Doctor Who is one of those television programmes that will never be able to win. It’s demographic is so wide-spread, and people want such different things from their Doctor Who experience, it really is impossible to please everyone. He’s too human, too alien, there’s too much sci-fi, too much humanity, it’s too childish, too adult, boring, complicated, incredible, ridiculous, etc, etc. Obviously opinions matter, and we write blog posts about the programme because we care about it. I’ve been known to air my disappointment about past episodes and I am usually at odds with most of the rest of the internet. That’s why, this time, I quite liked the episode. It had grand ambitions, and a great premise, and I enjoyed it - although I do think it slightly missed the target.

Rush And thus, my Formula One world collides with my Film Watch world again. This looks like a pretty solid effort, I’ve been watching Ron Howard tweet about it for what seems like forever. Thankfully, it’s all about to get going and we’ll be able to watch the results soon.

The entire start of the film was a mystery to me - I had forgotten the 1960s stuff and assumed it began with baby Kirsten Dunst. I was impressed with the special effects, although they weren’t very consistent - some were great, some were awful, and some were in between.

I hadn’t quite realised the Fisher Stevens controversy going into this and only discovered it when noticing - ‘Hey, that’s the guy from Friends but… he’s not Indian.’ So, there’s that aspect of it which is a little disconcerting. verall, though, the film is fun, the characters are kooky and the robot is über-cool. It’s amazing how quickly they can get you to care about a hunk of tin that was designed as a war robot.

Two big storylines this month, with the developing situation at Bridge Farm, and the saga between Chris and Alice. Alice heads off to Canada after a frosty goodbye with Chris, and it isn’t long before she’s getting a phone call saying he’s had a bad accident and she needs to return. There’s a long-standing joke saying: “It’s all kicking off in The Archers” because it never is. This time, it literally was, as Chris found himself at the wrong end of an angry horse. He pulled through, although it was touch and go for a while, and thus the agonising over whether to stay or go continues with the added emotional drama of recovering from a near-death experience as well.

I think I was in a bit of a weird place watching this because I could see that it was a bit funny but nothing special, and yet I was laughing like a crazy person. The bit with the gym ball had me in tears. So, chalk it up to overwork, exhaustion, or the glass of wine I had alongside me, but I really enjoyed it. The wrestling was a bit much at times, particularly in the big finale, but I can’t exactly moan about that because it is the premise of the whole film. Ultimately feel good, amusing along the way, and happy endings all round. Not much to complain about.

Actually a really good film! It took a while to get going, and was utterly predictable at many moments. But it was fun, and the characters were great, feisty and annoying and creative and gutsy. The emotions at the end were a little overdone because it was quite obvious to all that it would be a happy ending. Still, Chris O’Dowd is in everything at the moment, isn’t he? I loved his portrayal, especially the conversation where he chose the lead singer, and the bit by the river.

Ahh, it made so much sense when finally we realised what the bells related to. It made sense, and also made me feel stupid. There’s so much about Doctor Who that should be obvious but it never is until it is revealed. It’s one of the joys of Steven Moffat’s era of the show, that you can concentrate too hard on unravelling the riddles, or you can just ride the wave and see where you wash up.

This year, Friends finally became available to download, in HD. We had been waiting for a long time to get the digital versions and were over the moon when there was a series 1-10 bundle. The glorious images are now in high definition, and a more sensible shape, rather than the square footage that was originally broadcast. Unfortunately, this can sometimes be a bit more revealing than the programme makers might have otherwise liked.

I finally found a really good course layout that I am happy running along, and it is exactly 5km taking me from almost door to almost door. It’s perfect, and I started to get in a really good routine, into the groove. I crossed the 100 kilometre mark, moving past 20% of the total. I even managed to get ahead of the target even if it was only by 0.02 of a kilometre.

I tried baking a cherry cake before, and it was a more traditional sort - the result was not quite what I was looking for. Instead, I searched for a loaf cake recipe, and uncovered this gem, which is apparently adapted from a Good Housekeeping recipe. It was so delicious, and disappeared very quickly. I couldn’t quite work out whether the cherries had stayed in situ or not - there did seem to be a larger congregation of them at the bottom of the cake, but they were scattered throughout as well. Sort of mixed results, I’d say.

A few week’s ago, I bought the Great British Bake Off booklet, produced for Comic Relief. There weren’t really any new recipes in there that I hadn’t already seen, but it was for charity - plus, I ordered it through a supermarket delivery, so it came right to my door without me having to lift a finger. Inside was a recipe for scones, and whilst I wasn’t keen on that recipe (includes yogurt?) I did get a craving for some scones. So, I dug out a recipe from the master, Paul Hollywood, and was intrigued to see that this one came with a video. After watching a five minute masterclass, I decided to have a go myself.

