Wacky Uses is a fab little site which offers up a charming and hilarious selection of weird and wonderful facts and ideas. Find out a legion of useful, bizarre and even legal things you can do with peanut butter, tea bags and Coke. Good fun.

Here’s a nice idea. The Web Photo School gives online lessons in photographic techniques. Whilst this is obviously not going to turn a duffer into David Bailey (who he?), it should give the new generation of digicam users a few valuable pointers as they struggle to master their megapixels. The site contains a free section, which contains a good selection of example tutorials. The main part of the school, though, is based around a fee of $60.00 a year, which…

Advogato is reporting on possible attempts by the media industry to water down the draconian copy protection plans which are currently before Congress in the US. This is not an altruistic move, by the way, as according to the article it may be no more than a clever strategic move to subvert opposition to the proposed, and vilified, legislation.

Behold, the Non-Verbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs & Body Language Cues. Everything you ever wanted to know about subliminal conversation but were afraid to ask. The nod of a head, the wink of an eye. Stunning site. [via Metafilter]

I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I’m simply fascinated by Japanese culture and custom. I also love sites that celebrate the uniqueness of the country in a non snide way and SyberPunk is one such example. A site outlining the quirky, bizarre and simply hilarious aspects of some of the Japanese culture (like the dog walking machine featured above for instance). Unfortunately it looks as though it is not being updated at the moment, but there is…

Not really the sort of article that I would normally post, except for this one excerpt which seems to sum up the desperate search for identity – er I mean obsessive focus on fashion – of Japanese youth. If it’s true of course! ‘Another recent trend was wearing boots with twenty-centimeter platform heels. There have been at least five reported shoe-related fatalities, one involving a twenty-five-year-old who died after tumbling off her own footwear, and another who lost control of…

Just when you thought you’d seen it all, along comes this kind of thing, which quite frankly leaves one gasping for air. The text based Pong site is….well…just that. A site where you can play the venerable game of pong in a text version. You know – ‘the paddle has moved up, now it’s your move’ kind of thing. So bizarre it’s hilarious.

A nice – albeit technical – article over at MP3newswire.net, which gives some valuable tips on optimising your MP3 recordings. The piece looks at the best MP3 rippers, advises on optimum configurations and lists the best products to use. If you’re an audiophile this article should be just up your street.

This New York Times article (I’m sorry but it requires registration) is an interesting evaluation of voice activated home appliances and gizmos. One of the key points is just how fiddly it may become when/if we all start talking to our home equipment, the author cites a problem where the voice activated television started reacting to a particular newscaster’s voice and raising the volume autonomously. Kind of spooky really. Anyway worth a read. Also mentioned in the article is the…

Well this is it really. Combine the two most popular phenomena on the Web and what have you got? Yep, the Google Weblog – a site dedicated to bringing you all the latest news on the Google service.

InfoSync has a short article showing off the type of colour screens we are likely to see in upcoming phone handsets like the Nokia 7650 and P800 from Sony Ericsson. Very pretty they look too, although one wonders just how much of a drain all this high res stuff will have on the poor old batteries.

Technologist Dan Bricklin has been playing around with Dean Kamen’s new Segway. This report is something of an attempt to describe what it’s actually like to ride and use rather than a formal review, which makes it interesting. Example quote: “People on the Segways were about as intrusive as someone on crutches or holding a wheeled piece of luggage — that is, not much at all.” He also mentions high speed, super rugged versions being tested out by the US…

Those venerable folks at Google have just released a set of APIs to let clever geek programmers create applications which use the awesome Google search engine. What does this mean for the rest of us? Who knows, but one thing’s for certain, there’s got to be some really interesting ways to use the 2 billion (and rising) documents currently indexed by Google from the Web.

While we’re on the subject of Web sites (we are aren’t we?) here’s a neat one – Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age. Enter your age, and the site will pop up with all the brilliant things that other – obviously more famous – people had done by that age themselves. Er…not recommended for those with a weak or palpitating sense of inferiority. Note: This site does not mention the 5.x billion unkown and unremarked folk who…

A strange place this, the Bankers Repository Corporation Global Dispute Resolution site. Also known as the….wait for it….Resolutionizer 7000, this weird Flash powered site promises to ‘resolve highly complex disputes within a matter of days for a fixed fee.’ Submit your evidence and information and a 3 person impartial committee will contact your antagonist, review all the facts and give you a non-binding recommendation. The company claims to solve over 60% of the cases submitted to it, which sure sounds…