard in The L Word anymore since I've seen her in that M6 crap. Lost any respect for her.
Ah, shit, S3 buckets are limited to 5GB. So much for backing up my data off-site in big encrypted dmgs.
Skins 2.01 — Meh, whatever, I couldn't care less about the lot of them. But yum, obviously. Looks like they figured who needed screen time.
On peut traiter la première dame de "parfaitement imbécile" sans se prendre une balle entre les deux yeux ? Tout se perd.
12 feb.
"Je sais mieux que toi, j'étais là dans les eighties."
I intended to chicken out at the checkout page. I'd forgotten you have to give a credit card number to create your iTunes account.
WTF? At what point did iTunes remove the "Export to OPML" option?
Aperture 2 doesn't look particularly exciting.
I could dedicate my life to porn and never have to take an HIV test again.
Arrêtez de dire que la cote de NotrePrésident baisse, ça va le pousser à faire des choses. Et personne ne veut que ça arrive.
So any settings you choose in 10.5.2 won't solve the inconsistency of clicking on empty vs. full folders in your Dock. Geez.
11 feb.
Who could I / would I drag as an escort to a web 2.0 launch tomorrow night?
Word I don't understand of the day: hostile takeover. Either the stockholders want to sell, or they don't; why should the board have a say?
10 feb.
So basically there's no real good GTD app for the iPhone, or even a convenient to-do list, is there?
9 feb.
You know what's worse than dreaming you're in a relationship and waking up alone? Dreaming you won the lottery and waking up poor.
I got shot glasses for Christmas and discovered jello in February. That's destiny, not a coincidence.
The molecular structure of jello is not at all what I expected.
Blade Runner: The Final Cut — Ooh, I finally understood the whole story, including the Deckard thing (I was young, and it's complicated).
Highlander: The Source — Oh, the humanity. This guy directed Lawnmower Man, and he didn't bother to improve a bit in 15 years.
Lost 4.02 — They so should have opened with that. (Or maybe they planned to, but somehow ended up showing the one-hour recap before 4.01?)
Yet another week that went by crazy fast.
Does MTV Multiplayer have few readers, or do the interstitial captcha and lack of cookies in the comment form tend to discourage trolls?
8 feb.
Lost Odyssey looks like a game I'd like to watch someone play — without having to bother with combat myself.
First PGR4 DLC
I think I’d read a number of complaints about the absence of a “cat and mouse” mode in this Project Gotham Racing, so it’s probably a welcome addition, but I’m mostly eager to drive freely around the cities in “tourist mode” — and to get a new (old) BMW M3.
Est-ce que j'ai envie de recevoir Lost Odyssey gratuitement ?
Bioware throws some salt on the wound
Pretty much everyone hates the fact that Mass Effect’s ending throws you out of the world and doesn’t let you keep playing and exploring the universe after you’ve finished the main story arc, and the only way to visit all the (boring) uncharted worlds and completing every side mission is to start a new game.
So everybody assumed that downloadable contents would fix this, and the additional missions, that you have to pay for, would let you play with your crew where you left them — besides, I’d always heard that the new missions would serve to bridge the gap between Mass Effect 1 and 2.
Well, how wrong can you be: not only can’t you play the “Bring Down The Sky” mission from where you left off, but you can’t just start a new game, either; you need to have your Shepard commanding the Normandy. Which means that, unless you plan ahead (good thing the download comes in a month) and have spared a save in the middle of the game (between getting the Normandy and leaving the Citadel for good) you’ll have to start a new game and go through Eden Prime and all the conversations that set the world up… just in order to get the privilege to populate your navigation screen with an asteroid you just bought for 400 points.
As cheap as it is, I’m feeling a lot like boycotting that download.
Saints Row 2
Avatar customization is certainly cool (and it looks pretty flexible, too), but those screenshots don’t really look like something I’d want to pit against GTA IV, as a developer.
7 feb.
"Trance Hacker." I can't believe I'm good at Rez.
The number of recent memories that make me cringe is uncomfortably high these days.
Not sure getting a free game every three months is worth the mounds of spam I get every day from Microsoft's blogpress agency.
The Golden Compass ★★★
Okay, that wasn’t as bad as I expected; but it wasn’t that much better, either. The script does an interesting job of moving stuff around to help smooth things out, and exposition in general is pretty well handled, but it all moves way too fast, just as could be expected — and as a result becomes pretty much boring… but very nice to watch.
I suppose it’s pointless to start nitpicking on casting choices when you’re viewing a movie adaptation of a book you enjoyed, but I still think there could have been much more interesting casting choices for Mrs. Coulter; I also dislike Pan’s voice, think McKellen doesn’t really work as Iorek (his voice doesn’t really scream of raw, muscular power, does it?), and hate the music.
Just like many adaptations of long, epic books, this could have been made much better by just splitting the story into two movies instead of one. The funny thing is I’m not used to being on this side of the fence, watching a movie after I’ve read the book.
6 feb.
Don't give me songs... Give me something to write about... I need something to write about...
5 feb.
I can't find the version history but it looks like the NetNewsWire update fixes the read articles' eagerness to disappear. Hurray.
Step 16 of getting used to having the net in my pocket: just remembered to set up email upload to Flickr from my iPhone.
Paris is cold and rainy. Maybe going south is the right idea.
Yeah. Paris. Whatever. I missed my Mac, though.
This train car feels dirty.
At least it looks unlikely that a 3G iPhone in late February would make me regret my purchase.
iPhone 16GB in a silent store update? Odd. 32GB iTouch, yum.
I hate iPhone webapps that prevent you from zooming.
Comment la version française de BSG traduit "frak" ?
4 feb.
Following my train's progress on Google Maps.
The sky and the light are always exactly the same color everytime I go to Smallville.
Tweeting and facebooking and watching TV on the train.
Rerouting my subway transit around a suicide. I'm jealous and I'm late.
I kinda wish I could hear when it's raining outside. It feels so disconnected.
3 feb.
I know a couple of guys who'd have a heart attack if they saw the photo album that just popped up in one of my Facebook friends' news feed.
Any thought that can't be summed and condensed into a 140-character tweet needs some more thinking and refining before it can be published.
Freaked out that Dakota Fanning's 8-year-old sister was capable of dubbing My Neighbor Totoro flawlessly.
You can't use your iPhone while lying on your side in your bed.
Wondering what exactly would have made the Call of Cthulhu silent movie look less like DV and more like vintage film.
Ah. Of course my iMac can't handle the 720p director's final cut of Blade Runner. Great deal of good that twenty-inch widescreen does me.
2 feb.
Trying to back up my media onto a hard drive that's too small. I need a Drobo.
1 feb.
Tentatively converting 8GB worth of MP3s to 128kbps AAC to save space on my iPhone.
Is Microsoft/Yahoo supposed to be important? Isn't Yahoo just about as irrelevant to the modern web as Microsoft?
Maybe I'm really done with Paris.
Il m'arrivait de trouver mon arrondissement un peu trop bourge, mais visiter le Bon Marché aide à relativiser.
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