It wasn’t long before I accidentally region locked my laptop drive to region 1. In South Africa where I live the official DVD region is region 2 however sometimes if you want to watch something that is not easily available your only option is to watch other regions.

To cut to the chase I have tried many paid for software options to fool my computer into believing that the DVD-ROM has not been region locked. They are all pretty cool, except that you have to pay for them and often they are full of bloat and unnecessary rubbish.

One day, while online, I came across what I can only say is my official free choice.

DVD43 is a simple application that runs in your system tray that auto-detects when it needs to do its job, which thus far it has done flawlessly. A light download, with no bulk and straight to the point and best of all legitimately: free.

Check it out here.

If you are like me and run a stock standard Apple iPhone 3G and by that I mean an Apple iPhone that is not Jailbroken, then you may have noticed sometimes the phone can be slow.

Usually after a reboot the phone will be pretty snappy, but we all know how long it takes any kind of smart phone to reboot, although the I find the Apple iPhone relatively quick when compared, but overall a bit slow.

Here are some useful things to know about the Apple iPhone OS.

In general when you run an app and then close it it has been removed from memory, however I learnt this great trick.

If you are in any app and you hold the power button down until the screen darkens on your Apple iPhone and you are prompted to either shut down or cancel. At this point the only button you need to push and keep pushed is your “home’ button. You will notice after about 3 seconds the iPhone freezes and then the app that was running is ejected from memory.

When next you are finding your Apple iPhone 3G is not performing as you know it should open Safari and perform this trick. (It is always a good idea to clear web pages you are no longer using in Safari)

As far as I know these are the only memory resident programs that run simultaneously with the OS. Along with the “phone’ app.

You can do this with your mail application and with iPod app. After this you will find your iPhone should perform much quicker.

Hope this helps

Generally in the online media industry it gets pretty panicky near the end of November beginning of December. This is for several reasons. The first reason is that in South Africa, where I live, the country literally goes into “silly mode” for about 2 weeks. You have to consider that for us, this is our Summer Holiday coupled with Christmas, which in our country is something of a commercialised affair.

The second reason for panic during this time of year in our industry is usually because our clients have left things to the last minute… or we have

It is with curious amusement that I share the following that I received via email in hope to bring a smile to some designers faces. Sorry for the quality.

Enjoy! I did

Some photos of insectoids of sorts to use as iPapers (iPhone wallpapers). Enjoy

Bee

Bug

Ladybird

Spider

Translucent Spider

Download the iPapers here.