Now here’s clever. VoiceAlizeR – ‘VoiceAlizeR� enables even the most technophobic web user to get high quality voice recordings onto any web site. Anyone with a telephone or a PC microphone can be up and running in no time. Now why would you need that, I hear you ask cynically, with the merest hint of a lovable sneer. Well dear reader, think of posting to your weblog by mobile phone and you’re starting to get the idea. One of the…

I’ve been playing around with the Last FM Radio site for a while and it’s really neat. Yet another collaborative filter cum referrer system, which actually works well. The cool thing is that both the neighbourhood collaborative feature and the profiling really seem to work, in a sort of Friendster meets Napster meets Godzillster kinda way. Definitely worth a visit.

HP researchers are working on a clever technology which can automatically add captions to your digital photos by listening as you chat about them. Sounds useful – anything that makes finding archived photos easier gets a tick in my book. ‘Fleck has developed software that records these conversations to hard disc, converts the speech to text using a speech-recognition program, and then extracts keywords with which the photos are captioned and indexed…Her current prototype runs on a PC equipped with…

TechSupportAlert’s 46 Best Ever Freeware Utilities is a useful list to keep to hand. I would only argue with a couple of things. I reckon that the best freeware editor is Metapad rather than EditPad, and why is there no Stripmail on the list? Tsk!

Finding fonts can be difficult (especially if you’re on a low or zero budget). Here’s a couple of sites which might help – FontGarden and DaFont. Watch for the inevitable pop-ups though!

The Seagrand X-Bar [Babel] is an interesting little audio player, if only because it has a pretty good feature set for such a small unit. For a start it’s one of the only USB flash memory MP3 players which incorporates not only an LCD screen for displaying track stuff, but also an SD slot for infinite expandability. It also handles WMA files. Pretty cool.

Look, you’ve got a bit of spare cash lying around from the garage sale last year. And a little space spare by the side of the pond in the back garden. What you need is to snap up a second hand amusement ride bargain from Ital International. Ferris wheels, dodgems, ghost trains, even a roller coaster. C’mon, $500,000 is a snap and if it’s good enough for Michael and Neverland…

I have seen the future, peeps, and have only two words to say – streaming music recorders. [huh? -Ed]. That’s right, a world where music is shared via internet radio rather than files. Sure it’s more cumbersome, but it appears to be at least as legal as listening and recording off the radiowaves. We’ve talked about the genre before, with Station Ripper, but Bill of Applian just sent me their new Replay Music proggie, and while it still has a…

The Freebord is being billed as a snowboard for the street. Actually the videos make it look quite funky, although you do of course need hilly streets to have fun with these things, unlike skateboards! ‘Snowboarding is a mix of carving and sliding motions but conventional skateboards aren’t designed to slide. Freebord carves and slides just like a snowboard. You can hug a tight turn or drift a long, gentle slide; flip the board into fakie or float a 360.’

ShareALot ‘The world’s easiest way to share photos.’ Seems to be a kind of Napster for photos. Similar kind of concept – albeit different technology – to Ourpictures.com. I think we can safely say that the market for this kind of easy share service is bound to grow massively as digital photography really takes off. ‘Just drop a picture into a ShareALot folder on your desktop, tell us who you want to share them with, and we’ll send your photos…

The Toshiba Giga Topaz [Babel] thermoelectric battery module creates power via the differences in temperature between the top and underside of the unit. Apparently they’re thinking about cars and stuff, rather than small devices.

LaserMonks. Real monks, making a living selling real inkjet and toner supplies online. Yeah it’s weird, but no weirder than Benedictine liqueur for goodness sake! Now what’s that green goop all about, eh?

Well waddya know? They’ve moved the Creatures game online for free. Creatures Docking Station. ‘This is no ordinary game. By playing with the Docking Station, you will be taking part in one of the largest ever Artificial Life experiments. Not only will you be breeding your own unique artificial life forms, called Norns, but you will be able to connect your computer, through the internet, and form a part of a vast online world through which your Norns can wander…

First sighting in the wild of a USB MiniSD reader/writer as far as I know. The Adtec AD-MiniSDR [Babel]. 1680 Yen ($16.00).

Hands up all those who’ve forgotten their password at one time or another. OK, well for those of you embarrassed folk here is a free Microsoft Word and Excel password recovery utility – Password Recovery Wizard. Check out also the equally useful sounding WordFix which may seem a tad expensive at �59.00 ($110.00) unless you’ve got a totally corrupt Word document which you need to open to save your job/marriage/health/country. Then it becomes awfully cheap, doncha think?