Category Archives: Movies

Moving pictures for snappers

At the Movies – 10 years

10th Anniversary, Movies

Nothing new here.

As with books, the movies which most inspire the visual senses were all made a long time ago. The modern obsession with the action/adventure genre, along with attention spans shortened by video games and the like, largely preclude the making of beautiful movies. There’s no money in them and the Hollywood system no longer has time for art house movies.

But go back a few years and choosing just five of the most beautiful movies is not at all easy, for there is so much great work out there especially from the 1960s and 1970s.

In no particular order, then, these are the five which have most stimulated my visual cortex this past decade.

1 – Death in Venice, starring Dirk Bogarde, directed by Luchino Visconti. 1971

Based on Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name, Death in Venice chronicles the last vacation and death of one Gustav von Aschenbach in fin de siècle Venice. Visconti’s work was always rich and lush with Italianate color and from Bogarde, a lightly regarded British comedic heart throb, he coaxed one of the very greatest performance on film. Never less than lovely to look at the movie is a treat for the ear, too, much of it set to the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The movie demands attention and patience, both amply rewarded. I originally saw it on its first run in Mayfair as a young man of 18 and recall well stumbling out into the Belgravia streets simply dazed and overcome with emotion.

2 РStreets of Fire, starring Michael Par̩, directed by Walter Hill. 1984.

You could not find a visual masterpiece as culturally removed from Death in Venice as this rollicking good time. Set seemingly in 1950’s Chicago and filmed almost exclusively at night, the imagery – set to a raucous Ry Cooder rock track – is startling and attention getting. Even the video game generation will get this one. The youngest movie here.

3 – Barry Lyndon, starring Ryan O’Neal, directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1975

This three hour long movie is not for those in a hurry, and visually it remains unsurpassed. Rather forgotten in a Kubrick oeuvre whose admirers prefer ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Shining’, this lushly filmed and costumed period piece is balm for the eyes. If your visual senses matter to you, this is probably the movie to see above all others. If nothing else, Marisa Berenson (the niece of that great Renaissance art expert and charlatan, Bernard Berenson) has never looked lovelier. Handel’s Sarabande dominates the sound track and could not be bettered.

My son, aged 13, had already watched it – all rapt attention – thrice, which tells you something about how you should bring up a kid in today’s world. He will be successful as a result of his attention span, not despite it.

4 – 2001: A Space Odyssey. The star is the English cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1968

In the previous column, one on photography books, I made mention of the adjective ‘breathtaking’ as one which is abused yet remains useful for lovers of good English. And ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is nothing if not breathtaking. It does not hurt that the movie includes simply the most stunning cut in world cinema, the moment when the monkey hurls the bone/weapon victoriously in the air and Kubrick and Unsworth cut to a space station set to Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz. Breathtaking. And if you have never quite understood Varese’s music, this is a good place to start.

5 – Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole, directed by David Lean. 1962.

Jackson Bentley: What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?
T.E. Lawrence: It’s clean.

A rare moment of humor in a film which you should see, if at all possible, in a revival movie theater on a huge Cinemascope screen. I saw it thus twice when it played in the Carnegie Theater in Manhattan, close to my home on 8th Avenue and 56th Street in the mid-1980s and it really is the only way to do it justice. And speaking of great cuts, the one here is in the same class as Kubrick’s money with the femur. Lawrence, showing off his disdain for pain, snuffs out a match with his bare fingers and Lean cuts to the infinite vistas of the desert. That is special and Maurice Jarre’s music is the icing on the cake. One of O’Toole’s earliest movies and one for which he was cruelly denied the Oscar.

If there was ever a more physically perfect leading man than O’Toole, I cannot think of one and it’s lovely to hear him speak in the proper English of my youth, not the grammar school garbage emerging from the mouth of the average English speaker today.

* * * * *

With the exception of Barry Lyndon, made on Kodak film (Kubrick opting for the pastel rendering), all were made in Technicolor. No surprise there. ‘Death in Venice’ comes on an SD DVD only (a so-so print) as does ‘Streets of Fire’ (an excellent print). The others all come in Blu-Ray options and there really is no alternative but to get these.

You can see all my movie reviews here.

Watching a genius at work – Geoffrey Unsworth

Movies

American Art.

