U2 were due to perform a week-long guest slot on Jimmy Fallon’s nightly chat show but of course Bono went and fell off a bike and broke himself. (BTW, why do people keep cycling when all I ever here from cyclists is tales of woe?) So, rather than drafting in someone less good, last minute, Jimmy upped the stakes and decided to become Bono himself. Video no longer available.

I’ve found the exams I’ve taken this year to be really quite intense and it turns out that the closer it gets to the day itself, and the more intense the revision is, the less room I have in my head for anything else. Whether that is writing on my own blog, connecting with people on Twitter, keeping up with news online, or listening to podcasts, everything comes to a grinding halt.

Pitch Perfect 2! A trailer! So much awesome! Fat Amy continues to steal the show, but I can’t wait to see the group back together. And bonus Hailee Steinfield who appears to be in every film ever these days.

One of our favourite things to do on Sidepodcast is look back at the stupid things we said a year, two years or more ago. Because you can’t search an mp3, that often means scrabbling for what is in the show notes, or better yet, looking back at the transcript for our word for word conversation. Transcribing is a lengthy process, however, and when it comes down to it, we don’t have time to record podcasts at the moment let alone sit down and write them out in prose.

I gave it four episodes, and in the end I’m going to have to admit that Peter Capaldi’s Doctor - so far - is not for me. The first episode I had to give the benefit of the doubt because it was a regeneration episode, one in which the characters were finding their feet and getting to know each other all over again. The second episode was instantly forgettable - something about a Dalek? The third was more entertaining, but for the Robin Hood aspect rather than the Doctor being the star of the show. When he was shooting the arrows, I just thought… this doesn’t feel right. I just finished watching the fourth episode in the series, one which a few have claimed as one of the best, and it was fine, a bit tense, but ultimately not gripping.

My interest in forts, bunkers and castles is well-documented, and recently I managed to squeeze in a visit to another place of interest that falls into this category. Somehow, it is both fort and castle, as Hurst Castle on the south coast was initially a Tudor dwelling, converted into a sea defending fort during the war. The castle is at the end of long shingle walkway that takes it out of you if you try and walk it. Well, so I’m told. Naturally, I took a boat.

Our experiments in expanding our food intake have so far taken in the excellent delivery service that is HelloFresh (still going strong, by the way, a few meals that haven’t been to our taste, but otherwise I’ve reached Apprentice chef level and am rapidly heading towards sous!) but we didn’t stop there. I’ve been aware of Graze for a long time, but never taken the plunge and ordered a box. Graze offer selections of healthy (and not so healthy) snacks, delivered to your door each week, from a choice of hundreds. You don’t get to specifically pick which ones you want but you can say what you do and don’t like, and those you would never want to receive. The great thing about Graze is, the boxes are long and thin, meaning they fit right through the letterbox and can be delivered by the postman. Genius!

Since I stopped running, 18 months ago, I’ve turned my attention to a variety of apps and online solutions to the ‘easy workout at home’ thing. Some of them are fads that are dropped as easily as they are started, but I’ve stumbled across one that has actually got me hooked. I first tried the Fitstar app about six months ago, and loved the concept but had to stop almost as soon as I’d started due to a small injury.

I don’t know if you noticed, but this week, Apple announced a new product - their take on the wearable tech phenomenon. Initially, I wasn’t that interested in the watch. That’s partly because the stream of Tim Cook’s keynote address was so bad that I gave up following halfway through and missed all the announcements. It’s also because I wasn’t too keen on the big, square, bulky look.

Much of the UK experienced some very hot weather in July, weeks of sunshine and muggy conditions bringing out the sandals and making it hard to sleep. That being the case, it’s typical that when my parents invited me on an open top bus tour of the New Forest, it absolutely poured down. The New Forest Tours are really quite a good deal. £14 may seem a bit pricey to start with, but you can jump on and off any of the three routes at any time for a limited period. Upgrade your ticket and you can get weekend and week-long extensions, so if you’re holidaying in the area, it can be a good way to get round.