After catching up with the penultimate episode of The Big Reunion on Saturday, we flicked over to ITV where Ant and Dec were having their evening Takeaway. We left this on as background noise and then were intrigued to see some of the bands from the Big Reunion going to sing at the end of the show. Our first chance to see them doing in public what we’ve watched them rehearse over the past few weeks.

I’ve had this book tucked away on my Kindle for ages (oddly, it doesn’t seem to be available for the Kindle anymore) but I dug it out in anticipation of the Boat Race this weekend. Mark De Rond spends the duration of the training period for the 2007 Cambridge boat crew, following them, guiding them, helping them, and documenting it all.

I enjoyed this one. I remember hearing Jon talk about the Psychopath test when he was plugging the book on endless radio and TV shows. From what he talked about, I had thought it would be more focused on the high profile names and faces that tend towards the wrong end of the test, but actually there is only a brief mention of how psychopathy may be prevalent in top businessmen and media types.

This year, Crashed Ice was at its biggest and best, the Ice Cross Downhill World Championship featuring five different locations and some of the top skaters from across the globe. There were team competitions, and more women participating than ever, and it even pushed the boundaries in terms of indoor tracks and corkscrew delights. We’ve been watching the winter sport since 2010, after discovering that Red Bull TV showed each round live for free. Each year it has been getting better and better, until this point where I am really sad it’s over and already anticipating 2014!

Last week, Google caused a right kerfuffle by announcing the closure of Google Reader - the RSS feed reading service that lets you keep up with news and websites via the magic of syndication. They’ve blamed the closure on a desire to focus on key products, plus the decline of users on the service. They’re not saying they want to promote the use of Google+ instead, but we all know that is the case.

I love it when a plan comes together. This time last year, getting an update through onto the Pocket F1 Handbook owned by loyal and marvellous customers was not an easy feat. Fast forward twelve months, and a significant period of chopping and changing within Formula One, and we now have two sections significantly updated and ready for you to read! No matter which version of the book you bought, iBookstore or Amazon Kindle, you should be able to get your hands on an updated copy - with a little less Razia and a little more Sutil. Just a couple of days after the season got going too!

This first one looks like your traditional action movie fodder, but there are heaps of famous people in there! Olympus has Fallen I hadn’t heard of this spin off from Cars that Disney are making, called Planes (or if I had heard of it, I’d forgotten!). It does what it says on the tin, and even has a bonus appearance from one David Croft! Lofty Crofty, the blimp! Amazing.

I realised part way through that the problem with the later books is the lack of camaraderie between the main characters. When Ford and Arthur finally meet up in this final one, it makes things an awful lot better/more interesting. There’s just not enough of that to keep it going.

Normally, I would call this kind of post my “early thoughts” on something. Kindles, phones, games, they all get the same kind of treatment. The Sims 3, however, was first released in 2009 and I have just managed to get my hands on it now… the year 2013. Part of it was reluctance. I loved The Sims 2 and had no particular desire to replace it. Part of it was time. I barely have time to play games as it is, if I was going to play anything, it would be the aforementioned second edition of the game. And, I suppose, part of it was that thing where, when everyone else loves something, you sort of don’t want to.

My dad sent me a link to this video, showing some bakers having great fun as they make heaps of loaves of all different shapes and sizes. I find it oddly fascinating, the sheer amounts of flour flying around, and the perfection and regulation of the dough!

The action in this historical crime drama gets underway straight away with the sinking of the Luisitania after being torpedoed by Germans, and then the murder of a tailor during a fire in his shop whilst his daughter was being assaulted outside. There are a lot of different strands to the book, and quite a lot of characters to get to know quite quickly, but gradually it starts to come together.

So far this year, my baking mojo has been worryingly absent. Perhaps it is the lack of any Great British Baking to inspire me (although the Comic Relief specials were bloomin’ marvellous!) but mostly, it’s a lack of time related to spending weekends buried in a keyboard. Thankfully, it’s starting to come back to me now so that I spent a bit of time perusing various recipes and opting for a reasonably simple bake to ease me back in gently.

I’m not a massive reality TV fan. I did the Big Brother thing back when it was good, and I’ve watched a Pop Idol or two, but mostly I find them irritating. The people tend to be either annoying or uninteresting, and this latest explosion of half-reality, half-setup stuff seems very misleading and contrived. However, I’ve finally found a reality TV show that I am totally on board with. The Big Reunion is an ITV show and subsequent tour, in which six (now seven) bands from the 90s who had acrimonious splits get back together and do it all over again. The show has, so far, charted the rise and fall of each band, how their reunions went, and the first few days of rehearsal. It has been a revelation.

