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.

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!

Update Now it has decided to randomly erase everything when I rebooted it. Avoid this piece of tat at all costs and buy one of the Maxtor home NAS devices.

I got a 500GB Iomega Home NAS device a while ago simply because it was cheap. I needed a bit of networked storage so I could share things no matter which of my machines I was using, and it seemed to fit the bill.

Unfortunately, it sucks. Royally. Mangled SMB packets, random destruction of the domain, all manner of badness. Then I happened across a nugget of information. The firmware it ships with (K104.W11) is just rubbish, and the latest update (K108.W15) is even worse. However, an older firmware (K102.W11) is much, much more stable. Go figure.

Officially you can't get the older firmware any more. But unofficially, you can if you know where to look. So if you're having trouble with your Iomega Home NAS being crap, try reflashing it with this:

http://download.iomega.com/english/storcenter_home_fimrware-k102w11.bin

The misspelling of "fimrware" is deliberate, just so you don't think to try and correct the link. Anyway, it might make all your woes go away. It does say that it makes it incompatible with OS X leopard, but I'm not sure how that's the case if it's just using standard SMB. I think it's the automagical device discovery tool that's not Leopard aware, but the OS already comes with the findsmb command which does exactly the same thing. Suck it and see. It's dead easy to reflash with the latest firmware if necessary anyway.

So I've spent a couple of weeks with my shiny new toy, the Samsumg F480 Tocco, so it's time to write a little review of it. I have to say that I'm very pleased with it, and would gladly recommend it to, well, anyone. The touchscreen interface might be a little too alien for some, but for anyone reasonably mobile-savvy it should present no issues at all.

Of course, it's going to end up getting compared to the iPhone a lot. It looks just like it to the untrained eye. It's actually slightly smaller than the iPhone, and the iPhone users who've seen it have commented that it's a much better size. Oh, and it comes with an optional faux-leather flip-front which is very effective and looks pretty good, too.

Those of you who remember the bad old days will know that getting freebies out of mobile companies was a worthwhile, though arduous task. Free upgrades, price reductions and other goodies could be had if you were able to withstand the tiring process of pretending to want a PAC to bugger off to pastures new.

More recently, the phone companies changed their tactic. You could phone up and request a PAC, but rather than offer you goodies to stick around, they'd just give you one. You then had a choice; let it expire, or use it to try and find a decent deal in a harsh marketplace.

Thankfully, yesterday Orange proved that the tides is changing once again. They called me, out of the blue, and said that my contract expires in 2 months. They offered me, right there and then, a free upgrade to any handset I chose and a substantially better value tariff. So I did. The fact is, I didn't actually want to leave Orange this time because they are, in my opinion, the best operator at the moment. However, they didn't know that, and I'm more than happy to let them ply me with free stuff to keep my custom.

So taking advantage of this generosity, I chose the new Samsung F480 Tocco, their new iPhone-alike with more features than you can shake a stick at. I was a bit dubious, a fan as I am of simplistic devices that do exactly what I need and no more. The X820 has been an absolute dream in that respect, being both completely reliable and having a very good feature set. So here I am branching out toward the world of shiny things without keypads.

Another reason I stick with Orange: they deliver promptly, and when they say they will. Unlike, say, O2, or T-Mobile. My new shiny device arrived promptly the morning after the night before, right on my desk where I could play nicely with it. I mean, where I could get on with my work and leave it until lunchtime ... *ahem* ...

So initial impressions, then. Excellent. I was worried about build quality, but no problems there. I was worried about touch screen sensitivity, and no problems there. I was worried about typing directly on to a touch screen, but again, no problems at all. The new "haptic response" system (i.e. a little buzz when it detects a click) means you get definite tactile feedback from the touch screen, which is both novel, and an amazing boost to usability.

Feature-wise I'm not very demanding of a phone, but I know what I like and I know what I don't. The T9 system is good, the touchscreen is just responsive enough, and the menus are logically laid out. The only complaint I can find so far is that the scrolling is upside down. The iPhone gets it right; move your finger down, and the screen scrolls down. The Tocco goes the other way and acts as if you're dragging a scroll bar, and it doesn't always realise that you're not clicking on the items you're dragging over. Still, it works well enough after a couple of minutes.

I'll use the phone for a bit and probably stick up a more detailed field report later. Until then, hooray for toys!

I've just finished rewriting my MegaHAL/Irssi script to be a lot cleaner and a lot easier to configure. You can get it from the MegaHAL/Irssi page.

New features include:

• Configurable using standard Irssi /set commands instead of hacking the script
• Supports changing nick without hacking the script
• Generally requires less hacking of the script ...

So, erm, yes. Enjoy!

One of the joys of IRC is the opportunity to write scripts, bots and toys that are not only entirely pointless, but also sometimes quite profane. A little AI script I knocked up to integrate MegaHAL with Irssi has gone through a number of lobotamies and now has the number of every regular member of the channel in which it is resident. Those members know who they are and what the bot in question thinks of them ...

Anyway, I put the script on my Irssi script page and it seems to be quite popular. Unfortunately, I hacked the AI::MegaHAL module from CPAN, installed only half the standard MegaHAL 9.1.1 distribution and generally made what can only be described as a one-of-a-kind bot. However, I decided to make it right, and the script now has some ... installation instructions!

So if you run Irssi and want to use an AI to provide fun and games in channel, or just to talk for you when you're too lazy even to spod, then grab the script and instructions from my megahal_irssi.pl page, install it, and have lots of fun.

To make the Phillips DVP5960, my latest toy, ignore region encoding, simply follow these steps:

1. Turn the player on and open the tray
2. Press "Setup" on the remote
3. Go right until you get to the "Preferences" page
4. Enter 138931 using the remote. The region code will appear
5. Use the up and down buttons to select region, or 0 for region free
6. Press "Setup" then "OK" on the remote

That should be it. Thanks to everyone whose comments appear on the Google results page for the search terms "phillips dvp5960 region hack"!

Some of you may remember that I bought an Onn SW2411A-DivX 3 months ago from Asda. At the time I was very impressed with the machine for the price, and have used it for watching both DVD and DivX content throughout Christmas. Well, it seems that these cheap gadgets come at a price; a 3 month lifespan. Last week I found that it had stopped reading disks properly. It could take 4 or 5 attempts before it would even spin a disk up, never mind read the content.

Back to Asda we go, then, and get a credit note to the tune of the 30 quid we paid for it. Using this and a little cash injection, it has now been replaced with a Phillips DVP5960 unit. This has basically the same feature set as the Onn with an extra 20 quid on top. However, for that 20 quid you're getting a named brand and a far more polished product. The strange hanging that plagues the Onn from day 1, the intermittent USB connectivity and other little glitches are absent. Indeed, the DVP5960 and its predecessors have had excellent reviews on many technology sites.

Now, I do know that many people come here looking for region hacks for the Onn machine. The funny part is that it doesn't need any. However, if that's why you're here, I would recommend you go with the Phillips machine. It costs a bit more, but I'm already impressed enough to recommend it over the Onn model. If something goes bad down the line I'll be sure to blog about it.

Yes, another new keyboard. This time it's an Apple Aluminium keyboard from the new iMac line. The basic reasoning behind this purchase is because I have wrecked the knuckles of my right hand in a fight with a door and a pane of glass, so I can't bend my middle or index fingers. This means that traditional keyboards cause a problem due to their long key travel, but notebook keyboards are fine. The new Apple aluminium keyboard is almost identical to the 'chiclet' design of the MacBook, so is very much like a notebook keyboard writ large.