Here are a few quick tips from Propellerhead to tidy up the Outlook Express desktop and make it easier to use. You should know by now what all of the icons and buttons do, so switch off the text labels and use small icons and you get an instant increase in screen area for your messages and mailboxes. Simply right-click on a toolbar and select Customize and in the two drop-down boxes (Text Options and Icon Options) select No text labels and Small Icons respectively. Click Close. There's more savings still to be had. Click on the vertical separator bar on the far left of the Icon toolbar and drag it onto empty space on the menu bar (to the right of Help).

 

Alas most home cinema style glasses we have played with so far have been well, crap. Nevertheless we are prepared to give the  MPGlass 230M glasses the benefit of the doubt for now.

The MPGlass 230M hook up to your DVD, VCR or games console. Once you've got them on, you can see a display that apparently gives the effect of watching a 30-inch screen at a 2 metre distance, plus stereo sound once you pop in the ear plugs. And it's personal - the images and sound can't be seen or heard by anyone else and you shouldn't be disturbed by enternal noise or movement once you're hooked up.

According to a story in the Hollywood reporter, support from Tinseltown's movie giants for Sony's UMD disc format, used in the PSP, is falling rapidly.

According to Games Digest, the article alleges that Paramount, Imagine and Universal have dropped UMD releases completely, with 20th Century Fox and Buena Vista said also to have scaled back their support. The piece blames a glut of too many titles, plus growing competition from the video iPod. Sony in return are said to be working on plans to let you watch UMD movies on home TVs.

For more on this, plus all the latest games news from across the consoles, check out Games Digest now.

Toshiba has unveiled the world's first commercially available HD DVD player - the HD-XA1, which, for a limited time, comes complete with two HD DVD titles.

Alongside the playback of pre-recorded HD DVD, Toshiba's HD-XA1 also offers support for up-conversion of standard DVD to a resolution of 1080i or 720p through HDCP capable HDMI output. Along with L-PCM 5.1ch audio, the HD-XA1 supports Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD.

Are you one of those people who quite happily snaps away with your camera phone, taking pictures of your mates, live bands or even the odd celeb in the street? It's easy enough to take them - but what about showing them off? If you want to display them quickly on the web, it's worth checking out ShoZu. if you want them on display at home, there's now the Parrot Bluetooth Photo Viewer.

The Photo Viewer, available in either leather or bleached oak, features a high-resolution TFT LCD colour screen, which can display up to 100 photos that can be uploaded from a Bluetooth-enabled phone in a couple of simple steps. You can decide which of the photos you keep on display or you can show as a slideshow at selected intervals. Software in the frame will automatically resize your photo to the frame size and re-adjust the image to portrait or landscape depending on whether the Photo Viewer is in a portrait or landscape position.

It seems like the transport companies are finally getting the message that we need to keep in touch and keep working, wherever we are, especially when we're on the move. We told you earlier in the month about National Express offering free Wi-Fi access on some routes, now train operator GNER is extending its trial of Wi-Fi access to all of its East Coast Mainline trains.

GNER began trialling on-board Wi-Fi in December 2003 and has since equipped ten of its Mallard-class trains, which run between London King's Cross and Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The company has now announced an extension of the service, bringing the wireless technology to the rest of the Mallard fleet and to its 13 remaining diesel High Speed Trains by this summer.

Bored of your Sony PSP in plain old black and white? How would you like one with wood panelling, with styling just like your gran's old wartime radio?

Sadly, this PSP doesn't live outside of a graphics package. It was created for Worth1000, a Photoshop competition site. Aspiring artists are given 48 hours to create a Photoshop masterpiece based on a specified criteria - in this case, modern technology with a vintage twist.

Well, we're not even into April, but a marker is already set for the worst piece of World Cup tat memorabilia - the England Bottle Babe.

I'm not sure what's worst - the way it looks of the lack of any real point to it. It's a holder for your beer, however, unlike similar products, it doesn't even keep your beer cool. Instead, the manufacturers have added something far more patriotic - it plays the National Anthem at the touch of a button. One can only wonder about the sound quality.

The BBC are getting awfully excited about the new series of Doctor Who, due to hit our TV screens in April. In fact, you get the feeling they can't contain themselves - they already have adventure games, classic clips and past glories online, now they're offering additional Tardisodes to your mobile.

Tardisodes are 60-second mini episodes of Doctor Who. There's 13 in all - with one going out after each of the 13 brand new TV episodes. Each will be an addition to the main storyline, featuring back-stories about the characters and adventures coming up in the next episode.

If you have a digital camera you've got to try AutoStitch. This ingenious little program, unearthed by Propellerhead, is a brilliant way to create spectacular panoramic images, and it's almost foolproof. Simply stand in one spot and snap away trying to capture as much of what you can see as possible. You don't have to worry about overlapping, or taking shots in sequence, the program takes care of all that for you, seamlessly matching images and blending them together into one picture. It's fully automatic, simply launch the program, tell it which images to use and away it goes. This is a fully functional freeware demo and it will open the finished image in your default image editing program, which you can then save and print as normal. There's tons more tips and links to some of the best freeware and shareware around over on the BootLog website at http://www.rickmaybury.com

I never really like Blue Peter. Maybe it's because I was rubbish at making things out of egg trays and washing-up liquid bottles, perhaps it was because all the presenters reminded me of school teachers - or it could well have been because I never had a Blue Peter badge.

