Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel will finally be completed. Immediately afterwards, an extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope will be installed at both ends which will miraculously allow people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa.

That’s what it says on the website of the Telectroscope’s website. According to the Tiscali page, which is sponsored by a plethora of London and New York’s public trusts (More London, Downtown Brooklyn Partnership).

More info plus link after the jump>

According to the site, the project will link London and New York using a long-abandoned tunnel and some industrial lenses, and not using webcams, projectors, and a broadband connection, at all. Odd, that.

Give the website a look, it’s well worth it.

Thanks Doog

Sorry for not posting in ages! As thanks for hanging on in there whilst my time is occupied with the new site, I’m kicking off the ‘Tony Stark’ series, in which I’ll be checking out and finding the coolest and slickest gadgets and big boys toys, as well as other miscellaneous stuff.

If you don’t know just who Tony Stark is, he’s a fictional character from the film Iron Man. As a side note, if you haven’t seen Iron Man yet, see it. It’s an outstanding film.

Anyway, the XYZ desk looks to be a pretty sweet piece of kit, and apparently has all of the aesthetic credentials as a Mac, bringing Apple-istic sleek design and clean lines to the party. The other upside of this slick idea is that it’s as upgradeable as a PC.

That’s right, it’s also a PC built into the desk itself.

For me, this raises a few issues. I know there are ways round it, but after migrating to a laptop, I don’t like the idea of a stationary unit.

Lastly, this thing needs a clever pop-out LCD screen, and it needs to be something in the range of 22+ inches, too.

Other than that, it’s a great idea. Unfortunately, it’s just that - a concept. Cue sad faces.

[via BornRich, image via BornRich]

Semi-tech related here. I’m a little late with this, but Coldplay are offering up a free sample track from their new album “Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends”.

If I’m honest, I was hoping that they would respond to the side of the mixed criticism of their previous album “X&Y” that said they should never have drifted from the quintessentially ‘coldplay’ sound, by making the mistake of adding synth sound effects, and moving away from the more authentic of acoustic based music, and lyrics that took the classics - love and life - in an entirely new way.

It’s not that X&Y, or the new track “Violet Hill”, was bad music. By any other band, I would have thought that they were a good sound. But unfortunately, Coldplay have departed from the sound that endeared them to people around the world.

With Violet Hill, Coldplay appear to be trying to prove something to the world, as seen in the interview after the jump. I’m beginning to think that the genius that gave the world Parachutes and A Rush Of Blood To The Head is fading, replaced by a more generic sound.

Violet Hill is a good track, but not through yellow-tinted glasses. Is Coldplay’s clock ticking away?

Get the track ‘Violet Hill’ here.

Remember when I said I couldn’t make this stuff up? Here’s an example. The other day I got an email prompt from Facebook - social network cum app sharing site.

I logged in, and as usual my long-dormant account had accumulated various requests. Friend requests, comment requests, request requests, but this one was new to me. I had a Godfather request. What?

Well, we’ve had various forms of online life before. Remember Second Life?

Anyway, it was an invite to create a baby with a friend I had on Facebook. It struck me as slightly odd, as well as strange, but you can actually create, care for, and buy stuff for your virtual offspring. Creepy thing number 1.

So, I thought; I’ll bite, and I followed the instructions to create Alex, a 0 year old virtual baby who, and I quote:

“I like fun! I live in a big old house on a sunny street in Chessapeak, with a white picket fence and my cat, Mittens. I love going to school and playing violin, and dad says I’m going to Yale or Stam-stan-stamford I drive my dad mad with all my questions, too :-)”

There are three variables that are viewable from the frontpage; Health, Hunger and Happiness.

Creepy thing number 2. You can invite your friends on Facebook to be relatives of the newly created ebay ebaby, Alex now has two parents, various uncles, and an auntie.

Get this, you can even spend your Baby Bucks - virtual currency that you earn by taking care of your digital little one - on accessories, food, access to things like Art Class and the ‘Children’s Museum’.

Either way, I’ve had one of these for 1.5 days, and I’ve put her to bed, sent her to art class, dropped her off at day care, picked her up, hugged her, and played peekaboo with her, and I’m not bored yet.

Get one here, or check out mine.

Every once in a while, someone comes along that really makes a difference; Randy Pausch is one of them.

A lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University, Randy has gained fame from his 2 lectures “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams“, and “Time Management“. He’s also dying of pancreatic cancer.

