I can't say I'm too familiar with Maxian, but I do like the look of their M800 media player, which is set to hit Europe later this year.

The slimline player (just 17mm in thickness) features a Sharp-manufactured 4.3-inch WQVGA screen and supports video recording from a TV or other source to the 30GB drive. Or you can transfer files across in a choice of AVI, MPEG, ASF, WMV, DAT and VOB formats, which can be viewed on the player or elsewhere via the TV-out. It's also good for audio recording and playback.

The company is due to release the player in both the Far East and Euriope simultaneously in both black and white, with a price of around 325 Euros (£219) being quoted.

Maxian website

Via Dapreview

More portable video players:
Archos launches 604 and 404 personal video players
MobiBox MP410 personal media player

Is eBay full of overpriced tat that never sells, even if it used to belong to a celebrity? Well, yes. Although obviously there's much more to it than that. Bayraider has just rounded up its favourite ten auctions for August, which has a healthy dash of those celeb auctions, but also includes some gadgety ones too, such as the home-made robot that looks suspiciously like a dalek, and miniature rawk drumkits for your toddlers.

Google Earth sets the standard for browser based earth imaging but NASA, with its unrivalled resources has its own earth viewer program called World Wind. It’s an open source project combining satellite imagery from satellites and shuttle missions, combined and rendered in rich 3D or a range of snazzy looking overlays that reveal hidden details, the weather and topographic features. The user interface is not as slick as Google Earth, nor is it as fast and there’s not as much detail but it has a great Mac-inspired Toolbar; it’s great fun to play around with and you can jump straight from the Earth to explore the Moon, Mars, Jupiter or Venus

The days of searching round the house for a good book to read are over - you can now search round with net and download one with Google Book Search.

But don't get too excited - you can only download PDF versions of out-of-copyright books. That does mean you can catch up with your classics, include such literary gems as Dante's Divine Comedy and Aesop's Fables, now in the public domain and available for Google to scan and offer online. It might be as well to check your printer paper before you run a copy off though.

Remember Philips' prototype interactive board game from this year's CES? Well, they've refined it and its ready to face the public.

The idea of the Entertaible is to mix the flexibility of the electronic games arena, such as dynamic playing fields and varying levels, with the traditional social interaction of the board game. The Entertaible features a 30-inch LCD, sophisticated touch screen-based multi-object position detectors, plus supporting control electronics.

According to Philips Research spokesman Gerard Hollemans, the idea in the short term is to "reinvigorate established board game classics", then create "brand new games offering unprecedented levels of user interaction - games that would never become predictable or ever quite ‘feel' the same twice, however often you played them."

You should get an idea of what that all means towards the end of this year, with Philips set to pilot the Entertaible in a number of public locations.

Philips website

The next time you go flying you might want to think twice about taking your laptop with you, following the events of the past few weeks. If a terrorist alert licks off while you are waiting to check in there’s a good chance you laptop and all of your electronic goodies will part company and end up going into the hold, with no guarantee you’ll see them again at the other end.

Losing a laptop could be a major problem, especially if it contains a lot of personal, sensitive or irreplaceable data, and it may not be covered by your travel insurance if it’s lost of damaged, so Propellerhead says leave it behind.

If you need a laptop you can hire one at your destination; take any data or files you’ll need on a flash drive or CD, or better still, upload it to the web and then you can get at it on a borrowed or rented PC, or in an Internet café. It needn’t cost you a bean, either. There’s 25Gb of free online storage at Streamload, no hidden fees, no credit card details.

