Feel like Phelps with Foot-Fins

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Okay – picture the situation. You’re sat in a bar. In through the door swims mega-Olympian Michael Phelps (he never walks anywhere). Emboldened by liquor, you shout “Oi! Phelpsy”. He doggypaddles over and eyes you up suspiciously. “Schwimming… it’s eashy”, you slur. Phelps doesn’t reply. “I bet you fifty quid I could shwim fashter than you!” you continue. Phelps narrows his eyes and fixes you with a steely glare. “I’ll meet you down at the schwimming pool, at 9am tomorrow!” you cry, and fall off your stool…

Robopong – for the lonely table tennis enthusiast

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Do you ever find yourself staring forlornly at the Ping Pong table in your garage at 3am? Wanting to bat a table tennis ball about, but feeling that it might be a bit antisocial to wake up your neighbor for a quick knockabout? It’s your lucky day. Robopong is a robot that’ll fire up to 200 table tennis balls at you. It’s heavily configurable – you can adjust the angle, speed and frequency of the barrage, and it comes with a remote control that lets you adjust these variables from the comfort of your side of the table…

IOC allowing Olympics highlights on YouTube

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced that it will be showing news and sports highlights from the Beijing Olympics in countries where no broadcaster has exclusive rights. The Video on Demand service will be available on a YouTube channel.

That means some 75 countries, including India and Nigeria, will be able to watch the best bits of the Games, as determined by the IOC. The channel will be “geo-blocked” so that those of us in countries where a TV broadcaster is already showing coverage of the Games won’t be able to access the YouTube footage.

Since the BBC will be near-exhaustively covering the Games, official YouTube clips won’t be available in the UK.

Leading Expert: Shimano Di2 electronic gears are "super nice"

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One sure-fire way to come up with a new idea for an invention is to simply add “electric” to the name of a product that already exists as after all, if something is electronic it is automatically better than its predecessor. Take the electric toothbrush, for example, or even the electric chair – chairs couldn’t kill anyone until someone had the bright idea of putting electricity inside them.

It’s with this mantra that Shimano have improved upon the humble bicycle, by coming with with an electronic gears system that they reckon will “improve performance” and “reduce maintenance”…