Two MSI X-Slim laptops announced

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These little Apple-aping beauties are the X340 and X600, from MSI. They’re part of the X-Slim range, which also includes the X320, which we spotted at CES.

The smaller X340 has a 13.4″ screen, with the X600 going up to a more standard 15.6″. They both offer HDMI-out as well as VGA and pack Centrino 2 processors. The X340 is suggested to cost somewhere between $699 and $999, which is a bit like saying London is between Spain and Scotland.

No release date, or UK prices yet. Shame, because these do look rather nice, even if they’re a tad on the derivative side.

(via Engadget)

A guitar photocopier, for effortlessly making clones of famous bits of wood

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Technically, this is a “wood carving duplicator” but the description “guitar photocopier” seems to fit the automated drilling machine so much better.

“A guide pin follows the contour of the original while a carbide bit does the cutting,” says the listing, creating a precise wooden recreation of your original once it’s finished. It’s so precise it leaves the newly created version only requiring…

Scarlett Johansson's album "Anywhere I Lay My Head" up for sampling on Napster

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Yes, really. This is not a May 12 Fools joke.

Everyone’s favourite large-chested, pasty-faced art house actress has only gone and done an album of songs. She’s called it “Anywhere I Lay My Head” – an invitation to lewd comments if ever there was – and you can listen to bits of it RIGHT NOW on Napster.

Subscribers to whatever service it is Napster’s running these days can stream…

Mobile phone music "too complicated" for most users

mum who can’t be bothered working out how to buy, organise and listen to digital music on her mobile phone – 66% of people simply have no interest in using their phones for buying music.

With most saying it’s too expensive and too awkward to put tunes on their phones, only a rather pathetic 14% of the 1800 people surveyed by Jupiter said they gave a rat’s arse about buying full tracks via their mobiles…

Yahoo! launching Digg clone "Yahoo! Buzz" – no wonder Microsoft was so keen

yahoo-buzz-revealed-social-digg-clone.jpgDisplaying the sort of creativity that’s seen Yahoo! gradually decline for more than a decade, Yahoo! Buzz is a new social news service.

Users will – get this! – be able to “submit” stories, stories which other users will then be able to “vote” on. The more votes a story gets, the higher prominence it’s eventually given on the Yahoo! front page.

Good god, it’s a genius idea. No wonder Yahoo! rejected Microsoft’s $45bn offer – with creativity like this on tap the company will be worth trillions by 2012…

Web plagiarism a serious problem in schools (and also on the internet)

web-plagiarism-school.jpgLONDON (Reuters) – More than half of teachers in a survey said they thought plagiarism from the Internet is a problem.

Some students who steal essays wholesale from the Web, they said, are so lazy they don’t even bother to take the adverts off the cut-and-pasted text.

Fifty-eight percent of the teachers interviewed in the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) questionnaire had come across plagiarism among their sixth-form pupils…

Play Guitar Hero online for free with "Super Crazy Guitar Maniac 2"

Super-Crazy-Guitar-Maniac-2.jpgOK, now here’s a very annoying thing. Guitar Hero isn’t the best pressing buttons to music game there’s ever been by a long shot.

That would be FreQuency, as spelled out in superb detail by Chris over on our PlayStation blog PSPSPS.tv. FreQuency was made by the Guitar Hero people, only about five years ago when no one cared and when pressing buttons to music in your house wasn’t considered particularly cool…