So I just got back from seeing Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, and having read various reviews from serious film-lovers and SF fans, I really didn't know what to expect. After all the anti-hype, I hoped it wasn't as bad as all the reviews made it out to be.

But do you know what? I really enjoyed it. Yes, sure, it was absolutely ridiculous. The storyline was present, sort of, and there was a lot of very silly slapstick moments throughout the film, but none of that is really a criticism. If you were hoping that the Transformers franchise would be turned into a serious, epic SF story arc with poignancy and emotion, then you will definitely be disappointed. If you were hoping that it would be a comedy action flick with lots of things blowing up and big robots fighting a lot, then you are most certainly in for a treat!

There's not a lot else I can say about it really. It was a good film insofar as it was very entertaining. If that's not the point of such things, then I await to be enlightened.

Good news! If you are fortunate enough to own an iPhone 2G, and have unlocked it to any network using my previous instructions ...

the OS 3.0 upgrade will present no problems at all!

Just let iTunes do its thing and upgrade the phone. The baseband on the 2G remains untouched, as does the bootloader. It's all good.

Last weekend, the company that host this blog (4Uhosting) had a major meltdown, along with several other companies using the same datacentre. The UKGrid Greenheys DC had a major power outage, taking out many servers entirely and effectively causing many hosts to drop off the 'net completely.

A news update on the support page at 4uhosting.co.uk had the following to say:

"We would like to make it very clear that this incident occured through no fault of ours. It could happen at any facility at any time. We rent floor space in UK datacentres to run our business and we do not expect this kind of thing to happen. Unfortunately, from time to time it does and we can neither predict, or prevent such problems."

So I finally joined the 21st century, boosted my Apple nerd cred, and got a funky phone to boot. An iPhone is now in my posession! So far so good, except for one small problem - I have 12 months left on my Orange contract and I don't really want to pay all that off now just to get an O2 contract. I need a way to get the iPhone to work with my Orange SIM.

Enter ... QuickPWN and PWNTools! These two excellent apps allow you to unlock and jailbreak your iPhone in style and comfort. It's not as straightforward as just following the instructions, though, so allow me to elaborate a bit.

For some reason, several places on the web with streaming video (e.g. ITV player) have gone with Microsoft's Silverlight for the interface. I have no idea what Silverlight is like as a platform, but I do know that it's a really bad choice for streaming video.

The main problem I have with it is that, on a 6MB/s ADSL connection, I get skip free performance from the likes of youtube and the BBC iplayer. Silverlight players, not so much. 0% left in the buffer every 30 seconds or so for even small videos, and there is no apparent way to change the buffer settings.

If anyone knows how I can make Silverlight less crappy, please to be posting comments!

Being the Luddite I am, I have thus far shunned the idea of having a television in my flat. I really couldn't see the point, given that I have plenty of other things to entertain me, and the fact that there is seldom anything on. Anything I do watch I do so on DVD, iPlayer, or *ahem* handy, handy torrents.

However, I do have two children who like to watch the these things, and it is much nicer to watch DVDs on a decent sized screen than on my 13.3" MacBook. I have previously used a projector for such purposes, but it's a faff to set up (don't have anywhere permanent to mount it) and in recent months the picture has turned increasingly yellow.

So, I had a plan. Don't get a telly. Get a decent monitor instead. A nice TFT monitor would let me do all the things I currently do on a much better display. Genius. And that's exactly what I was going to do, until I saw a UMC 21.6" TV in Tesco for very little cash.

I went over to my local Tesco (all of half a mile from the flat) and picked one up last night, and was immediately impressed. Everything just worked out of the box, and it has an impressive array of connectors. There's the usual SCART and component inputs, as well as HDMI for HD content and a VGA connector. This last addition is what swayed me. For £170, I got a 1080p HD television that doubles up as a 1920x1080 monitor for plugging the laptop into.

It's quite an impressive little thing, for the money. The interface is clean, easy to use, easy to read and responds quickly to user inputs. It does everything you could want of a TV, and the built in Freeview tuner picks up a suitable amount of channels. The 1000:1 contrast ratio is very nice, producing a clean, crisp and vivid picture even when using my grotty low-bitrate AVIs I have acquired from the internet.

The only problem, really, is that there's still nothing on!

Some many moons ago now, I had a little rant about a new scourge on the internets ... the beast that is Twitter. In it, I said that I can understand the draw of social messaging (I use IRC and IM, so the concept is not alien to me) but that I can't understand the point of sending out details of the minutiae of your life to complete strangers. However, a long time has passed since I wrote that post, so I thought it time to revisit. Why? Well, simply because I've been actively using Twitter for a while now. Yes, I have been sucked in. Bugger.

This is just a quick post to remind myself how to do this, because for some reason I keep forgetting ... It might come in handy for others though!

If you're installing the VirtualBox Guest Addition on a Linux guest, you might have problems with display resizing, mouse capture, and complete breakage if you upgrade your kernel. This is easily fixed. Just installed DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) before running the VBoxLinux*.sh script for your architecture.

This handily enables automatic recompilation of the VirtualBox kernel modules if you change your kernel, and in my case, also actually makes them work in the first place. Double win! Hope this helps somebody. If not, it can just be a post to jog my memory in the future.

Today I decided to buy a new USB flash drive, seeing as I appear to have lost my old Kingston DataTraveler II down the back of a sofa somewhere. I figured I'd probably end up paying about a tenner, although most non-specialist shops sell them for about 20 quid or so. Imagine my surprise, then, when I checked the Boots photo centre and they had 4GB Sony MicroVault drives reduced from £24.99 to £4.99!

It's that time of year again! The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is behind us, and the season of frosty mornings and cosy evenings has arrived. And with that, it appears that some sort of festive trimmings are in order.

I don't have a lot of room for such things, so what room I have has to be made the most of. To this end, I have possibly the tiniest little Christmas tree I've ever seen! It's a real tree, and apparently it can grow up to a whopping 3 feet over a 10 year period. At the moment, it's a mere 10" tall so sits quite nicely amongst my other token attempts at greenery.

I've dressed it up with a bit of ribbon and a paper chain. The paper chain was, of course, made by yours truly. It was a tad fiddly, and the fiddliness of that made me realise that making baubles for the thing out of beads was perhaps too much for my fat fingers.

Incidentally, the penguin was a gift from my mother. He certainly brightens the place up a bit!