Whack your birth year into http://whathappenedinmybirthyear.com/ and settle back for the story of your first year. Built in HTML 5, the site gently scrolls through (seemingly) everything that happened that year. I found out that in 1974, The Godfather Part II pretty much cleaned up at the box office, Stephen King published the first novel under his own name, Carrie and luminaries such as Kate Moss, Leonado di Caprio and Alanis Morissette were born. Isn’t it ironic? Not really, but it’s well worth a fun few minutes to check out what pre-occupied the world the year you were born.

Researchers at the company, alongside staff at the University of Washington are using 3D cameras and recognition and projection technology to build virtual worlds around physical objects made from Lego. 

This video shows the research in action – if you’re six years old (or thirty-six like me) prepare to be blown away. Place a Lego dragon on the table, it breathes fire. Place said fire-breathing dragon next to Lego house? Guess what happens next. But don’t worry – build yourself a quick fire engine and disaster can be averted.

But that’s nothing compared to what they can do with a Lego train. I won’t spoil the fun, but what I wouldn’t give to be six again! Back in the late 70s, we had to make do with spacehoppers and not-very-good Star Wars figures. Fingers crossed when my own son reaches that age, this tech will be ready to go!   

The TDL Boombox is set to kick out the beats again in January, with cool retro styling hiding bang up to date technology. There’ll be two models on offer, sporting two or three speakers, the latter adding a large central sub-woofer to annoy the neighbours just that little bit more.

Those giant buttons of the past have been swapped for sleek, touch sensitive controls and a cool display but you’ll still find a hefty volume knob to crank up the tunes. Both models come with a fixed handle, whilst the smaller, two speaker blaster also has a leather shoulder strap, so no worries on portability.

No, there’s no tape deck. No, CDs are out too. But you will find USB, 3.5” mm and RCA jacks available to plug in your music player/phone du choix? There’s also a larger jack for hitching up a mic if you’re ready for an impromptu bout of human beatbox on the street.

Sadly there’s no network connection, so music streaming is out. Boo! What is this, the 1990s? To find out more, head over to Cool Hunting for the lowdown.

Did you know that the US is apparently highly placed on most bank’s payment fraud hotlists? Frustratingly, that means I now have to let my bank know of my movements before I travel, or else, no cash. That may be set to change however – Hot Hardware reports that VISA are looking into the use of a location based service to help with fraud detection.

The idea is that on most occasions, your credit cards aren’t too far away from your phone – if they’re in close proximity during a transaction, chances are, it’s really you making it. If your card is making a transaction in New Orleans and you’re in San Francisco – maybe not.

Sure there’s still a lot to work out. What happens if your phone gets stolen, for example, or you leave it at a friend’s house by accident before you travel? But if it helps reduce the number of payment and cash withdrawal blocks I get when I travel, you can sign me up right away.

Fortunately, next year may well see more manufacturers dropping the printer driver. Last week, the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) announced that there was a 200 percent increase in DLNA certified printers released in 2010. The DLNA networking standard ensures interoperability between devices from different manufacturers – whilst traditionally that’s meant more for media streaming than other areas of networking, it seems as if the manufacturers are starting to develop certified products across other categories.

In the realms of printing, that means the end of the printer driver – digital camera X is able to transfer photos directly to printer Y without the need to copy the file to a PC first. With IDC estimating that the size of the “digital universe” will be 44 times larger in 2020 than 2009, it’s good to hear that someone’s figuring out an easier way to get our files transferred between devices much more easily than today.

Before you hit delete on that printer driver, a little perspective. The quoted 200% increase in real terms is an increase from 14 models launched in 2009 to 40 models in 2010 from the likes of HP, Samsung and Epson. But for sure, we’re likely to see that number grow exponentially next year and beyond, saving the world a whole heap of bandwidth. DLNA Printing – definitely a trend to check out at CES next month. 

Image credit: PC Magazine

At first glance, the Duo looks like a standard 10.1” notebook, but give that screen a little tap, and it’ll flip right around to switch into a touch-screen tablet.

Armed with Windows 7 Home Premium, Intel’s Atom N550 processor and 2GB RAM, the Inspiron Duo also packs a suite of touch apps to convert the PC into a picture frame, alarm clock and touch screen music player. Drop it into the optional JBL Audio Station speaker dock and you can really get the party started.

It’s dinky, so you’ll only get a couple of USB 2.0 ports, but there’s 320GB hard drive on board, Bluetooth and 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity and a SIM Card socket for web on the road. As ever in life, not all is perfect – note that the Duo lacks Ethernet and video out ports, so it’s very much designed to be a mobile device.

Remember, “Fliptop”, you heard it here first. Rats, just checked the web. Everyone’s calling it a fliptop. Bah.

Why? Well, hard drives are a little dull, truth be told – but perhaps if this DeLorean “Back to the Future” hard drive had been on offer, who knows what plot twists would have ensued? That’s right, it’s a Seagate 500GB hard drive embedded into a detailed 1:18 stainless steel replica model of Marty and the Doc’s chosen method of time transportation. And it’s now included on my letter to Santa.

If you can’t find an actual DeLorean to race around in, then save yourself a whole heap of cash (and more than a few maintenance headaches, no doubt) and pick up the world’s coolest hard drive instead.

Or what, are you chicken?

So, what better time to warm up your desktop with the new Windows 7 Holiday Lights desktop theme? 17 new desktop wallpapers each featuring a wintry theme are on offer, with “sparkling images of holiday celebration and winter wonder” according to the website.

My personal favourite is the snowy river scene, shot deep in a forest. It looks like the coldest place on earth, apart from the glow from a sole fir tree, fully illuminated and bathing the adjacent river with light.

I don’t know who had the impossible job of wiring that tree up, but next weekend, when I’m nailing up our own lights in the garden, I won’t feel so bad!

Windows Media Center comes with an integrated TV Guide (unfortunately not available in all countries) which brings together listings from all of the channels your PC’s TV Tuner can receive, with the ability to filter specific types of show – News, Films, Sports, Kids’ TV and so on. Compared to pretty much all of the set-top box EPGs I’ve used here in the UK (and there have been a few!) it’s superb.

But, thanks to a small app called My Channel Logos, it can be made even cooler.  My Channel Logos does one thing, and one thing only. It downloads and installs logos for each of the channels available in your TV Guide. Nice and simple.

You can choose from monochrome or full colour logos, set the application to automatically update logos when new versions are available, and… that’s about it. But it certainly adds a that final bit of polish to Media Center's awesome TV experience and is available for free (or for a highly recommended developer donation, if you can spare it).

Want to see who’s getting talked about right now? How many people have mentioned the New York Times in the last hour? How about which brands, people, places and products are being discussed in conjunction with a certain keyword? Or cooler still, how about comparing the buzz around three competing products or brands?

SocialGadgets brings that kind of real-time Twitter analysis to your fingertips in visual form, and indeed to your website or blog – just select one of the four available gadgets, the size you wish to display plus a timeline for the analysis and you’ll get an iframe to plug right into your site.

You can find out more about SocialGadgets over at FUSE Labs.

Short of a quick reimage courtesy of our favourite imaging software or a rebuild from Windows Home Server, one of the quickest ways of getting many of the essential apps up and running is using the download service at ninite.com

No, it’s not one of those download services, it’s all above board, thank you very much. Ninite allows you to select from a host of popular applications, freely available from around the web – media players, PDF viewers, security products and a whole lot more. Simply create a shopping list of all of the apps you need, and Ninite builds a bespoke installer just for you, which plucks said applications from the various download sites around the web, and automates their installation.

Once started, there’s no further interaction required, and in a few minutes, all of your apps are ready on the PC, leaving you a little extra time to work out what you did to cause the need to reinstall the PC in the first place.

Touching the areas of photonics, robotics, telematics, dynamic physical rendering and intelligent sensors, the four stories from best selling authors Douglas Rushkoff, Ray Hammond Scarlett Thomas and Markus Heitzbruing to life the technology of tomorrow. Here are the synopses:

Last Day of Work – by Douglas Rushkoff

Today is Dr. Leon Spiegel’s last day of work. But he’s not just another retiring technology worker: he is the last man ever to work.

