When the last series of the Great British Bake Off aired, I was inspired to start baking. I’ve made the occasional cake here and there, but I wouldn’t have called myself an enthusiast beforehand. However, with each episode of the series, I baked something out of my comfort zone to varying degrees of success. This year, I’m less inclined to get the oven on. Part of that is because I …

My travels through some of the more popular works of Charles Dickens have found him to be a bit hit and miss, but this was a definite hit. Although I was less interested in the stories that Pickwick and his friends were gathering, it was a good ruse to get them travelling around and finding themselves in scrapes.

I saw the TV adaptation of this a while ago - long enough that I had forgotten most of the plot, but not so long to stop scenes and images coming back to me as I read through. It's a good start, with the three separate cases, and you wonder how they will be investigated and how they can possibly be connected.

Thankfully, I still love it on rewatching. It's fun, it has Dennis Hopper, it's got some good lines, some amusing moments, some good action. It also has some dodgy effects but nothing too bad. It stood up far better than I thought it was going to.

It took me a little while to get into the storytelling - not because it was backwards, but the delineation between the black and white bits and the colour. It was a really fascinating way to gradually reveal the story, particularly when we started to learn about Sammy Jankis and get more of the backstory on that. I like the twist, but I did think it was a bit of a weird ending, and I was left wondering what he was going to do after the end(/beginning).

Overall, I enjoyed it, and it's definitely sparked up my obsession with submarines again. I thought it got a bit confusing in places, and I did find it difficult to keep which submarine was which in my mind. I later read that they tried to make the interiors a different colour for each one, particularly in the three-way battle at the end. I didn't notice that, so that didn't help me! I thought the accents were weird - I get that they didn't want to speak Russian the whole time, but then perhaps could have decided if they were going to attempt Russian accents or not?

When I was a kid, I remember being driven across Salisbury Plain, and spotting a pristine but empty looking village tucked away in the fields. My parents told me this was an army village, not for living in, but for exercises and drills. My imagination was absolutely caught by this and whenever I travelled around, across or anywhere near Salisbury Plain, I would always be on the lookout for this …

I did write an extended review of this book, but the draft got lost somewhere, which is quite frustrating as I was very conflicted by the story. Clearly written as a means of getting the points about copyright across, I was surprised that it was actually a good story as well - utterly transparent, and erring on the side of adult rather than young, but interesting and kept my attention.

This is an interesting one. David Mitchell has attempted to put a unique spin on the memoir format, by linking the life story together through a walk around London. It's a good idea and for the most part it works, although in some places it gets a bit contrived. Sometimes the 'I'm walking by this and it reminds me of...' works and sometimes it doesn't. Still, it's better than just a boring diary-style, and it allows for some rants about the way the world works alongside the story of how he got to where he is today.

It's such a short film, the ending took me by surprises. Subsequent reading suggested a lot of the action sequences were those cut from the first two films, which makes me think they just ran out of ideas and that's why it ended after 85 minutes. Still, it was nice to see Dr Grant back, and the return of characters who didn't appear in the second, even if only for a moment. It was also slightly less predictable than the second, but also slightly less scary.

It's actually better than I remember, there's plenty of fun dialogue to be had with Ian Malcolm around. It's very predictable in places, and it does go a bit odd at the end with the dinosaur rampaging around the city. There's talk of scenes being cut which explain why everyone on the boat was killed but the dinosaur was still trapped... it would have been good for them to keep some kind of explanation in about that!

As I'm sure you're aware, I'm always on the lookout for things of a subterranean nature, and Steven very kindly pointed out this Cold War mansion in Las Vegas, as featured on The Verge. 26 feet underneath Las Vegas, a worried individual built a bunker to resist any Cold War activities. What I love about this, and what I haven't seen in underground dwellings in the past, is the way …

I enjoyed this more than I thought I might, particularly after the first couple of chapters. It took a little while to get into it, particularly as the different chapters were told from different points of view, but it soon became easy to read and really interesting.