I feel quite a fraud writing this, because I’ve only really been made aware of Randy’s story and his work in the past few weeks.

That said, as soon as I saw Childhood Dreams, I immediately told the world, found Time Management, I read his website, and I check his news and updates page daily, to see how he’s doing.

If you do anything today, look at his lectures. It’s easy to see why he is so incredibly popular, watching him talk is an experience in itself. He has an incredibly infectious lust for life, and he is so enthusiastic about everything he does.

After checking him out on the web, I thought damn (not to mention other, more angry words) - why the hell didn’t I know about this guy several years ago? What really crushes me is that he’s had a huge effect on me, watching his lectures, and reading his site, and I’ll never get to meet him. As you would expect, he’s devoting his time to his family now.

It’s safe to say Randy gets about a bit. He’s written a plethora of books, he helped create ALICE - (a “head fake”, which teaches kids how to program, but sneaks education in when they aren’t looking), has taught loads of lectures and has touched so many lives. From his bio:

“Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he was the co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done Sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and consulted with Google on user interface design. Dr. Pausch received his bachelors in Computer Science from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles, is the director of the Alice (www.alice.org) software project, and has been in zero-gravity.”

I think I might email him to brighten his day a bit, even if he doesn’t reply. If only I had his phone number! (I wonder if the Virginia residential phonebook is available online, hmmm…)

Last, but not least, I say this about few people: If there were more people like Randy Pausch, the world would be a better place, and I can safely say after seeing hours of his lectures and reading pages of literature about him, short of meeting him (which I may never get to do), he is now one of my childhood idols, and I aspire to be like him one day.

Graham

It’s hard to get a broad look at the effect Randy Pausch has on the world, check out his website for more info.

Thanks to the Internet, media is everywhere. I mean literally, almost everywhere in the world. What Nappster started, everyone is still continuing.

Until a few years ago, if you wanted to get hold of a song of a movie, you had two viable options. Buy, rent, or steal. In recent years, companies like media distributors and studios have cottoned onto the fact that the Internet can be used to safely and legally sell their content.

But that hasn’t slowed the Internet down in it’s progress at all.

Right now, if you want something to watch, you have a plethora of options. Sites like YouTube and Dailymotion have brought us quick and simple ways to share our home-made content, giving rise to video blogs, video podcasts, as well as virals, and semi-professional free movies.

If you want something more professional, like a movie, you can rent it off of iTunes, and watch it on various (Apple-only) media devices.

But one area of the Internet which - I think - shows the most promise is the hallowed IPTV.

That’s Internet Protocol Television - and it’s exactly what it says on the tin - TV, but online. There are various channels who also broadcast live web feeds for their viewers, but this is limited.

No, the next generation of TV will come from services like Joost and LiveStation, which use P2P (Peer-to-Peer) networks to distribute live feeds across the Internet, or provide on-demand downloads.

One of the best upsides to P2P-based TV is that when it lands properly, content producers like TV stations of all kinds will be able to ’seed’, or directly provide a few hundred people, and that feed would be redistributed to other viewers, slashing the cost of getting involved online.

This is nothing short of fantastic. Some people have realised that IPTV is the next big thing, and - aware that many people have no idea what IPTV is, there’s a little-known race emerging to become the standard for IPTV.

That’s because if all of the major providers used one platform, popularity could then take off, and move to new platforms - and let’s not forget, if everyone uses that standard, then people will pay to be a part of that.

Getting it for yourself

There are plenty of IPTV providers out there, but if you really want to get in on the action, there are free services available now. Check out the list of providers I’ve found here, shown in order of potential, promise, and usability:

1. Joost [Free] by far, my favourite. Joost is a well developed platform that works on Windows and Mac, and has a great lineup of content, considering the service is still in its infancy.
2. LiveStation [Free] another service that’s still in beta, but in a web 2.0 world, beta doesn’t mean much. UK based, LiveStation is built on top of Microsoft’s Silverlight platform, and only works with Windows XP SP2 or Vista, a Mac client is ‘in development’ - I wouldn’t hold your breath.
3. SopCast - This is a difficult one. Despite a rather silly name, the SopCast service looks really promising. Again based on P2P, the service offers recording of media, and will handle (apparently) almost any common stream type you can throw at it (asf, wmv, rm, rmvb, mp3). Here’s the killer: it also works with Linux.