Purists and aesthetes would have you believe that Motherwell, Rothko and Pollock are what passes for American Art in the twentieth century.

Utter rot.

Where America’s genius lies in the world of art is in the movies.

And while you could argue that a British cameraman making American movies flouts that rule, the reality is that Geoffrey Unsworth, British cinematographer extraordinaire, could only have worked his magic in the United States, the land of infinite opportunity and imagination. And the land of abundant risk capital.

2001: A Space Odyssey remains Unsworth’s masterpiece, but if you seek a perfect evocation of America between the wars, one of infinite hope and generosity, then Superman is just the ticket.

Just take a look at these images, then watch the original in Blu Ray set to John Williams’s music:

When Superman – the fabulous Christopher Reeve – takes Lois for the flight around Manhattan, the myth is complete:


Is this photography or what?

Technicolor? But of course. British genius? Of course. American capital? Natch. Made in Pinewood Studios, Buckinghamshire.

Watch Superman.

Quadcopter imagery

Movies, Photography

Stunning technology.

Quadcopter technology is becoming both reliable and inexpensive.

Checkout this stunning video of the Niagara Falls:


Click the image for the video.

Be sure to watch it in HD. It’s breathtaking.

The artist used a Phantom Quadcopter (Amazon has it for $479) and a Black Magic Hero3 camera.

The Phantom uses GPS positioning technology and has a maximum yaw velocity of 200 degrees a second, meaning it can spin a full circle in under two seconds. Maximum flight speed is 33 feet/second, meaning 30 mph, and it comes with a microphone.


Click the image for the DJI Phantom site.

The Hero3 camera shoots – wait for it – 4K video, and comes with wifi technology. It can record 12mp still images at 30 frames per second. Check out some of the incredible videos on their home page. Whether mounted on helmets, surfboards, birds or lions (!) the effect is overwhelming. Image stabilized, wifi, 4K definition and $400 at Amazon.


Click the image for the GoPro site.

So $879 gets you technology that cost Stanley Kubrick thousands times that when he made the first Steadicam movie, The Shining. That was in 1980.

Tosca – finalmente mia!

Movies, Photographers

On DVD at last.

One of the enduring mysteries of the operatic world is that Andrea Andermann’s mythical production of Puccini’s Tosca was never transcribed to DVD. I had managed to copy my much worn VHS tape to a hard disk a few years ago but it was never a very satisfactory solution. The intrusive sub-titles could not be removed, the quality was not the greatest but there was no alternative.

If you have a child you wish to introduce to the seemingly forbidding world of Italian grand opera, there is no better place to start than with Puccini’s Tosca. It’s short, colorful, intensely dramatic, has clearly defined heroes and villains, involves torture, murder and execution – in fact just what the doctor ordered for any little boy! And the girls will revel in the beauty and vulnerability of the heroine and her surroundings.

Now, finally, the Tosca is available on DVD from Kultur.com and in Blu-Ray at that. My copy came from Amazon in standard definition, where it was packaged along with Manon Lescaut and La Fanciulla del West in a Placido Domingo album. The image quality on the DVD copy is decent, not breathtaking, you see the occasional jaggies in fast motion shots, but anything beats that old VHS transcription, and the sound is splendid. The aspect ratio is sadly 4:3, as were TVs of the time. Surely an unadulterated widescreen original exists somewhere in the vaults? By the way, there is no indication that the Blu-Ray version has been remastered, so I would not spend the extra over the standard definition DVD. Optional subtitles are in English, French, Italian and German, though why anyone would want to despoil the beauty of Italian by translation to brute German is quite beyond me. The language of command does not well suit that of love.


Giacomo Puccini.

For readers new to the opera, the plot could not be simpler. Set in 1800, Mario Cavaradossi is a revolutionary painter with Napoleonic republican ideals, in love with the actress Floria Tosca. Tosca is as beautiful as she is jealous of his association with the Marchesa Attavanti, whose portrait Cavaradossi is rendering in a wall fresco of the Catherdal of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome. The police chief Baron Scarpia wants to capture another revolutionary recently escaped from gaol, Cesare Angelotti, Attavanti’s brother, and believes he can get to him through Cavaradossi, a known associate. Scarpia tortures Cavardossi to get at Angelotti’s whereabouts but promises Tosca he will desist if she sleeps with him. She agrees but not until she has secured a release for Cavaradossi, which Scarpia pens right before she stabs him to death. Believing that Scarpia has ordered the use of dummy rounds at Cavaradossi’s execution by firing squad, she turns up for the ceremony and tells Cavaradossi, her lover, that all is well. But Scarpia has double crossed Tosca and real ammunition is used. Mario dies, and Tosca commits suicide.