Doctor Who finally returns to our screens after a lengthy wait since the Christmas regeneration special. And was it worth it? Erm, no. Sadly, I didn’t like this episode at all, and I will expand on that further below. It’s nice to have the show back though, and even nicer to see the addition of Doctor Who Extra - a bonus ten minutes of content, online, in a replacement for the much-missed DW Confidential.

While we were watching the Captain America sequel recently, there was one face that I felt like I recognised but couldn’t quite place. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? So distracting. This time, it was one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. henchmen, in it every so often but not exactly a big part. I’m not even sure it was a speaking part. It turns out this is Callan Mulvey, who used to be Drazic in Heartbreak High. Drazic! In Captain America!

I enjoy cooking a lot, but it’s something I’ve never really managed to get fully into. I had that brief interlude with baking and impressed myself with a couple of dishes, but even that ended up petering out before it really got going. The trouble I have is that I don’t really have the fundamental basic knowledge to start experimenting and learning and making great things. Without boring details about the meals I have been making up to now, I will say that the famous rut of cycling through a handful of recipes over and over has definitely been reached.

I was listening to an episode of Current Geek recently, when a fascinating conversation emerged regarding the structure of television shows and their series’. Current Geek features Scott Johnson and Tom Merritt with guests, discussing pop culture topics. At the end of each episode, they have a feature where they predict what will happen in the future. I’ll be honest, I usually skip past this section because there’s no way it can live up to the fun of the quiz before it, but this time I listened to the scenario and was intrigued. The episode is available to listen here, with the specific section at about 49 minutes in, but I’ve transcribed the bits that interested me below.

It was an impromptu trip to the theatre, a last minute decision to snap up tickets to The Phantom of the Opera on a spare Friday night nestled in the midst of a very hectic couple of months. I like musicals, as they have been ingrained in my life since childhood, but I haven’t had as much chance to indulge recently as I’d like. Since watching We Will Rock You five times, I haven’t seen much else.

When I got back from the US, I was very enthusiastic to be a new baseball convert. Watching that game up close and personal was quite the revolutionary experience. Except, I’ll be honest, I haven’t watched more than about an hour or two since I’ve been back. I’m never sure when it’s on TV and I don’t really have the same time to focus on it as you do when you’re sitting in the stands.

I love that game where, you’re listening to a song and it sounds just like another song and you compare and contrast. In this day and age, there aren’t a lot of new things in music left to be discovered - almost everything has been done before and can be picked up as “copying” a previous artist. Whilst driving, I was listening to Return of the 90s, a surprisingly cheap album stacked full of songs that bring back memories. This tune came on by Inner Circle, which I knew of but wasn’t overly familiar with.

I’ve stumbled across an interesting problem that hasn’t bothered me for a while. The past few months have been hectic, with all the travelling and working and stuff, but it has resulted in me actually leaving the house and taking a handful of pictures here and there. When I got back from Houston, I suddenly remembered that I had a Flickr account. I hadn’t checked in for a very long time, since before they updated their accounts to give you oodles of space for free.

Whilst I was in Houston, I went to the cinema. I haven’t been to a cinema in years, and have pretty good reasons for not doing so, but I thought hey, why not see how the Americans do it? Alright, in all honesty, I just wanted to see how big the popcorn was. It was huge. You can’t really tell because there’s no scale, but the drink is twice the size of normal UK sodas, and thus the popcorn is even more enormous.

When it comes to getting creative, particularly with writing, we all know the key is to just get started. You’re not going to come up with anything by going about your normal day to day routines and hoping it is somehow getting done, you actually have to put the effort in and begin. There’s an old video doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment, a talk by John Cleese on how to get the creative juices flowing, and it’s really well worth a watch. If you want to skip to the abridged version, I have made some notes below the video with what I took away from it.

Recently, I sat down and wrote a draft in Ghost about Ghost. Meta. It was an update on my experiences so far, which ended up as a bit of a complaint. I’m still in love with the concept of Ghost, but the gist of my dissatisfaction was two-fold. On Film Watch, I miss the comments. Moving to Ghost meant either switching on Disqus or going without comments. I opted for the latter, because I dislike that Disqus has rubbish integration, layout and login options, plus it stores the comments when I’d rather have a feeling of control over them. As it turns out, Film Watch is something that feels like it needs comments. Discussing my reviews and what other people think about the films is something I really miss. The options here then, Disqus as mentioned above, returning to Wordpress or just putting up with it.

