Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince trailer and new Harry Potter book

July 31, 2008 | Videos, Links

Time for some more Potter excitement - the teaser trailer for Half Blood Prince has been released. All Potter fans should check it out as it looks great. Make sure you have your speakers on.

The films have been fantastic so far - each one improves on the one before. I just hope the cast all return for the finale as it wouldn’t be right to have them change now.

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Whilst writing this I got an email from Amazon letting me know that Tales of Beadle the Bard is going to go on sale later this year. I was under the impression that it would never be released so this is great news! There are going to be two versions, one special edition (£50) and one standard edition (£3.99) - with all proceeds going to charity.

BBC Olympics 2008 ident

July 24, 2008 | Videos, Links

I saw this when I was having my dinner this evening and thought it was absolutely fantastic. I was pretty sure it was Jamie Hewlet almost from the start, but I didn’t realise the music was by Damon Albarn (for those outside the loop this is the duo responsible for the Gorillaz).

I have no interest in the Olympics at all, but I really hope the Beeb have more of these up their sleeves.

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Harry Potter prequel

| Harry Potter, Links

Waterstones (the UK bookstore) recently ran a promotion called “What’s your story” where they got people to submit a postcard with a short story on it, and they will be turning the best into a limited edition book.

In total they had 4522 entries, and some of those were from celebs - including JK Rowling.

The postcard book is going to be made in a limited run but they have posted the celebrity cards on the What’s your story website so you can have a read now.

JK’s story claims to be - “From the prequel I [JK Rowling] am NOT working on”, and is a snippet of action from a young James and Sirius.

To read JK’s “prequel” you should go to the What’s your story website, then press authors -> JK Rowling (unfortunately it’s made in flash so I can’t send you directly there).

Dr Horrible

July 17, 2008 | Links

I found out about Dr Horribles Sing Along blog a couple of days ago, and today I watched the first two episodes. They’re absolutely bloody fantastic so watch them while you can.

The show is a musical (as in song and dance) tale of a horrible doctor who is having woman troubles.

The shows are free streaming mini movies and, more importantly, the brain child of Joss Whedon (Buffy and Firefly being his most famous creations).

Dr Horrible stars Nathan Fillion, who played the ultimate bad guy in Buffy (a character I thought was a bit crap) and then became Captain Mal Reynolds in Firefly (a character I thought was awesome).

I don’t want to say too much as each episode is only 13/14 minutes. All I really want to say is that the first two episodes are out, the third is coming on Saturday - and the whole lot are being taken …

New plugin : BM Admin Tweak

July 11, 2008 | Web Design

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned how I have customised my wordpress administration interface to make it more streamlined and usable. This is an interface I made for myself so it works the way I want it too - however I had a couple of people say they liked the look of it and wanted me to release it as a plugin… so here it is.

Before anyone downloads it I would like to point out that this was made for me. Whilst there are features you may like if they don’t benefit me and I can’t add them in 10 minutes or so then I won’t be adding them. For example when I announced the theme on Twitter I got a comment saying it doesn’t work with Ozh Dropdown Admin Menu - I have spent about half an hour looking at it and I can see …

Seven useless pieces of information about me

July 2, 2008 | General

Last week I got tagged by Gnorb. I was going to write something clever about how I normally turn these things down because everyone does it and they’re so passé… but to be honest I’m flattered to even be considered, and I haven’t seen a meme in months - so here goes.

I have to tell you seven random peices of information (that you may not know) about myself.

Before becoming a web designer I studied 3d art at university with a view to becoming a video game artist… but nobody wanted me