"It never rains but it pours". Yes, despite yesterday's late website of the month post, I'm already posting again. This is the first post in the "film" category - not because I've suddenly decided to start reviewing all of the films I see, but because there is really no other category this post could go in, and it really is worth posting about.

Born of Hope is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Unlike the trilogy, it had a budget of only £25,000, and can be seen for free on the internet (as a fan film, there aren't many other distribution methods available). Personally, I am not a fan of The Lord of the Rings though the trilogy is in my DVD collection. Born of Hope is, in my opinion, well worth seeing - especially considering the price (free), ease (online) and length (just over an hour - nowhere near as long as the trilogy). The budget barely seems to harm the film in any way - a good story, locations, props, costumes and acting combine to make the film enjoyable to an extent that I never thought was possible. The soundtrack is very nice too, although they're still working on getting that into a releasable format. They say that pictures say a thousand words and, at 25 frames per second, this trailer should be able to say far more than I ever can:


The website is here - it has some extra stuff such as video podcasts about how this project happened (it took six years). Feel free to donate too, if you enjoy it.

The website of the month for March 2010 is GraphJam, a collection of funny and (sometimes) true graphs and charts.

In other news, Apple is once again being silly and I apologise for the lateness of this post - I had a group project code completion deadline at noon yesterday and ended up doing a 23-hour final stint.

What is it with HTC and doing triple announcements on Tuesdays? Anyway, today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona they announced three new devices: Desire, Legend and HD mini. The Desire is the "Nexus One with Sense" or "HD2 with Android" that everyone has been waiting for (unsurirpsingly, apparently "all key networks in all key countries" want to sell it). The Legend is an upgrade to the Hero, with an aluminium unibody (unlike the Touch Diamond2, announced at MWC last year, the Legend is more stylish than its predecessor). The HD mini is, as the name implies, a small HD2 - it's the only one of the three to run Windows Mobile (6.5.3, I believe), although I must point out that I have an issue with them still calling it HD (it implies that their "HD" line is more of a design style than anything to do with the screen quality). Anyway, videos of the new devices (and of the HTC Smart) were uploaded today - check them out:

HTC Desire


HTC Legend


HTC HD mini


HTC Smart


In other news, Windows Phone 7 Series (Windows Mobile 7, to those familiar with Windows Mobile) was announced yesterday. It's definitely the change that Microsoft needed (a complete rewrite of the OS and big changes to key concepts), but I'm not sure that I'm a fan - I do want my phone to be a PC to an extent. What do you think?

An interesting series of videos from YouTube is below - they demonstrate various parts of the designing and manufacturing process for the Nexus One (including a rare peek inside HTC's manufacturing facility). Presumably the process is fairly similar for many of HTC's phones.

The website of the month for February 2010 is Airbrushed for change - MyDavidCameron.com - a rather funny website.