I’m not a huge fan of fireworks, but even I can appreciate a close up view of some pretty lights in the sky. This video was taken in Florida with a quadrocopter helping the camera get close to the action. The legality of flying drones is in question at the moment, but until that’s decided, we can revel in the joy of videos like this.

When I stepped off the plane in Houston, I didn’t think Netflix was going to work. I have a UK account, obviously, and I figured that it just wouldn’t function across the pond. That was crazy thinking and when I opened the app I was overjoyed to see not only my current shows but also a selection of new and exciting things that we don’t get in the UK.

Continuing my space-mad theme at the moment, before I disappeared for two weeks, I was most excited to read this story about wifi on the moon! MIT have been experimenting with beaming things off multiple satellites in an attempt to reach the moon, and they reckon it’s possible, if a little tricky. Communicating at high data rates from Earth to the moon with laser beams is challenging because of the 400,000-kilometre distance spreading out the light beam. It’s doubly difficult going through the atmosphere, because turbulence can bend light-causing rapid fading or dropouts of the signal at the receiver.

Watching a bit of Vevo TV on the Nashville channel (it’s more entertaining than it sounds), I stumbled across this video from Brad Paisley. It’s a terrible song but a great video, have a peek! It’s a water-skiiing squirrel! At first I thought, jeez, some animals must have been harmed in the making of this video, but a little closer investigation revealed it’s an actual squirrel that has been trained to water ski. Meet Twiggy, the water-skiing squirrel.

My interest in science and space has grown exponentially over the last few years. Science was one of those subjects that was beaten out of me at school and it’s taken a long while for me to really give it the time of day. Since I have, though, I’ve been fascinated, particularly developing a fledgling obsession with the moon. Over on Sidepodcast, we live commented some of the launch and landings of the space shuttle and its successors, and who can argue with an astronaut making a Rocket Man video in actual space?

When the chance to watch a baseball game in Houston came up, I jumped at it. Experiencing something so traditionally American, as well as enjoying an afternoon of entertainment made for an enticing invitation. It wasn’t until I was sitting in my seat, snapping pictures of the highly manicured green field that I realised it counted towards my Life List goals as well - watching sports live. The thing about baseball is, it’s long and there’s no way of predicting when it will finish. When you go to see a football match, you know exactly how long you’re going to be there. Two forty-five minute halves, an interval midway through, and a couple of minutes here or there for injury time. Job done. With baseball, you have no clue how long it’s going to take so you have to come at it with a different approach.

When we signed up for BT Sport, I figured it would be one of those things that would be exciting for a week or so, and then eventually become a forgotten about channel – or in this case, set of channels. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We’ve watched endless hours of content from the telecommunications broadcaster, and although not all of it appeals (ultimate fighting is not my cup of tea, and the wrongly named Sportshub that only focuses on football just grates), I’d reckon we’re getting good value for money.

Google have finally taken the plunge and announced they will be building their own self-driving cars, rather than attempting to adapt existing machinery to be self-sufficient. It makes sense, after testing out the viability of the concept, to then start from the ground up and create a new vehicle. The design is a bit bubble car, but if it serves the purpose, there’s always room for improvement on that front.

Whilst pounding the streets of Dublin, we stumbled across a section of disused quay that was being redeveloped. An impressive theatre sits on the waterfront, whilst out on the waves, a rig has been set up to allow enthusiasts to wakeboard. I love these little spots where there would otherwise be no particular use for the water, and there’s not enough room to get up to speed with a boat. Rig up a pulley system, install a couple of ramps, and you’ve got some real potential.

Whilst avoiding the internet over the last week or so, I was very heartened to see this pop up in my Twitter mentions. I love Bibendum, with his endless smiling face and happy, happy wave. It really cheered me up, and thus it occurred to me that what the world is missing is an app that sends you a daily Bibendum greeting. Just a different picture delivered direct to your device of the bulbous character brightening up your day.

