Hey there folks, this is it, this is the big day, this is the beginning of the end! Or at least that’s what you may think! Yes the time has come that I have officially opened up the “Inverted Hourglass Shop” basically if you click the new link in the menu bar at the top of this page you will be taken to the wonders of the “aStore” which is basically just a place where you can buy items from amazon.co.uk or scroll further down the page for the US version! All this is is a way for me to share things that I genuinely think are good or things that I think you may like, I won’t ever put anything I don’t like in there! All the items you buy are bought from the usual amazon sources and the price you pay through here is the same as the normal site, the only difference is that if I am lucky amazon will give me a few pennies and as I have said before maybe one day I will be able to make as much as 40p a week! All I am attempting to do is cover the basic costs of running the site, like domain registration and web hosting so let’s see how it goes!

    Right now though, lets get some more Random Reviews under our belts!..

Banksy: Wall and Piece

    When I think about graffiti I can’t help but think of a rough looking street where somebody has scrawled swear words on a wall or some other such stereotypical idea! Banksy however is an amazing artist! He is a graffiti artist, if you believe such a term is not a contradiction. He does all kinds of stencil based artwork along with sculptures and fake museum exhibits, a lot of which have a strong political or social statement to make. There are all manner of different things he uses to really baffle you sometimes, the book is over 200 pages a  most of which are colour photos of his work. It is almost unbelievable to see some of his creations such as the works he created on the segregation wall in Palestine. They are incredible on three counts at least, firstly the sheer size of them, secondly the danger he must have been in to create them and thirdly because they are actually beautiful. There are so many different things in this book it would be pointless and destructive to the enjoyment of the reader to try and list them all.

    I don’t want to sound like I am spewing out the type of rubbish that a professional critic might say about a book but this is really: Humourus, thought provoking, entertaining, moorish, intelligent and is likely to have at least on thing that makes you smile or think in it!

The War of the Worlds, By H. G. Wells

    This really is a great book. I will open this by saying that it is only a short story at 180 pages long which means you won’t have to invest a huge amount of time compared to some of the thousand page plus stories we could talk about! On that low risk basis it is certainly worth a read. The story is written from the point of view of one of the survivors of the Martian invasion of earth. What he saw and what happened across southern England. He tells us about how he travelled across the countryside through various towns and areas of London. This book was written and set all the way back in the 1890’s so it is really interesting to see how alien technology was envisioned by Well’s based on the old mechanical technology that was cutting edge back then in the real world.

    As mentioned it is only a short story, but that is one of the reasons that it is so good. It is focused and doesn’t wander off, everything is related to the narrating character, so you are never really thinking “get on with it” but you are always wanting to find out what happens, if that makes sense.

    As always with these reviews I don’t want to say to much because I don’t want to be responsible for spoiling anything, lets just say that there are some really fascinating ideas of what might happen during an alien invasion written among these pages! I really do recommend this and don’t think that anybody could not be at least entertained by it if not engrossed. Definitely worth a look.

Flip Mino HD Video Camera

    In a break from tradition here is a little review of an absolutely brilliant piece of equipment. The Flip Mino HD has changed the way I think about filming. It is a 720p HD recording camera that still manages to be incredibly small, somewhere in the region of maybe smaller than todays smartphones. I take this almost everywhere with me and it has stood up to a good bit of punishment. The video quality is amazing, it has built in storage for about an hours worth of footage and a battery that lasts for a good few hours from my experience. The usb connecter is built in as well so there are no wires for connecting it to your computer, the internal battery is also charged via usb.

    The only downside to this that I have personally found is the fact that the screen is built in the back of the unit means that for doing some talking to camera filming you can’t actually see yourself like you would with a swivel screen camera, this is only a minor gripe though and I really can’t stress enough how handy, useful and excellent quality this camera is! The files it produces are all easily available on the macbook that I use for editing, either though the built in software, iPhoto, or dragging and dropping from the file system, iWeb and Final Cut Express both have no problems with the files either. An awesome camcorder, I wish that they had been around a lot longer so my old videos could have looked as good as the new ones!

    I will be posting a video review here within the next 24 hours so check back for that, for now this is a basic sample of what the video recording quality is like: