Having access to Netflix on a console is extremely handy if you want to watch a video while still using your computer. This may seem like a blindingly obvious thing to say but shut up, I needed an intro.
The interface is simple. When you log on you have several broad categories including standards like comedy, horror, drama, etc. but also special categories for foreign and independent movies as well as television shows and “anime,” which includes both Japanese animation and North American cartoons. There is also a “recently watched” option (that disappears for not good reason) and usually a list of recently added movies and television shows. In each of these categories there are 75 entries but there are many more available that it decided not to tell you about. When you used to walk into a video rental store (remember those?) all the available movies would be on display. Netflix approaches this at if you were to walk into a video rental store and see a bunch of boxes labeled with their respective genres and all the movies tossed in every which way with you invited to root through the boxes and hope to whatever god you believe in that you might actually find something you want to watch buried in the piles of digitized dog poop. For extra fun these categories don't even make sense all the time. I have seen several movies listed in both comedy and horror, which leads me to believe that someone is very confused / they choose movie categories by blindfolding themselves and throwing darts at the wall.
To aid you in your coprolitic excavation they create new categories based on what you watch. So if you watch a large enough number of episodes of a show they might add a category called “Like: Help My Interface Sucks” and in it will around 20 movies that share some particular (randomly selected) quality with the show or movie you have been watching. It will also set up categories with weird criteria based on movies and shows you have watched. I have seen “TV Shows from the 1960's,” “Violent suspenseful movies,” and “Movies with strong female leads.” Strong female leads? That is getting pretty specific! It must be great to find movies based on such narrow criteria! Haha, sucker. It only shows you those when it wants to show you. It is like some weird video game where you have to unlock genres by watching movies with matching labels.
What makes this especially weird is the fact that it has so many specific genre labels. For instance, the movie “The Lost Boys” has the following genres: “Vampires,” “Teen Screams,” and “Cult Horror.” You would think that they would offer a way to look for other movies in those categories but apparently they decided that would be too easy. You can't even activate a “find movies like this” option. You have to hope that it deigns to give you this option the next time you log on. “You really want to see more Vampire movies,” it says with eyes wild and jaws frothing, “then you would work and find more movies with the “vampires” label! The gods have spoken!” Then it cackles madly and you hire an exorcist because it is clearly possessed.
If you know what you want to watch you can go ahead and use the search feature but this only highlights the problems with Netflix for the 360. For instance, there is no real way to browse the full selection. Sure, you can go to search and type in “a” and scroll through a full list of titles starting with that letter. How about if you want to find documentaries on a single subject? Nope. You will look at the movies it offers and you will like it! Of course you could go to your computer and look up the Netflix site, search with whatever means are available, and then use the search option on your 360 interface to find the movie you want. But this is a bunch of extra steps (assuming you have a computer nearby) for no good reason. Why not implement better search options in the 360 Netflix app? I blame NAFTA.
Besides this, it lacks a “save as favourites” option to easily find shows you were in the process of watching. There is an “instant queue” but, really, who plans out what they want to watch that far in advance? It does have a interesting “party” feature which lets you watch shows with other people who also have Netflix. This has the potential to be cool and maybe I will even get to try it some day.
Summery: Workable if mediocre.
Rating: 2 out of 5 “Be kind, please rewind” stickers.
Reviewed by: Leer's Poor Fool
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Review of my Dell Inspiron 1525
The first warning as to what I was getting myself into should have been the price tag. Three hundred dollars for a laptop? “Affordable” is often a synonym for “put together by our division of trained apes.”
But before I get ahead of myself I should perhaps talk about the laptop itself. The screen is just over 15 inches across. It is easy to see provided you are not in direct sunlight. The case is an attractive blue that I picked out of several colour options, none of which, I was surprised to note considering the company in question, are made from the unborn offspring of the worlds most endangered animals. The keys are actually not annoying to type on like some laptop keyboards; I have to give credit where credit is due.
Unfortunately if I just wanted a comfortable keyboard then I would have purchased a keyboard. The Inspiron worked reasonably well for the first year and a half of its life. Then one day I decided to reformat and reinstall windows. This should have been a simple process. Alas, it was not meant to be. Dell came with this preinstalled program called Dell Media Direct that existed on its own partitioned portion of the hard drive. We peacefully coexisted for a time; I ignored it and it left me alone. However, when it came time to reformat my hard-drive I ran into a little problem. Through an obscure set of conditions, including having a partition of an amount of space that is a multiple of 4 (I believe), Vista was unable to properly reformat. To be fair I had also created a second partition where I was running Ubunto, but when I searched the error code I saw other people with the same computer and the same problem so I can be fairly sure that this was the Media Direct partition's fault.