The original libretto. The first performance was in 1900.

At first you might think the artifice of staging in this production – the opera is performed in the original locations at the original times – is but a gimmick. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only are the settings – the cathedral of Sant’Andrea della Valle, the police chief’s Palazzo Farnese headquarters and the prison of Castel Sant’Angelo – breathtaking, the great Vittorio Storaro does for the cinematography here what he did for Coppola in Apocalypse Now. Words cannot do either production justice.


Vittorio Storaro.

The complexity of filming the opera live and hiding all the gear is no less remarkable. Everything is done right here. Nothing seems forced or rushed and the technology is mercifully nowhere to be seen outside the brief opening clips to each of the three acts.

So now you have the greatest cinematographer of our time, a more than competent conductor in Zubin Mehta, and the original settings made available to you, what do you do? Why, get the three greatest opera singers of the time and give them their heads. But describing Catherine Malfitano, Placido Domingo and Ruggero Raimondi as opera singers does not begin to do them justice.


Placido Domingo.

Clint Eastwood should be relieved that the Oscars are limited to movies. His ‘Unforgiven’ pretty much swept the board in 1992, when this version of Tosca was first released. His Best Director award would have gone to Gianfranco de Bosio, Best Actor to Raimondi (his voice unforgettably choked with lust at the moment he thinks he can finally possess Tosca, his body language saying everything about power and its abuse) and Best Picture to Tosca. And much as I admire Emma Thompson and her well deserved Best Actress award that year, no one, but no one, could hold a candle to Catherine Malfitano’s Tosca.


Catherine Malfitano. A woman possessed.

The finest acting performances are without exception those where the actor subsumes the role, living it as one. Until 1992 that honor belonged to Dirk Bogarde in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (still not out in Blu-Ray – what is it with these people?). His subsequent nervous breakdown and absence from the studios for an extended period testify to the fact that no acting was involved. Bogarde was Gustav von Aschenbach.

And in no lesser a way, Malfitano is Floria Tosca.

It’s not enough to have a superb soprano voice, be one of the great beauties of our time, and have the ability to render seemingly dozens of facial expressions in seconds. You must also be able to act and her performance would head an Oscar sweep if one was but possible. It is as exhausting to watch for her passion and intensity as it must have been to perform. By the time of the final act, at 6am in Rome, as Cavaradossi (Domingo) goes to the firing squad atop Castel Sant’Angelo, Malfitano is a complete wreck. It is written all over her face and body. She has lived a decade in the past 24 hours and now stands at the moment of triumph, only to have all her hopes and dreams shattered in the closing moments of the opera. You will gasp, shout, cry, exult, rejoice, despair and generally end up in her state by the time the opera ends when she leaps to her death from Castel Sant’Angelo to the Roman street below. Exhausting, and there is not anything remotely like it in the movies.


Ruggero Raimondi.

What about those locations? I have a special affinity for them as my mum, The Countess, spent a couple of joyous years – 1937-8 – living a stone’s throw away. (She would spend the following five under Nazi occupation in her native Poland, while discovering that titles are generally not worth the parchment they are written on). Educated in the romance languages and the arts, it was a short walk from her Roman pensione to the 16th century Sant’Andrea della Valle, built at the very height of the Renaissance. It was her local Church. Receiving Communion there one Sunday, her purse was stolen by a fellow communicant at the altar rail. She used to love telling that story as much as I enjoyed hearing it, all forgiven in our shared love of things Italian.

Palazzo Farnese, the French Embassy to this day, is another Renaissance masterpiece, its architects including that painter of ceilings who went on to work down the road in the Sistine Chapel. And Castel Sant’Angelo, the cylindrical prison with impenetrable walls and a shooting gallery on the roof dates back almost two thousand years to Hadrian, offering refuge to more than one Pope over the centuries. Quite where the angels come into the naming of a prison is hard to fathom, and pretty it is not, but like all these things it’s intended as a monument to the power of the state.

