I remember the days when newsgroups where one of the best sources for info and nobody had heard of a forum (how things have changed). As newsgroups were text only (forget the attachements in warez and shall will say adult ones) the geeky way to sign off a message was with an image made up of asking characters, like:

What’s this?

( . )
___( . )

That’s a big breasted girl running without a bra. (thanks Hodgedup)

Anyway onto the post about generating ASCII art (if you can call it that) from photos.

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Unlike the recent release of Apple’s iPod nano or Dell’s DJ Ditty, the Toshiba Gigabeat Audio player is a HDD-based audio player that comes with a variety of selections of storage space. The Gigabeat is fully loaded with functions, presented with a large 2.2-inch QVGA TFT display at the front, and looks pleasing to the eye as a portable handheld player.

The Toshiba Gigabeat F series is available in four different storage capacities, starting with 10 GB, up to 60 GB, to satisfy the demand of storage-hungry users. In addition, these players are colour-coded to differentiate their various storage capacities in the media. The 10 GB version is available in aqua blue, black and silver acrylic; 20 GB in either black or silver brushed aluminium; 40 GB in champagne brushed aluminium; and 60 GB in dark gray brushed aluminium. The external cover is quite hardy to prevent damage to the interior circuit board. The controls on the panel are touch sensitive, supported by five blue blacklit buttons located on the right profile of the media.

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After being made a plonker off with our report on the Quintet TFT Display we thought it only fair to find something better and *real* to report on. Digital Tigers produce multi-screen displays ranging from the boring dual TigerVista Duo right up to the monster 8 screen zenview Atlas priced a dollar short of 5K.

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I’ve long been a fan of Sony’s digital camera range. Partnering their undoubted electronics expertise with the respected name of Carl Zeiss optics has produced consistently class leading results.

The DSC-N1 is the latest in a long line of Sony digicams and has most of the features associated with a high end camera: 8 megapixels, a video mode, a range of manual controls and a 3.8x zoom lens covering a 38mm-114mm range.

It also goes to ISO 800 – I’d like to see the noise performance of that!

The big news on this camera is the touch screen, allowing you to pick a focus point by touching it on the screen as well as operate the standard menu functions It’s an interesting idea – could make for a nice UI. It could make for an expensive repair when you drop it too!

RRP is $499, more details at sonystyle.com

If you are ever in the relationship dog house this present is the proverbial get out of jail free card. It’s not cheap coming in at 25 quid and is a total waste of money but it will earn you infinite times more brownie points than forecourt flowers.

Gold Leaf Chocolate combines 2 things that women love, and it doesn’t take a genius to guess what.

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How would you like to be able to control your temperature of your PC to avoid over-heating? SpeedFan is freeware program that allows user to monitor fan speeds, temperatures and even voltages in computers, equipped with hardware monitoring chips. In addition, SpeedFan also could access S.M.A.R.T. information on the hard disks (provided they supports this feature) to display its temperatures too.

Although SpeedFan is a hardware monitoring application, the most fascinating part is that it could allow you to control the speed of the fans (depending on the type of sensor chip used), in relative to the temperature inside your PC, thereby reducing noise and power consumption.

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You know the scene. The phone rings and that computationally challenged friend / relative / coworker is in trouble. They’ve bought something, installed it and now the screen is asking them all kinds of funny questions. They clicked “yes” to something and all kinds of strange things are happening.

Oh, and they’re 1/2 hours drive away and they have something urgent to do tomorrow and could you please help them out?

Well now you can! Copilot is a very nice implementation of desktop remote control software. It’s based on VNC which is nothing new in itself but their implementation manages to get around things like firewalls so that you can just connect remotely to their PC and have a look for yourself.
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If you find it difficult to awaken kids on school days you can take revenge with this nasty little alarm. Simply pull the pin out, throw it through the bedroom door and cover your ears. In 20 seconds the sonic alarm will let out an ear blistering racket which will be sure to wake the heaviest of sleepers.

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