The Movie Review Query Engine. What it says. A search engine for movie reviews. Over 26,000 of them. Does it add more to the field than, say, the bewilderingly comprehensive Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB or even the quirky but loveable MovieLens? I’m not sure. But worth a look nonetheless.

From the ‘too bizarre for words’ dept. A team of starlings apparently ‘captured’ on camera during one of their regular jaunts to steal quarters from a car wash machine in the US – $4000 worth of coins eventually recovered. Eh? [via Madville]

Expect to see a few variants of the new Vario keyboard hitting the shelves over the coming months, as manufacturers offer this compact Bluetooth enabled PDA keyboard under their own brand name. Originally developed by RAST Associates, it looks to be a clever product, since the Bluetooth feature should enable it to work with a wide variety of upcoming products. No firm pricing or availability as yet though.

MSNBC is reporting on a new metal called LiquidMetal which apparently is twice as strong as steel and titanium, doesn’t rust and can be cast like plastic in a mould. Sounds great. Now all we need is for someone to work out how we recycle it once its usefulness is over.

Finnish company Hantro Products has demonstrated the capture, playback and transmission of MPEG4 video on the Nokia 7650 handset. The significance of this is that it looks as though the Symbian operating system will be able to support simple video capture (10 fps at 160 x 120 pixels) using nothing more exotic than a first generation smartphone with integrated digicam. This article from Infosync says that a 10-30 second clip uses about 60-250 Kb, and that although audio is not…

Here’s a sign of the [coming] times. The GPRS traffic counter for PocketPC devices lets you keep track of your data traffic so that you don’t end up spending too much for your ‘high speed’ mobile information. This type of tool is bound to become more popular as GPRS mobile services take off.

It seems that Sanyo has been showing off a new prototype wi-fi (i.e. 802.11b) enabled digicam based on the DSC-SX560. This 1.5 megapixel model will accept a wireless compact flash card to let you transmit pictures directly via an outdoor or indoor wireless LAN hub. I’m a tad confused here. Why exactly would you need to connect a digicam up to a wi-fi network? Is this not a little bit of technology overkill? Oh I get it. You’re at an…

Says it all really. Barry Trotter. A wizard boy. A book. A somewhat crude parody.

Went to a Samsung do the other day and was intrigued by the display of upcoming smartphones adorning the walls. Not one to miss out on a possible winning technology, the company has cannily opted to produce not one, not two, but three flavours. The i330 Phoenix is a bigger handset – obviously aimed at the Nokia Communicator crowd – with tri band, Palm OS, touchscreen with Graffiti, address book etc etc. The BlueChip is another Palm based device in…

Oh dear. You spend $7 million developing a computer game as a recruitment tool and then blunder around and get the launch completely wrong? Oh dear, oh dear!

I have no idea what this cow is about, primarily because the site is all in some Scandinavian language. But I do know that it is just about the best implementation of Shockwave that I’ve yet seen on the Web. And it’s funny as heck! [via MajorGeeks]

Google backwards. But why?

Got $15,000? Fancy going one up on the Joneses next door? Why not buy yourself the latest in handy family runabouts. The new Lexus..er…sorry Neoteric hovercraft is custom crafted to give you years of blah……. [via ZZZ]

Been working too long at your PC? Worried about strain or RSI? Check out these three programs designed to avoid problems. * EyeCare Reminder is a free prog which reminds you to get up from the screen every so often and stretch etc. It does not, unfortunately, advise you to get a life. * The $19.95 ErgoTimer goes one step further by letting you set up a specific number of mouse clicks, keystrokes and time elapsed before a pop up…

The Google Zeitgeist page is a great way to track Web – and presumably thereby, general – trends and social patterns of the moment. The top ten chart climbing searches of the moment, for instance, includes John Entwhistle, WorldCom and Ronaldo. Fascinating. [via Aula]