I know one thing on the guitar - Pinball Wizard. I'm useless with one, though that didn't stop me from being in two bands in my youth. I might have been better if I'd had technology to help me instead of a Bert Weedon book - like the Fretlight, the world's first computer-powered electric teaching guitar.

Fretlight teaches you to play through a series of lights embedded in the guitar. Available in red, pink, black, white and tobacco sunburst (pictured), the learning system includes software for all types of players and levels of ability. Connect to your PC via USB cable, install the software, follow the software generated lights on the guitar and you could be playing and doing the Hank Marvin walk in no time.

I can't say I ever really took to Elmo on Sesame Street - probably because I'm of an age that remembers Grover, the poor puppet who got shunted off to the Muppet Retirement Home to make way for the new kid on the block. But I'm guessing I'm in a minority judging by the amount of merchandise out there relating to the cute character.

Amongst all that tat, the folks over at Bayraider seem to have found something a little more exclusive - a Pro Elmo puppet. This ain't no toy, as the seller points out, it's a "professional quality rod-arm puppet featuring a form-fitting leather-lined hand grip, soft chamois thumbcap, poseable hands, constructed with a high-quality foam base and durable faux-fur." Master this and a summer season at Blackpool awaits.

Want to know more? Find out about this and other great auctions at Bayraider.

A while back, we mentioned a survey that claimed Sanyo was one of the least cool companies around. That could change if it continues to bring out products like the Xacti C6, reckoned to be the world's smallest, thinnest and lightest solid state still and moving image camera.

Small enough to fit in your shirt pocket at just 23mm in width and 159g in weight, the C6 features a  2-Inch LCD Monitor, 6MP CCD, 5x optical zoom, 12x digital zoom and Digital Image Stabiliser for correcting any shake. The C6 shoots and can shoot in high-resolution MPEG-4 for DVD-like recording - with a 1GB SD card, Sanyo reckons you can store around an hour of continuous video recording. You can also take digital photos whilst shooting your digital movies.

According to a number of reports, Sony is preparing to launch a re-designed set of Network Walkman E-series digital music players in a variety of coloured cases and with an integrated USB connector, not dissimilar to Apple's shuffle.

Very little is known about the players beyond their fairly unimpressive looks. Capacity is a choice of 512MB, 1GB and 2GB and there's no FM tuner - present on the current E-series models. The players also feature a single-line OLED screen that glows through the coloured casing. There should be five colours to choose from - green, red, blue, purple and black.

  In what could be a very significant step for the mobile download market, mBlox, in conjunction with New Visions and record labels V2 and Ministry of Sound, is offering 'single price' full track music downloads without additional data charges.

Currently, if you want to download a track, you're looking at the cost of the track and the cost of the data traffic to deliver it, which could mean a 1MB download costing £1.50 track plus an additional £8 in data charges - the cost of going buying the album at a supermarket.

In what must be deemed a massive success for Microsoft's new console, the Xbox 360, the company has announced that 85 per cent of "connected" Xbox 360 owners have downloaded content from the Xbox Live marketplace.

A total of over 10 million items have already been downloaded, with Microsoft's service hitting that number faster than iTunes. And over half of all Xbox 360 owners are hooked up to Xbox Live, compared to around 10 per cent of Xboxes.

We told you recently about Pandora, the music discovery service that offers you a playlist based on track selections. Well, it seems like Napster has followed that lead by introducing a similar service to its digital music offering.

Based on your listening history, Napster compiles 50 recommended tracks and albums for each user, along with a daily 15 song playlist from the two million tracks it has online. Being a user of both Napster and Pandora, I can see benefits with both services. Pandora seems restricted by the amount of music it can call upon, but its scientific approach has offered up some interesting choices of music previously unknown to me. And of course, it's free. Napster's service has the music to call upon, but seems content to recycle many of the same tracks you've played previously all too often.

Designer Marcel Neundörfer has come up with an interactive urinal to help improve men's aim. The "On Target" urinal concept features a pressure-sensitive pad in the urinal and screen - with games encouraging accuracy played out on the screen in response to where the pressure pad is, erm, splashed on. The concept is currently being positioned as a potential art installation. More here.

Games Digest - for all your gaming needs.

You would not believe how much time the folks at Propellerhead and BootLog have wasted bringing you this tip. It concerns one, possibly two 'Easter Eggs' concealed inside Windows XP. Easter Eggs are small hidden programs or features within programs, usually put there by bored programmers. There were lots of them in previous versions of Windows and Microsoft applications but it was thought they'd all been expunged as part of a deal MS struck with US Government agencies, in which it agreed not to include any undocumented features in Windows. Anyway, this one concerns a Windows Screensaver called 3D Pipes, which you will find on the Screensaver tab in Display Properties (Start > Control Panel > Display). The Easter Egg that does exist lets you change the 3D pipes into striped candy canes. To make it work select 3D Pipes from the list then click the Setting button

According to industry title In Stock, Nokia has announced it is preparing a range of new gaming handsets for release in early 2007. Nokia announced the range alongside a new toolset for developers to create mobile games at GDC, currently taking place in San Jose.

