Just as 8 meg broadband is set to become the norm for many UK homes, Bulldog has nudged it on a step further with a service offering speeds of up to 16 meg.

Bulldog, which is owned by Cable & Wireless, says it can double the speed of its existing service via ADSL2+ technology. The ISP has unveiled two packages - Anytime Plus which costs £15 a month and Unlimited Plus at £25 a month. A package aimed at small businesses will cost around £45 a month.

Here's another neat tip from Propellerhead for Word 2000/2/3 users, to display what the 'F' or Function keys along the top of the keyboard do. Right click into an empty area next to the Toolbar at the top of the screen, and select Customize from the drop-down menu. Put a check mark next to 'Function Key display' and a new toolbar will appear at the bottom of the screen, with clickable buttons showing what each key does, plus their alternative functions, when you press the Alt, Shift or Ctrl keys. More great top tips like this one can be found in the BootLog archive.

It's easier than ever to be a movie maker these days - buy a camcorder, film your movie, upload to YouTube and you've got an international audience for your short. But how about going a step further and being a real producer on a real film?

Bayraider could make it happen. They've found that very thing on eBay. The film in question is a horror movie called "Survival", with shooting set to commence in June - check out Bayraider for the suitably manic plot. For your $500 you get a producer credit, a featured-extra role, at least one line of dialogue and a DVD when filining is complete.

Could this be your big break in the movies? Check out Bayraider for full details on this and loads more weird and wonderful auctions.

If you've not yet heard of YouTube, where have you been? It's a video sharing site and arguably the net's biggest phenomenon right now. So it's no surprise to see other companies following the same path. One such site is SelfcastTV, from the people behind the Blinkx.tv video search engine. And it's now available to use as a beta version.

As with YouTube, you can upload and share your videos, as well as searching and viewing those already uploaded to the site. And like YouTube, you can embed your video files into web pages using the code provided. But SelfcastTV does offer something a little different - on full launch, you'll be able to publish videos direct from your mobile and download content to their iPod or PSP.

Sony is adding two more models to it's range of HDD DVD recorders. The RDR-HX525 and RDR-HX725 feature 80GB and 160GB of drive space respectively, which for the HX725 means up to 249 hours of recording time.

The models feature Sony's new 'IQ' system (standing for 'Intelligent' and 'Quality' apparently), which includes a DV terminal for One Touch Dubbing, set-top box control, pausing of live TV, chasing playback and high quality recording mode for the best picture quality.

Well, if the rain comes down over the Bank Holiday weekend, you can always spend your days 3D modelling, after Google released a free version of SketchUp - a tool for creating, viewing and modifying 3D images. And if you're proud of your designs, you might be interested in the company's 3D Warehouse - a website where SketchUp users can store and share designs, or collaborate on joint 3D projects.

The software is available as a result of Google acquiring @Last Software in March. The free version is for personal use only. It is based on the existing SketchUp Pro 5.0, a fee-based version with a commercial licence and more advanced features.

The casing might change shape occasionally, but nothing massively different has happened to speakers in a long, long time. Which is why SoundArt's Canvas Art Speakers stand out so much from the rest of the crowd.

SoundArt is a canvas speaker system designed to show off your choice of art or photography, whilst playing your tunes from any sound source. I've yet to hear them in action, but the maunfacturer claims they deliver "a stunning, natural audio performance" through the canvas.  Or as natural as music through art can get.

It doesn't have to be all metal and plastic - you can now get a luxurious leather laptop courtesy of the S6F from Asus, which should hit the stores next month.

The S6F's wrist-rest and lid are both covered in genuine cowhide, tanned and coloured in either Camel or Dark Chocolate (light or dark brown), then hand-pressed onto the laptop. The company said it's taken great effort to ensure the leather ages gracefully - but with the average life if a laptop probably about 2 years, it's not something I'd worry about.

Around a week after details were accidentally leaked, Seagate has officially announced their 750GB external hard drive - a capacity posssible thanks to Seagate's use of perpendicular technology.

The 750GB Pushbutton Back-up Hard Drive, which runs at 7,200rpm and contains 16MB of cache memory, features both USB and Firewire connections, and is available with both PC and Mac software that will automatically back up your computer's hard drive when the button on the front of the drive is pressed.

Just as we were starting to doubt Nintendo's assurance that Revolution was merely a code name, it has been given its official name. So without further ado we welcome the Nintendo Wii to the fast paced world of next-gen console gaming.

The announcement came as a bit of a surprise as we are but a few days away from E3, the traditional ground in which to break such important news. And that's it as far as details go. Wii is pronounced "we" and is supposed to symbolise the console's wide appeal, unique design and be easy to remember.

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Here at Tech Digest, we were both saddened and confused by Sony's decision to give their robot dog, Aibo, the chop. And especially with robot dogs becoming all the rage again with the return of Doctor Who's K9. Not to worry, those clever Koreans have brought the robot dog back to life.

Sadly it isn't Aibo, but a new mutt on the block by Korean robotics company Dasatech known as Genibo. Looking a bit bulkier than Sony's dog, Genibo is one up on traditional dogs because it understands 100 words - rather than just "walkies" and "lead". The company claims the commands include "come here", "sit", "wag your tail" and rather strangely, "do a headstand". Additionally, petting Genibo or giving it a ball gives your dog a "happy expression".