I really loved this. A sci-fi story set in the future, where humans are colonising planets across the universe and doing battle with alien races. I write that sentence and think this doesn't usually sound like my kind of book, but it's so inclusively written, I was with our hero for the entire journey.

The trailers I can't remember if I knew they were remaking Robocop, or if I've just forgotten but the trailer looks really good. I very much enjoyed the original one, except for the rather ridiculous blood-letting at the beginning. Most remakes are a letdown, and this will probably be the same, but it certainly looks okay from the short clips in the trailer. Film stuff Other bits and pieces about …

The lens flare situation was much improved - it only crept in a little obnoxiously at the end. I liked getting suspicious of the characters and following their twists and turns as they proved to be good/bad/otherwise. I saw some complaints about over-use of CGI, which always baffles me when you're talking about a film like this. However, I realised that I hadn't noticed the CGI one way or the other which must surely be a good thing. Enjoyed the various dialogue scenes with Spock, and with Scotty, those two really make the films for me.

When I was younger, I moved from one school that hadn’t started teaching languages yet, to another that were already a year into their studies. I was an entire year behind in learning French, and I vividly remember spending a few weeks beforehand driving around with my mother, listening to some French tapes to try and catch up. In the end, I did a couple of years of French, but …

A marvellous video from the BBC has emerged, showing three trips from London to Brighton via train from three very different time periods. The journey was filmed in 1953, then thirty years on in 1983, and then this year, another thirty years on. The videos have been sped up and put side by side, and it makes for one of those viewings that I find oddly compelling. I thought more …

Another month has magically flown by both in reality, and in Ambridge. Rob and Tom had dinner, much to Pat’s disapproval. What would she think if she learned about Helen’s real relationship with Rob? Meanwhile, Tom got all over-eager, based on Rob’s advice and Kirsty’s Twitter campaign – she’s turning into the new Brenda, meals with Tom, marketing ideas, etc. But Bellingham’s don’t want to increase their order, and Tom …

It was so much better than I thought it was going to be! Funny in all the right places and cultural references galore. The music was a bit saccharine in places, but it had some excellent mashups and songs that got us talking. I was surprised that the big Cups song was actually just a tiny scene in the film, but it just made me want to learn how to do it. So, really enjoyed it, very entertaining and likely to stand up to several rewatches as well.

This was another book that I picked up in a bundle, otherwise I'm not sure I would have stumbled across it. A murder mystery with an estate agent as the protagonist, finding herself oddly drawn into a world filled with intrigue - both into the murder, and into the past life of the guy that she finds the body with.

I approached this crime thriller with an awful lot of trepidation, only because of the title and the concept of snakes being involved in the plot. I picked it up in amongst a Story Bundle, so I didn't know what to expect as I ploughed on through.

This is probably a book for die-hard running fans only. There's no big coming-of-age story or over-riding point to make, it's just the journey of one man through an amateur career of marathon running with details of the highlight races. Some are good, some are bad, each are instrumental in the journey from marathon first-timer, to a veteran at the 26 miles.

There was plenty of this movie that I didn't really get but at the same time, it was fun just to watch the good cinematogrophy, listen to the soundtrack and drift away. It was an interesting storytelling technique, dipping back and forth and crossing dialogue from one scene across another. There wasn't a huge amount of story to tell, and the end was a bit weird, but I don't really think it mattered. To get all deep about it, it was the journey. And the Britney.

That last comment above was made in what was, hands down, one of the best moments of cinema for geeks there has ever been! We loved it! Can't say the same for the rest of the film, it was one of those that was glorious in its rubbishness, over-the-top nonsense. It was like the brilliance of disaster movies packed into the White House. It was filmed in Louisiana so almost all of it was green-screened up and you can tell.

