A neat piece giving 10 tips on how to improve your home theater for under 100 bucks. Actually it should be subtitled – ’10 common sense tips for newbies’. ‘Tune your Home Theater. Here again, a lot of folks just simply spend huge amounts of cash and then expect it to work right out of the box.’

Install PCIMax Ultra and turn your PC into an FM radio station. Comes complete with a handy 20′ rope ladder for escaping out the back window when the jackboots of the pirate radio hunters hit your front door. They should really have produced a PC Card version for a laptop, so that you could at least escape with your transmitter as well.

So Microsoft is going to move into the search engine business? Wasn’t that part of MSN’s remit or did I miss something? Let’s see how Google responds after they finish laughing.

Could the music business actually be learning? As evidence I point to the fact that you can now listen via streaming audio to the whole of the latest album from US rockers Linkin Park on MTV.com. Yep free. No charge. Nada. On the other hand this could, of course, be seen as yet another desperate attempt to show their street creds whilst pushing a drearily ‘past it’ artist.

Joytech’s Playscreen is a cool tablet style portable DVD player. It’s also got integrated speakers an everythang! Priced at �299.99. Full specification here.

The PicoShot [warning:Japanese] – a USB flash drive digital camera. 64MB of memory, 0.3 megapixel, complete with a 15-30 fps webcam function. Gimmicky? Yes. Cute? Definitely.

Skype is a P2P voice over IP application brought to you from the Kazaa developers. Apparently it gives better quality than conventional voip services. ‘Just like KaZaA, Skype uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to connect you to other users � not to share files this time, but to talk and chat with your friends.’

The DataSense USB cable lights up to give an indication of data flowing through the ends. Quite clever really, and terribly useful if you do a lot of your work in the dark.

Flocksmart.com – a web site for flash mobs. Will this weird fad get bigger and bigger or whither away in apathetic disarray?

Hmmm, a new Netflix type service is just starting up in the UK. The ScreenSelect service has 12,500 movie titles (Netflix has 15,000), and for �14.99 a month you get to keep three at a time for as long as you like. Send one or more back when you want new titles to watch. I smell a Starbucks play. What do I mean? Werll, there was a couple who started up a coffee shop chain in the UK a while…

Another interesting article on the strangely consistent stupidity of the record labels in the US. Nice last line. ‘Most of all, spend less on lawyers and more on creative thinkers. You can’t subpoena success.’

Looks as though the folks at Sony are about to release a CLIE PDA [warning: Japanese Babel] with a virtual keyboard attachment. Ferret readers will remember that I’m less than impressed with this trendy keyboard technology, so good luck to them.

All the attention may be on the Archos AV300 series of video players at the moment, but don’t forget that the folks there have some other pretty cool technology as well. Like the ARCDisk, a super small and very funky 20GB portable USB 2.0 hard disk.

Nixie valves. Strange old fashioned things. Nixie clocks, cool clocks made out of same. Not up to making your own? Why not buy one here, or from Dave Weiner, the ‘master electronic clockmaker’? ..or forget it completely and get yerself an uber cool Virtual clock (‘a rotating bar of LED lights strobe the face.’

This is Broken is a web site devoted to cataloguing broken company offerings. ‘A new project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it.’ Basically if you see a corporate process that is broken (rather like the naff sign-up that is required before you can even find out about the wee-mee service below) then you can post it into the site and hopefully this will prod the company into fixing the problem. Geddit?