Looks like some use is being made of the fact Apple are letting hardware manufacturers get their greasy paws all over the iPhone’s dock connector. You didn’t know you wanted one, but now you won’t be able to avoid the lust induced by this mini projector for the iPhone. Watch your videos in 70inches of not-quite-bright-enough glory, and wander why you ever needed a TV…

To be honest, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more gadgets that will plug into the iPhone since the launch of OS 3.0. Most of all, I’m astonished that I can already buy a hardware keyboard… anything coming soon?!?!

This, as a Brit who needs to cut down on what they carry around, I like…

Read more, from someone who clearly has more time than I do right now, here

Grabbed myself a LaCie iamakey 8GB USB drive this week… The humble USB key can be overlooked sometimes as merely an extra. Something you can get for free as long as you don’t mind it being branded by your local Indian Curry house or a condom manufacturer. To be this flippant however, is to overlook the sterling work done by the humble key. Backing up files, transferring documents, running portable applications - they’re all important and we’d be mighty fucked (well, ‘a bit annoyed’) without them. Hence my desire to purchase a solid metal key, that I can keep with me at all times.

The LaCie is very nicely designed, very solid and erm, works. Although I must say the transfer rate does seem a bit slow, but nothing terrible.

With recent news that Microsoft’s Bing is to serve up explicit pictures of naked teens riding hard cocks (or whatever your particular niche is) from a separate domain to make it easier for schools, offices et al to filter such tomfoolery, even above user filters, the porn question is in the air. Which is I why I uncovered the following… Honest.

1) Imagine you want to find the Bing logo. Being a Google user you hit up Google Image Search

2) You type in ‘Bing’ thinking that’ll be enough to get the Microsoft owned ‘decision engine’ to pop up on the first page of results

3) Instead of any logos you get ‘a lot of pink’…

You’d think that when the powers that be were picking a name for Microsoft’s ‘Google Killer’ (or at least ‘gnawer at the ankle of’) they’d have realised that ‘Bing’ happens to be the surname of a rather popular, large breasted young lady who spends an awful lot of time naked. Love it.

Plugs. Sure, they’re not sexy, but they are attached to every gadget you’ve ever laid your hands on. Well, at least every one that requires a healthy dose of electricity. Sometimes however, these pronged marvels need a little love and now, is one of those times as I offer up not one, but two plug related items for your delectation.

Number one, a map of which plug types are used where in the world. Maps, are undoubtedly cool. Plugs, as we’ve established, are undoubtedly useful. Marrying the two, well, it will simply blow your mind…

Slightly more gadgety, is the Pogoplug, a chunk of plastic that looks pretty similar to a plug, and allows you to share data nice and easily across continents (where you may, or may not, have to use a plug adapter). It’s a great way to set yourself up a file server of sorts to keep all your files available wherever you are, fairly securely. Never go on holiday without your entire porn stash, or game emulator library again.

Get the full skinny here…

Recently, I’ve been lucky enough to toddle over the Atlantic and spend a few days in San Francisco courtesy of work. Lovely. Better than simply a free flight, a hotel and a lot of expensed BBQ ribs and Mexican food however, I was also in the lovely situation of being able to geek out with some of the world’s best.

Not only did I get my hands on a Nokia N97 (stunning) and a Palm Pre (gorgeous software, terrible keypad) while in town, I also felt the corona glow from WWDC, and the iPhone 3GS - so smartphone porn all round really. Better than that though, I got invited down to Automattic HQ, by the fine folk behind WordPress for a meet-up and run through of version 2.8, which was launched there and then… I also chatted to the bloke who created the ‘Add to Any’ plug-in for said platform. It was marvellous.

For my trip, I also picked up one of Apple’s in-flight Empower connectors so I could enjoy unbridled MacBook stroking at several thousand feet. If you want a quick review: it works, and it does its job. So that is as great an endorsement as I ca give. It even claims not to charge, but ‘maintain’ the battery power. I found however that leaving it plugged in while in sleep mode would creep the battery up a few percent. It’s also very small, and I’d love to see trains, and even offices and cafes adopt the empower standard, making it less necessary to lug around huge chargers. So, there’s my brilliant idea for the day.

On a down side, why is the in-flight entertainment software used by British Airways so woefully inadequate? Sure, it ‘works’ but I thought we had gone a long way past hitting ‘back’ buttons only to find ourselves right at the beginning of very long lists we were actually about half way through. Boo to you, though I guess all that poking at the screen does make the flight go quicker.

A Compaq Mini 702 to be precise. I was just feeling a little out of the club, you know, dragging around my massive 13.3″ MacBook. Actually, I mainly picked up the Compaq because I don’t have a Windows machine in the house, and it’s always useful to have around. It’s also useful to have a spare laptop from time to time, and since I’m a glutton for sexy looking things that let me stay productive, the Compaq (a rebranded HP mini 1000 for those of you Stateside) with it’s awesome keyboard (considering its size) ticks both those boxes

I’m off to the US for a week in a couple of days and I’ll be taking the little puppy with me. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of use I can get out of it, and how it holds up. As I say, I’m in a win-win situation, since to me, a netbook is just a cheap laptop to have on the side for emergencies - if it stands up to good beating on the road, then it means I might just be able to get another year out of my MacBook before she (yes, she) final keels over and coughs up blood one last time.

At some point, I’m sure I’ll try and squeeze OSX on this bad-boy, if just to impress girls, but for now I’m happy with an XP installation pimped up with Rocketdock, Launchy and some darn sexy icons.

A nice labour of love here from webdesignerdepot.com, showing the evolution of the mobile phone. If you’ve spent more than a few years wandering into network provider shops and poking at their display models uttering ‘no, I fine thanks’ every so often, then this will be a joy to behold…

The Evolution of Cell Phone Design…

Why doesn’t apple offer a docking station for their laptops? Yeah, yeah, I know Bookendz offer a version, but it looks terrible, and doesn’t have a version for current models - not exactly a slick solution. With such power in Apple’s portable puppies, there are plenty of people using them for work at the desk, as well as on the road - so you’d think such a dock would be useful?!

The gem of course, would be an iMac without any innards, just a few ports on the back and a working screen. Slide your Macbook into the side, hear the satisfying ‘click’ and lo-and behold - 21″ of super screen glory with an external keyboard and mouse.

Of course, once they’ve developed that technology, they may as well make an 8″ laptop that rips of the Celio Redfly, and accepts and iPhone as its innards. Oh, how much joy we would have daisy chaining those babies right up…

I’ve just discovered Dosbox, a quite marvellous little application for running old Dos games under any environment (in my case, OSX)…

Here it is running Theme Hospital, and I’ve also been playing around with Sensible World of Soccer, two games that shaped my youth. I’m now desperately trying to remember the name of a text based football management game I used to play, even pre-SWOS days. I think it came out in 1991/92, as Leeds were the best team in Europe in the game. If I can find that, and 10rogue, I may as well give up on work for the next few weeks…