Spam Gourmet is a clever little service which lets you sign up for disposable email addresses to use with online logins, shops and the like. You give out the Spam Gourmet address, and it will forward messages coming into that address to your private email address. The really neat thing is that you can specify just how many emails you want to receive (max 20) before the address self-destructs, which makes it great for signing up for newsletters or something…

Those incorrigible folks at Google are at it again, this time with a live answer beta test called Google Answers. The idea is that you ask any question you like, and it will be answered by a live researcher for a fee. Google takes a 25% cut of the fee, you get your question sorted and everyone’s happy. This is not a new idea (the Askme.com site for instance has been offering a free service of this kind for a…

Today must be magnet day, but whatever. The clever boffin type folks at ZZZ have posted a piece on a new device called the Meg Generator which apparently uses an electro-magnetic generator to produce energy from a vacuum. The clever – nay astonishing – part about it is the fact that the device apparently delivers 500% efficiency, i.e. it outputs 500% more energy than it consumes. The example given is that you could power your whole house using the same…

OK, take one ordinary looking silk neck tie, secrete tiny colour or B&W camera inside (about an inch below the knot), poke lens through hole and connect whole thing up to a battery pack. Result? The Covert Hidden Neck Tie Camera. Yours for a mere $299.95 sir. [via madville.com]

This ‘ere stuff is a magnetic liquid called ferrofluid making some extremely strange waves. The rather excellent Dansdata site has a great article all about magnets, and the cool and wonderful things you can do with them. I like Dan’s site, it’s full of quirky geek stuff – like an evaluation of toothpaste as a thermo paste, or how to destroy your PC – all done in an offbeat Aussie style. Mentioned in the article is the Force Field site…

So I went to the Symbian Developer’s conference here in London the other day just to see what was happening, and ended up spending a while chatting to the folks from Sony Ericsson (SE), as well as playing with their new toy the P800. Very interesting! The more I learn, the more I’m convinced that these new Smartphones will eventually decimate the PDA market place and cause more than a small ripple in the computer world in general. The product…

Interesting little article looking at one of the alternatives to fibre optic cable. The point is that you can never have enough bandwidth. ADSL, cable, satellite? Fooey! Eventually we’re all going to want fibre or equivalent plumbed into our homes to cope with all those holographic 3D re-runs of Hogan’s Heroes and the like. So it’s heartening to see that folks are trying to work out how to use alternatives to give the same kind of speeds without the massive…

This has got to be the ultimate in video gaming heaven. Yoshi’s Boxx – named after its creator – contains a full blown PC, a Nintendo Game Cube, an X-Box, a Playstation 2, an 8 bit NES, and an Atari 2600. Uber geek Yoshi DeHerrera built this monster as part of a project for a television program he is involved with, so don’t expect to see this on your local store shelves anytime soon, will you? :-) And while we’re…

The neat free download of Microsoft’s Power Toys for XP is back, after being pulled temporarily by the Redmond giant (with no real explanation). There are a couple of new interesting tools added in; one is a Web cam client which will capture and save snaps at user defined intervals and the other is an HTML slide show wizard which will let you create a show for uploading to your web site. Definitely worth a download at the price! Update:…

The Baen Free Library is a bold experiment in publishing. It’s basically an online location where authors may make their books available for free download by anyone. It’s not a huge venture at the moment, just around 30 books from 20 or so science fiction authors (including Pournelle, Niven and James C Glass), but it is important because it shows that at least ONE set of the world’s creative and commercial minds are focusing their thoughts on how to work…

The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer is a free downloadable software tool from the Redmond folks which runs on Windows 2000 and XP and scans for missing security hot-fixes. Kind of like a sniffer dog for vulnerabilities. Of course if you find any holes in your system you will still need to fill them by downloading the required patches, but it sounds like a useful tool nonetheless. [courtesy of Dr Dave]

An excellent and well observed article from Cory Doctorow which clearly sets out one of the main reasons why the current knee jerk drive to protect and restrict intellectual property use through litigation is a dangerous and ultimately disastrous act. In summary, the only way that innovative development works properly is when users are encouraged to experiment with technologies. No-one anticipated how important the telephone, PC, VCR or even the Web would be to their industries and the world in…

I think that this Piddle Poop n Putt set is for real. Nah, can’t be. [via MajorGeeks]

Tired of staring at your face in the mirror? Why not try staring at someone else’s face on screen, whilst trying to extricate their nose hairs. Yes it is mildly disgusting – but funny.

OK I take it back. Flash is great, Flash is good, Flash is fun. To be precise this Flash based darts game is awesome. I lost badly to a guy called Mark last night in a fun filled online multi-player match. Sniff. He’s obviously been wasting his time on the game for far too long. Hint – those who have no idea of what darts is should maybe start with this site. [via Metafilter]