The way The Countess would reminisce of those days included many tales of the lecherous Italians and their bottom pinching ways, despite the presence of her chaperone at all times. She was 23 at the time and history confirms she had more money than fiscal sense. The Germans saw to the former and, much later, I provided the latter. She did me the great good favor of introducing me to opera, if little else.

Throughout Tosca Puccini’s music soars, exults, revolts, sings, weeps and generally tells you why this is the most enduring opera ever. There are no longueurs, no moments where you wish you were elsewhere, no nodding off, no waiting for the intermission. Why, there is not even an overture. The whole thing is under two hours in length, suited to modern movie attention spans.

Here are some favorite images from the production:


Tosca enters Sant’Andrea della Valle.


In passionate love, Tosca and Cavaradossi share a duet. Quite how one survives 100 decibels
of Placido Domingo eight inches distant from your ears is a mystery to me.


The beautiful actress gives the performance of a lifetime. Here she is, wonderfully lit
and photographed, beneath the platform on which Cavaradossi is painting the fresco.


Tosca chides Cavaradossi who is painting the Attavanti chapel portrait of the eponymous blonde.
“But make her eyes dark, Mario”. Italy has long excelled at combining sacred and secular art.


Scarpia’s first appearance. Raimondi has overwhelming stage presence – check the obsequious
Spoletta, his sidekick, on his right shoulder. The composition would make Raphael proud.


The cruel police chief, Scarpia, offers freedom for Cavaradossi in exchange for sexual favors. Just
look at the cinematography and Raimondi’s body language. Police brutality has been all downhill since.


Palazzo Farnese: Vittorio Storaro renders Malfitano in the
light of Caravaggio, as Tosca agonizes over Mario’s fate.


“Vissi D’Arte, vissi d’Amore”. I have lived for art, I have lived for love.
Malfitano soliloquizes over her fate as Scarpia tortures Cavaradossi.


“E lucevan e stelle”. And the stars were shining. Atop Castel Sant’Angelo, Cavaradossi
prepares for the firing squad, St. Peter’s in the background.


But 1,000 yards from St. Peter’s.


Cavaradossi wonders how Tosca’s delicate hands could be the same which wielded the weapon used
to kill Scarpia just hours ago. Malfitano is simply in a state of emotional ecstasy here.
You will not see the likes of this anywhere.

It matters not whether you like opera or Italian singing. Tosca is an orgy for the emotions and the eyes and should be in your collection.

A note on alternatives: There is one other video performance worthy of attention. Forget the one with Anna Gheorgiu, Roberto Alagna and Ruggero Raimondi (again). The production is such a mess, with pretentious cutting between set and studio, it’s impossible to watch, despite Gheorghiu’s decent, if overrated voice.

The one to seek out has the spinto soprano Raina Kabaivanska, a porcelain beauty, joined by a fascinating Scarpia in the shape of Sherrill Milnes and Placido Domingo again reprising his role as Cavaradossi. On purely technical grounds, Kaibaivanska has it over the dramatic soprano of Malfitano, spinto meaning a high set voice with an extended range of great beauty. I never cease to wonder how so delicate a body can produce such a big sound. But what Kabaivanska – whom I adore – lacks, is Latin passion, something Malfitano has in abundance. The American baritone Sherrill Milnes has great presence as Scarpia, in no small part thanks to his sheer bigness, and a sonorous voice. He uses a great range of expressions from playful to evil but the problem is that he is just too young to have the gravitas of Raimondi in the Andermann production. Don’t let that put you off, as the performances here have a lot to offer. Interestingly, the opera starts with an extensive long shot of Angelotti escaping from Castel Sant’Angelo to hide out in Sant’Andrea della Valle – Google Maps has it as a sixteen minute walk, so I imagine Angelotti got it down to under ten!

Ripping Blu-Ray DVDs

Hackintosh, Movies

Easy.