As a kid, they were useful things, getting you into places for free while your mates had to pay up - not very exciting places, usually art galleries and museums, but at least it was something for nothing. Over at Bayraider, news comes in that the Beeb is now tackling unscrupulous types that are flogging their BP badges on eBay. Not very well it would seem, as the Bayraider folk have found well over 200 still listed.

I'm not suggesting you bid for one, but if you want to find out why the BBC is blocking the Blue Peter badge trade and where the remaining badges are listed, head on over to Bayraider now.

You may recall we covered the iLuv i604 iPod battery recently. Well, here's another option if you need a battery boost when you're out and about - the TunePower rechargeable battery pack from Belkin.

The TunePower is effectively an extra power source for your player, offering between 8-10 hours of additional playing time, with a power indicator showing his much charge is remaining. The pack comes with three slim-fit protective sleeves, so it'll fit whatever iPod model you have and not cause too much added bulk.

Plextor has introduced its latest weapon in the fight against hard drive accidents - a silicon skin.

The newly-launched PX-SP portable drives are covered by the silicon, which should add some protection from the inevitable bumps and knocks. The drives, available as 80GB and 120GB models and weighing just 170g, feature high speed USB 2.0 bus-powered connectivity, password protection (via PlexTools Professional HDD software) and a black carrying pouch - which I can only assume is for protection of your protective cover!

Although Nintendo has yet to officially announce precise details of its next-gen console, still codenamed the Revolution, games website IGN has compiled a likely set of figures from "a variety of trusted development sources". These don't hold many surprises and confirm what Nintendo has been saying all along - that the new console isn't trying to engage itself in the high tech battle that Microsoft and Sony are throwing themselves into, instead focusing on a quiet, inexpensive and compact.

Without going into the nitty-gritty of clock speeds and so on, the new console makes a fair comparison to the original Xbox in terms of numbers, although obviously the architecture of each system differs greatly and that's what really counts from a developer's perspective.

With the launch of Sky HD in May and the BBC promising a high definition World Cup over summer, it seems we're starting to take the idea of HDTV more seriously. And that means sales of up to one million HD-ready sets over the next year.

According to Continental Research's Spring 2006 Digital TV Report, just two per cent of the UK has a HD-ready TV right now, with seven per cent very interested in converting and 36 per cent quite interested in the new technology. From that data, they reckon that equates to between 800,000 and one million purchases.

Apple has introduced volume controls on iPods following concerns about the link between music players and damage to hearing, releasing a free download update allowing users to set a personal maximum volume limit.

Apple is already facing a US legal action over the issue of iPods damaging hearing, while health experts have called for studies into the effect on hearing of earphones. Greg Joswiak, Apple's iPod marketing vice president, said the company was responding to "increased attention in this area".

  Want to be a pop star? Don't want to wait in a queue for 12 hours before being humiliated by Simon Cowell, Ozzy's wife and the bloke who inflicted Westlife on us? You could soon test out your tonsils down the phone instead with the Ring 'n Sing service.

The phone-based game uses a "pitch-tracking algorithm" to compare different voices. So, select your song from those on offer, listen to the song being sung by a professional crooner, then sing your version down the line. The system compares the two renditions before giving your effort a mark out of ten. As far as we know, you don't have to sit through 5 minutes of criticism about your hair, clothes and choice of song before the result comes through.

With over a million Nintendo DS consoles and Sony PSPs shifted in the UK in the last six months and with 280 million games expected to be downloaded to mobiles in Europe this year, lots of us are now gaming on the go. If that includes you, have a look at the new Pocket Gamer website.

Created by six experienced games journalists, Pocket Gamer offers news, reviews and previews. With so many people new to portable gaming, the team behind the Pocket Gamer intend to make the site open to all, not just the gaming fanatic - mixing the latest gaming reviews with advice on getting the most out of your console or mobile.

Dell has unveiled the Latitude D620 and Latitude D820 - lightweight, slimmed-down notebooks with wireless broadband connectivity, biometrics security and Intel Core Duo processors. 

The basic version of the Latitude D620 features an Intel Core Duo processor with a wide aspect 14.1-inch WXGA display, 512MB shared DDR2 memory, 40GB hard drive and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi capability. The base configuration for the Latitude D820 includes the Intel Core Duo processor with a wide aspect 15.4-inch WXGA display, 512MB DDR2 shared memory, 40GB hard drive and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi capability.

Last week we went to a very nice old fashioned members' club, Mortons in Mayfair. As well as eating several nice danish pastries we also checked out Navman's latest range of GPS systems (it's not that we've been lazy in reporting the event, it's just that we had to sign one of those confounded NDAs for some reason).

Anyway the big news is that Navman has come up with a pretty cool feature for its latest 700 series products (the iCN720 and iCN750) which lets you take pictures of places on a built in camera and store their geographical (latitude and longitude) details.  Called NavPix, it means, for example, you could take a picture of, say, a pub you fancied going into and its co-ordinates and image would automatically be stored in your GPS system for next time - handy if you were too much the worse for wear when you saw it the first time!