Having delayed the inevitable for longer than he should, Spiegel recounts the events that have led to a world where no companies, no money, and no need for employment exist. In doing so, he reveals how humanity nearly allowed technology to bring life to a close, before stumbling upon the truth of man’s own culpability for his dire condition. And now that humankind has avoided its dark fate and transcended the previously limited definition of what it means to be human, Spiegel is having a hard time letting go and joining the rest of the world.

The Mercy Dash – by Ray Hammond

In the year 2125, two young Mannheim residents are forced to undertake a high speed drive to save a life.

Billy Becker – a successful furniture designer ¬– and his girlfriend Sophie, a medical student, learn that Sophie’s mother Hélène has suffered a serious back injury whilst waterskiing.  Hélène has a rare blood antibody which means it is unsafe for her to receive ordinary blood transfusions.  Sophie also carries the rare blood antibody and she alone can provide blood.

But, in 2125, all major autoroutes through Europe are under networked traffic management and Billy and Sophie are forced to override the automated controls and speed limits in order to get to from Mannheim to Nice before surgery on Hélène is completed.

Billy and Sophie are not alone on their journey.  Billy has recently acquired a new virtual assistant, also called “Sophie”, who is able to communicate in a very lifelike way; so lifelike that real Sophie starts to get jealous about her rival for Billy’s attention....

The Drop – by Scarlett Thomas

Agnes is 32. She lives in a seaside town in Britain about six years (or so) in the future. When she is out running one evening on the seafront she ends up racing a boat and winning. When one of the rowers sends her a message on her GSRcx (a sports watch that includes galvanic skin response data and information on air pollution and wind-speed) she is quite surprised: you can’t get messages on this kind sports watch. Everyone uses their ‘Box’ for communication. It’s not clear how she can send him a reply. She doesn’t even know which one of the four people on the boat he was, but hopes he’s the one with the dark curly hair and the green top. When she discovers that he sent her the message using a mind-control patch, she must learn mind-control in order to send one back.

Agnes’s family make money by generating electricity on exercise machines. They get briefly excited when they get some ‘hits’ from people watching them in their everyday lives (like reality TV, but live and accessible direct from home-to-home via speed-of-light data transfer), but the hits soon evaporate. It doesn’t really matter – everyone, watches the Takahashi family in Tokyo anyway. Agnes’s father spends all his time in the (virtual) mountains. Danny, Agnes’s younger brother, is obsessed with watching cars on the ‘network’: a system many people think is very beautiful and even mysterious. Cars drive themselves, using the most efficient route. And all cars have their colour chosen by the network. The cars make patterns that can be seen from space (and that anyone can tune in to).

The Drop imagines a future in which telematics, photonics and intelligent devices have changed the ways in which people interact with their world. The world, and the people in it, remain (lovably) flawed, mysterious and sometimes funny – but the technology makes many things so much easier and more interesting.

The Blink of an Eye – by Markus Heitz

translated by Howard Fine

A brave new world, thanks to sensor technology and AI! Every movement is monitored. Alexin can walk around inside his house without ever having to flip a switch. The house detects, interprets and makes life easier: doors, lights, electrical and electronic devices, even the toilet seat lifts and lowers automatically. But Alexin knows this is making him dependent – and it’s becoming painfully clear to him that AI also has a dangerous disadvantage….

Intrigued? Head over to the Morrow Project where you can download the stories in e-book form or podcast. Nice work, guys.

Their latest streamer, the A-210 is due for release next week, and I’ve been lucky enough to get hold of a review unit a little ahead of time. Like other products in the range, the A-210 boasts an insane level of support for a heap of audio, video and photo file formats – throw what you like at it, and chances are it’ll gobble up the file and stream out your desired entertainment, no questions asked.

The really cool think about this new model is that it takes a look at your music and video files, and as long as you have a wired or wireless internet connection, the Popcorn Hour will go and hunt out cover artwork and other metadata for movies including cast and crew information, ratings, synopses and more.

It’s all displayed in a stunning new user interface which allows you to browse your media collection by cover, file or category – sweet! Dig down into the menu and you’ll find a host of online services supported, including SHOUTcast Radio, BBC Podcasts, Flickr, ABC News, CNN and a whole lot more.