A very interesting premise this. A future, not too far removed from our own, in which the worst of Britain's prisoners are dumped on an island and essentially left to fend for themselves. With a minimum of input from the outside world, they fend and survive, with rival gangs, a dictatorship and plenty of internal politics.

I've been put off reading this one before because of the amount of local dialect - I find a bit of written dialect fun but too much and I start to zone out. Nevertheless, I made a concerted effort to get past that and found there was actually less than I had thought! Typical.

I remember when I first saw podcasting guru Leo Laporte talk about the Withings scale, that tracked your weight and tweeted about it every day. I thought he was completely mental, sharing such personal information, although the effect of peer pressure when it comes to healthy intentions has been proven. What I didn’t think was crazy was the concept of improved smarter gadgets tracking what you do. The so-called “wearable …

During some recent summer community fun over on Sidepodcast, the challenge arose to bake something F1 related. Given the wealth of choice of recipes available to me, and a limited amount of time, I went for something I’ve already made in the hopes I could do it better. A long while back, I baked an F1Minute cake, to celebrate a podcasting anniversary. It went down very well, although it was …

I think I must have picked this up in a Kindle sale because it's not my normal kind of purchase. I whipped through it quite quickly, it's an easy read in terms of style and writing, but the content is where it gets tricky. Telling the story from a mother and a daughter's perspective, we're granted the inside line to what happens when a terrible car accident changes the family's life forever.

Loved it. I was so wrong about the trailer, we had more of Tony Stark's awesome wit, alongside some rather more vulnerable moments as well. Trevor was brilliant, and having a rather more human enemy (if enhanced in a terrifying fashion) was good to bring Tony back down from 'what happened in New York.' I would have rolled my eyes at the involvement of a kid, normally, but they handled it well and there was some great dialogue between the two. All in all, a success, and the two hours absolutely flew by which is a sign of a really good film.

It was actually better than I remembered it being, funny in places if naturally a little childish. I thought the effects, animatronic more than anything, held up really well - we just both had issues with the idea of an ant taking on a scorpion. I love the concept of giant stuff, it's a bit of a contrived premise, but it's a fun result nevertheless. I hadn't remembered quite how gross the film is, lots of goo and falling in puddles and stuff. But there's a happy ending, with all family issues resolved, so that's good.

The premise of this spoke to me, as I think of myself of something of a reluctant traveller. I like to see new and exciting things, but I very much enjoy my home comforts. Here we have the tale of Bill who, for some reason, is talked into going with his friend to climb a mountain in Ethiopia - a mountain that has a location no one is quite sure of. Some even doubt whether it actually exists.

The trailers I am so not sure where I stand on this trailer for Getaway - it looks good and intriguing but I just don't understand why someone would want someone to drive quite so much. Also, I'm not sure what kind of goody-two-shoes Disney persona Selena ever had, but she's shedding it quickly. In a completely different sort of film, the aforementioned Disney have one of those nature documentaries …

This one has been growing on me ever since we watched it. At first, it seemed an overly complicated (to our tired brains, anyway) plot littered with rip-offs. It was visually stunning, and for that I was happy to keep watching and ignore the plot, but gradually it started to win me round. It started to feel less like it was stealing from other films and more like an homage to all the best bits of sci-fi history. Even after watching, I've been thinking about it here and there, realising some of the smaller pieces of the plot and reliving the best bits in my head. If I posted this in a few days or weeks, maybe it would be up to a five!

We thought this was going to be like Bridesmaids, and although it seemed like a mashup of that and The Hangover, it wasn't really the rip-off we anticipated. It was actually quite funny in places, and although the story had a bit of a sickly ending, it was good to journey with these not-all-that-likeable characters as they navigated the tricky waters of friendships and reunions and moving on.

I've always been put off from reading this because of the idea of so much political talk in it, but considering some of the other classic works I have succeeded in reading through my Life List challenge, I thought I could give it a go. It's true that I probably missed a lot of the more political aspect, the comparisons between France and England, and all that.

