Fight Club Compared: Blu-rays vs iTunes HD vs D-VHS vs DVD vs Laserdisc

Caustic, nihilistic and controversial, Fight Club successfully adapted Chuck Palahniuk’s transgressive fiction novel, it’s a credit to screenwriter Jim Uhl’s excellent adaptation that the voice of the original novel is heard so clearly, and at the same time the film proved to be an enormous success. Though much credit is also due to the excellent sound and editing: so much in this film depends on hitting exactly the right tone.

Based on a reader suggestion, I decided to take a look at the various home video versions of Fight Club that are available.

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Ubuntu LTS running under QEmu on Windows 7

Getting Ubuntu Client running under QEmu on Windows 7

Having just gone through the exercise of getting QEmu running Ubuntu ‘Desktop’ (not Server) under Windows 7 without installing a bunch of Intel hardware virtualization driver software. I thought I’d share the process, in the hope of helping others. Note that even with the latest software acceleration enhancements (TCG), Ubuntu isn’t particularly usable as a graphical operating system under Windows 7, however it’s perfectly fine to support SSH sessions for doing linux stuff.

Honestly you are far better installing the ‘Server’ edition of Ubuntu if you just want SSH, but I viewed this as more of an ‘experiment’.

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The whole crew on the bridge. Moscow Cassiopea (1974)

“Moscow: Cassiopea” (1974) and “Teens in the Universe” (1975)

Moscow: Cassiopea (Москва́ — Кассиопе́я) and Teens in the Universe (О́троки во Вселе́нной) are a duology of mid-1970s Soviet science-fiction comedy films, directed by Richard Viktorov (Ричард Викторов), and written by Isai Kuzentsov (Исай Кузнецов) and Avernir Zak (Авенир Григорьевич Зак). Originally intended to be a single film, a glut of footage enabled producers to split it into two eighty minute features.

The films are enduringly popular in the former Soviet Union, and were unavailable in any digital format until a 2007 DVD release, in 2016 both films were added to iTunes in high-definition, so I thought I’d take a look.

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