Celebrity Squares: Futurama co-creator David X Cohen

What's your favorite piece of technology? The Apple II computer , circa 1980. How has it improved your life

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Celebrity Squares: Futurama co-creator David X Cohen

Microsoft’s Azure is not Hailstorm, but what’s the point of it?

Microsoft has made its Azure cloud computing announcements at PDC, so now we know what it's doing: it is extending Windows 2008 Server into the online market so that programmers who develop applications in Visual Studio (and other things, see below) can test them locally and deploy them globally . Azure runs the same code but uses a hypervisor to distribute it across multiple machines and, next year, multiple data centres on different continents. Application management is automatic

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Microsoft's Azure is not Hailstorm, but what's the point of it?

Sony recalls another 100,000 laptop batteries

Sony has recalled more laptop batteries that may be a potential fire hazard, but this time it's a small one: only 100,000 batteries, compared to the 9.6 million recalled in 2006. According to Reuters : The recall affects around 74,000 notebook PCs sold by HP and 14,400 from Toshiba. The faulty batteries are also used in laptop PCs from Dell Inc, Acer Inc and Lenovo Group Ltd, Sony said

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Sony recalls another 100,000 laptop batteries

Pilot Stuart Ross develops rocketbelt designed to strap on and fly

"I've always loved flying," says Stuart Ross, a commercial airline pilot for whom flying a 767 to the Mediterranean and back a couple of times a week just isn't enough of a thrill. "A lot of my colleagues get involved in restoring old fighter planes and things like that," he says, "but I thought, sod it, let's go for something a bit different." So Ross retreated to the bottom of his garden in Horsham, West Sussex, and spent four years and the best part of £100,000 building a rocketbelt - a Buck Rogers-style flying backpack that can shoot the wearer 1,000 feet into the air at 60mph. With testing of this most sought-after of gadgets nearing completion, Ross is preparing to take his rocketbelt on the road. High flyer "It's designed, quite simply, to strap on and fly," he says of the device, which will look pleasingly familiar to sci-fi fans. The rocketbelt consists of a pair of stainless steel fuel tanks, a gas tank, a rocket motor and two downward-facing rocket nozzles. The whole device weighs almost 60kg (130lb) - even without a pilot strapped into it - and is powered by highly volatile 90% pure hydrogen peroxide. Although Ross talks down the obvious dangers involved, he understandably keeps the rocketbelt tethered to a frame during testing. With an earsplitting burst of superheated steam, the contraption lifts Ross gently into the air and, for a few noisy seconds, he is flying. "The adrenalin rush starts three hours before you fly it and finishes when you go to bed," he says. Originally imagined in Amazing Stories comic books and Buster Crabbe film serials, the flying backpack - or jetpack - is the most desirable and elusive of sci-fi gadgets . Today we carry personal communication devices in our pockets, walk through automatic sliding doors, buy robots to vacuum our carpets, and can even book trips into space - if we have a spare $200,000 (£127,450). But we still can't strap on a jetpack and zoom off to Tesco for our groceries. This isn't for want of trying: inventors have been working on creating real working jetpacks for more than 60 years, with mixed results. An attempt to build a rocket-powered flying backpack was allegedly made by the Nazis towards the end of the second world war, and further attempts were made in the US after Nazi rocket experts were transferred to Alabama as part of Project Paperclip. None got more than a few inches off the ground. The rocketbelt that Ross has based his design on was invented in the 1950s by Bell Aircraft Company engineer Wendell Moore, and then developed into the 1960s for the US army as a proposed method for moving troops around battlefields. However, the device had a fatal flaw: its heavy fuel consumption meant flight times were limited to just 21 seconds - too short for any practical use

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Pilot Stuart Ross develops rocketbelt designed to strap on and fly

HP picks Intel Atom for new Mini 1000 netbooks, but they’re not upgrades on the Mini-Note 2133

HP got into the netbook market six months ago with the HP2133, but its original machine ran Vista on a slow Via C7 processor. (See my mini-review .) Now the world's biggest PC maker has followed Asus and others with the HP Mini 1000 series , which runs Windows XP on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor. Prices start at $399.99. HP's sales blurb says: The HP Mini 1000 is the perfect on-the-go companion for the ultra-mobile consumer. Stay connected with more people, in more places. Our HP Mini is available with an 8.9" or 10.2" diagonal display, weighs only 2.25 lb., and has a nearly full sized keyboard. Personal computing just got a whole lot smaller. The basic price gets you an 8.9 inch screen and half a gig of memory. It costs an extra $50 for the 10.2 inch screen (but it still does WSVGA: ie 1024 x 600 pixels), and an extra $25 to get 1GB of memory. Since the Flash drive is only 8GB, you may also want to pay an extra $40 for a 16GB solid state drive or $50 for a slow (4,200 RPM) 60GB hard drive. However, a fully expanded version does not look very competitively priced. Also, you can't upgrade the operating system to Vista (a Linux version will appear later) or upgrade the Intel 950 graphics, and there's no long-life battery. However, you can get a special Vivian Tam edition, which is red and peonic. HP announced this on September 9 ( press release ) when "Vivienne Tam and HP unveiled the design of the new must-have digital clutch on the catwalk today at Tam's fashion show during New York's Fashion Week at Bryant Park." It says: The peony design features a unique blend of Asian and Western cultures, antiquity and modern style, technology and fashion. It was inspired by Tam's "China Chic" style, which is recognized from the runways in Milan to the Olympics in Beijing and represents her personal mantra to live well and be beautiful. Gizmodo has pictures of the machine, but not the fashion show. Funny idea . However, the HP2133 was a solid and beautifully made bit of kit.

