Feckoff.net

Because it lets me run 64-bit virtual machines on a machine which is running 32-bit Windows, albeit on 64-bit hardware.

/nerd

Check out the new theme! This is “Pixel” by Sam. Also updated to the latest version of Wordpress which broke a couple of plugins. I do like the new dashboard/control panel though.

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I just updated my iPhone to version 3.0. It was quick and painless, although my jailbreak and carrier unlock have been removed by it. Fortunately the iPhone Dev Team crew are promising to release their jailbreak tools for 3.0 tonight, and unlock tools (called Ultrasn0w ) on Friday.

I don’t need the unlock since I’m on an O2 SIM anyway, but its always nice to keep one’s options open… and to use cheap foreign SIM cards when roaming.

I particularly like the new spotlight search, which will search the entire phone (including emails, music tracks, podcasts, contacts, etc) for content matching your keywords. See the screenshot below for example.

Also, some long overdue features that should have been present from day 1, such as MMS messaging and copy & paste finally arrived. Its free it seems to have come with no performance penalty, although I have read about a few people on boards.ie experiencing difficulty performing the upgrade and having to wipe and restore their devices.

I still recommend it. This update is available to iPod Touch users as well but Apple will charge you for it

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Today I hooked my PC up to my nice 32″ HDTV using a DVI-to-HDMI adapter and a HDMI cable. The picture looks wonderful etc. However, there’s a problem. The main reason I did this was to play games like Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 on the big TV rather than my small PC monitor.

The problem is nVidia’s graphics drivers do not support running things in full screen mode on a secondary display. Huh? Wtf? A quick google reveals that people have been complaining about this since at least 2004. The only current solution is to make the TV the primary display before playing games, then change it back (manually) to the monitor when I’m finished gaming. What a pain in the ass.
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Skype for the iPhone and iPod touch was recently released on the Apple AppStore, and it works just fine once you stay on a wifi connection. The app has built-in restrictions to prevent you from making Skype voice calls when on a cellular network, mainly because of Apple’s cosy deals with their various network partners around the world.

Fortunately, clever people have made a way to work around this restriction using a little package called VoIPover3G from Cydia (Cydia is the package manager of choice for jailbroken iphones).

Full instructions are here. VoIPover3G has been updated since that article was written to have Skype support built-in, so you can skip the steps involving editing of the plist file.

On a geeky side note, you can actually run nano directly on the iPhone when you SSH to it rather than copying the file to a computer, editing it there and then copying it back

Skype over 3G on iPhone

That’s the end result – working Skype calls via the mobile operator’s network, charged at data rates! Although if you are on 3, I would have my doubts about it working. They seem to traffic-shape the crap out of VoIP from my experiences with Fring when I was with them.

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You may have noticed a sudden burst of short and poorly formatted posts here. This is because I’ve linked Wordpress with my Twitter account using this Wordpress plugin. Any old shite that I tweet to Twitter is getting crossposted to here for posterity. New posts here also get spammed out to my (very few) Twitter followers also.

I wasn’t particularly bothered with Twitter in the past since they shut down free SMS to Irish numbers, but now that I have the iPhone I’m using Twitterific on it, which is just as good.
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I got the 64-bit Windows 7 beta yesterday and installed it on my main machine which I was planning to rebuild anyway, and I am quite pleased with it. It feels far more like a finished product than any of the Windows Vista beta releases did.

Microsoft’s site took a pounding yesterday and they pulled the beta release until they can organise some more bandwidth to keep things rolling.

I have all my usual stuff (Steam games, iTunes, etc) running very well indeed on it. The beta release is good until August 1st, when it expires.
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Microsoft’s Skydrive service upgraded its free storage from 5GB to 25GB this week as part of Windows Live Wave 3, which is nice. I’m using it as a free online backup of all my digital photos, which currently weigh in at about 13GB. Now, if only my broadband could upload faster than 384 kilobits per second…

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…My PC cooked its processor and was out of commission at the time the full version of Left 4 Dead was released
This did seem to be a good reason to upgrade it though. I got a new motherboard, CPU and 4 gigs of RAM from Komplett and got it all up and running on Thursday evening, then spent much of the weekend slaughtering the zombie horde with friends on Left 4 Dead
The new CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, one of the shiny new 45nm ones that runs much cooler than my older 65nm E6600 that killed itself. I am impressed at the difference in frame rate I’m getting in games on the same graphics card as I had before – it must have been CPU-limited by the old processor.

The game, by the way, is awesome, especially in versus mode where you can play as the zombies. Its having a hard time finding lag-free dedicated servers though. Hopefully Valve will get this fixed.

I’ve also gone and stuck Windows XP SP3 onto my Eee PC after a few months of Ubuntu. Eventually got pissed off with it. I’m actually finding XP much faster on it. The only problem is the fact that the C drive is a measly 4GB (as the Eee’s solid state drive is split into 4GB of fast but expensive flash memory, and 16GB of slow but cheap memory) so some fooling around had to be done to move user profiles and stuff to the larger but slower D drive. Battery life is noticeably better under Windows XP too, mainly down to the availability of Asus’s power saving apps I reckon. All of the ACPI on-screen displays and hot keys and stuff worked without any fucking about. To get that stuff working in Ubuntu was a total headache, involving kernel modules and acpi scripts and what not.

Added bonus: This means I can play Peggle on it, woohoo! Couldn’t get that to work through wine on Ubuntu either.

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