For some time, you lovely commenters might have noticed you're apparently all spammers. Every word dropped out seems to trigger outrageous spam accusations upon the site and remains unpublished until the Poorhouse gets round to going through them all.

This is most unsatisfactory all round, so as of now a little bitty upgrade has taken place in the hope that at least some comments are allowed to be published sans your generous host's intervention. Chat away, and we'll see if it works or not.

Using the techniques mentioned on a previous article regarding converting postcodes (well, actually full addresses if required) to latitude and longitude via VBA, the Poorhouse conjured up a Microsoft Access application to do this en masse.

The Poorhouse spends a lot of time looking at dull grey grids of numbers. It's not a hobby per se, but it happens. As per pretty much any other normal business, these numbers appear a lot in Microsoft Excel where hours upon hours of top fun can be had moving them around a bit until they sort of hint at some sort of conclusion that makes you look good. But between staring at these dire digits comes time to prepare for staring at dire digits, which leads to magical shortcuts being discovered.

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!

What on earth do they think they've done?! When doing the usual lazy 100-tabs-in-one-browser surfing session, the Poorhouse was befuddled to see that there seemed to be no Google-icon-clad tab open in the browser despite the fact that at least 10 different resource-sapping results pages should surely be open.

It turned out that no, it was not some magic anti-Google fairy closing things, but rather that Google have changed their "favicon" – that little image that sits in your Favourites and tab corners. Below, courtesy of Google Operating System, is what the old one looked like compared to the new one. Poorhouse verdict on the change? Lame.

Now we live in a world where high-speed Internet access is almost as essential to modern rich-guy life as say water, net neutrality is a potential hot topic. Net neutrality refers to the historic practice of your ISP granting (kind of) equal access to the internet, no matter what you do with that access – subject to legality au naturelle. From Google's – who of course have a vested interest in this – guide:

Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet…the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content.

Having had no time or inspiration to come up with exciting new innovations himself, the Poorhouse resorts to jibbering about other people's fancy stuff.

After eons of no news...here's more no-news. Flowing Data, a blog which just loves statistics, numbers and the like, have come out with radical new study of no less an institution than Facebook applications.

They took what must have been one of the most painful datasets known to humanity - 23160 different Facebook applications, and analysed by category. The shock revelation?

Wireless networking is clearly a basic requisite for any electrical device these days, now we all live in the future. The Nintendo Wii, for instance, would almost be worth the extra £180 even if it was exactly the same as a NES, but had wireless controllers and the ability to upload your shamefully bad racing times to the world. However, inevitably, the more devices that are on networks, the more security issues crop up; and the more devices that are on wireless networks, well, you don't even have to touch them to destroy them.

It's bad enough that people's computer networks are relatively easy to illegally access, even when certain common forms of encryption are used to prevent it. Generally, this isn't a matter of life or death. When it's hacking into someone's pacemaker though, obviously it is.

No, the Poorhouse is neither dead or so poor he can't pay the hosting bill. So many sorries for lack of updates, I know I shouldn't take those micropennies of google ad income for granted. However the situation (extreme busyness, lack of internet freedom) is in no danger of resolving itself anytime soon.

So, in the mean time, baffle yourself with this apparent fact.

If you divide the length of a river from source to mouth across a gently sloping plane by its direct length "as the crow flies", you'll find pi.