Making yesterday seem like tomorrow since 2001.

Franz Ferdinand’s second album won’t have a title, just a different colour scheme from their debut album.

Both albums will be known as ‘Franz Ferdinand’.

CNN.com on how production designer Nathan Crowley built the car for Batman Begins.

Found on Gadgetopia.

Back in 2003, I posted an entry about Google taking snapshots of websites and making them available as cache copies on their own servers. It attracted a few comments from Copydesk readers.

Based on the recent Supreme Court ruling against Grokster, Salon have published an interesting analysis on the implications of the decision and how it could potentially affect everyone from Google to browser makers.

Found on Boing Boing.

The full trailer for King Kong is now available, sponsored by Volkswagen.

Acrylic is a new professional graphics package from Microsoft, currently in beta.

So far, it doesn’t seem to offer anything that’s not already in Photoshop, but it’s an interesting move from MS.

US Supreme Court rules in favour of big media companies in Grokster P2P case.

This is just simply insane.

In Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer pull off a minor miracle with a resurrection of the Batman franchise, largely by surrounding lead man Christian Bale with an ensemble cast of seasoned Hollywood actors, including Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer and Michael Caine in a superb performance as Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred.

There’s even a few notable cameo roles from veteran Shane Rimmer and Rade Serbedzija, whilst Katie Holmes even manages to shake off her Dawson’s Creek shackles as assistant DA Rachel Dawes, to join Bale on the Hollywood A-list.

As with Richard Donner’s original 1978 Superman movie, the formula succeeds because of the performances, but also due to Nolan and Goyer’s finely polished script, which pays much more respect to the original source material than its big budget, lampoonish, and instantly forgettable predecessors.

Focusing on a Batman’s origin for the first half of the movie, the story ramps up the action in a very dark second act when the eponymous hero takes cente stage against the Gotham City mob and a mad psychiatrist, Jonathan Crane (AKA Scarecrow), played with meanacing ease by Cillian Murphy.

The plot loosely bases itself on original comic-book material from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s seminal Batman: Year One and borrows elements from Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson’s Legends of the Dark Knight: Gothic, along with Miller’s groundbreaking Dark Knight Returns.

But it also achieves so much more; evoking scenes from such diverse source material as George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Ian Fleming’s James Bond, whilst generating a genuine element of believability in the depiction of Batman’s sprawling Gotham City, all of which is topped off with a tempered score, fabulous jump-cut action sequences and some genius direction from Nolan.

I wouldn’t want to spoil any of the great moments in the movie for anyone, but I guarantee fans will be thrilled by the end.

I finally got my invite to Odeo today, and it’s quite excellent – expect to hear more about it in the coming months.

If you want to know more about Odeo, this interview with Evan Williams, the guy who created it, might help.