Troll Hunter is in the style of Cloverfield or perhaps more accurately the Blair Witch Project. Norway. Amateur sleuth reporters go in search of mystery poacher. Bears have been turning up dead. Unexplained destruction. Rough camera work. Overall, a great idea. There is a plot, but of course, when you’re doing one of those spoof roughumentaries, it’s very hard to unwind the plot neatly for the viewer without making it look staged, destroying the rough-cut feel. The plot doesn’t hold together fantastically well anyway, assuming you’re the kind of cinema-goer who can suspend disbelief for a while. I can, but even so, there were enough discrepancies to cause me some minor niggles.

Pop your brain out and enjoy a bit of a romp through crinkly Scandanavian scenery. Don’t watch it in the English language option. The Norwegian ‘poacher’ has an annoying Mexican twang. I kept imagining Cheech (Richard Marin) behind the mike. Stick to the Norwegian with subtitles. Score 3/5. Mostly for the scenery.

You will need:
1 x large onion, roughly chopped
2 x cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
12 x large carrots, roughly chopped (are you seeing a pattern here?)
1 x chorizo sausage, skinned and roughly chopped
0.5 litres of boiling water

NOTE: If you have supermarket bought carrots that have been washed, don’t peel them. Just chop them up and discard the ends. Obviously, if you have muddy, real, homegrown or organic carrots you might need to wash and peel them.

Toss the onion and garlic in to a deep pot with a splash or two of olive oil and fry on a high heat for 3 minutes. Add the carrots and chorizo and continue to fry for another five minutes turning vigorously. Add the boiling water, pop a lid on the pan and turn the ring down to a medium-low heat. Leave for 30 minutes and then stick it all in the blender. Season to taste but BE CAREFUL! Chorizo is salty already so taste it first.

For a bit of extra wow factor, drop a blob of sour cream into each bowl. This recipe should easily make enough for four bowls of soup, maybe six, depending on the size of your carrots. Please let me know what you think. I’m sure it’s been done before, but this was made up on the spur of the moment because of the limited range of ingredients in the fridge.

Why?: The question I got asked by my family was why is this a good thing? Clever lot really my family. My answer was this: None of the machines in the house that could operate as a media server is ever on 24×7. The main home computer, the PS3, my wife’s Sony Ericsson Xperia phone (!) etc all either get turned off at some point or other or leave the house occasionally. The Linux server stays put and quitely hums away in the garage just doing it’s job. With the consumption of media in the house going up and from a number of different devices, it is making more and more sense to have it available in one place. We don’t have a massive library of music, but even our relatively modest selection doesn’t fit on a basic smart phone or iPod such as our children have. Do we want to copy songs, photos etc on and off phones as our mood changes? No.

Should you contemplate this if you don’t have a Linux server in your house? Only if you’re happy to roll your sleeves up and learn some Linux admin skills.

NOTE: This guide will not be much help if you haven’t got a Linux server set up and don’t know how to do that. There are plenty of good guides around for that. This set of instructions assumes you have a Linux server already running. I have Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid). I am not a Linux expert in any way shape or form but I managed this. The install wizard for Ubuntu is damn good and it suggests sensible defaults all the way through.

Step 1:Create a user on your Linux server that will be dedicated to managing your media.
Why?: Because we will create a shared folder a bit later on where all your media will live and we will share this to everyone. It’s safest not to share your own folders like this.
How:
a) Create the new user (I’ve named the new user ‘mediasvr’ but you can use your own:

su useradd -p /home/mediasvr -m mediasvr

b) Set the new user’s password

su passwd mediasvr

Step 2: Create a folder structure that will be used to store the music, photos, videos you want to share.
Why: It’s good housekeeping to create a logical set of places to save all your valuable media. it will be easier to manage later on.
From your own Linux login, type:

sudo su mediasvr

and then:

cd ~

to make sure you’re in the home folder. Now create three folders:

mkdir music

mkdir video

mkdir photos

these are optional. You could bung everything in the /home/mediasvr but you’re not that kind of girl!

Step 3: Share the Linux folder with Windows machines.
Why?: Because you need to be able to drag and drop music and video from your family computer and/or laptops etc onto the Linux box so they become part of your media library.
How?: You need to install and configure Samba on Linux. Samba is a service that runs on your Linux server that allows you to make a folder on Linux visible to the rest of your network.
a) Refer to instructions relevant to your Linux O/S as to how to install Samba, but for Ubuntu, it was as easy as running the following command

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

b) Configuring. If you’ve never setup Samba before and start digging around on the internet, you will quickly be baffled by the range of options Samba provides. DO NOT LET IT WORRY YOU! Samba is like a 72-piece Swiss-army knife. You only need a few simple lines of config if you are using this in a secured network in your home. I’ll share mine with you which you should be able to paste in pretty much line-for-line.