Norwich is now three weeks into a £1.1m, 18-month pilot covering three sectors of the downtown with free wireless. Kurt Frary, the project manager, says, "We had 1,800 connections in the first week, more than 2,500 in the second and 3,000 in the third. It's been glitch free so far - we have had very few technical problems." Unsurprisingly, early figures show a lot of action around the University of East Anglia, the downtown college and the central library. Frary also warns people to use their standard-sized brains about applying standard anti-virus techniques. [GT]

Norwich pioneers free city wi-fi

Related stories: Impressive UK WiMax trials continue | City of London Square Mile to get complete Wi-fi coverage by end of year | Norwich gets UK's largest free wireless network

When you run short of drink venues at your next geeky party, just whip one of these Tea & Biscuit magnetic coasters off your ultra-arty fridge front and fling it like a shuriken underneath the encroaching glass.  You get six photographic coasters of the 'tea & biscuits' variety and they've got nifty rubberized magnets on the back.  Applications for magnets are becoming increasingly funky and cool, and bring geeky interest to an otherwise purely arty object.  At £5, your fridge could use the present.  [GT]

Tea & Biscuit magnetic coasters

Related stories from Shiny Shiny: Floating (yes, floating) LCD Clock and Shuttle | Ever Together rare earth magnet jewelry | Wireless on/off switch from Tobias Wong

As I reported earlier today, Spiral Frog is a new style of online music download service aimed at reforming those illegally downloading music by offering free music in return for watching adverts.

So what do you reckon (despite the fact it's not available in the UK yet). Will it be a hit?

Today's Website of the Day is Cool Text, a site that lets you design basic text logos and buttons, as well as providing textures and free fonts.

Whilst the buttons and logos aren't amazing original pieces of art, they will provide a way to display your text in a variety of fonts, styles and backgrounds, and might be useful for a quick design, particularly as they may have more fonts on the site than you have on your PC.

Once designed, the image can be saved in most popular graphics formats, including layered Photoshop.

If you're a whizz on Photoshop or Paintshop Pro you might be quicker doing it yourself on your own PC, but it's a bit of online fun, despite some of the backgrounds looking like they'd belong on a mid-90s website. Minimalist they're not.

Kensington have released a notebook expansion dock with VGA output that works off just one USB port.

Connecting your notebook PC to the dock gives you access to a four-port USB hub, Ethernet, speakers, a monitor up to 19" at 1280x1024 resolution at 32-bit colour depth, and stereo audio in/out. You can connect an external keyboard and mouse to use your notebook as your main desk computer.

Its wedge design also raises the notebook to increase the airflow around it.

It's quite something to have everything controlled via one USB port. Part of it is apparently based on video compression techniques to reduce the bandwidth required. Not sure what speed Ethernet it will support, but presumably not the fastest available given the comparative speeds of Ethernet and USB2.

There's no word on whether this is PC only or if it will also work with a Mac. Given the standard array of ports, it sounds Mac-friendly, but best to check first.

Not sure of a price for the unit, but looks to be available now.

I looked at the Navman Mobile Travel Assist S60 - there was a name change in the time between I recorded this video and you seeing it now, so excuse the trip into the past. You can read a full review here.

According to a listing posted on Amazon.com (example), Windows Vista and Office 2007 will be launched on the same day - January 30th 2007. Who wants to take bets on that date slipping - at least for Vista?

Maybe this will be the release date - I mean, Vista can't slip for ever, can it?

Prices seem to have been revealed, too, with Vista Ultimate (great name) priced at £210, Vista Business at £157, Home at £105 and Home Premium at £126.

Of course, this could all just be speculation. We're not reliant on Amazon.com for announcing important software releases.

Apparently those with volume licencing agreements will get Office code in October and Vista code in November, though may be unlikely to install it until it's really released. Whenever that is...

So. Fans of Star Trek and fans of The Simpsons are in for a treat. Rhodes piano, theremin and casio keyboards lock antlers with a man in a yellow hat and a shouting through a funnel. This is ace.

Mof Gimmers

Google has launched a service to allow users to download PDF versions of classic and public domain novels and books and print them out.

It's a potential threat to traditional book retailers, both on and offline, though I wonder who will want to print out their own books at home, given the amount of paper and ink or toner it would take, and the fact that you'll generally end up with something looking more like a report than a book.

