VMWare black screen of death

Ever had a black screen when loading up a VMWare image?  Try booting into safe mode and deleting your display adapter from Device Manager, then restarting.  (Don’t worry, the adapter should reinstall automatically.)

This issue seems to appear after changing monitors – in my case, when I unplug an external monitor from my laptop.  I’m running a Windows Server 2008 guest VM on a Windows 7 host, under VMWare Player 3.1.0.

Another workaround here.

iPhone 3G running slow on iOS 4? Time to jailbreak

Update (26/10): Apple have released iOS 4.1, which pretty much fixes the speed issues on the 3G.

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I’ve been slow to the iPhone jailbreaking party, but I just found the killer app for my 3G – overclocking.

Since upgrading to OS 4.0, my iPhone has been dog slow.  Apple have confirmed this is an issue and are working on a fix, but in the meantime you can do something about it have released a fix, woo.

Disclaimer: at the very least this could make your iPhone run hotter and increase battery consumption – worst case, it could brick it.  But if you think it’s worth the risk then keep reading…

To get your iPhone 3G to run at 600 MHz (normally 421 MHz), follow these instructions:

1. Backup your iPhone through iTunes
2. Jailbreak: open Safari on your phone, browse to www.jailbreakme.com and follow instructions [Note – iOS 4.0.2+ is not supported, so if you’ve already upgraded then restore a previous backup first]
3. Follow instructions to overclock (I used iFile rather than SSH)

You should notice that apps like Google Maps run much faster now.  This hack also works on the 3GS.

Some more benefits of jailbreaking:

• Multitasking on the 3G (backgrounder)
• Internet tethering for your laptop without paying extra
• Install any app, not just ones that Apple arbitrarily allows onto the App Store

On the last point - I’m not suggesting you go and download apps like TomTom without paying for them, but there are plenty of legitimate apps that for some reason Apple haven’t approved.

And in case you were still worried…

• Jailbreaking is completely legal (in the US at least)
• All existing iPhone functionality will still work, including syncing with iTunes and the App Store
• You can completely reverse the jailbreak by restoring a previous backup of your iPhone

On the downside, your phone might crash a bit more (not that I’ve noticed) and you won’t be able to get the latest official iPhone updates until they’ve been cracked by the jailbreak community.

Showing Delicious bookmarks in your Blogger sidebar

I thought this would be easy, but not so much.  Here are a few options:

1. Delicious linkrolls

Great idea, but this doesn’t seem to work with Blogger; paste the script into http://www.blogger.com/add-widget, and you just get an empty element on your blog… neat.

2. Widgetbox

There are a few widgets that claim to be Delicious feeds, but they all look pants.  And the free version requires you to have a  big fat Widgetbox advert.

3. Blogger’s “Feed” gadget

This is what I went for – it works, and it doesn’t suck too much.

Just add a gadget to your blog, select “Feed” from the list, and put in your URL (e.g. http://www.delicious.com/duncsmith).

One small thing – there seems to be a bug where the feed URL has “count=15” at the end, which doesn’t give you the latest bookmarks.  You need to change this number to match the number of items to show (max = 5).