The configuration of Samba is held in a file called smb.conf which should live in /etc/samba but it may depend on your Linux version so you may need to search for it using the command “whereis smb.conf”. Go to the folder and edit this file using this command:

sudo nano smb.conf

…and add the following lines in somewhere under the comment line that says #==== Share Definititions ====

[media]

comment = Family Media Server

path = /home/mediasvr

create mask = 0755

force user = mediasvr

force group = mediasvr

guest ok = yes

read only = no

browseable = yes

writeable = yes

What’s all this?: What you are telling Samba to do is create the illusion of a folder called “media” in the root of your Linux server that actually points to the home folder of your mediasvr user who we created in Step 1. above. The instructions underneath specify that guests can access this folder and that when they do, they should be treated as though they are the user mediasvr, that they can write to the folder and that external connections will be able to browse the folder structure.

Test it!: On another PC in your house, type this into your directory navigator or folder explorer:

\\<LINUX-SERVER>\
…and you should see a folder in there called “media” that you can click on to see the contents. If it doesn’t work, try the IP address of the Linux server instead as there might be a DNS problem on you home network.

\\192.168.0.44\

…that’s just an example of course. I have no idea what IP address your Linux server is configured for.
If that works, copy some MP3 and JPG files on so that we can use these for testing. Don’t get carried away just yet, in case you ahve to tear everything down and start again.

Step 4: Install Mediatomb on the Linux server.
Why?: Simply exposing a set of folders to other computers to your house does not make it a media server. True you can now access any files you place there from all kinds of gadgets in your house and where this might work for photos, it wouldn’t be great for music or videos. These files are bigger and many applications would want to load the whole file over to where they are running before playing them. You don’t really want to wait for a 4Gbyte movie to copy over before you can play it. What a media server does is streams a file across a bit at a time as it’s needed.

How?: Mediatomb is part of recent Linux Ubuntu builds but if you’re not sure, you can do this

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install mediatomb

You may need to start Mediatomb.

sudo invoke-rc.d mediatomb start

But check here first: Mediatomb FAQs

Step 5: Tell Mediatomb what you want to share.
Why?: Right now, Mediatomb is just sitting there twiddling its thumbs. It has no idea what you want to stream to other computers. So now you have to show it where you put your media.

Mediatomb provides a web-based interface to do this which is relatively intuitive and if you got this far, you probably don’t need my help to figure this out. From one of your home computers, type in a browser URL bar:
http://<LINUX-SERVER>:49152

or, if you prefer, use the IP address, for example:

http://192.168.0.44:49152

You should get a screen that looks a lot like this. You can see here I’ve navigated to the filesystem where my media is and the next step is to click the scan button shown circled in red top left.

Test it!:

a) Fire up your PS3 and it should find the media server straight away.  I found that if I changed anything on the Linux side, I had to stop and restart the PS3 for the changes to take effect.

b) Try this too. Fire up your Media Player on Windows. You should see this appear:

Windows Media Player

Last Saturday saw my first outing as Penny since the trip to see Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in London. My good friend Tina gave me a lift as it was (mostly) en route. This event had been organised by others that Tina knew and I was lucky enough to get to tag along. I’d met Gabby and Rachael before, but the group eventually swelled to include about ten lovely people I’d never met before. About half of us met and got dressed early enough to go into The Lanes and have an late afternoon meal of Tapas at the Casa Don Carlos which was great! Portion sizes were a lot more generous than your average tapas and I was famished, so it suited me.

After the meal, Tina, Gabby and I did a spot of shopping just before everything shut for the day. This in itself was quite an event for me because I’ve never been shopping before as Penny. I’ve always been a night time tranny. Well, OK, it was dark outside, but traipsing about well lit shops was a first for me, sticking my Adam’s apple out in front. Still, this is the UK, and I just love it because nobody gives you any bother (ahem).

After the shopping, we went back to the hotel and spruced ourselves up, changing into our best party clothes and adding a little sparkle before heading out to the bars and clubs. ’3 and 10′ was great. Cosy atmosphere and not ‘scene’ as far as I could make out. When that got jam packed we went to Bar Revenge which used to be the R Bar. Room for us all to sit and that’s where the rest of the crew joined us. A mix of real girls, men dressed as men and men dressed as girls. Straight Kevin was lovely. Gay Ben was a big guy with a big heart. Rachael was the same exuberant person I met last time. Sophie, Dana, K and Tracy added the oestrogen to the evening and they were all friendly and fun to be with. There was Tiffany, Nina and my mind goes a bit hazy after that!