If you’re looking for a streamer during the holidays, make sure you check out the new Popcorn Hour alongside other streamers.

A 10.1” slate will be available in February, and those who prefer the solid feel of a keyboard will love the dock that ships with the tablet – it houses a full sized keyboard. That means not only will the tablet be great as a mobile web and email device, but if you need to get your head down for some work, dock the device and tap away.

The tablet will be powered by an AMD processor and comes with dual 1.3MP webcams, front and rear. Wi-Fi and 3G models are expected, and Acer have promised to show off the device at CES in January.

Whilst there are now a number of Windows 7 theme packs with collections of the Best of Bing images,  new this month is a Bing desktop gadget which combines the daily image with a search bar – so it’s even easier to search the web, and you don’t miss out on the image of the day.

There’s a great write up of the gadget over at My Microsoft Life, otherwise jump straight to the gadget over at the Windows 7 Desktop Gadget showcase. 

Perhaps the latest Windows 7 based tablet to hit the streets?

LG’s all-new E-Note H1000B has just been released in Korea. It's a10.1” slate with a capacitive touchscreen, 1GB RAM, a 16GB SSD and your choice of an Intel Atom Z510 or Z530 at its heart. Connect up via 802.11n Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and expand courtesy of an included SD Card slot and two USB ports. Now choose between Windows 7 Starter or Professional and get that flight booked!

That’s why I was cheered to see TechRadar’s feature at the weekend highlighting the Top 10 Windows Command Line Tips and Tricks. Hurrah, the Command Line is cool again! Well, maybe retro cool, like a Mini.

Packed choc-a-bloc with sneaky tweaks to get the most from your time with the command line, the guide gives you the lowdown on customising fonts and colours to create that old-school green-screen effect, increasing the command buffer size, enabling copy and paste, dragging and dropping filenames from Windows Explorer and a whole lot more.

Whilst I’m 99% percent sure these tips won’t be so new to you Niners, there may well be a long-forgotten cherry in there somewhere, and if not, let’s out-do TechRadar with our own set of Command Line tips from the real experts… over to you!

Enter LaCie’s FastKey – capacities up to 120GB, SuperSpeed USB 3.0 transfer speeds of 260 MB/s (that’s equivalent to 1000 mp3s per minute), and all in a drive that fits very neatly into the palm of your hand, or 26 cm³ for the Archimedes fans out there.

LaCie have dropped 256-bit AES Encryption on to the FastKey too, so if you’re worried that your Blu-Ray rip collection is going to fall into the wrong hands, then relax, it’s secure.

Now your only concern is locating the myriad 512MB thumb drives around the house that are destined for the trash!

The latest release of the platform was launched in New York yesterday, and is set to be available from December 1^st. According to Microsoft’s announcement, corporations such as Boeing, Estee Lauder, France Telecom, Nikon and Orange are already using Lync.

A big element of yesterday’s buzz around Lync was a discussion on bridging the gap “between the boardroom and the home”. To support that goal, Lync’s Corporate Vice President, Gurdeep Singh Pall, announced plans for a forthcoming software update for Lync which will integrate Microsoft’s Kinect Video Chat with the platform’s video conferencing service.

We highlighted Video Chat for Kinect a few weeks ago, which allows video chat with other Kinect users as well as your contacts on Windows Live Messenger. Whilst it’s fair to say we all spend a little too much time at the office nowadays, the integration of Kinect into Lync at least means we'll have the company of family and friends whilst nailing that crucial deadline at the office.  

The technology, three years in development and still a long way from the market, utilises a short burst of high intensity laser light to illuminate the scene, then captures minute amounts of light that reflect off objects hidden around the corner to create the image.

Professor Ramesh Raskar, from MIT Media Lab outlines the potential uses for the “femtosecond transient imaging system", "You could generate a map before you go into a dangerous place like a building fire, or a robotic car could use the system to compute the path it should take around a corner before it takes it".

Whilst the potential uses for the technology are many, when it comes to motoring, let’s remember that if you can see around corners, others around that corner can see you - who’d like to bet that one of the first applications for MIT’s invention is an even more covert road safety camera?

