Hmm, this ‘ere book self-publishing business is starting to get busy. We’ve already mentioned Xlibris and CafePress and now we’ve got iUniverse. Just where do these services cross over from being ‘on demand’ publishing to becoming ‘vanity’ publishing? Suggestions on a manuscript to…..

The Mercury News is reporting that Microsoft has started to spend the $53.5 billion cash hoard that it’s got stashed in the bank. Please form an orderly queue, and absolutely no talking at the back, OK? [via the excellent mikeslist (hi Mike, nice to have you as a reader. :-)]

Buzznet.com is a rather cool photoblog site which offers free community phlogs. After registering you can send your phonecam piccies to any of the relevant email addresses and they will be posted in the chosen community. It’s early beta, but the idea is well sound I reckon. Check out the London community ([email protected]) and the celebrity sightings one at [email protected]?

Err..I don’t think that I can comment on this right now. Maybe later when I’ve recovered. Ladies n’Gennlemen we present to you the Holy Hand Grenade. ‘The HHG is an orgone generator. It is indicated wherever you want to balance DOR (deadly Orgone radiation) into good Orgone…. In the home, car, garden, office or anywhere, the HHG transforms bad energy into good. People report that having a HHG nearby transforms grumpy people into cheerful people and lifeless plants into healthy…

So Palm has now renamed itself to palmOne (note the caps!). Hmmm….is that good or bad? Will it help staunch the sales slide as smartphones arrive in their droves? Only time will tell.

The Yuki Coin Charger is a public phone charging booth. It looks really neat, and according the good folk at I4U is quite cheap for operators to buy (around $370.00). I like the idea of freely available emergency chargers dotted around the place. Kinda gives you a sense of security, know wot I mean?.

Mmm, so M-Systems has now introduced a bootable flash drive? Am I the only one who sees this as being a somewhat major announcement? All of a sudden you can carry around your whole laptop on a 2GB keychain which you can then plug into any machine to boot into your environment. If I was Starbucks or an airport chain like BAA I’d start to investigate the feasibility of renting out real skinny Tablet PCs with no disks. Plug and…

The Home User Self Defense page is a neato user guide to securing Windows XP against potential attack. It’s split into easily understandable sections which make it a snap to navigate. Well worth a bookmark if you’re a bit on the paranoid side.

The Walk Through Fog Screen looks interesting. Basically it involves projecting your images onto a cleverly arranged flow of air. Stirring stuff! Arf arf!

Sometime in the far future will we look back on this guy’s work as the start of the new age of androids a l� Terminator 3? Who knows? Did I hear you mutter, ‘who cares’?

OK, I think that we can officially state that DVD player/hard disk recorder hybrids are finally mainstream now that JVC has introduced the XV-DDV1. Sports an 80GB hard disk (20 to 80 hours recording), plays MP3 & DVD +/-R discs and has 30 disk resume play bookmarking among other nifty features. Price? Around �390.00.

Image Enhance is a free and really tiny – 287kb – image editor from Daniel Backstrom. It’s perfect for those times when you just want to do a quick bit of editing like crop or something, but don’t want to bother loading up a huge edit proggie like PSP or Photoshop.

Yes it was spam, but again I was intrigued (especially since it’s heat wave time here in Europe). The Chillow is a ‘thin, very soft, medical-grade, non-electric thermoregulating device’. Designed to keep your pillow cool, see? Review here.

Er…there’s a Religious Conference Manager magazine? Really? Wow! Nothing seems to be able to stop the growth of the religious meetings market, a market that has survived and thrived in the post-9/11 era….

The SIPPhone is a voice over IP phone. Plug it into your broadband connection and you can talk for free to any other SIPPhone user anywhere in the world. Two phones for $129.99. Nice idea, especially for those who are not too technically minded and who don’t want to bother with all the hassle of inserting a microphone into their PC, installing phone software, configuring speakers etc etc.