Texting while driving could be costly for UK drivers

Engadget is reporting that drivers in the United Kingdom could be facing stiffer penalties for using their favourite devices while driving their cars. The current penalty is a maximum of £2,500 fines or community service, a new classification for the offense is being sought and could result in a maximum 2 years imprisonment. Now that's harsh! Perhaps that's enough incentive to smarten folks up!

15 useful iGoogle gadgets

Web Worker Daily has compiled a nice list of it's 15 most useful gadgets. If you are like me, your homepage is iGoogle! I use a couple of tabs to manage my rss feeds and the Home tab has my Gmail gadget, a sticky note gadget, a picture of my cat, Google calendar, pacman, and some others. Web Worker Daily's list is a bit more productive and has opened my eyes to some nice tools that I'll be adding, like activity tracker and Document to PDF.

The MMO Report

G4 TV has produced a very entertaining weekly news segment called the MMO Report. Hosted by Casey Schreiner, the show recaps the news of the week in Massively Multiplayer Online gaming. Check out this weeks offering...

btw Casey, I've got a green iPod shuffle I've giving away! But you'll have to do a little work to be considered. Check out my post here.

Internet enabled exercycle allows you to ride famous courses and challenge others

c|net's news.com tries out the Ergo Bike Premium 8i from Germany's Daum Electronics. The bike packs a lot of technology that enables you to customize your training, train with others over the Internet and view their stats, or load up race profiles that simulate course layouts making you work harder on hills, etc.. The bike is reported to cost $3500 US so it's not for every family but if you are serious about training it may be worth consideration. Watch the c|net video review here.

Port of Halifax employing new security measures, can you say minority report?

The CBC is reporting that the Halifax port authority will soon be scanning the veins in the hands of their employees. The technology known as vascular biometrics, created by Identica Canada Corp. of Toronto, is apparently much safer than scanning eyes. Vascular biometrics maps the veins in the employees hand and stores data on an id card, when an employee enters the port they will be required to swipe their card and place their hand on a scanner, the system uses pattern-recognition to determine if the identity matches. "So, you are guaranteed the person carrying the card is the person it was issued to." unless the terrorist is carrying a lobbed off hand... or perhaps I've been watching too many movies!

How Google got its start on this date in 1998

Wired has the tale of a $100,000 check made out on this date in 1998 to "Google Inc." before the company was even incorporated... a quick but interesting read about how Sergey Brin and Larry Page got Google on the move, with a little help from Andy Bechtolsheim.

A better touch based technology?

From Apple's iPhone / iPod Touch to Microsoft's Surface PC, everyone is striving to change the way we interact with our devices and it seems that touch screen is the way to go. One big drawback to touch screen is that your hand momentarily obscures your view as you invoke action on the screen. Researchers at Mitsubishi, Microsoft, and the University of Toronto have teamed up to tackle this problem. Their answer appears to lie in a new technology dubbed LucidTouch, "users can choose to manipulate objects by touching a sensor pad on the back of the device; this allows users to resize images and text, as well as navigate around any graphical user interface without their hands getting in the way of the display." ars technica had an opportunity to view the prototype and has an article chronicling the experience.

Molson Canadian wins Beer Cooling Challenge

The guys at tom's hardware have way too much fun! Some time ago, on a whim, they put a few bottles of Molson Canadian up against traditional liquid coolants to see if beer could compare. At that time the Canadian brew finished second, so they guys at tom's thought they'd have an international challenge to see which regions beer would perform the best. Molson's again came through and holds the title as tom's international best beer - coolant. Check out the video evidence here.

Why you shouldn't attempt to hack your iPhone

Wired has the tale of a would be iPhone hacker who bricked his iPhone while attempting to free it from it's AT&T only service. Looking at the picture, it's a little more than "bricked" it's probably more like "burnt toast". Perhaps he should have waited for the iPod Touch and kept his old cell phone! I don't know about you but I can't really afford to throw that kind of money away with the slip of a screw driver...

Speaking of the iPod Touch, here is a little video courtesy of YouTube and slashgear, the audio is a little poor but you'll get a glimpse of the new iPod in action.

New iPods

Here are a couple of pics of the new iPod Touch and the new iPod Nano, Courtesy of Apple.