Stop the RIAA Lawsuits. ‘The Stop RIAA Lawsuits Coalition is a group of 158 websites (and growing) that have come together to denounce the record industry’s filesharing lawsuits and to call for a boycott of major label music.’

Presenting the iPen, the ‘worlds’s first 3-in-1 pen-shaped digital camera’. Webcam, VGA camera, 8MB flash memory. And apparently it writes too. …but what about the refills, Ma?

Ladies and gentlemen, the battle of the concepts. In the blue corner – representing the geeks – the Linux based Prismiq media server at $249.95. In the red corner – fresh over from the Japanese consumer electronics world – the Yamaha MusicCAST media server at $2800.00 or so (including some extra bits).

Audioscrobbler is a collaborative filter which helps you find new music that you might enjoy, rather like Amazon’s recommendation system, or my favourite one at MovieLens. It’s not working at the moment because of upgrade work, but is probably worth a bookmark for when it comes back online.

The Olympia CDP-24201 is the world’s first Bluetooth enabled cordless phone that offers ‘simultaneous voice and data access allowing laptops, PCs and PDAs to connect wirelessly to the Internet…The CDP lets consumers chat on the phone using a Bluetooth headset while wirelessly surfing the Internet or accessing email on a laptop anywhere in the home — all from a single cordless data phone.’ Priced from $199.95. Sounds neat.

Got an iPod? Then you need Everything iPod.

Q: How do you take a fairly trivial but amusing idea, and wreck it completely? A: Present it to the world via the worst Flash powered web site you’ve ever seen. The DigitalXpression service. Send in a photograph – and optionally an MP3 audio file – and they will convert it into a moving morph video which is fairly amusing for the first 10 to 15 seconds. But no-one’s going to get that far because they won’t be bothered to…

Canadian researchers have apparently developed a new type of battery that generates electricity by forcing water through special ceramic filters. These Electrokinetic Microchannel Batteries as they’re called, only produce a small amount of juice at the moment, but the boffins are hoping that one day things like PDAs and cellphones could be powered using this technology. Water fuelled phones – the mind boggles. ‘When any liquid, such as water, comes in contact with a solid, such as glass, a tiny…

The How Far Is It? service is a neat little online app which calculates the distance between any two global geographic locations as the crow flies. Did you know, f’rinstance, that it’s 671 miles (1079 km) exactly from Heaven Heights in Massachusetts to Hell, Michigan?

Doesn’t video wallpaper overload processor resources? Or am I being old-fashioned? Anyway here’s the free Vista Wallpaper Manager and here’s the ViviPlayer commercial alternative. Caveat emptor!

Apparently these things have been around for a while, but I only just stumbled across one the other day at a local computer fair. The Netac USB UCF card, a Compact Flash card with in-built USB socket. Needs larger capacities to make it really shine. More here. Around �60.00 at the fair.

Ooh look, it’s the return of the free online, advertising sponsored service. Are the good ‘ole bad times back? FreeCRM – ‘is a hosted software solution for customer relationship management and sales force automation.’ Grab it now, while you can.

There’s a real war going on between the Diebold electronic voting system folks and a faction of American liberal youth activists. Seems like Diebold wants to stop people learning about some stuff, and the activists want to keep it alive via the Internet. Guess who’s winning?

The public gets a first peek at the new single seater Toyota PM electric car in Japan. It may look kinda funny, but it’s very very innovative. ‘Fly by wire’ controls, inbuilt navigation and communication systems to enable car to car chat, auto pilot for convoy travel (?), and body panel LEDs which change colour to indicate different emotions. The vehicle can also rotate on the spot. On the road in 2 years? (Thanks Kevin!)

From toaster to ToAsTOr PC. The everyday story of how an ordinary household toaster came to enjoy life so much more. I particularly like the CD disc popping out of the bread slot.