Take a peak at sister site Games Digest for even more gaming news.

Sony's "PlayStation Network Platform" has been formally announced. The network that will form the backbone for the PS3's online play is set to stand midway between current PS2 online functionality and Xbox's Live service.

The PNP will be free, and will provide lobby, matchmaking and ranking, as well as multi-play, services. But publishers will then be able to add on extra services on top and charge for them. Like Live, the PNP will feature content downloads and micro-payment systems. The service will be built with Sony Online, makers of EverQuest and The Station online system.

Check out sister blog Games Digest for more gaming news.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 system security is proving a real challenge for the hacking community as the most promising potential exploit is revealed as "useless to the public". An exploited loophole in the DVD drive firmware had raised interest by letting one hacker run a copied version of Project Gotham Racing 3.

However, the hack itself is too impractical, and potentially lethal for the 360, to ever be risked by the average console owner. So it looks like Microsft's "core security system" is resisting most hackers' best efforts and could updated very easily, thanks to Xbox Live, if Microsoft feels it is necessary.

Via GamesIndustry.biz

I can't think of any occasion when I would want to add a sound effect to a mobile conversation - or indeed a text or voicemail message. But if you're the office joker, you might well appreciate the japes you can have with the Razz mobile headset.

The Razz headset offers you 10 "funny sounds" that can be dropped into your calls, outgoing messages and voice mails with the click of a button. Just fix the Razz device to your mobile, then choose which of the sounds you want to use in your conversation via a scroll wheel.

Research in Motion (RIM) looks set to introduce a 3G version of the BlackBerry to the UK in the shape of the 8707v. Whether there's any great benefit to a 3G BlackBerry is open to question - with flash storage remaining at 64MB, there's nowhere to keep your large downloads anyway. We don't know yet either whether users will be able to harness the 3G modem in the device to surf the web on ther laptops.

The 8707v is based on a 312MHz Intel PXA901 processor with 16MB of SRAM. In addition to 3G connectivity, the handset offers quad-band (850/900/1800/1900MHz) GSM/GPRS operation - it's not yet clear if there is EDGE support. The 3G modem seems to be used exclusively for data. There is also a 320 x 240, 65,635-colour display, Bluetooth 2.0 on board and a battery which offers up to five hours' talk time.

The Games Developers Conference has thrown up a whole load of interesting bits of news this year including more details on the Xbox 360 camera. It has a nine foot long cable that plugs into the back of your 360 and it enables both still image and video recording, with control and functionality integrated into the Xbox dashboard.

Its most intriguing feature is the gesture recognition which is aimed at taking real life body movements and putting them in the game. Kind of like the Revolution controller then.

As you know pressing the Alt + Tab keys you can switch between the various programs and applications running on your Windows PC but did you know that there's a simple way to make the Application Switcher in Windows XP a lot more useful, and interesting to look at?  Propellerhead has found a way and it's called Taskswitch a free add-on from Microsoft. In addition to the normal icon view it also generates a preview or thumbnail of the applications you are switching between. It's part of the Powertoys suite (which includes the most excellent Tweak UI -- there's more about it on the BootLog website).

In a moment of great symmetry, the 3 network has turned 3 - and to celebrate, they've conducted a survey about the trends in video conversation - or to put it plainly, how people use their 3G phones.

And the upshot is a series of new descriptions of phone uses which very much sound like they were dreamt up by over paid trends agency staff after a bottle of Chablis or two. Actually they were...

Nevertheless I can see potential for Mobumentaries and especially The Andrew Marr Effect.

The full list in all its glory is after the turn.

The grandaddy of all British sci-fi (well almost) Doctor Who is about to make his return to British screens - and according to TV Scoop, the BBC throwing around teasers for the new series with complete abandon.

Not only are they offering up sneak previews of the action, featuring new Doc David Tennant, but they've also got classic clips, behind-the-scenes documentaries, snippets of the last series and an assortment of stuff you can download to your mobile.

Interested? Head over to TV Scoop to find out more about this and other great TV.

Leading film rental site Lovefilm has signed a deal with Universal Pictures to offer big movie titles for download via the AOL website - starting on April 10th with monster movie re-make King Kong.

What makes this different to other legal download sites is that these are for keeps - you can watch as often as you like on your PC and certain other portable devices. Sky's free download service lets you watch the movie, but it's deleted after a couple of weeks.

Fujitsu Siemens is launching three new Amilo consumer notebooks in April - the Amilo Si 1520 with 12-inch display, the Amilo Pi 1536 with a 15.4-inch screen and the Amilo Xi 1546 with 17-inch display.

The Amilo Si 1520 features Intel Centrino Duo mobile technology, Intel Core Duo processor and a 12-inch LCD WXGA display with CrystalView technology and light sensor which automatically adjusts display brightness to lighting conditions There's also an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 128MB shared memory, USB 2.0, SPDIF, DVI-I and IEEE 1394 ports and Bluetooth connection and up to 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM in two SO-DIMM slots. It should retail at around £800.