Sometimes the vision of people really astounds, especially when it’s someone from the staid ole BBC. Witness this talk given by Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, which just nails the future of television and media in general on the head in so many ways. ‘One major new direction we are looking at in this context is to purposely create ambient TV, TV that is meant to be watched with just half your attention span, or just…

Can a dead duck fly again? Dunno, ask Napster. Back on Oct 29th as an iTunes clone, but only in Windows WMA format, which is a bit of a downer really. Meanwhile, iTunes is heading to Windows. Which is really going to make things interesting!

A pointer towards the future of the music biz, or just a one-off? Scott Andrew’s latest album, Where I’ve Been, includes not just the album, but also MP3s of every track for downloading to a portable player, an extra bonus MP3 album and artwork and photo gallery. And all licensed under Creative Commons.

Er…those awfully clever folks at Mitsubishi in Japan have created robot fish. No really. ‘Incredibly, all three fish appear to move and look like their biological brethren.’ Spooky!

Hey, why rip to CD when you could have so much fun ripping your audio to vinyl instead? The Vestax VRX-2000 looks like it is priced around the $10,000 mark, so one for enthusiasts only probably. Neat though. Oh and for those who only want to do a bit of conventional ripping, here’s what looks like a neat bit of software – RIP Vinyl. Nice play on words, doncha think?

A superb, and poignant, article by The New Yorker looking at the suicide problem of the Golden Gate Bridge. ‘In the United States today, someone takes his own life every eighteen minutes.’ Maybe this other story could explain some of the reasons why.

The City-Data.com site offers a fascinating collection of stats about US cities. For example, the Top 100 cities with the shortest commuting times. Gotta be useful, eh?

The Panasonic SJ-MJ57 [warning:Japanese] is a minidisk player that glows in the dark. OK, well actually just the flat speakers do, but that’s enough isn’t it?

So the new Windows powered Smartphone from Sierra Wireless is called the Voq. Snazzy name, chaps. It’s out next year sometime (sure…snigger) and features a fold out qwerty keyboard. However, judging by the size of the keys, you won’t be doing any Pitman type touch typing on this puppy that’s fer sure.

Plug the Reader Vision [warning: Babel] into your television and you can browse the contents of your memory cards at will, and with full remote control access. It’s also USB 2.0 so you can download stuff from your PC onto the card very quickly indeed! Oh yes!

Panasonic claims to have developed a 3D sound system that can be used on portable low power devices, since it only requires a low power source. Funky stuff. Hypersurround Sound System is a ‘ high-fidelity surround sound reproduction technology that will enable reproduction of three-dimensional sound fields on compact / mobile electronic equipment.’

Oh hilarious, hilarious, hilarious. Remember the CD and the felt tip pen mark? Well here’s yet another ‘foolproof’ CD copy protection system broken by a trivial mechanism. ‘This technology is going to end up in the hall of fame beside the previous Sony technology that was famously defeated by drawing on the CD with a felt-tipped pen. This time, the technology can be defeated completely by holding down the computer’s Shift key while inserting the CD.’ We simply couldn’t make…

A USB powered electric blanket? For those cold and damp days spent huddled around a computer monitor? Jeepers!

The Oyster laptop computer stand looks like a neat idea. Although I’m not sure how many people use their laptop screen nowadays as opposed to adding on a desktop LCD screen anyway. ‘Simply open the laptop, slide it into the Oyster and connect your power and USB cables.’

Wanna know how tough it is in South Africa at the moment? Well, they’ve started fitting add-on flame guns to cars to try and combat car-jackings. Yours for $655.00 a…ahem…pop. ‘”This is definitely non-lethal…. A person is not going to stand there for a minute while you roast him. It will fend off the attacker, and that’s the end of it.”‘