Yesterday I saw the new X-Men movie, and I must say off the top, that it may be my favorite X-Men movie to date, and certainly rates as one of the best Marvel movies. Anyway, to the review. And yeah, they’ll be some spoilers). Click the “more” to see the rest.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Another year, another Marvel movie. In this case, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which, as it turns out, is kind of a bad name for the movie (more on that later).
The movie starts out some indeterminate time after the events in The Avengers. S.H.I.E.L.D. (god that’s painful to type) is doing it’s usual S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff, and Captain America is doing his usual do-gooder stuff, head butting between Nick Fury, and the Captain, ensues. The cast is all back, and once again, Black Widow is the side-kick. I’m actually not sure how I feel about her being the side-kick in all these movies, but she seems to pull it off well enough.
While I never read the comics, I can assume Hydra is the ever-present enemy in them, as well as seemingly going to be the enemy in all of these movies, which is fine. Basically, Hydra survived in the usual clandestine way, and has taken over everything we thought was “good”. The Captain must fight back, and quell the new instance.
What is interesting about the title is that, the Captain isn’t the Winter Soldier. The Winter Soldier is the “bad guy” in the movie, who has even less character development than Nero from the 2009 Star Trek. He’s a good villain, but I find it interesting when they give a movie’s subtitle to the name of the baddie. There aren’t a lot of examples of this in motion pictures. “Wrath of Khan”, “Empire Strikes Back”, Bond movies, etc. Not sure what that says about the movie, or the others that use that title formula.
Anyway, the movie was good. The action was pretty well balanced, though at times did seem a bit over-long, but certainly not as long as the climax of Avengers, or Iron Man 2. I’d recommend it, it certainly ranks in the top 5 or 6 of the Marvel movies. It’s enjoyable, and certainly is one of the better sequels.
[xrr rating=4.75/5]
USB Tester 2.0
I have been looking for an easy way to monitor USB voltage and power used by devices, and while there are numerous cheap usb inline adapters to do this, and a few people that just show how to cut a USB cable so you can probe the lines, I thought both of these seemed a bit weak. Then, looking around Tindie.com one day, I found the USB Tester 2.0. It’s a very simple PCB, and some pin headers. The advantage is it provides easy voltage/current monitoring, but also provides an easy way to probe the data lines with a scope. Plus, it isn’t ugly (like a hacked USB cable would be).
I ordered the “kit” on a Friday (along with the Plexiglass base), and it was shipped from California the same day. Somehow USPS opened a wormhole, and I got the kit the next day (Saturday). Assembly was extremely straight forward via the instructions here. Took maybe 5 minutes, at most (including time for the soldering iron to warm up). Initially, I was a bit confused by the pin header holes being a bit offset from each other, but it seems to was done on purpose to hold the pin header in place for soldering, which is awesome.
Anyway, once assembled, the units work as expected. The only problem I’ve seen is that the 4mm “jacks” are a little smaller than 4mm, it seems. My dual banana plugs don’t quite fit fully. I’m actually thinking of installing some real jacks on the unit, so things will fit, but I am not sure they’ll fit very well, or not block the rest of the unit. =/ Hopefully I’ll figure something out, as I’d like to be able to use banana plugs without worrying about ruining the PCB holes.
All and all, very happy with the unit. It does what I wanted it to do, and maybe in the future I’ll buy the OLED “pack” that basically makes the unit self-contained and won’t require a meter.
[xrr rating=4.75/5]