Here is where the real problem with a Dell product began: I called their tech support line. One of the ways that they can give you a laptop for such a cheap price (besides paying their workers in bananas) is cutting back on their tech support. If you are still under warranty then great! If not, prepare to listen to an Indian gentleman inexplicably named Kevin explain that they can help you at the small cost of your first born child. Or 50 dollars. I can't remember.
Beside badly thought out partitions and a tech support service that boarders on extortion, the laptop is mostly fine. And by mostly I mean not even a little. There is, for instance, this little problem where several of my keys stop working randomly, a problem that was shared with other users who noticed the same keys on their Inspirons failing. Fortunately no one ever used keys like “T” or “R” or “G”. For example:
And speaking of fewer features: I hope you are not overly fond of your DVD drive. About a week ago mine stopped working. It didn't just stop reading, mind you; It just doesn't have power anymore. I'd open up my laptop to see if I could fix it but, frankly, I know what happened last time.
Finally there is the issue where the laptop sometimes over heats and just shuts down without warning, which is ironic since it was forged in the deepest depths of hell. One would assume that a cooling system that actually does its job would be in order, but who am I to question the Dell Chimp Platoon?
Summery: Don't buy a Dell. Seriously.
Score: 1 out of five Apple IIEs
Reviewed by: Leer's Poor Fool
But before I get ahead of myself I should perhaps talk about the laptop itself. The screen is just over 15 inches across. It is easy to see provided you are not in direct sunlight. The case is an attractive blue that I picked out of several colour options, none of which, I was surprised to note considering the company in question, are made from the unborn offspring of the worlds most endangered animals. The keys are actually not annoying to type on like some laptop keyboards; I have to give credit where credit is due.
Unfortunately if I just wanted a comfortable keyboard then I would have purchased a keyboard. The Inspiron worked reasonably well for the first year and a half of its life. Then one day I decided to reformat and reinstall windows. This should have been a simple process. Alas, it was not meant to be. Dell came with this preinstalled program called Dell Media Direct that existed on its own partitioned portion of the hard drive. We peacefully coexisted for a time; I ignored it and it left me alone. However, when it came time to reformat my hard-drive I ran into a little problem. Through an obscure set of conditions, including having a partition of an amount of space that is a multiple of 4 (I believe), Vista was unable to properly reformat. To be fair I had also created a second partition where I was running Ubunto, but when I searched the error code I saw other people with the same computer and the same problem so I can be fairly sure that this was the Media Direct partition's fault.
Here is where the real problem with a Dell product began: I called their tech support line. One of the ways that they can give you a laptop for such a cheap price (besides paying their workers in bananas) is cutting back on their tech support. If you are still under warranty then great! If not, prepare to listen to an Indian gentleman inexplicably named Kevin explain that they can help you at the small cost of your first born child. Or 50 dollars. I can't remember.
Beside badly thought out partitions and a tech support service that boarders on extortion, the laptop is mostly fine. And by mostly I mean not even a little. There is, for instance, this little problem where several of my keys stop working randomly, a problem that was shared with other users who noticed the same keys on their Inspirons failing. Fortunately no one ever used keys like “T” or “R” or “G”. For example:
“May od pu any ades up ei sos.”Of course sometimes instead of the keys not working they double click when you tap them, turning that into:
“May Ggod putt anggrry bbadggerrs up tthheirr shhorrtts.”The best part is that this goes in and out so you sometimes actually forget about it before turning on the laptop to find yourself with 8% fewer keys.
And speaking of fewer features: I hope you are not overly fond of your DVD drive. About a week ago mine stopped working. It didn't just stop reading, mind you; It just doesn't have power anymore. I'd open up my laptop to see if I could fix it but, frankly, I know what happened last time.
Finally there is the issue where the laptop sometimes over heats and just shuts down without warning, which is ironic since it was forged in the deepest depths of hell. One would assume that a cooling system that actually does its job would be in order, but who am I to question the Dell Chimp Platoon?
Summery: Don't buy a Dell. Seriously.
Score: 1 out of five Apple IIEs
Reviewed by: Leer's Poor Fool
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