Light Sleeper. I love the idea of bedclothes and pillows that get brighter to wake you up in the morning. Lotsa cool. ‘A silent alarm clock, an illuminating, personalised alarm integrated into your bedding that gently wakes you in the most natural way..Light Sleeper Bedding uses electroluminescent technology allowing traditional textile surfaces to become a reactive light source.’

Blog Binders – Turn your Weblog into a Book! Must.try.not.to.laugh. ‘Blogbinders application strips out any images and HTML formatting at this point, so you are left with the basic written text from your blog entries. Subjects, dates and carriage returns are maintained.’

The happy little chappie above is a depiction of an augmented car mechanic, the sort who may well be working on your car in the later part of the 21st century. I don’t know about you, but the site [duh – sight] of this fellow leaning over my beloved chariot o’bolts would really inspire confidence. ‘When the cover is loose, the user requests the next step using voice activation: Removal of the cover. Arvika specifies step-by-step how to unscrew the…

The computer/console games industry is in a state of flux at the moment. The games are simply too expensive to produce, which is stifling the traditional creativity that comes from smaller developers (where have you heard that before?). We may, however, be about to move out of the stagnant period into a…gasp…new era. First, Microsoft announces the XNA set of initiatives which appear to be geared towards making game development easier. Second, we’ve started seeing tools like the free Softimage…

Just right to go with your glowing keyboard, the FlexiGlow FX illuminated mouse pad. $26.99. ‘You can choose to lock in your favorite color, or have the lights phase gently through from one color to the next providing a very tranquil illumination effect.’

Now why would anyone want a fully illuminated computer keyboard? Are there that many people who work in the pitch dark? The FireFly Lighted Keyboard – ‘ uses patented Electro-Luminescent (EL) technology to produce a soft glow that highlights the keyboard’s lettering and alleviates eyestrain common among computer users.’

Liteon has introduced the LVW-5005 multiformat home consumer DVD recorder. Apparently it’s the world’s first home recorder that can record on both DVD-R/W and DVD+R/W. It can also access MP3, VCD etc etc. We’re not sure just how much this is going to affect Joe Consumer, but it sure makes for a purty press release. Priced at around �270.00 ($399.00).

So there’s this bunch of people who really, really like to own cool computers. So they attach cooling towers. Zalman Resolator cooling towers. Or even an HTCS Passive Radiator (which incidentally doesn’t look that much smaller than the one in my car!). Strange.

Mahogany framed LCD monitors? Whatever next, keyboards? Swedx – from Sweden.

The Quik House is ‘a prefabricated kit house designed by Adam Kalkin from recycled shipping containers. It has three bedrooms and two and one-half baths in its 2,000 square foot plan. The basic kit costs $76,000 plus shipping.’ It also has a mahogany door option, which for some reason tickles me funny bone muchly. I am experiencing one of those Snow Crash deja-vu moments.

The Filtron is an inexpensive coated porous clay pot which can purify water. A brilliant application of sustainable technology for the third world. What’s more it’s produced by a group who call themselves Potters for Peace. ‘The Filtron has successfully been laboratory tested in over ten countries on four continents. This technology has been proven effective in eliminating coliforms, parasites, amoebae, and vibrio cholera from water.’

Winlaunch is a neat little freeware proggie that ‘will allow you to use Function Keys as shortcuts for loading different programs, folders or websites anywhere within Windows.’

The Collab people have stuck a Unity2 powered multiuser, multimedia chat site up as a demo of their talents and it’s rather interesting. Shared whiteboard, video, audio and standard text chat and all wrapped in a funky Flash format. Broadband’s global future?

The NAVInote is a new pen gizmo which provides mouse, pen and digitizer tablet facilities. ‘NAVInote is a ballpoint pen type input device, which is much handier than ordinary mouse and enables more delicate works than the later [sic] does. With NAVInote, you can write and draw just as you normally do on paper and thus the result looks absolutely natural. In a word, you can create personalized natural-looking letters and documents using NAVInote.’

Lisa is an email speaking assistant. Priced at $15.00. ‘LiSA is a small application which announces incoming email with a real human voice, specifying who the message is from – in relation to the receiver…”You have have a message from your wife” or “You have a message from your boss.”‘