New Doctor Who hitting iTunes – one series a week popping up during December

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Doctor Who, a show which chronicles the increasingly camp adventures of a time travelling man who gets his clothes from a Help The Aged sale rack and solves everything from interplanetary war to tooth decay by shouting while pointing a screwdriver at a broken numeric keypad, is coming to iTunes.

BBC worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC that’s allowed to sell things for money, is dumping every episode of the new Who on Apple’s shopping system. Episodes from the first series of the modern Who should be ready for buying and downloading today…

Guitar Hero makes music look easy – 2.5 million extra kids learning instruments thanks to video games

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Hear that sound? That’s the slow, disjointed, tortured noise made by 2.5 million 14-year-old boys currently trying to work out the opening chords of ‘Smoke on the Water’ on their new proper guitars.

It’s all thanks to the success of music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which have triggered a massive surge in the number of kids learning to play musical instruments. The Times says a survey by Youth Music found that over half of…

Sony UK sort of cuts price of PlayStation3 – starts offering £40 discount on 40GB model

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If you really, really must have a PlayStation3 right now, you might want to buy yourself one via Sony’s online shop SonyStyle.co.uk – as it’s currently offering a £40 discount on its cheapest model.

The deal takes the RRP of the Blu-ray-playing “entry level” 40GB machine down to an almost reasonable £249 including free delivery, with a nearly tempting…

The μTRON Keyboard – a terrifying new form of Japanese brain torture

As if typing isn’t a difficult and tiresome enough chore that only exists because voice and brain recognition technology is STILL rubbish, here’s something to make it harder. The μTRON Keyboard. A keyboard that’s been chopped up and rearranged. An invention that could halve office productivity over night.

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The μTRON Keyboard comes in two pieces, with the space bar relegated…

Xbox 360 "Jasper" hardware variants spotted in the wild – efficient and with built-in memory for game saves

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Microsoft’s been fiddling with the internal organs of its Xbox 360 again, with the long-rumoured “Jasper” hardware re-jig apparently rolling out across the world right now.

The new Xbox 360 – as found and disassembled by a user on Xbox-Scene – features a lower-Wattage PSU (150W instead of 175W) that’ll keep Greenpeace happy when it does its next name & shame list.

But the most thrilling enhancement for you, humble end user, is the addition of 256MB of internal flash memory…

Energy & Efficiency, episode 10

By simply making a few changes to how we live our daily lives, it’s possible to save energy – and therefore also money and the world.

In a system I’m calling the Modern Energy Efficient Lifestyle (2.0) I shall outline two simple techniques designed to get mankind more in synch with the planet and therefore assure the survival of both man and environment. Here’s how.

To summarise – go to bed at 4.30pm tonight…

The Mintpass Mintpad internet, notepad, writing, watching, digital camera, media THING

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The global gadget development arms race to see who can fit the most stuff into the smallest, whitest box has taken a dramatic turn today, thanks to this clever little everything-in-one miniature… digital… wi-fi… thing.

You can write on it, browse the internet on it, listen to music on it, take photos on it, watch films on it and, most importantly of all, get it out of your very smallest pocket and impress people with it by showing them all of the above. It all happens on a fairly minuscule 2.86″ touch screen, mind…

International Space Station astronauts indulging in urine-drinking party tonight

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You wouldn’t think people would ever be pleased to hear they can start drinking their own urine – but the astronauts on the International Space Station are currently over the moon about it.

“There will be dancing later,” Mission Control said, after ISS commander Mike Fincke told Earth that the the orbiting station’s faulty urine processor – which filter space wee, condensation and SWEAT and turns it into lovely drinking water – was finally fixed.

This raises two important questions – how do you dance in zero gravity? And before…

Idiotic juror asks her Facebook friends to vote guilty/not guilty in child kidnapping case

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“I don’t know which way to go, so I’m holding a poll” a female juror wrote in a vote application on her Facebook page when she couldn’t make her mind up about a court case she was part of.

The unnamed juror failed to set any sort of privacy options on her plea for help, meaning the entire Facebook-using portion of the internet was capable of viewing her confused cry for help…