To celebrate finishing my latest batch of exams, Mr C and I took a dash across the water to Dublin - a place we both love. A spot of sight-seeing, with ominous rainclouds overhead. It is Ireland, after all. The Spire of Dublin. As well as the occasional sight, we tasted the local wares. Our waitress brought us the wrong food and the wrong drinks, but eventually we got what we came for.

CNET published an exclusive story about Nike’s plans to shut down their FuelBand hardware section, including layoffs and a focus on software instead. This was rebuffed, sort of, by a spokesperson, although their quote was more about continued support of the existing bands, rather than expanding the line. We will continue to improve the Nike+ FuelBand App, launch new METALUXE colors, and we will sell and support the Nike+ FuelBand SE for the foreseeable future.

If you’ve been following my adventures online for any sort of time, you might already know that I haven’t been big on the emotions. My Film Watch reviews, in particular, have shown that I’ve avoided getting swept up in romantic comedies, and those that are considered tearjerkers left me cold. Because everything is a Friends reference, I was kinda like Chandler. You may also have noted the past tense in that first paragraph.

The Verge posted a hands on video of the new CarPlay interface from Apple - Siri in your car, basically. It looks good. Well, no, it looks rubbish. But compared to what my current car does (which is nothing) and what other cars look like (which is awful), it’s not a bad step up.

Time is my enemy at the moment. Life is a repetition of work, study, Sidepodcast, sleep. It is always better to be busy than bored, but frazzled is the word I’m choosing to use at the moment. With that in mind, here are a few things I’ve been using to try and make life a bit easier. News The Yahoo News Digest app intrigues me greatly, because I always think I’m interested in the news but when I settle down to read or watch, I find I’m not. The great design of this app, plus the fact that it is a limited selection of must-read news, makes it more appealing to people like me. I like the idea of checking off the stories, and having the days that you have read marked off on a calendar.

It wasn’t long ago I was waxing lyrical about how great Jimmy Fallon’s skit with Paul Rudd was - the pair of them taking on a lip sync battle with amusing results. Now, the Tonight Show host is back again with another classic. This time, he’s roped in Billy Joel for a spot of crooning. I love the use of the looping app in this, and how great they both are. I didn’t actually know Fallon could sing, but he holds his own against one of the greats.

We’ve recently invested some time and energy in using Flipboard to share posts, pictures and shows from Sidepodcast, which meant having to learn to use the crazy thing. Primarily an app, Flipboard allows you to browse through content from Twitter, sites and various web locations in a gorgeous looking magazine style. There’s absolutely no doubting that it’s a good way to peruse content. I found it quite hard to get my head around though. From the app, you have to find the content via some kind of stream that is already in there - ie, a Twitter account or someone else’s magazine. I couldn’t see there was an easy way to add content without navigating through many circles of hell.

I was sad to hear that We Will Rock You will be closing, after 12 years as a mainstay of the West End theatre scene in London. Long time readers will know I was completely obsessed with this musical when it first came out, seeing it no less than five times in just a couple of years. I’m not a huge fan of the so-called “jukebox” musicals, but this one worked for me right from the start.

I read with interest this post about Maria Sharapova’s views on men playing three set matches. I’ve heard the arguments that women should play five-setters, to earn the equal prize money they were given a while back, but I hadn’t heard the flip side to that. At first, I couldn’t really see any reason for change, but actually reading her quotes, it makes a lot of sense. Sharapova’s main points were that it would make the matches more exciting, because every point really is crucial, and that it would ease the strain on men’s bodies, as some of these matches are now reaching the five hour and beyond mark.

There was a lot of consternation doing the rounds this week when it emerged the BBC have plans to switch BBC Three from a TV channel to online only distribution. I can’t say that it’s a hugely surprising move, particularly as they have made a big push recently with putting the episodes of comedies up on the iPlayer before they appear on TV. The big pink Premiere logo appears on the show, and you can watch it online long before it reaches the schedules.

