BT Wholesale in conjunction with the service providers has been testing an up to 8Mbps ADSL service for what seems forever. Today sees BT Wholesale announce the product.
From 31st March 2006 the product will go live on a national basis. The service should be available on around 5300 exchanges, which will cover around 99.6% of homes and businesses in the UK. The key component to the Max services is that they are rate adaptive (i.e. will run at the highest speed they can) in both the downstream and upstream directions, which should see the vast majority of lines running a lot faster than under the existing planning rules used by BT Wholesale.
The potential line speeds are 160kbps to 8192kbps downstream, with upstream from 160kbps to 448kbps on Max, and 832kbps on Max Premium. 78% of BT lines are expected to manage 4Mbps or faster, 6Mbps to around 42%. It should be pointed out that even if you get the full 8192kbps, this is actually 3.6 times faster than an existing 2Mbps line. This is because a 2Mbps line runs at 2272kbps so that with the network overheads people will see close to 2Mbps under ideal conditions, so an 8192kbps line speed will provide around 7.1 to 7.3Mbps of potential data speed.
First it was 512k, then 1Mbps, now 2Mbps, and soon to be 4Mbps or more. 
Source [ADSL Guide]
Microsoft are giving out free USB keys. FIll in your details, answers are: 2, True, True, True. Hopefully this won't end up like IBMs offer.
Free MS USB Key
A blatant Digg clone, Yigg.de reports tech news in german. It uses exactly the same layout as Digg, but apparently there has never been any form of communication between it's owner's and Digg.com. The biggest difference seems to be the lack of interesting story, the top story at the minute being that Pluto has two more moons! 
Yidd.de
News of the Optimus keyboard seems to have died, and the last I heard, it was supposed to be released at the beginning of February. The good news is that you can now Pre-Order an Optimus mini, which has three high res customisable keys. They're priced at $100, which seems pretty expensive for a gimmicky Winamp remote.
Optimus Mini - Preorder
I have a few Vista domains for sale. For anyone that doesn’t know, Vista is the next operating system from Microsoft, the successor to Windows XP.
GoVista.US [eBay]
GetVista.US [eBay]
I also have GetVista.org and VistaSite.US. Leave a comment if you’re interested. 
Google has updated it's maps of the UK to a high enough resolution to make out some pretty small details. I can't quite see my blue Peugeot on the drive, but it's a big improvement on the resolution they previously had.
Google Maps
It's always the quiet ones who suprise me.
Beware, this video might trigger some kind of Japanese schoolgirl kissing windows fetish.
Video [Spiked Humor]
Chris at http://exploding-boy.com posted a CSS menu tutorial. This version fixes a few bugs and adds an active tab.
Read more… [Exploding-Boy.com]
After four months, I’m selling my World of Warcraft account. Getting my Warlock to Level 60 took 15 days of solid playing time, and made me lose focus on other things. The Matrix Online only kept me busy for a few weeks when it came out last year, but WoW was different, somehow the repetitive grind night after night appealed to me at the time. Instead, I’ve decided to take up EVE Online because of the giant battleships and amazing scenery!. It won’t be as time consuming as WoW, because your skills level constantly, whether you’re playing the game or not.
L60 Human Warlock on Terenas (Euro) [eBay UK]
EDIT: eBay removed my listing for being in violation of Blizzard’s intellectual rights. If you’re interested in purchasing the game and guide ONLY from eBay, then also aquring the character, I’m selling the whole lot for £105.
World of Warcraft & Strategy Guide [eBay UK]
Sacha Cohen's Borat has had his .kz domain revoked after claiming that “Kazakhstan is as civilised as any other country in the world. Women can now travel on inside of bus”. The president of Kazakh IT companies, Nurlan Isin said, “He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains”. Borat later announced, in character. that, “I have no connection whatsover to Mr Cohen, and I fully support my country's decision to sue this Jew”.
Songtapper.com lets you tap the spacebar in time to a piece of music, then finds songs that match the beat you tapped. I can't get it to work after four tries, so I think it needs some refining…
Songtapper.com
I've just signed up for Blingo, a search engine that gets it's results from Google. If you're searching anyway, you might aswell win stuff while you're doing it. There's a Firefox plugin which adds Blingo to the search bar available too. Rogie at kokomedia.com says he's already won two £10 iTunes certificates and some other stuff.
Signup [Via]
Two videos made me laugh today. Some idiot playing Counter Strike spends five minutes shouting insults at a guy blocking a corridor. Maybe he thinks if he keeps shouting and insulting the guy, he'll realise the errors of his ways. 
CS: Source Idiots
In this one, a PETA (RSPCA in the US) activist goes to an animal testing lab on a fear-factor type show. I can't make out whether the rat man's a real guy in a costume or some kind of animatronic puppet. Either way, I want one!
PETA activist meets Rat man
“Data mining” of all that information and communication is at the heart of the furor over the recent disclosure of government snooping
…
Using a simple 6-line shell script and the popular wget command line tool, I configured two computers on two different DSL connections to begin downloading all 260,000 wishlists in increments of 25,000. Each group of 25,000 wishlists took about four hours to download, for a total download time of less than one day.
…
Using a pair of 5-year-old computers, two home DSL connections, 42 hours of computer time, and 5 man hours, I now had documents describing the reading preferences of 260,000 U.S. citizens.
Impressive, but I don't see how the Amazon reading habits of every geek in America would be of much use to anyone. Unless they're buying copies of 'Communism for Dummies'…
Source [AppleFritter]
Lightbox is a Javascript image handler which overlays a full size image onto the current page, while keeping the content underneath visible and semi-transparent. It even works in IE. Sounds pretty boring, but the effect it creates looks pretty cool. If only I had more photos…
Lightbox
