Google has launched a new beta service that allows you to search for contents within a book and then pass you on to a retailer.

Google is not receiving any revenue from the service as of yet. Get the low down here

The best player for the PC (in version 2 guise) has just got an upgrade to version 5. This latest version takes the code from version 2 and version 3 and merges the best bits of both.

As usual there is a Winamp Lite (655Kb) version and a Winamp Full (4Mb) version. www.winamp.com is taking abit of a bashing from all the traffic at the moment so is going abit slow but I have tested the product and it seems fine.

This is genius: It makes up songs from words that you give it

This is a blatent rip of the article in Linux arstechnica but I couldn’t find a way of linking to that one article or keeping the information of a very interesting introduction to CVS

They talk about basic building of a system with links to a Open Source Development with CVS tutorial, graphical clients and their personal favourite Windows client TortoiseCVS. All useful stuff.

Reading other users blogs and news sites has shown that the level of new and interesting technology for the home coming out from over the Pond is so much greater than here and with much more competitive pricing.
Not only have they had a greater range of home-automation products for many years now because of x10, they are starting to see many of the big computer manufactor’s getting in the on the act, not least Gateway.

Gateway have been supply big Plasma flatscreens for TV for a while, but are now offering HDTV LCD screens for very reasonable prices.
But what really got my interest was their new DVD player range - not only a DVD player but also ethernet or wirelessly connected with support for streaming MP3, MPEG, WMA and DIVX from a network. Great, but I don’t see why they can’t support PAL regions either. Now just really a software and power supply change, it should be easy but no-one seems to be thinking of us over here. Lets hope soon they realise that they can saturate the market over here with good products.

Sony have brought out some more news on the forthcoming PSX, according to the bbc news it feature the TV tuner, Harddisk, PS2 internals that we thought it would be. Not included in the box are MP3 playback and CD-R support.

The DESR-7000 will sport a 250Gb Harddisk for 99,800 yen, and the DESR-5000 a 160Gb Disk for 79,800 yen.
Non-inclusion of MP3 playback might not be so bad, the audio format at its best doesn’t have the fidelity that competing codecs can manage though Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format suffers from not being compatiable in alot of devices including Apple’s widespread iPod. One wishes that it would have Divx/xvid support, and support for CD-Rs as a large number of the buying public would probably have a store of MP3’s on the disks.

Nice looking box though..

Well I have changed alot with this latest update, mainly the style sheet. I tired of the old one with its picture and as it was mainly for autumn a winter theme seemed more valid.
At the moment I don’t have a picture for the top, perhaps I will render one in 3DS Max, but for now I am liking the change.. Just need to add to the new content areas.

Updated the blog slightly to make more of it run from database so that it is easier to manage and update from afar.. Will be doing the new pages soon, so that there is more content… And a Winter picture is also coming..

Not much news from further afield because of being asleep most of the time due to this pesky flu.. Oh Well..

Well it has started slowely, after re-building my smoothwall firewall box - mainly because another person pulling the power on it messed up the filesystem and bios quite well, and secondly to use RC1 of 2.0 beta release. Also gave me a good opportunity to re-number my internal network.

Shown to me this morning is also http://www.strategy.gov.uk which happens to have a really nice PDF of the UK versus the rest of the world… Its nice to see how well we are doing or not as the case may be. I am just wondering what it like to work in such a place - I imagine very relaxed..