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I've reviewed probably a couple of hundred MP3 players over the years, but this post on choosing a player for the first time reminded me of the first one I actually used. This was a SmartDisk Rover, back in 2002 or so. It held 128MB of music - two to three albums, give or take - and had no display. It also had nothing that could, even charitably, be called a design.

Since then I've owned a few. One Creative MuVo NX, one Archos Gmini XS, one Creative Zen Xtra (my beloved 30GB iBrick), one original iPod Shuffle and a couple of dodgy no-name personal video players later, I'm now using an 80GB iPod Classic. This has over 600 times more storage than the Rover (enough to swallow every record I've ever purchased) plus a huge and swanky colour screen and a battery that'll outlast a transatlantic flight even when using it to watch TV shows. Also, as an added bonus, it's nowhere near as ugly.

And all those changes in six years. It's quite amazing, really.

Hunter takes off - in HD from Tom Royal on Vimeo.

Hunter does his bit for science, helping me test the EX-F1's 60fps mode. This was shot as 60 6mp JPEGs in a one second burst and then smooshed onto the interweb, hence the dubious image quality (technical smooshing details: JPEG images resized to 960×1,280px in Photoshop, stitched into an AVI with JPEGVideo, converted to H.264 in Quicktime Pro then uploaded).

(NB - he did actually land safely about a second later. And he caught the snake, too.)

As per Si's note, the video below is very flickery so anyone with epilepsy, or who simply dislikes flickery things, should probably beware.

A test taken with the Casio EX-F1, which shoots video at 300fps or full-resolution photos at 60fps. The plan now is to film Hunter or Ralph jumping - it needs lots of light at this speed, though.

The other day I met some people from Microsoft, who were in London to show off Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. One of the most interesting features - to me, at least - was the new Accelerators menu: if you highlight a block of text in the browser a context menu appears, allowing you to use that information (you could highlight a postcode and send it to Google Maps, for instance).

Personally, I'd like to use this to send items to Delicious, but there doesn't seem to be an official Accelerator for that yet. In the interim, here's one I've made:

Add Delicious IE8 Accelerator

It works in three ways. If you invoke it from a page, that page is sent to be bookmarked. If you invoke it on a link, the target page is sent with the link text as its title. And, more usefully, if you invoke it on some selected text the current page is sent, with the title automatically set and the selected text pre-entered into the notes field. All three methods open Delicious in a new tab, ready for you to add any tags you want.

Three caveats to note:

• I've tested this accelerator in IE8 Beta 2 under XP and Vista, but any use is at your own risk.
• I am not affiliated with Delicious in any way, and this is not an official Delicious tool.
• Log into Delicious before using the Accelerator. If you are not logged in some info (notes, title) may not be transferred correctly on first use of the Accelerator.

Quick screenshot of the installed Accelerator:

Three days away from work, so obviously I thought I'd get away from technological matters by breaking a computer. Er, I mean, "upgrading" it.

About two years ago I built a Media Center PC for the flat. For anyone unfamiliar, Windows XP Media Center was a special version of Windows designed to be used as a TV recorder. Instead of a monitor, mouse and keyboard you use a TV and remote control, and a set of big blue menus allow you to watch and record TV, view photos, listen to music or view any video files that you might have acquired that may or may not contain US television programmes not yet shown in the UK. Like Sky+ it can record a series of shows at the touch of the button, making it, when it works, a fantastic thing.

But that's only when it's in a good mood. XP Media Center proved more than a little cranky, and to compound matters I built the PC using odds and ends that I had lying around rather than the best parts for the job. Slightly iffy software combined with hardware of dubious provenance combined to produce a PC that worked fantastically well most of the time, but which spent days on end stubbornly refusing to do anything.  Eventually, persuaded by a colleague, I decided to try to fix it by installing the new version of Media Center, now a part of Windows Vista.

Should take an hour or two, I thought - something to do while waiting for the washing machine and before going out to get a newspaper. Did it take an hour or two? Did it bollocks.