Did you ever wonder whether using the lines from pop songs would help to find you a date? Well, whether you did or you didn’t, someone has put the theory to the test for you, and the video evidence makes for some amusing viewing. On the Vevo YouTube channel, there is a series of videos called Lyric Lines, in which Tommy Wooldridge takes specific lines from pop songs – one …

At first, I wasn't sure what to expect from this book. The introduction gives away a lot of what Victor has done during his life, and I was worried it was going to be an improbable mass of incidents, talked up to seem interesting. It was nothing like that. The book focuses on the army years of Victor's life for the first two thirds, and then the final third is what happened to him afterwards.

Overall, I thought this was a good, strong movie - entertaining in the right places, moving in others, and with plenty of action to move the story along. I did think it got a bit too violent in places, and some of it was a bit grim to watch, but I suppose that's just trying to be hard-hitting. It also felt like it was missing any serious chemistry, between any of the main players.

I have tried to read this many times but never really got past the first few chapters. This time I made a concerted effort and got to the end, and I found it was really good! It's so nice to see one of the early vampire works, especially now that they are so prevalent in popular culture at the moment. It's fascinating to see most of the book taken up with the characters dealing with the situation, without really knowing or believing what it is.

The trailers Seen three good trailers this week, the first of which is for The Monuments Men. This is George Clooney and Matt Damon sharing screen time again, which can only be a good thing. The film itself looks good, one of those that is entertaining if not perhaps completely historically accurate. Next up another trailer for the second Thor film. More of the same, it looks like. And finally …

When I saw this book in a Kindle sale, I knew I wanted to read it - detailing the history and transformation of bits and pieces of the English language, but in a fun and not even slightly stuffy fashion. It was exactly why I expected it to be and a really good read.

This past weekend, I headed towards Marwell Zoo for something of a family meetup. It was a nice day, the rain held off with just a few spots threatening but then scampering away. I took a few photos but mostly wandered around chatting and wondering why the animals are always asleep when I go to see them. It was slightly disappointing to be at a zoo quite a few hundred …

Considering what a classic and well-loved film this is, I was a bit disappointed. It certainly was good once the job actually started, and the Minis starting careering about all over the place. But it was quite slow to begin, and Charlie didn't seem all that nice a character really, I wasn't completely sure I wanted him to succeed.

Ruined! This was such a good film right up until the very last scene, where it crashed and burned. What had been mystery, magic and great twists, turns, flashbacks, flashforwards and everything in between, turned into something completely different with just the one big reveal. There was a review in the critics section on Wikipedia that sums it up: 'I love a good science fiction story; just tell me in advance.'

Last weekend, the BBC confirmed just who would be playing the brand new Doctor, the twelfth incarnation. You’ve no doubt heard by now that it is Peter Capaldi who is going to be on the other end of Matt Smith’s regeneration, and the reaction I’ve seen so far has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s a stark contrast to when Smith was presented as the Eleventh Doctor. A startlingly young, unknown actor, …

I approached this with some trepidation, knowing it to be another long Russian book. It was surprisingly good. I said of War and Peace that I enjoyed the peace plot far more than the military sections, and Anna Karenina is just like W&P but with all the war taken out. There are still political and philosophical sections, but it's really about the characters and their trying to make their way in the world.

Another post about how things are made, after the video about Steinway pianos, but this time we're in the world of automotives. The Tesla Model S is a somewhat revolutionary product, and we know the automotive industry is high-profile in robotics, but this video showed some of the amazing robots at work making the Tesla cars. The machines that move the cars along following magnetic paths are amazing. Plus, the …

As mentioned in my Snowdon post, I had four hours to while away before going up the mountain. Ordinarily, I think I would have gone on to another location, I had plenty of options of places to visit, but I was a bit worried about getting back in time. Somehow, I’d managed to time my mountain trip on the same day as the Snowdon International Race – a crazy event …