This was really quite a good thriller, a debut novel done very well. I had a few problems with it along the way, but overall it was definitely worth reading, almost a page-turner, with some intriguing characters.

Fun in places, but ultimately disappointing. It was noticeably tamer than the previous version - although in some senses that was a good thing! There was a lot less story, with the film sailing on knowledge of the characters from the first movie, and not bothering to expand on them at all. I liked that the daughter got to be a bit kick-ass rather than the one being abducted, but in the end, it was just forgettable.

I heard about a game you can play within your browser, in which you begin to type in the URL bar, and see what site comes up as the first suggested for each letter of the alphabet. I thought I’d give it a spin and see what mine were. In Chrome, it seems to be a cross between most visited and latest viewed as well. amazon.co.uk bbc.co.uk/iplayer caterhamf1.com dooce.com (bit odd, haven’t looked at this one for a while, not since there was just a blatant ad as a post, but I guess I don’t visit that many d’s) espnf1.com f1minute.com (naturally!) google.com humblebundle.com imdb.com joesaward.wordpress.com kindle.amazon.com lotusf1team.com marussiaf1team.com (over mrschristine.com? For shame!) netflix.com origin.com (The Sims 3 may or may not have just become available. Shhh.) paypal.co.uk (I have nothing for Q, just some admin pages that I won’t link to here!) runkeeper.com sidepodcast.com twitter.com (Nothing for U either, although it brought up Autosport and F1Minute again) vivaf1.com wordpress.com (Nothing specific for X, just a link to Netflix and also Grand Prix Guide) youtube.com/sauberf1team (I guess I’ve been watching that Harlam Shake thing too much!) zombiesrungame.com A bit of F1, a bit of blogging, a bit of running. This all seems very fitting for the online life I lead! Have a go yourself, it is both fun and sometimes intriguing!

Despite being a short month, it’s been a busy few weeks in Ambridge, with lots of storylines thrown into the melting pot. Here are my scatter-brained thoughts on February with The Archers. Pip did overdo a bit going to stay at Rickyard Cottage whens he was mad at her parents. It’s quite fun seeing Josh become the responsible one as Pip gradually loses every ounce of respect she ever earned from her parents.

January ended with a disappointing 14km deficit from the target, thanks to some days inside due to snow and illness. I was determined to catch up a bit in February (there’s nothing like a target on a graph to be motivational!) and started off with an ill-advised 9k. I was aiming for 10 and had to give up before I got there, and then felt like I’d overdone it for a while. However, it definitely helped kickstart the month in an effort to catch up.

It’s fair to say that the movie isn’t really aging well, and there are bits of it that are far more ridiculous than I remember. That still doesn’t diminish my love for it though, even if I have to hide behind the sofa for THAT bit. All those one-liners amidst the great action, fab supporting characters like the janitor and the comms guy, it’s just a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Another brilliant advert has caught my attention, I’m not sure how old this is, but I’ve only just seen it and I love it. I would say, with this and the EDF energy thing, that I like adverts in which odd things dance to old music. More of this, please.

I’ve always been a bit intrigued by the army - not for military or war reasons, but more for the self-contained way of life. Along with bunkers and islands, the ghost villages of Salisbury and the fenced in housing estates of Tidworth have always captured my attention. Plus, tanks are cool.

You go into the book knowing exactly what you’re getting, within the first few paragraphs you know there are a family of five sisters who all kill themselves. The odd style of narration (third person plural) gives it an inclusive edge, and allows for the story to cover all kinds of things that just one person wouldn’t know. Presenting the evidence of the Lisbon girls’ short lives and abrupt deaths, the story meanders to its heartbreaking conclusion in a compelling and tasteful way.

Disappointingly, I wrote this post last month and - thanks to having to get the screen captures off the iPad and general forgetfulness - have only just remembered it was tucked away in my drafts. It is still interesting though, so let’s just wind back and pretend it’s the 27th January rather than February. It’s not every day that you see a tweet from your significant other waxing lyrical about Antiques Roadshow, and when that occurred to me last week, I had to investigate further.

This year, the Pocket F1 Handbook is spreading its wings and launching on more than just Amazon reading apps and devices. The Guide to the 2013 F1 Season is now available on the Apple iBookstore, making it available to an iDevice near you. If you prefer your books to have a more standard viewing experience, and the ability to update faster, the iBookstore option may be the one for you.