I’ve been spending my Sundays recently digging through our music library, filling in the blanks where we’re missing album art and where we do have album art, upgrading it to as high a resolution as possible. My mission is two-fold:

1. Ban the generic music icon from our house. It will not be seen in 2011!
2. Ensure album art looks great on every device we own.

The latter is actually a pretty big job. Sure, 300 x 300 pixel album art may look fine on a PC or smartphone, but scale it up to the large TV screen, and it doesn’t look that great. So, high resolution artwork is where it’s at!

So, I could sit down and try to Bing every album in my collection, but I may be some time. So, instead, I turned to a fantastic application called Album Art Downloader XUI – it’s a dedicated search engine for album art, with plugins for a growing list of artwork resources (currently clocking in at 30 resources). Enter an artist and album, and the app goes to work, bringing back thumbnails of the cover art from as many sources as it can find.

Search options allow you to filter results to bring back artwork of a minimum or maximum resolution, and once you’ve sorted results by size, you’ve got yourself the highest resolution artwork available on the net. Click once to preview, and click the disc icon to save locally to your hard drive. Lovely job for a rainy Sunday! 

But what actually happens in the recycling process? You may assume they’d end up back at a printer cartridge factory, cleaned up, refilled and sent out once again as new – good for the planet, and great for manufacturing costs! The truth is a little different, as this video from HP shows.

Each printer cartridge recycled is shredded, melted down, blended to improve the quality of the resin, reprocessed, heated up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit and extruded into plastic strands. Those strands are then cooled, cut into pellets and sent off to be melted down again and manufactured into new printer cartridges.  

HP have now manufactured more than 1 billion printer cartridges with recycled materials. That’s a lot of landfill saved. So, next time you spot one of those little envelopes, make sure you join in the efforts to keep your ink green.

If your laptop uses a Synaptics trackpad (to check, just type mouse into the Start Menu search box to open up the Properties dialog, then hit up the Hardware tab), then there’s a couple of ways you can enable two finger scrolling.

The first method involves downloading new drivers from the Synaptics website, whilst the second utilises a freeware app called, unsurprisingly, Two Finger Scroll. Install the app, set it to active and you’re good to go. Browsing websites just got a whole lot quicker!

Once you get the hang of two finger scrolling, you won’t look back – great tip, How to Geek!

In these modern times, there’s no longer any need to miss your favourite TV. byRemote is a new plugin for Windows Media Center, that allows you to access Media Center’s EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) remotely from any PC or smartphone.

It runs as a Windows Service, so it’s always available without the need to be logged into the desktop and presents the EPG using a fantastic Silverlight 4 user interface in a web browser, with listings for all of your channels available for the next two weeks. You can check out episode summaries, additional screenings, and search for specific programmes by title. Best of all, when you’ve spotted something you must record in the guide, you can record the episode or the whole series with a single click.

On the mobile side, Windows Phone 7 users get a fabulous, native version of the EPG which you can see in action here, whilst other phone models get to play with a text based XHTML version to use in the handset’s web browser.  

Other features include the ability to view and manage your scheduled recordings, search for shows by genre, cache data locally on Silverlight Clients for a little extra speed, and view complete episode guides of hundreds of thousands of TV series.

Remote access is made super-easy if you're a Windows Home Server owner. Simply forward a port on your router to your Media Center, then access the Media Center PC directly using your home server's remote web address. Job done.

Apps like byRemote really bring the benefits of using an extensible DVR like Windows Media Center to life. It’s a must-have for all Media Center owners, and if you haven’t clicked the green button yet, this may well persuade you to give it a try.

I’m next travelling across the Atlantic for the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and thanks to ZDNet, top of my list to check out (outside the show, of course) is now Brookstone’s Pillow Remote Control. That’s right, a 6-in-1 universal remote embedded in a sofa cushion. As the blurb says, “you’ll never lose this remote in between the cushions. Because it IS a cushion!”

With a database of codes for over 500 devices, fingers crossed, the Pillow Remote Control will work with your home theatre kit. It has fabric buttons to ensure changing the channel is as comfortable as possible, and after 60 seconds, the remote shuts off to ensure you don’t switch the channel by accident when you’re giving the cushion a squeeze.

The Pillow Remote Control comes in a choice of, well, brown and is available for couch potatoes right now.