Author: James O'Malley
Holy fanboy, Batman!
Check this out – someone has actually built themselves a Batmobile based on the version in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. The Tumbler, to give it’s proper name, is a near-perfect replica features everything from the after-burner to the stealth-plane-esque body and, remarkably, was built merely by looking at pictures from the two films and publicity photos with no original blueprints used…
Olympus and Panasonic set the standard for smaller SLR cameras
I always feel intimidated when I go on to the photo sharing website Flickr. Whereas I can feel a smug sense of superiority towards commentators on YouTube, as they’re mostly idiotic fundamentalists or 9/11 conspiracy theorists, on Flickr, the comments don’t talk about what’s actually in the photos: it could be a kitten, or even incontrivertable photographic evidence for the existence of the Loch Ness Monster – and yet they’re always about how good or bad the composition of a photo is.
Because my digital camera is of the cheap “point and shoot” variety, I always feel rubbish in comparison to the Flickrati and their £1000 SLR beasts and their beautifully framed shots of, well, mostly artsy cityscapes. This could all be about to change though thanks to a new technology developed by Olympus and Matsushita…
EFF decides to remain "neutral" over net neutrality
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has come up with some software to help us keep an eye on our ISPs and find out whether or not they’re ‘traffic shaping’ or ‘bandwidth throttling’ what goes into and out of our computers – a practice that some ISPs have begun doing to try and kerb all of that nasty BitTorrenting that’s clogging up the internet…
Nokia to use Zune Marketplace? "Maybe", says grapevine
An interesting rumour has appeared on the “that’s a pretty logical move now you think about it” pile – apparently Nokia and Microsoft are looking for a tie up between Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace and Nokia’s mobile phones.
This makes a lot of sense for two ugly kids for whom prettyboy Apple is the bane of their lives – Microsoft doesn’t make phones, having repeatedly denied that they’re planning a “Zune phone”, and Nokia doesn’t make dedicated music players…
Linux narrows the market share gap to a tiny 90.2%
Good news for fans of sticking it to the man – the number of PCs sold in the UK preinstalled with Linux has shot up from just 0.1% in January 2007 to an incredible 2.8%. Microsoft shouldn’t be too scared yet though, as they still have 93% of the market…
Asus Eee 900A announced. The "A" stands for "[yet] another one"
Since Asus realised that its Eee line of tiny “netbook” laptops are wildly successful, it has been slapping an ‘Eee’ badge on to everything that’s compatible with electricity – from monitors, to desktop PCs, and apparently up to 23 different versions of the original Eee PC. The latest in this long line of brand dilution looks set to be the Eee PC 900A…
Sony unveil a few small additions additions to home theatre range
Sony has today announced some exciting new home theatre systems that have speakers the size of golf-balls – meaning that you’ll have plenty of extra room on your wall for your massive telly…
KNGT icom MK1 Car PC makes driving both more fun and more dangerous
Korean firm KNGT has announced a new car PC that runs on Windows XP, suggesting that jokes about “crashing” don’t translate well into Korean…
NASA briefing the White House on secret Mars news. HG Wells' fear of Mars may be vindicated.
A couple of weeks ago the sixth man on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, in an apparent bid to catch up with James Watson in the “man of science inexplicably becomes a crackpot” stakes, went on the radio and claimed that the human race has made contact with aliens and there’s a big cover-up to disguise this fact.
Maybe he’s not mad after all if Aviation Week, a publication not usually known for its hyperbole (or generally not known) is right with its story about NASA deliberately sitting on a huge announcement?
Moderately important men say Radiohead's "Pay what you want" gimmick for In Rainbows was successful.
A shocking new report out today has sent shock waves through the music industry after the revelation that giving away stuff for free is actually really popular.
Will Page, an economist for the MCPS-PRS alliance (perhaps the world’s longest acronym) and Eric Garland (boss of Big Champaign – a company who apparently do “online media measurement”) have taken a look at Radiohead’s In Rainbows album that they released last year with the gimmick of “pay what you want to pay”, and have come to the conclusion that it was actually a pretty good idea…