There are some great ways to get media online, with IPTV services getting their act together, too. But all in all, I still think that any successful standard would have to be simple, open source, and easy to use. Did I mention free?

Okay, so I was close. For those of you just joining us, the Apple Store went down recently, and the rumour mills went even wilder than normal.

I made some predictions for the comeback, and I was close. I predicted things like updated iMacs *ahem*, colourful iPhones, or more storage.

Hit the jump for the 411 on what’s new, plus a breakdown >

The next jump in Apple’s iMac arrived. I was close on the prediction of Penryn, but still managed to miss a little.

The new iMacs are now updated, with decidedly more bite. What you need to know:

• The iMac lineup will still start at $1,999
• The 24-inch iMac now offers a 3.06 GHz Intel processor and the high-performance NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics as options
• The other iMacs will now come packing faster processors with 6MB L2 cache and a faster 1066 MHz front-side bus across the entire line, and 2GB of memory standard in most models

I add the digested press release, featuring Philip Schiller:

“The iMac’s gorgeous aluminum and glass all-in-one design has been an incredible hit with our customers and is just one of the reasons Mac sales are growing three and a half times faster than PC sales,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With the latest Intel processors, a faster new graphics option and more memory, customers now have even more reasons to love the iMac.”

For the first time, the 24-inch iMac features an optional NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS with 512MB of video memory, to deliver up to two times standard performance for graphic intensive applications.

The new 20-inch 2.4 GHz iMac, for a suggested retail price of $1,199 (US), includes:

• 20-inch widescreen LCD display;
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066 MHz front-side bus;
• 1GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB;
• 250GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive® with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
• ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB GDDR3 memory;
• built-in iSight video camera;
• built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.1+EDR;
• mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately);
• built-in stereo speakers and microphone; and
• the Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and infrared Apple Remote.

The new 20-inch 2.66 GHz iMac, for a suggested retail price of $1,499 (US), includes:

• 20-inch widescreen LCD display;
• 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066 MHz front-side bus;
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB;
• 320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB GDDR3 memory;
• built-in iSight video camera;
• built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.1+EDR;
• mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately);
• built-in stereo speakers and microphone; and
• the Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and infrared Apple Remote.

The new 24-inch 2.8 GHz iMac, for a suggested retail price of $1,799 (US), includes:

• 24-inch widescreen LCD display;
• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066 MHz front-side bus;
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB;
• 320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB GDDR3 memory;
• built-in iSight video camera;
• built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.1+EDR;
• mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately);
• built-in stereo speakers and microphone; and
• the Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and infrared Apple Remote.

That pretty much sums it up. The Big Fruit has knocked down their store, and the Apple rumours are flying fast and thick as to what could happen.

Hit the jump for more info, plus predictions>

Okay, so barring a simple maintenance update on Apple’s store, there are a few options:

1. Updated iMacs. On the last-but-one refresh of the store, Apple brought Penryn processing technology to it’s MacBook Pro units, meaning they were faster, and more power efficient - could this be a move to bring the iMacs to the penryn party?
2. More storage. In past store updates, existing devices have just had added storage. Case in point: The 32GB iPod Touch, the 16GB iPhone (which is still not enough storage), and a bump on the storage of Apple TV.
3. Colour iPhones. This is remarkably unlikely for Apple, but they may be offering up changes to the colour of the iPhone’s reverse case.

Like I said, this could just be maintenance on the store, it’s happened before.

Stay tuned for updates, you refresh-happy readers.

This is a (pretty cool) demo of a new ‘next-gen’ physics engine that’s sure to cause a laggy death.

Based on virtual layers of human elements, like a skeleton, virtual muscles, and collision detection.

The video also goes on to explain how amazing this is over ‘ragdoll’ physics, where parts of characters are stitched together.

Technology like this paves the way for virtual game characters that actually act like humans. I’m game.

All we need add to this is a Wii suit.

[Stay tuned for my look at the Wii fit]

Just an update for all my readers: as some of you may know, for months I’ve been threatening to move to a new, more professional website.

Well, I am.

It isn’t easy to get hold of the right people, but its in the works. The new template is working well, and I’ve lined up 2 definite providers for my month of wall-to-wall product reviews. That means a launch month with so many products and video reviews, you won’t be able to keep up.

Like I said, just an update. The new site will be arriving soon, along with some other major players, plus the long-awaited affilliate scheme, and more features, too.