Now this is NOWHERE as cool as the iPod, but it looks like it might be the closest competitor at the moment. The Rio Riot – quaint name guys! – has all the design cred of a Scottish haggis, but the capacity – and more especially the software features – look to be killer. The big loser? The fact that it only has a USB connection. Forgedaboutit folks. You think downloading 400 albums across USB is going to be fun?…

OK, so it’s not quite cricket, but I love these types of things. Not for nasty surveillance stuff, but more for the thought of the kind of fly on the wall things you could do with them. They’re just cool, especially the sunglasses camera. For a mere $1270 you can have a pair of 2.4GHz wireless shades with a colour wide angle camera embedded inside. Oooh yes.

Minolta has finally unveiled its Dimage X digital camera and it looks quite sweet from first looks. The key thing here is size. The digicam manufacturers have finally realised that size does matter when all you want is a carry anywhere camera to point and shoot. The result is – and will continue to be – a raft of funky little cameras like this. Thanks to Imaging Resource for the link.

Now here’s something interesting. The Americans are starting to roll out Powerline technology. That basically means being able to run your computers and stuff across a network by using standard electricity plugs in the wall. This is interesting because it could complement wireless networks in the home nicely. As the article says you’d use the plugs to hook up your stationary stuff like PCs, and use wireless to hook up laptops and PDAs. The best of both worlds. The top…

Not so sure that this is quite as cool, but if you’re in the right country it could be very useful. Ladies and Gennlemen, I present to you the world’s first Anti Mosquito software package. Written by a Thai programmer with obviously too much time on his hands. Apparently it works by broadcasting an audible sound at a mosquito unfriendly frequency around your PC. Clears the little pests for up to a 2 metres radius from the PC. Won’t run…

Some nice bits in from Mike’s List today. First up is this neat little 1GB plug in USB drive. The $900.00 price is not so hot, but these things are becoming way too cool for prices to remain this high. The convenience of carrying around a gig of storage (wow you could transport your whole library on a keyring! is just too neat. One thing though is that I’ve found that they’re not that transparent in terms of installation –…

I like new cool tools, and this simple utility is a doozy. Daily Rotation sits there in your Windows tray and with one left click of your mouse button you can load your next favourite Web page onto the screen. Simply load up the pages you go to a lot and off you go. Nice.

You’ve got to hand it to Michael Robertson, late of MP3 fame, he really does know how to work the media. Here, courtesy of the new and very cool Chris Pirillo.exe are some screen shots of his new Lindows product. For those with short memories, this is the ‘Linux running Windows programs’ gig. Keep up at the back there!

I have been slowly coming round to the idea that I should protect my vulnerable Outlook Express mail package from the nasty people out there who seem to want to damage it (and me!) by investing in some sort of guard. I toyed briefly with changing altogether to Pegasus, or The Bat or Eudora, (not bad!) but after having played with each of them, came to the conclusion that none offered everything that OE did. So I was really glad…

Another cool find is Yolosema, a weirdly named but increasingly useful search plug in for Internet Explorer. The first version I tried was a bit suspect, but the latest version is starting to look and act as if it could be a really useful addition to the browser task bar. One of the coolest things is the text highlight button which lets you add a Google cache-like colour highlight to text on any Web page. Which makes it a breeze…

Q: What’s the definition of an opportunist company? A: One that decides to take on Microsoft at their own game. Two such foolhardy (brave? prescient?) beasts are based at Lindows.com and Windux. Will they be able to attract hordes of users fed up with the high cost of WIndows XP and product activation? Hmmm, don’t hold your breath.

Well I really liked the Lord of the Rings. It was majestic and obviously done with a lot of feeling. Hope that the sequels are as good.

If you don’t use Trillian yet, you should do. It’s a very neat IM – i.e. messaging – product which lets you talk to AOL, MSN, ICQ and even IRC buddies – all from the one interface. The new version fixes a few problems, and updates the look. It’s nice and it’s free.