People will still want proper books, according to book sellers, and they're probably right. Even in our technological age, there's something good about picking up a real book with a decent cover and well printed and bound pages.

The service still appeals, though, particularly if portable document readers become more commonplace. Reading from the screen is generally uncomfortable and less portable, but the technology keeps advancing. Now there'll be a free source of fiction - if not the latest bestseller - available online, though to get it all you might have to wait a bit: Google reckon it'll take about 300 years to make all the world's information available online.

Pah, if anyone can do it, Google can...

QuietPC have introduced the Zalman ZM-NC1000 ultra-quiet notebook cooler, in light of the recent spate of stories about overheating batteries. I'm not sure that this is going to sort out a dodgy battery, but nevertheless keeping a notebook cool is important for both the equipment and your lap.

It's PC and Mac compatible (in other words, they can both sit on it), and has two centrifugal fans which give high air pressure and low noise. It's been aerodynamically designed to ensure the fans aren't overworked. The fan speed can be adjusted depending on the environment.

I use my Mac Powerbook a lot and when it's working at max capacity I really feel the heat - and hear the machine's fans - so this kind of solution would be very welcome. It's USB-powered so there's no extra power pack to carry around. It weighs just over a kilogram, so isn't hard to transport.

It comes in silver or black, costs £32.99 and is available now from QuietPC.com http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/audio-and-laptop-products/zm-nc1000-notebook-cooler

The Propaganda

Sennheiser has a massive range of products, from proper audiophile headphones, to sport friendly earbuds, to the more serious VoIP end of the market. The P120 is aimed as an addition to the PC set-up, with the internet telephonist. In fact, like so may other products on the market, it's Skype certified. It's got one earbud that fits on the side of you head, with an over the ear contraption to secure it, from which a short microphone extends. It's a budget purchase, since you can pick it up for just over £16.

I read the announcement for GEAR4's HouseParty 24/7, and was drawn in by the title: 'around-the-clock mood enhancer'. Wow, how's it going to do that? Invite Noel Edmonds round?

Well, no (thankfully) that's not part of the deal. What we've got is the usual iPod dock-and-speakers affair - not that you'd think it was ordinary by the way its features have been described.

Apparently this unit is better than a glass of Moët for lifting your mood, more versatile than a Swiss Army knife, and sexier than a supermodel. I'm not convinced - the one that maybe comes closest is 'bigger sound than Pavarotti singing in the shower'.

What they seem to want to extol is its portability. Move it to the bedroom and - well I won't go into details about how it performs in there, though it does have three LCD brightness settings so as not to keep you awake at night (yeah, 'cause I'm constantly awoken and blinded by my clock radio display), as well as an alarm clock to, err, wake you up.

Xoro have announced the HSD 7500, a portable/handheld Freeview TV and DVD player with a 7 inch LCD widescreen, resolution 480x234.

Its Freeview tuner is detachable, has auto-scan, EPG and Teletext. The DVD player is a slot-loading affair (smmooth) and the whole unit looks quite attractive. Xoro claim that the unit is unique because it has Freeview and DVD in one unit.

It has a built-in harness that allows it to be attached to the back of a car seat headrest. It can be powered from the supplied lithium battery, AC mains or car adapter.

Music giant Universal Music is supporting a new web site that allows visitors to download songs free of charge, in exchange for viewing adverts.

With a suitably odd name, Spiral Frog will launch in December - initially to the US and Canada - in an attempt to lure illegal music downloaders away from those sites. Recent stats suggest that for every track downloaded legally, another 40 are downloaded illegally.

Eventually, Universal must be hoping that it can turn these reformed music fans into paying customers. Apparently, though, young consumers (you know, the stereotypical music pirate) will tolerate online advertising, so long as it's relevant, if it gets them free tracks.

It will be interesting to see whether this model takes off and how long they can sustain it as a revenue generator based purely on advertising.

What do you think? Will it entice people intent on downloading illegal music? Will it draw people away from pay-services like iTunes?