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HP picks Intel Atom for new Mini 1000 netbooks, but they're not upgrades on the Mini-Note 2133

Celebrity Squares: Sean Astin’s ‘awesome’ iPhone

What's your favourite piece of technology, and why? I would say hands down, bar none, my iPhone . If you'd shown this to Benjamin Franklin his head would have exploded. The user interface is incredible – if I can use it, anyone can. It's designed for the simple-minded. It's just awesome. How has it improved your life

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Celebrity Squares: Sean Astin's 'awesome' iPhone

Adam Vaughan on the wind-up MP3 player

The revamp of Trevor Baylis's wind-up MP3 player is more of an evolution than a full-blown Revolution

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Adam Vaughan on the wind-up MP3 player

Technology to pick out sounds from background noise

Technology to pick out sounds from background noise could be useful for range of applications from music to medicine

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Technology to pick out sounds from background noise

Victor Keegan on tourism and technology

It could be argued that technology is diminishing the experience of going on holiday, but enriching the memory. Having just returned from a trip to Rome, Florence and Venice it was interesting to note that for lots of people it seemed more important to get a photo or video clip of an attraction than to savour it at the moment of contact. It may be inevitable because of the vast crowds that pour into the tourist areas, making it difficult to enjoy a personal experience. Even in October, if you visit St Mark's Basilica in Venice you have to walk along a predetermined route without stopping, in order to accommodate the numbers queuing outside. In the case of St Mark's, you are not allowed to take photos, so you won't get the experience of emotion recollected in tranquillity that a photo might have allowed. Galleries and churches have yet to come to terms with the growth of digital cameras and cameraphones. St Mark's church bans them, but in St Peter's in Rome (though not the Sistine Chapel) you can use cameras including flash with abandon. The Louvre in Paris follows a laissez-faire approach, but if you try to take a snap at the Tate or National Gallery in London, attendants are on to you in a flash, so to speak. Maybe the European Commission should harmonise policy with a simple rule: everyone should be allowed to record images, as it is now part of the experience of visiting a gallery, but with a total ban on flash, which is disruptive to other visitors and can accelerate the deterioration of old pictures. The trouble with this is that turning off flash from a lot of cameras, and being confident enough to know it has been turned off, is not always easy. In these conditions I found my recently purchased Flip ( flipvideo.co.uk ) surprisingly effective. Flip is a sub-£100 video camera that ought not to exist. It doesn't do anything your digital camera or cameraphone can't do, it adds yet another gadget to your pocket and it doesn't have flash. The reason it is becoming the latest must-have gadget for the YouTube generation is precisely because it is so easy to use. Instead of four or five moves to activate the video on your phone, you simply point the Flip at your subject and press a large red button to start and stop it. Flip now has several devices, and others from Kodak (with the Zi6) and Creative (with the Vado) are all worth looking at. Suddenly, technology gives you the chance to record the highlights of your holiday for later enjoyment. I started taking a series of short clips of everything I did on a day – from the experience in a museum to the inside of a restaurant. Taking a 15-second video sweep of the inside of the Santa Croce basilica revealing the resting places of Florence's favourite (though under-appreciated at the time) sons, Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Galileo will bring back images of the holiday later in a way that fading memories cannot.

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Victor Keegan on tourism and technology

Bobbie Johnson on how to digitise your vinyl

I have collected vinyl for 20 years and have more than 20,000 12-inch singles. Apart from spending months with a USB turntable, is there any way to transfer them to computer? If I were to download all the songs from a filesharing service, would I be breaking copyright laws? People who download from filesharing services such as LimeWire and eDonkey are breaking the law - even if they already own a copy in another format - but the music industry has so far focused on tracking down those who upload music so others can copy it. In fact, according to strict legal interpretation, you are not even supposed to rip music from the CDs or vinyl you own. Of course, that doesn't stop millions of people doing it, and the ripping rule is now considered an archaic piece of legislation that would crumble if anybody ever challenged it. Whatever you decide to do, the real problem with having such an vast catalogue of music is that many of the more obscure tracks are going to be difficult to find anywhere

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Bobbie Johnson on how to digitise your vinyl

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