Now it was while we were at Bar Revenge when the incident happened. A short, smiling Persian lad introduced himself and started out friendly. He was drunk and didn’t speak good English but being polite, two or three of us included him in our conversations for a while. It became clear soon enough that he was a pest. I don’t know what he said to the others, but Gabby wanted my help to get rid of him. I steered him away from Gabby and very soon, he invited me back to his place. “No thanks, I’ve got a wife and three kids.” He refused to believe me and that’s when he gropped my crotch! I wished someone had been filming me. I would love to see the expression on my face when he did that. Shock, followed by indignation with an overlay of politeness. I grabbed his hand and pushed him away. He must have been distracted for a minute because I decided to use the loo. I needed to go, and I decided it was an opportunity to collect my thoughts and decide how to deal with this monster. I went to the ladies, found myself a cubicle and rolled down my tights to pee. The next thing I know, thie little twerp is knocking at the cubicle door! Luckily, some plucky lady comes in and throws him out. When I emerge a few minutes later, the little Persian pratt has gone.

Now I don’t suppose this happens to women all the time when they go for a night out, but I’ll bet this kind of unwanted attention happens often enough that womenfolk tend to think of all us men as perverts. Thankfully we’re not. I, for example, am utterly normal and straight as a die! Well OK, perhaps I’m not, but I’ve never been rude like that and groped anyone. I sort of understand that people with low emotional intelligence might think that, if I wear a dress, the signal I am sending out is ‘I want to be f**ked’. What I don’t understand is how they think that being offensive and brutish is the way to get what they want.

Anyway, that was that. The evening ended well with some dancing in Revenge which was really great! I just wish my feet had lasted longer.

To my knowledge, only two other people have read any of it. Ben read the first five chapters of the first draft and to him, I apologise profusely. It was, quite honestly, dreadful back then. Poor plot, weak characterisation and naive writing style. Byron – I think – read the whole of the book at draft one level. As I recall his feedback was “I liked the battle scenes.’

Chapters 1 through 7 are done and the overhaul of chapter 8 is underway. Unfortunately this is another total rewrite. The content contributed nothing to the plot and failed to expand on the characters. The target of getting to the end of chapter 10 by the end of 2011 looks challenging right now, especially as I have distracted myself by trying to write a synopsis. Writing a synopsis is harder than it sounds. Apparently a synopsis has to provide a thorough review of the plot, describe the characters and their motivations all within two or three pages of A4! Hmmm…

Another day or two and I should be done though and then there will just be 14 more chapters to go. Eek.

View of Mars

No. There were basically a few things that were wrong with this ‘mission’ for me. First and foremost, it simply wasn’t a spectator sport. I didn’t spend much time looking for information on what was going on. If you want a potted history, the ‘highlights’ so-to-speak, here’s a 15 minute video Mars5000 in 15 minutes.

Of course the real trip to Mars, when it does eventually take place will hardly be more thrilling, but by way of compensation, there will be the real prosepct that some dreadful disaster will take place, plunging our heroes into the furnace of the sun or, more probable into the vast and unending coldness of space. Naturally no one will actually want this to take place, but you can’t deny that this spice is missing from an entirely ground-based mission. For the same reason, there’s surely a big gap between the stress levels that the space-faring crew would endure over and above these brave souls of Mars5000. If you are tens of millions of miles away from Earth without the least hope of rescue, that’s got to do something strange to your head. I’m not sure what coping strategies there are for that.

Another key deficiency of the mission was the oversufficiency of gravity. Now I haven’t spent any time in zero-G, but I’m pretty sure that 72 weeks of your piss and spittle floating away from you, your hair clippings clouding up a small cabin, your turds refusing to head neatly down into the u-bend, food not remaining neatly on your plate awaiting consumption and everything but everything having to be stowed away after each and every fricking use! That, would drive me absolutely stark-staring mad.

Well done to the crew! It must have been hard, but let’s not assume we know a great deal about cramming folk into small metal containers and firing them across the cosmos.

Here’s to Bawlin’ Change eh?. Welcome back my friend and thanks for that really long missive. Apologies too for the long absence!

Postscript – Here is a link to some of Neilmac’s other stuff: Vidalism

Back in 2007, the problem was that although the concept and setting was good with plenty of material to put in the book, the plot was almost non-existent and the character development was poor. The prose was mostly turgid too and I had a basic inability to describe people. Not much to rescue perhaps. Well, I picked it all back up again three months ago and reworked the plot and painted it into a revised chapter plan. Here I am now at 20% through the rewrite and still fired up with enthusiasm. Hurray!

Finally, I’ve found a really productive use of the 2-3 hours I spend on the train every day, that is if I can stay awake. :-/ Stay tuned! Harple, bless her cotton socks has promised to read and critique it.