For months, edging on years, now there's been speculation, comment and complaint about how the otherwise beauteous Nintendo Wii can't play (film) DVDs even though quite clearly it has a DVD drive. It's hardly the biggest issue ever, DVD drives are 10 a penny now, but it would have been nice for those broken DVD-player emergencies. Plus Nintendo themselves, so it was said, claimed it was coming in a version 2 Wii which was later shelved/massively delayed.

No need to wait for mythical version 2 mind! Clever Wii-hackers have worked out how to get the lovely white beast that you already own - if you have any sort of good console taste - to play DVDs . Whoo!

Now we're all tied to our computers 24/7 downloading megabuckets of online, advert-free audio visual entertainment it sometimes seems like the simple pleasures of life, such as watching a bit of TV from the comfort of your sofa are long gone. However, it doesn't have to be like this, as it is easy enough to convert many types of video playable on a computer - for instance .avi or .wmv files that you may have downloaded from who knows where - to a format suitable for putting on a real life physical DVD no less.

If you remember your last 20th / early 21st century technology well you may recall you can then put this silver disk into the machine under your TV and off you go, custom TV and films from the comfort of ones' living room setup.

If, like the Poorhouse, you are blessed with a nice slightly old-skool Daewoo DVD9000 S5 DVD player or similar you can easily enough get around the "region" restrictions on it. Yay. DVDs are coded to certain regions; perhaps the most relevant here being Region 1 = America, Region 2 = UK. A DVD player will only play the specific region's DVDs it is set to, presumably to stop UK importing cheap / early release US DVDs and the like. Boo.

However, if you have this specific DVD player you can remove this silliness as below.

Happy weekend from the Poorhouse. Not much of note has hit the Poorhouse's stream of consciousness in recent times so instead here's a couple of geek-funny vids to watch.

Firstly, who doesn't love the oh-so-realistic techno/terrorism battle that is any given series of 24? Well, little did you know it was first produced in 1994 - and here's the pilot to prove it.

Given that, oooh, eleven sixteenths of this pointless site is about nerdy geek-things, and the other eighteen twentieths consists of rambling rants about the evils of the Bush cabal, you will be unsurprised to hear that the Poorhouse quite liked the below video.

Combining the razzamatazz of Apple launching its nine-millionth nigh-on-identical iPod upgrade and the upper limits of American mispronunciation satire, check out the fabulous premiere of the iRack.

It's Monday. We need entertainment. Let's start with Brad Paisley, with his country ditty simply entitled "Online". Note guest appearance by the Shat.

Then there's "Dontcha Wish Your Cell Phone Was Hot Like Me?", a version of the Pussy Cat Dolls' classic of course, only this time obsessing over the geekgasm that was the iPhone, rather than filthy hos.

It's an oldie, but a definite goodie.

For those Youtube-disabled, the transcript is below.

Anyone who, such as, has the internet - be it in US America, the Iraq or elsewhere - will no doubt have seen, such as, this but anyway...check out Lauren Caitlin Upton - Miss South Carolina - attempting to win the "perve on pretty teenagers who are way too young for you" competition that is Miss Teen USA.

Youtube, time-wastering site of the decade (Facebook aside), is stuffed to the gills with vital, important and amazing video clips, not to mention a billion huh huh videos taken by 13-year-olds on their dodgy phone camera.

However, for those lost, lonely times where you need to view say Spiderpig (*) whilst away from the cyberhighway it is not entirely intuitive as to how to download it for offline use in a non-flash format there is a chance your computer, PDA or mobile might be able to repetitively play until your colleagues kill you.

...could it? Details on the Great Internet Crash of 2007 follow.

(via Lifehacker, amongst other places)