Nightwish @ O2 Apollo, Manchester

Hot on the heels of the 3rd of November folk power metal extravaganza, the 4th showed no sign of letting up with the Manchester night of Nightwish's UK tour. After the controversy of former vocalist Anette Olzon's sudden departure and the drafting in of symphonic metal stalwart Floor Jansen to take over vocal duties, it was destined to be an interesting night.

Given Floor's previous experience in After Forever and ReVamp, there was no doubt she could carry the tunes, and sure enough the performance was everything I hoped it to be. After the previous night's frantic leaping about with Sabaton it was a major step down in the liveliness ranks, and Emma commented that she would have preferred some of the more up-tempo numbers. But that's not to take anything away from the night, and is mostly a reflection of how exhausted we were by that point! They played most of my favourite tracks, and even had a rather lovely acoustic version of Nemo in the middle.

See the full set.

Comments

Juniper Network Connect on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Juniper Network Connect is a very popular VPN client for corporate networks. It bootstraps from a Java applet and has native versions for Windows, Linux and Mac, and works very well. Unfortunately, it seems that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard have some issues caused by a dodgy installation program. One common way to make it work is to enable the root user and log in with full admin privileges under OS X and install it that way. This is a sledgehammer approach to a fairly simple problem, opens up security issues, and didn't even work for me. I won't even bother exploring that route in this blog post. There are a couple of other things that can be done to make it work, though. If you upgraded from a previous version of OS X and already had the Network Connect client installed, you may just be suffering a simple permissions issue. These instructions are for Network Connect 6.2.0, but they might well work with other versions with a tweak. From Termin...

Something is afoot - Opera Mini on iPhone

Strange things are afoot. 20 days ago, Opera submitted the iPhone version of Opera Mini , their mobile browser, to the Apple AppStore. 20 days later, it was actually approved, despite previous browser technologies and the like being rejected for "duplicating iPhone functionality". Strange indeed. Having used Opera Mini before on many different devices, both touchscreen and traditional keypad based, I have long appreciated its raw speed, excellent rendering engine and intuitive navigation controls. But can it stand up to Safari on iPhone for browsing excellence? The answer: sort of. The Good Like its predecessors, Opera Mini for iPhone is blazingly fast. Using Opera's own proxies, web content is compressed to within an inch of its life to reduce bandwidth requirements, and the browser itself renders what it downloads so fast that the likes of Safari just can't keep up. Even on a GPRS only connection it is almost as fast as Safari on 3G for largely text based page...

Removing dead tracks from iTunes

On occasion, for one reason or another, iTunes seems to have a link to a file that no longer exists. Your options are then to either hunt for the file manually, one by one, or manually hunt and delete all the dead ones. There is a handy exclamation point icon that will tell you which are broken, but there is no way to filter for these. Fortunately, thanks to a bit of logical jiggery pokery, you can use Smart Playlists and a cunning quirk of iTunes to do it for you. Herein lies a step-by-step guide to finding all those annoying broken links. Step 1 Create a new Smart Playlist with a single Artist Does Not Contains rule. Put some garbage into the search field so it will return every artist. Call this playlist "All Music". Step 2 Create a normal playlist called "Working Music". Step 3 Create a Smart Playlist with 2 rules. These are: Playlist - is - All Music Playlist - is not - Working Music ...

Lazy Robot

Search This Blog