I’ve been busy compiling my own A-Z of attractions in the UK, something that came to a bit of an abrupt halt last year due to one thing and another, but is high on my priorities to complete. What I hadn’t realised is that the Royal Mail have already done it, releasing a set of stamps to celebrate the UK - 26 different stamps with a highlight of the British Isles for each one. I have only gotten so far as P, and two of my choices match theirs. The rest are intriguing, this would have been very useful when I was making plans, and still could be!

After watching Skyfall, we browsed through some of the upcoming trailers on the Apple TV, and came across Oblivion, the new Tom Cruise movie. Good grief, that man works hard! Oblivion There’s another, earlier, trailer here that tells a bit more of the story. It looks interesting enough, although the amount of CGI it’s going to have worries me a little bit.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this one. The amount of research that has gone into this shines through from the very start, and it becomes obvious quite quickly that this is a fiction story layered on top of what really should have been a non-fiction piece about the island of St Kilda.

We watched the required (by our own rules) thirty minutes of this, and it was beautifully shot and looked like it might be good. Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying, so had no idea what was going on. It was all a bit too confusing, and although I thought LaBeouf was actually quite good, I didn’t really have any desire to sit through another hour of it.

I met up with my parents this past weekend, and we went for a walk around the National Trust estate at Kingston Lacy. The place wasn’t fully open yet, still hunkered down and working through the cold weather, but they were celebrating the carpets of snowdrops that were across some of the gardens. We thought we’d brave the freezing conditions (there were literal snow drops falling at times) to have a look at nature in action.

Loved it! All the subtle James Bond references, all the 50th anniversary nods, they were all brilliant. The story itself was a heck of a lot easier to follow than those in previous instances, and it was great to see a bit more character out of, well, everyone. I didn’t notice that it was so long, the time seemed to fly by. I almost felt as though this is the James Bond we should have had straight away from Craig, it was a bit less camp than Brosnan but just as cheesy at times. However, I can see that they needed some serious ones to go first to set the character on his own path. Loved Ben Whishaw, as well.

It’s been a while since I read the previous book in this young adult time travelling extravaganza, so I was worried I wouldn’t remember anything that had happened before. Thankfully, there are plenty of nudges and reminders throughout the book - it’s a complex business this time travel stuff, we need to relive odd bits and pieces here and there to keep track!

I spotted this crazy but brilliant gadget stand that is way over-funded on Kickstarter, and it is such a great idea. Taking inspiration from the animal kingdom, the Monkey Kit stand is actually billed as a “tablet positioning system” but it can cling on to plenty of different types of gadget, and then can curl around things or prop itself up in the strangest of places. I particularly like the suggestions for use on the sofa or in the kitchen, but they also suggest in the gym or just curled around as a stand on the desk.

I’m a big fan of Tom Merritt’s podcasting work, particularly as part of the dream team with Molly Wood, but also on the TWiT network. He’s professional, super smart and explains tech things without being patronising. Yay! So, I was intrigued by the book, clearly born from a simple love of all things tech. I recall a Tech History Today podcast that I lost track of, but the book no doubt came from there.

This week only one trailer crossed my path and it was for Emperor. Unfortunately, I just can’t get past the fact that this is Jack! Particularly in the opening scene where it is Jack, in a plane, heading towards an island! LOST really has ruined my life. Emperor

Mr C showed me this Tumblr site a good few weeks ago now, and I was instantly in love. In a nutshell, the Movie Barcodes are all the frames of a movie squidged up to make a colourful (or not so colourful) barcode style image. In some cases, they’re offered as prints, and I am sorely tempted to snap some up. Some of them are better than others, naturally, and I find some of those that have been created with fewer images make my brain go a little fuzzy, but the really good ones are so impressive.

Shakespeare has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Like most Shakespeare heathens, I don’t mind the odd Romeo and Juliet here and there, and comparing people to a summer’s day is fun, but mostly it’s just too much work. I wanted to read this because it seemed like a nice, friendly introduction to Shakespeare, not taking itself too seriously, and thus I could see if I was missing out on anything good.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. Lens flare aside, it was beautiful to look at, arty but not overly so. The acting was great, dialogue strong, and the concept a great one. I’ve seen heaps of complaints about plot holes and paradoxes, but mostly I can put those aside and enjoy the story.

In all honesty, I wasn’t that bothered about reading past the third book in this series. I had bought the full trilogy of five, however, and so for completeness sake, I wanted to keep on going. This fourth book is a bit different to the previous outings, with a lot of the story taking place on earth and a lot of it between human beings.