When I added Blu-Ray capability to the HackMini, it was solely with the intention of using the enhanced reader/burner to play back a handful of Blu-Ray discs. However, the convenience of rapid access to discs stored on hard disk drives nagged at me so I though I would do some testing to see what is involved in ripping Blu-Ray DVDs and storing the results on HDDs.

Most Blu-Ray discs are encrypted so a competent and current ripping application is called for. After wading through the usual collection of suspects – all seemingly from the same maker with just the names changed, and with questionable output quality – I settled on MakeMKV. OK, not the greatest product name in the history of technology, but it works well.


Click the image to go to the download page.

The author appears to keep the product current and there’s a useful Forum where issues are discussed. There’s even a Windows version for true masochists. Windows 8 appears not to be supported, but I can only think that is a feature rather than a limitation. The application expires after 60 days but a fresh download renews it. The purchase price is $50 and it’s worth every penny and is just reward for the developer’s sterling work.

The process is very simple. Insert the Blu-Ray DVD, fire up MakeMKV and direct the output to a destination of your choice. My first rip took 51 minutes and delivered some 46GB of output spread over many files and directories. Most of this is junk which can be discarded – extras, advertisements, menus, etc. All that needs be done is for the one big file to be retained. After a few rips I have found that file – it resides in the ‘BDMV/STREAM’ sub-directory – is typically some 28GB in size. (See ‘Selective Ripping’, below). The file is renamed, moved to the destination of choice and all the remaining 18GB of junk can be erased. Remember to go to Finder->Delete Trash to free up the related disk space. For comparison, a regular DVD delivers a file of 4-7GB and takes 10-14 minutes to rip. For reference, the HackMini uses a Gigabyte H67M-D2-B3 motherboard, an Intel i3 SandyBridge CPU and a modest nVidia GT430 graphics card. RAM is a slim 8GB of 1333MHz speed.

The ripping process creates little thermal stress for the HackMini. The usual CPU temperature of 88F rises to 104F during a rip, and the CPU cooler is the stock (and not very good – though it is very quiet) one which ships with Intel’s CPUs. With a service limit of 176F it’s not like anything untoward is about to happen to the CPU here.


MakeMKV at work, ripping the key file from a Blu-Ray DVD. The total download
time is overstated here, typically falling to ~51 minutes through conclusion.

The ripped file needs no further conversion if played using the applications mentioned below on a Mac. If the destination is an iPad or iPhone, then Handbrake can be used to convert the file but why anyone would waste their time ripping Blu-Ray movies for viewing on those small displays is beyond me.

On my first attempt I placed that file on my external Mediasonic box which is connected to the HackMini using an USB2 cable. There are at least two players which can play the ripped file – the latest version of VLC (free) and the inexpensive Mac Blu-Ray Player which currently sells for $40. Unfortunately, playback was not good, with some stuttering using VLC and heavy stuttering with Mac Blu-Ray Player. I guessed the issue lay with the slow data transfer speed over USB2, and relocated the file to one of the internal drives in the HackMini, a small 2.5″ spinning disc, 5400rpm SATA 2 3GB/s notebook drive. Perfect. The movie played back without hesitation and the sound was excellent. All the various language sound tracks, together with the director’s voice over track were available, as were all the various subtitle features, all seeming embedded in this one file. Nice.

However, the boot and backup drives in the HackMini are very small so this is not a long-term solution. Accordingly, I zipped over to Amazon and bought one 4TB 7200rpm, SATA3 6GB/s HDD, for all of $175. Whether you buy 2TB, 3TB or 4TB, storage cost is the same at approximately $45/TB.


Seagate 4TB HDD.

The HackMini uses a largish SilverStone enclosure which has capacity for two internal full-sized HDDs (four will fit at a push) in addition to the two notebook drives for OS X and OS X backup. It was a moment’s work to install the 4TB whopper which, at say 30GB per Blu-Ray movie, will store some 130 movies at a storage cost of $1.35 per movie. Given that I only buy Blu-Ray movies of all time classics, such as those mentioned here, meaning very few, the ability to store 130 movies on the internal drive should last for ages. By the time that HDD is full I suppose we will have 8TB HDDs available for under $100!


SMARTReporter confirms that all is well with the Seagate 4TB Internal HDD.

