The Virtual Football Trainer – ‘immersive virtual reality provides a much different and unrivaled experience: You are fully surrounded by the virtual players on the field, the players are presented in full scale and in stereo. It seems that you can touch them.’

German CD and DVD replication giant Sonopress has just announced that it has bought the UK’s largest vinyl pressing plant Audio Services. What’s interesting though is that the factory, which produces 7″, 10″ and 12″ records, ships over 4 million vinyl disks a year. Four million? That’s a whole lot of black plastic for a supposedly moribund sector, isn’t it?

Ho ho, the British Civil Aviation Authority has just ruled that ‘flight mode’ – the setting which allows smartphones to operate in PDA only mode, with no radio transmission – is OK. But just how are the crew going to be able to tell which phones are safe and which not? And what does safe mean anyhoo?

Maggie and Brad – two eBay community members – met on the bidding board. Love ensued and now they’re getting married at the massive eBay Live bash coming up in New Orleans in June. She said yes, but only after Brad promised to throw the shipping in for free. ‘Brad sniped Maggie’s engagement ring on eBay, so it seems fitting that they get married in the middle of the community.’

Now you too can have your own Minority Report experience in the comfort of your own bedroom with the Pinch Glove system from Fakespace. $2582.00. ‘The PINCH system uses cloth gloves with electrical sensors in each fingertip…The PINCH glove system provides a reliable and low-cost method of recognizing natural gestures. Recognizable gestures have natrual meaning to the user: a pinching gesture can be used to grab a virtual object, and a finger snap between the middle finger and thumb can…

The BBC has set up a One Minute Movie site. As a sort of showcase for new talent. Good ole Auntie. ‘We’re not looking for epic films with sweeping stories. Brilliant photography? Not necessary. Quality actors? No thanks. Big budgets? Forget them. If you want to make a film about your dog playing with a stick, why not? ‘

The Ferret henceforth designates 2004 as the year of retro-tech. How do we know? Well just take a look around. Retro kitchen appliances, audio systems, toys, and even telephones. And don’t forget the candy. For some real authentic tech though, take a gander at Design20c. Fab.

The Sola Neko [Babel] is a portable solar charger for mobile phones. Not sure from the blurb whether it’s for specific phones only, but suspect so. Not sure also whether it works in the dark, but suspect not. Babel review here.

SpitfireSpares. Is this the ultimate flight simulator? ‘Amongst the cockpit’s many impressive features perhaps the most impressive is our unique ‘heads-up’ image projection system. This system allows the monitor picture to be projected perfectly onto the windscreen with the monitor and connectors discreetly hidden away…With the brake on ease up the throttle and hear the Merlin engine roar through the 200watt sound system…All being made even more realistic by the force feedback joystick..’

The TailViper is rather cool, in a sort of ‘look at the ostentatious sparks under the deck of my skateboard’ kind of way. [Via Gizmodo]

I have absolutely nothing to say about the slinky new Sony Cybershot T11 [Japanese] digicam except….oooh! The Casio Exilim is finally under real attack!

Mobile phones with fingerprint recognition sensors integrated into their screens could be on the way. Alps Electric has just announced that it is developing a range of transparent pressure sensitive film technology that ‘uses double-layer electrodes formed with high integration on a film to sense the peaks and valleys of a fingerprint…With a transparent sensor construction, set manufacturers will be able to design the sensor on the top of an LCD display for a variety of applications.’ This is Very…

I’ve finally gathered together a definitive set of freeware tools for copying and creating audio music CDs for my further listening pleasure. FreeRipMP3 is great for ripping CDs to the hard disk, and now sports file conversion between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Audacity is a fabbo tool for recording and editing audio from external devices such as hi-fi systems and portable players and Burrrn, which I just found the other day, is a really simple and fast proggie which lets…

Auntie reports on a study by Computeractive Magazine which purports to show that it can cost up to �1770.00 over 18 months to use a cheap inkjet printer. What tosh! Anyone spending that kind of money on inkjet printing clearly wants their head examining and needs to get a colour laser printer pronto. As with all of these stupid reports one important fact is forgotten – before the era of cheap inkjet printers it would cost around �4000.00 to buy…

The foneGEAR Cord Free headset is a wireless headset with a difference. It uses magnetic technology to get the sound from handset to lughole. Why? Well very low power consumption for one thing – how does 25 hours of talk time from one measly AA battery sound? And by the way, the AA battery is used as a charger for the headset’s battery, instead of using AC power. And maybe health benefits too? ‘Unlike RF technologies, Aura’s LibertyLink based devices…