Lazy Robot

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. In order to unlock the iPhone, you need to build a custom IPSW package using PWNtools. This is because QuickPWN only builds a firmware to jailbreak the phone, rather than unlock it. For that, you need to replace to boot loader as well as the firmware. Ick. To build an unlocked boot loader, you need to have a copy of bl46.bin from somewhere. My first experiment in building a custom IPSW with PWN...

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...

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. Seriously, though, I have started using it. The reasons are manifold and complex. Actually, that's a lie, it's very simple. A bunch of people I know also started using it more actively and I joined in. Why does anyone do anything on these social networking type sites? Because other people do. It's as good a reason as any. Although I have started using Twitter more actively, I still use it in a fairly limited way. For instance,...

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! So, while making a mental note that these things might eBay well, I headed to the till. While waiting, I perused the pack to make sure it wasn't going to be crippled in any way. Right on the front was a big star that I'd managed to previously miss, advertising the fact that the new Sugababes album is preloaded in MP3 format. I'm not sure the Sugababes would be pleased to know that their inclusion warranted a 80% price reduction! I found this use of MP3 format very interesting indeed. Sony are no strangers to negative publicity over their DRM policies. In fact, they are ...