Safe Talk is a new service in the UK that allows you to generate a temporary phone number to use for 7 days to give to people you don't trust/know.
It's simple - text CALL to 80876 and get a temporary number that diverts to your mobile phone for 7 days, and keep your own number safe - until you know if they're nuts or not!
Each number costs £1.50, and you can choose to either extend your usage of the number after seven days or cancel it.
Safe Talk [ Via: Gizmodo ]
Valve are selling head crab toys for $24.95. The perfect gift for your toddler. 
I’d get one, but the shipping to England would probably cost twice as much.
Buy from Valve
I found a 30 second trailer for the Simpsons Movie, due out in Summer 2007. I can't imagine it would be anything other than great, but I'm sort of wondering what they're going to fill a 90 minute film with.
Download Video
The Mozilla foundation have closed the Firefox Flicks competition because some of the entries were apparently being spread in a ‘viral’ manner. The site was a place where anyone could create and upload a firefox commercial. The best one was supposed to be chosen by Mozilla to run on TV.
Video: Wheee!
Firefox Flicks
Google have released a web-based calendar similar to 30boxes. It allows users to build a calendar and make events visible to certain people. You can also import your events from Outlook or other sites which use open calendar formats. Like everything else at Google, it’s a beta, but it looks promising. I’m struggling to find motiviation to carry on with iZeit.
Google Calendar
A UK version of the Body Worlds exhibit is to open in the UK. The show proved popular in the US, claiming to show the general public what is normally reserved for doctors and medical professionals. Bodies are preserved using acetone to replace body fluids.
The sources of the bodies have been questioned in the past, and two had to be sent back because bullet holes were found in the back of their head. They were thought to be chinese prisoners who hadn't given their consent. Under chinese law however, it's perfectly legal to use the bodies of executed prisoners for medical research.
Bodyworlds
The instructions are pretty simple. All you do is add potting soil to the green sewer-pipe-shaped flower pot, and push the spores deep into it. Soak the soil with water using the dropper, add a squirt of the food solution, and then it's off to a dark location for a few weeks. Break out our NES to relive some classic Mario memories, then three weeks later, check on it and hopefull find your very own 1up mushroom.
I've ordered mine, I'll post pics when it comes.
Get yours now! [ThinkGeek]
Now that Dell have aquired Alienware, they seem to be selling ridiculously over-specced and over-priced PCs. The XPS Renegade has four 512Mb GeForce 7900 graphics cards in SLi, two 10,000 WD Raptors in RAID 0 aswell as a 400GB drive. It also has a 4.26Ghz overclocked CPU. Pretty amazing, but for the price of $9930 USD, it should be.
Dell XPS Renegade
28th March 2006
According to The Inquirer, Dell has sold all of these. They probably didn’t make that many, but it’s suprising they sold any at $9930.
XGL is an X server which uses OpenGL for it's drawing operations, allowing you to create some pretty swish desktops. By the time Longhorn's finally released, most of the technology it offers will probably have been around under linux for a while, but I'd still like to see a DirectX version running on windows.
XGL wiki
Source [WhaleSalad]
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]
It's hard to imagine using a higher resolution display than my notebook's 1920×1200 WUXGA screen, but there are Q-WUXGA 3840×2400 displays available. Images and text are so sharp on my TFT, that I couldn't imagine using a resolution that high on a panel less than 60″. It's four times the resolution of HDTV!
Source [The Inquirer]
So I got my new Laptop, a Dell Inspiron 9400. Expect a review by the end of the week. 
I've been using TrueLaunchBar for years, and never used the battery monitor plug-in for it. The skin that comes with it looks too Win98-ish, so I created a better one using UVAcav47's icons. All credit for the icons goes to him, I just compiled them together into a skin.
Download @ deviantART
The United States Army is testing lasers on the battlefield. Ionatron, Inc. of Tucson has developed a weapon called a femtosecond laser, which creates light pulses that last less than 10 trillionths of a second. These pulses carve a channel of ionized oxygen in the air which can conduct electricity. Then, the weapon blasts lightning bolts through these 30-foot channels of conductivity. This is said to be especially good at neutralizing bombs. Ionatron's CEO says his company will be sending 12 of these units to Iraq, the first one by the end of July.
Source [Defensetech]
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
Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupe’s team of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call “virtual cell biology”