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

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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And its easy too, but there’s a catch. It needs to have bootloader version 5.08, which mine conveniently does. If you have 5.09 or newer, you’re still screwed for now.

Full and idiot-proof instructions on iClarified. Essentially all it does is downgrade the baseband firmware of your iPhone to a version that the existing soft unlock tools work with. It worked perfectly on my O2 iPhone.

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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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 finally cracked and bought myself an iPhone 3G. So far, I love it. Its not the best phone ever, considering its missing some features common to pretty much every other modern mobile phone, but as a mobile internet device and ipod all in one, it wins.

That said, Apple went and changed the charging voltage of the iPod range from 12V in the old ones to 5V in the current ones, meaning my car’s iPod kit will not charge the iPhone. Apparently there’s some kind of adapter out there that will sort it out.

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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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…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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