For reference, I did test the 4TB Seagate drive in the external Mediasonic box and it was both recognized and quickly formatted using Mac OS X’s Disk Utility. Currently my Mediasonic boxes use 3TB HDDs, so it’s nice to know that they will work fine with larger sizes. Each holds four drives.

Back-up? No biggie. I’ll just keep the Blu-Ray original DVDs in the cardboard box in the corner of the garage which the black beetles call home.

Video and audio quality? Identical in every way to the original Blu-Ray DVDs viewed on my 1080p 55″ LCD TV.

If you are not a Hackintosh user, preferring to use something like a MacMini, I would expect that an external HDD enclosure connected to the MacMini using USB3 should provide adequate data feed rates to avoid stuttering, but I have not tested this. Mac users will also have to add an external Blu-Ray reader as no Mac ever made comes with one. For those few very special movies – the newly remastered The Godfather I/II/III and Lawrence of Arabia are stunning showpieces for this technology – it’s worth it. Those movies may be 40-50 years old but they don’t make them like that any more.

Meanwhile, the HackMini has gradually grown to become a powerful home theater PC. Having started life with the sole purpose of routing ripped DVD content from hard drives to the TV, it now rips and stores Blu-Ray DVDs, and acts as a conduit for some 24TB of movies with one mouse click via the splendid DVDpedia application, relays streaming Netflix and Amazon VOD, fronts for the BBC’s no less splendid iPlayer, plays iTunes music and, why, it can even purchase ridiculously overpriced movies from Apple, all controlled with an RF Microsoft mouse, which is superior in every way to any Bluetooth device. Best of all, it comes with faultless voice control whereby I simply turn to my son: “Winston, fire up ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, the Blu-Ray version if you don’t mind”. By comparison ask Siri to do that and you will likely get driving instructions to Bangladesh. If you want the optimal price/performance configuration for a modern build (the HackMini has some now discontinued components) drop me a line and I will be pleased to help. If you are a movie buff, I strongly encourage you to build one. Assembly borders on the trivial and the software hacking is now very easy with the latest free tools available from the Hackintosh community. Today’s construction cost for a HackMini with a single SSD boot/OS drive is little over $500 and no separate graphics card is needed, owing to the excellent HD4000 integrated GPU which comes with the current IvyBridge i3 CPU, more than capable for the intended use.

Waiting for Haswell: I asked ace Hack builder, the pseudonymous FU Steve, to add a few words on Intel’s upcoming Haswell line of CPUs. What follows was written by him.

“Intel’s current IvyBridge CPUs (i3/i5/i7) are about to be replaced with the 2013 Haswell variants. The significant changes are lower power consumption, good for mobile users, and the integrated HD4600 GPU which updates the already pretty competent HD4000 in the IvyBridge line. The i5 ($195) and i7 (starts at $300) Haswell CPUs will be out first with the i3 ($130?) to follow in the summer. While the performance of the existing integrated HD4000 GPU in IvyBridge is more than adequate for a home theater PC (and for Photoshop/Lightroom use) like the HackMini, it makes sense to wait for the Haswell i3 version. Unlike IvyBridge, which uses the same LGA1155 CPU motherboard socket as its SandyBridge predecessor, Haswell has yet again changed to a new socket (LGA1150) dictating a new motherboard, so it makes sense to wait for both if you can. The bottom line is that no longer will Hack builders have to spend money on a separate GPU card, thus saving $100-250. Only hard core gamers will need to make the additional outlay, where premium graphics performance is required for the most demanding games.”

Thank you, FU.

Update: Selective Ripping

After posting a question on the MakeMKV forum an expert replied that clicking the disk icon in MKV would make selective ripping available – someting unclear from the instructions:


Click the disc icon.

On doing so you are presented with selections, one of which is the equivalent of ‘rip main movie only’ common in other ripping apps.

Select the main movie (if there are two, the larger is likely the one with the director’s commentary, as here – avoid):

And off you go – saving 7 minutes per rip and having all chapters arranged into one file for you in those few cases where the DVD maker has tried to obfuscate issues by spreading the big movie file over several smaller non-contiguous ones. Not that uncommon.

If MakeMKV cannot decide which files to join for the main feature, read the above linked post, go to AVSforum for the file names to join, rip the full DVD then join those files into one using Mkvtoolnix.