On the first weekend of the new f1 season the live coverage was on the BBC in the early hours of the morning, so wanting to watch the repeat the BBC’s iplayer was the option ahead; but I didn’t want to watch it on my 12″ PowerBook so I investigated whether watching it on our Nintendo Wii was a option… and it was.

The Wii’s browser of choice is Opera and has Flash already installed so no extra plugins or apps are needed (unlike the iPhone!). The BBC have also added a few extra features and options especially for the Wii along side a very nice set of FAQ’s which solved all my queries. This all lead to being able to watch the 3 hour Gran Prix on demand on our widescreen tv in our lounge.

The only real issue is that you need to purchase (with your wii points) the Internet Browser application via the Wii Shop, it costs about ¬£3.50 – I had already purchased and downloaded the application so it wasn’t a downside for me.

Find out more here; www.bbc.co.uk/blogs, and there’s a little demo of it all in action on youtube here.

This year and in the future i’m going to take small steps to help out the UK economy, how you might ask?

Well, by purchasing web based services such as hosting and domain names at UK companies. Keeping my hard earned money and the money that I invoice my clients with in the UK – no matter how small the figures – can only help. So here are 2 companies that will be getting my business in the future instead of previously used companies outside of the UK.

In the future I’ll be registering all my domain names at Domain Monster, I’ve been using them for a couple of months now – in the past I purchased the domain along with the hosting, but a particular project cropped up where I needed to register a bunch of domains for a single website. Domain Monster’s site is very easy to use, the admin area for editing your domains is simple – yet still allowing you to do everything you need with the domain, and the prices are very competitive.

Next up is hosting, previously I’ve only swayed away from my previous host once and it wasn’t a great experience – so I wasn’t sure about this one – but I searched high and low, and it wasn’t until I Googled specifically for Wordpress hosting that 34sp.com showed up. I have just registered my first website with them and so far it has been a breeze. A competitive price to begin with, a easy sign up and purchase system next and good upload speeds since have made me so far a very satisfied customer.

Global economy crisis? I’ll be looking a little closer to home from now on.