If you’re not a fan of Kindle-shaped reading products, never fear! The iBooks edition of the Pocket F1 Handbook: Guide to the 2014 Grand Prix Season has arrived. The book contains all the driver and team profiles, rules and regulations updates, and circuit information that you’re going to need for the upcoming Formula One season, and has the iBooks bonus of easier navigation and better-looking tables. So, if you own an Apple device, be it phone, tablet or desktop, there’s no excuse not to get your hands on a copy of the Pocket F1 Handbook. You can download a handy sample to preview the book before you buy, but snap it up soon. There are only nine days left to the start of the 2014 season, so you can swot up on all you need to know before the action gets underway in Australia next week.

A great video of the lovely Paul Rudd is doing the rounds today, as the actor faces off against talk show host Jimmy Kimmel in a lip sync battle. I love this for three reasons. First: Paul Rudd. Second: Queen. Third: Lip sync battle sounds like a fab game! And while I’m indulging in a bit of Paul Rudd, I saw this other video a while back, in which Rudd essentially Rickrolls Conan O’Brien with clips from his movie. The film contained within looks scary and a bit weird, but I love the concept and that Conan just keeps on falling for it.

The Winter Olympics drew to a close last night, with one of those closing ceremonies that include about ten minutes of fireworks. I don’t get fireworks at all. Anyway, the games themselves saw two weeks of triumphs and controversies and tears and flowers, and all sorts of stuff. I really didn’t get to see as much of the games as I wanted, but unlike the London 2012 fortnight, in which I wrote off the rest of my life in favour of solid TV viewing, I couldn’t afford to hand over too much of my time to Sochi.

To celebrate the release of the latest Guide to the 2014 Grand Prix Season, the previous two editions have been reduced in price, allowing you to complete your Pocket F1 Handbook collection. The Pocket guides have been previewing the last three seasons of Formula One, featuring all the information you need to know about drivers, teams, rules and regulations, plus bonus extra content in each edition of the book.

I was recently watching one of those episodes of Friends that are always on a TV channel somewhere, and realised that there’s a lot of landline usage in the show. Because Friends ended in 2004, they’re missing a whole ten years of technology, which includes the revolution of smartphones that came after the iPhone in 2007. I dread to think of the jokes Chandler could make about Flappy Bird. Anyway, Friends isn’t a particularly technology heavy show, so although it is frozen in time a decade ago, it doesn’t take away from the sitcom that much.

Recently, we’ve been playing Tomb Raider, the definitive edition on the PS4. It’s the game that actually made us interested in the new generation consoles in the first place, and it’s a highlight in what has been a very quiet early market for this new Playstation. I was intrigued by the game trailer when we saw it so very long ago, it looked good but I was concerned about the level of screeching and pained noises that Lara was making. It seemed to show a level of realism that I’m not really looking for when it comes to an hour or two of Playstation time.

The 2014 F1 season promises to be a dramatic one, a time of regeneration and modernisation that more than anything else guarantees to be unpredictable. With an overhaul in the regulations, a raft of driver and personnel movements, plus a handful of new races to challenge all, it is set to be an eventful year in motor sport. Defending champions Red Bull field a revised driver line-up, but they are far from alone. All teams bar Marussia and Mercedes have at least one new face behind the wheel. The regulations too create their own special kind of chaos, with new turbo engines, fuel limits, plus a raft of aerodynamic tweaks to challenge the most experienced of engineers.

I’ve been following the recent tumultuous times at TWiT with interest. As one of the mainstays of podcasting, and one of the few able to create a business from the process, Leo Laporte has always been something of an inspiration. When he hired Tom Merritt to create a daily news show and step into his shoes whenever necessary, I thought they were on to a very good thing. Unfortunately that all fell apart at the end of last year, and Tom departed from the TWiT shores. I have many thoughts about this, some are wildly speculative, some are opinionated about Leo’s choice of replacement, but most of them are just sad that the magic partnership didn’t deliver.

Do you read a lot of series of books? I do. Books from the likes of Clive Cussler, Jeffrey Deaver, Bernard Cornwell, and Alex Scarrow all make my list. And the list is the key point here. Sometimes, particularly if there are double digits worth of books in a series, it can be hard to keep track. It’s okay if you’re just working through a trilogy, it’s not difficult to keep your place, but something like the Sharpe series has 24 books, and they’re written out of sequence in terms of dates and history. Tricky.