Call me tight careful, but when I shell out a couple of hundred quid on an item, I make sure I get good value out of it. According to a new survey, over £2.5 billion-worth of gadgets have been slung into cupboards across Britain after just one month of use - with games consoles high up the list.

PriceRunner.co.uk looked at the cost per use (CPU) during their first year of ownership for 30 everyday items.  It found that while your classic "use once" items such as fondue sets and ice-cream makers still top the "fad list", games consoles come in fifth - just after the foot spa!

Casio has always been very good at pakcing a lot into very small packages, and this new 10.1 megapixel Exilim Zoom with wide-format LCD display is no exception.

The  2.8-inch (230,400 pixel) Super Bright LCD is a big plus on a small unit, allowing you to enjoy your snaps as soon as they've been taken. As an added bonus, Casio uses the extra screen space to offer some new functionality, including simultaneous viewing of a wide angle and a telephoto shot and there's room for a set of icons to save you working through the full menu system.

Want to know more about IPTV? Well Phil Sellick is your man then, because home-grown Vividas are leading developers of video streaming technology and just recently delivered the first full-screen, feature length movie across the internet before it even went to a cinema.

What does the future hold for IPTV, how does High Defintion fit in and will TV On Demand someday see the end to traditional storage formats? Now's your chance to post your questions before we send them over to him - drop them in the comments and we'll pick out a few to ask the man himself.

Right now calendars are probably not very high on your list of priorities but it's never too early to start planning for 2007, or maybe you've just decided to organise the rest of the year. Either way, hidden away inside Microsoft Word there's a little-known facility for making nifty-looking calendar pages. Here's the Propellerhead quick-start guide to using it. Go to New on the File menu and select the Other Documents tab, if Calendar Wizard isn't shown then click 'Templates' in the Create New box. If Word says the feature isn't installed you may have to dig out your Word or Office installation disc and load that, but it's worth the effort. Click the Calendar Wizard icon and follow the prompts to choose a style, layout and whether nor not you want space for a picture, then set the start and end dates and the finished design will appear. You can fiddle around with it as much as you like, it's simply a Word document, and when you are happy with it just click Print and it's done. 

Once, making a World Cup record was simple. Get a well-known middling pop act of the day (in Scotland's case, this was always B.A. Roberton), write a catchy chorus, then get the squad to belt it out. Throw in a Top Of The Pops appearance with players all dressed in casual sweaters for the occasion and you're top 10. It was a cert because you were the only act with a World Cup record.

Not anymore. The folks over at Who Ate All The Bratwurst reckon you can make your own World Cup hit in just 10 easy steps, thanks to the advent of broadband technology. Get it right and you'll have the crowd singing along over the summer, not to mention the cash rolling in. Get it wrong? Well, no-one remembers the also-rans.

Want to know how you can make it big in pop on the back of a novelty hit? Head over to Who Ate All The Bratwurst for the 10 steps that could change your life.

It's almost May, the sun's started appear a bit more regularly - and we're all stuck indoors for most of the week. Once the temperatures start to rise, you might need a little help cooling off - with something like this Lindy USB fan.

Yes, it's another novelty USB gadget, but this one does have some use. Just plug it into any available USB port and get a blast of cool air. Ideal for a stuffy office, even better if you're on a cattle truck busy train with your notebook and need a blast of air to keep you melting. And with a long (45cm), flexible neck, you can direct the air easily.

I'm guessing this so something you'll either love or really really hate. PC manufacturer Rock has teamed up with Atari to produce 100 limited edition Pegasus 650 notebooks featuring the Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach game artwork. And just to make it even more desirable for you role players, there's just 100 in existence.

A scene depicting four game characters doing battle with the red dragon is individually applied to each notebook's rear lid. The notebooks are first painted black then artwork from the game is applied using a patented process to give a near-photographic finish. A hard lacquer finish protects the artwork, so you can take it out and about.

Deep down, all football fans are nerds. We can't simply enjoy a kick around for 90 minutes - we need to know everything from how many corners and free kicks each team has had to what the goalie had for his pre-match meal. It's probably the fault of those Panini albums we all had as kids. Thing is, we can now do it in a more hi-tech way than buying packs of stickers, we can download programs for out PDAs.

FIFA World Cup 2006 from Sharko should be enough for any "statto". It's a tool for compiling statistics of matches through both the qualifying rounds and final stages of the competition. All facts are available from the 6 continental zones, with details of the groups in each zone - and all matches. Details of the final stages are already inputted and ready for the start of the competition.

If you've still not been tempted by a case for your video iPod and perhaps want something a bit more classy than a rubber novelty face, it might be worth taking a look at the Cambio case from Italian leather specialists Orbino.

Apparently these cases take inspiration from "hand-crafted yachts" - to me it looks more like a 1950s football or a baseball glove. But they certainly do look more stylish than most on the market - the leather is hand-stitched with a waxed thread that leaves no protruding seams or leather borders and finished with traditional edge staining, which means the leather is repeatedly buffed with protective polish, so it mellows with age and doesn't split or fray.