Rob Atkinson - KnowledgeByte Ltd.

• My wife is a big fan of Michael Bublé, so today I moseyed over to the new Tesco entertainment site and within 10 minutes had setup my account added my Tesco club-card and started downloading the Crazy Love album for £3.97. The same album on iTunes is £7.97, so a whopping £4 saving
• Well done Tesco. Now’s who’s going to beat them? Spotify maybe? The other players had better get real with their pricing structure, because now that Tesco has entered the fray, the musical pundits will now be forced to give us genuine market prices and the torrents will eventually die off, as people will prefer to have legal ownership

• My wife is a big fan of Michael Bublé, so today I moseyed over to the new Tesco entertainment site and within 10 minutes had setup my account added my Tesco club-card and started downloading the Crazy Love album for £3.97. The same album on iTunes is £7.97, so a whopping £4 saving
• Well done Tesco. Now’s who’s going to beat them? Spotify maybe? The other players had better get real with their pricing structure, because now that Tesco has entered the fray, the musical pundits will now be forced to give us genuine market prices and the torrents will eventually die off, as people will prefer to have legal ownership

• Robert Llewellyn demonstrating how Dad’s end up dancing in middle age. True? yeah sadly so, arf

• I have another PC at home that needs to be upgraded from Vista – Win7 and might have some malware. So I fired up my Virtual Image based version of Windows 7 and then fired up Virtual PC 2007 XP Mode

• That way, say if someone visits a site that might be infected, I just shutdown the XP session and it’s sandboxed into oblivion..
• I also recommend Microsoft Security Essentials as an alternative to AVG9, as 9x has become clobber-ware, i.e. all the good things taken out of it

• Now I’m seeing the big picture. Mosey on over to the Bing Maps site and play around with the new Silverlight interface with street-eye view. Very impressive use of PhotoSynth integration with 360 degree panoramic views. Take a walk around Capitol Hill
• Next I daresay this will appear on our mobiles. ‘Take me to the best Thai restaurant and show me how to get there with a street-eye view with GPS overlay’ W ith a virtual ‘you’ ghosted over the GPS overlay, as you walk along.. got to be on the cards :-)

• Denise Trabona, Senior UX Lead (User Experience) walks us through how the Windows 7 logo (login) background was developed. After a good amount of fruitful internal work Microsoft decided to look to an external  illustrator called Chuck Anderson of NOPATTERN
• You can see some of Chuck’s work on Flickr

• On the theme of how to actually change your Login screens background without any third party tools , watch this short video – beware do not change any other parts of the registry! you’ve been warned
• Here is the direct path:

• Folder path: %windir%\System32\oobe\Info\backgrounds . Note the Info folder is already there, so just add ‘backgrounds’
• Folder name: backgrounds
• File size: >256KB with .JPG extension

• I’ve heard a lot about Amazon’s Kindle, but I don’t want to fork-out for the cost of one, given that both Apple and Microsoft are due to bring our competitors in the New Year. I discovered they do the Kindle app for iPhone, Blackberry and even the humble PC

Kindle for the PC

• Once in awhile I see a compelling little app like Bing Mobile, which includes live maps and GPS location or approximation via your mobile network. I tried the Google Maps equivalent, but much prefer this app. If you live in the USA you get Live Traffic and Gas (fuel) prices. The full moving map with GPS tracking is way cool and if you fall out of coverage there is still a tracer in place until you regain a signal. You can also Speak your destination and it will search according to what the voice recognition software thinks you said. Close enough providing your not in a noisy car. I’m assuming you would use this at a halt, or to find a restaurant etc. Not bad for a free bit of software. Tom-Tom and co, much be worried.. it’ll kill their market share big-time!

Download for the client

• Just picked this up via #carpool (twitter) on The London Imperial College’s partnership with Radical Sports SR8 to modify an existing sports car into an EV Electric vehicle. The aim is to start from the southern most tip of South America and travel to the northern most tip Alaska. Looks like it will be a very hard ride! Capable of 390Km distance and peak power of 500 BHP! 0-100km/hr in 7s. I’d like to know the data on CO2 output based on battery usage and production. So weight for weight, how much CO2 does this car consume over the journey including it’s creation… carbon fibre production probably has fairly high carbon footprint
• Looks like we’re set for EV F1 racing at some stage.. Formula 1-EV anybody?