Cover of the book You Only Live Twice

A friend of mine asked recommendations about the early Ian Fleming books. This is what I replied to him:

For early Ian Fleming it’s best to start from the beginning: the first Bond book was Casino Royale (1953), which introduced Bond and his lifestyle plus gave the character a big push with a plot twist. However, the structure of this book is not quite as tight as in later Bond adventures.

Bond doesn’t much evolve in the books, but some of the books refer lightly to earlier adventures, so you get most out of them if you read them in order, but it’s not a requirement for their enjoyment. Nevertheless, it’s good to be aware that the order of the books was different than the order in which they were eventually filmed.

It’s been a while since I’ve read most of the books, but I remember I liked best Diamonds Are Forever (1956), because of it’s detailed description of how diamond smugglers work, Goldfinger (1959), because it has a great mix of high class villains and high class women and Bond gets to play with both of them, and You Only Live Twice (1964), because of the insights into old Japanese culture.

From Russia With Love (1957) was a hugely popular in it’s time, because the president John F. Kennedy listed it as one of his favourite books. Incidently, the story is about how Soviet spies get fed up with Bond’s excellence in defeating their plans and try to set a trap for him – in a form of a beautiful Soviet female agent, of course.

It’s also good to know that the last three Bond books Fleming wrote – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), You Only Live Twice (1964) and The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) – actually tell one big story, and it’s propably very good to read them in order.

And the one catch: The Spy Who Loved Me (1961) is very different from all of the other books. Fleming wrote it from a perspective of a woman, and Bond is just a small side character in her story, so that’s not a good book to begin with.

You can find the order of the books from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming

From the British newspaper Guardian, on July 3rd:

Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining, complete with look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall, for a TV ad to promote a More 4 season of the director’s films.

The 65-second promotional spot has been filmed as a one-take tracking shot through the recreation of The Shining set.

Channel 4’s tv ad sure looks nice.

(via Daring Fireball)

Barack Obama seems to have an ever-increasing chance of winning the US presidential election later this year, if the various grass roots campaigns are of any indication. Boobs for Barack (not work safe) is sure to catch at least some eyes.

The picture quality on Robert Luketic’s card counting film 21 looked too smooth when I saw it in cinema on Tuesday. Avid’s customer showcase page confirmed what I suspected: it was not shot on film, it was shot with HD digital cameras.

The digital movie cameras of today can provide amazing looking shots if the director and director of photography know what they’re doing, but in this case the end result looked like a dvd projected with a digital projector, even though the theater I saw it in used film projectors. I really missed the grain and texture of film. Very disappointing.

The teaser trailer for the upcoming James Bond film Quantum of Solace was released on Monday and guess what – it’s basically a remake of the Casino Royale (the previous Bond film) teaser trailer.

Here’s the new Quantum of Solace teaser (and you can also find it on the official 007 site):

Compare the above with teaser for Casino Royale from two years ago (also available on Apple’s trailer site):

There’s definitely similarities. First there’s a relatively slow build up with M scolding Bond (with the idea of one of the smaller villains talking down to Bond taken from the final trailer for Casino Royale) followed by a potpourri of action scenes, with images of scantily clad Daniel Craig and Bond girls thrown in for good measure.

I know it worked very well last time (Casino Royale was a major success), so you can’t blame for them using the same format for cutting the clips together. Still, a few surprises in the teaser would have been nice for fans.

Here’s a good example of a more original approach when talking about Bond teasers. It’s from 2002’s Die Another Day, the last Pierce Brosnan Bond film:

I just love the way those sand dunes turn into Bond girls and the bullet morphs into Bond’s car, plus as a bonus you can here her blow the smoke in the end. Nice touch.

The Finnish iPhone 3G provider Sonera has announced it’s pricing for iPhone’s monthly voice, sms and data plans.

Good news: the monthly fees (there’s three main choices) start from 31,69 euros (that’s currently $50,03 dollars). I feared it would be closer to 50 euros, so I’m happy it’s not. Still, 31,69 euros is way more than I’m paying now for my non-3G phone bill.

Bad news: the monthly fees don’t include limitless data. With 31,69 euros you’ll get only 100 Mb per month, with the overflowing traffic costing an arm and a leg (1,49 euros per Mb). In practice you’ll have to keep constantly guessing how many websites you can visit per month. Sonera is including their Home Run wi-fi service with every plan, but the placement of these hotspots are quite limited.

Surprise: the cost of iPhone 3G depends on the monthly plan. 159 euros ($251) for the 8 Gb model in the 31,69 euros per month plan.

It’s official: to promote the theatrical release of the 22nd (by official counting) James Bond film Quantum of Solace, MGM and Fox are bringing the early adventures of the secret agent on Blu-ray worldwide on October 20th.

In this batch, six Bond films are getting the high definition treatment: Dr No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), Thunderball (1965), Live and Let Die (1973), For Your Eyes Only (1981) and Die Another Day (2002). That’s three from Sean Connery era, two from Roger Moore and one from Pierce Brosnan.

You’ve got to admire their press release, which makes it sound like this high definition re-mastering and restoration process they did was just for this Blu-ray release:

Recently restored and re-mastered for the highest quality picture and sound quality via the state-of-the-art Lowry process digital frame-by-frame restoration and featuring special features galore, Bond is primed for Blu-ray Disc with a selection of 007 adventures spanning the storied career of cinema’s most recognisable spy.

I’m betting though that the restoration they’re referring to is the one they made when they released the Ultimate Edition dvds in 2006. Here’s what Macworld.co.uk wrote about the restoration process back then:

The project team also worked to a higher resolution than DVDs support, offering a route forward to release the digitised classics on other formats in future. The film was scanned at a resolution of 4,000 x 3,000 pixels, in contrast with the 720 x 576 pixel resolution of DVDs. This meant that each frame of each movie weighed in at 45MB.

That would mean that essentially all they’ve done now compared to the Ultimate Edition dvds is that they’ve upped the pixel count on the image from dvd quality (576i) to high definition quality (1080p). That’s certainly something, of course, if you’ve got a Blu-ray player and a large screen, but those who already own the Ultimate Edition dvds and don’t have big television sets are propably not missing anything too essential when the new high definition discs arrive.

Unless they decide to release the discs with new extra features.

I’ve previously had problems with my earphones, because those small foam and rubber things that surround the earphone part always come off and go missing.

So, come to think of it, it was not propably very wise to buy Sennheiser’s MX 55 VC Street earphones. They have not only one, but two pieces of rubber that can come easily off, I today realized. Yes, the smaller rubber thing above the actual earphone secure the earphones very snugly into my ears, but the whole thing is going to be pretty useless, if they go missing.

Fortunately the box came with lots of spare parts. They might actually last a few weeks (and then I’ll have to go buy another pair of headphones).

Leo Laporte has hosted lots of technology shows for American and Canadian tv and radio audiences, and he’s currently one of the most well known personalities in podcasting, having his own TWIT network of shows. Currently, with 39 152 followers he’s also the most followed person on Twitter. So, when he posts a web link for something on Twitter, the hosting server of that web address better be ready for extensive load, when people go see what he’s talking about.

Today he posted about new Twitter like service called Plurk.com, with expected results.

New York Times, May 31, 2008:

“This time, it was the top of the crane that fell. The huge pieces smashed into the penthouse of a nearby building, then tore off a row of balconies and plummeted to the street in a shower of bricks, dust and debris. Two men, both workers, were killed.”

Where’s Spider-Man when you need him?