Vista and the old system might have got along famously had the motherboard manufacturer ever bothered to publish any drivers of any kind, or indeed any information about what parts it used, on the web. Sadly it hadn't, but in London you're never more than an hour or two away from even the most esoteric product, including computer parts. One quick trip into town later and I'd picked up a cheapo processor (Celeron E1200, £30) and motherboard (Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H, £40). Rip out the old stuff, stick the new bits in the case, wrestle with Intel's completely stupid "push it until you're certain you'll break something" heatsink design, and voila:

.. a Media Center that actually works. The old one had an ancient integrated graphics chip that struggled heroically with the menus but would often mess them up, but the new one shows Vista's newer, spanglier Media Center in all its fanciness. The old one ran at alarming temperatures, but the new one sits idle at less than 30 degrees and runs to just 36 going full tilt. The old one had to hibernate when not in use - and that required extra software - but the new one slips into S3 standby. Better yet, it found all the Freeview channels first time and compiled the programme guide automatically.

In short, it's bound to break down spectacularly in the next seven days, probably taking the TV and/or our central heating system with it. Watch this space.

Despite writing about computers from 10am to 6pm five days a week, and occasionally on weekends just for the hell of it (that and the money), I'm not a very keen computer purchaser. In fact, I've bought just one computer in the last six years and that - despite my working on a magazine called Computer Shopper, which specialised in hardware reviews, at the time - was purchased using the highly scientific "that one's very cheap, we can afford it and it'll suffice" method. Incidentally, it broke down completely about a year later, so I'd heartily recommend that everyone else should do as much research as possible, preferably using magazines that employ me. Ahem.

Lately, though, I've been mostly writing about netbooks - tiny little notebooks that use cheapo processors, and which are ideal for surfing the web and writing documents, if not much else. Ever since the first one (the Asus Eee PC 701) loomed on the horizon I've been a fan of the idea, particularly given that I've lugged some comically large notebooks in flight hand luggage. A little notebook that weighs nothing, takes up little room and won't cost the earth to replace if (OK, when) I drop it would be great. Attempting to be the savvy buyer, though, I held off buying one for some time until I could find a netbook with both a low price and a really good keyboard.

Eventually, along came the Acer Aspire One. I was really rather taken - as Google will testify - by its low price and lovely keyboard, and after much faffing I forked out £200 (which, interestingly, I'd earned by reviewing netbooks) at Play.com, getting in just before the price rose by another £30. So, I've purchased a perfect little computer at a bargain price using the power of research, for once. Clever, clever me, eh?

Well, er, no. Acer has been having trouble with the supply of the Aspire One, so it arrived a month late. And, when it did arrive, it was completely, utterly, inexplicably dead. Pushing the power button produced about half a second of life before it stuttered and died, and the battery (which I think is probably the cause of the problem) wouldn't charge at all. So, after months of deliberation and plotting I've ended up with a £200 plastic paperweight. Not so clever.

A courier will hopefully take the One back to Play.com at some point today, and with luck I might have a working one next week. In the meantime, I've learnt the error of my ways: my next laptop for travelling will be a notepad and biro.

The Telegraph's Shane Richmond decided to get his new iPhone in Lewisham:

I didn't know what to expect when I arrived at Lewisham shopping centre, in south east London, at 6.15 in the morning, but it certainly wasn’t to find the centre deserted, barred and locked. I started wondering how embarrassing it would be to be the only person in the queue.

See, here's where local knowledge is useful - that's exactly what I'd expect in the middle of Lewisham at 6.15am - well, that and some generic fried chicken boxes fluttering in the breeze. I am rather disappointed that a pre-order queue did indeed form shortly afterwards, though. For shame.

All you need to know about today's big UK technology news, courtesy of one sentence from the press release:

"Further details about pricing and rate plans will be announced at a later date."

You are welcome. Wonder how much space this gets in tomorrow's papers.

Bookmarklets (or favelets) are bookmarks that use Javascript to do something more than simply opening a static page. They're particularly handy if you regularly search the same websites: rather than opening the website in question, clicking in a search box, entering a term and clicking another button you can simply click a button on your browser, type the search term then press enter. Here's a sample bookmarklet that searches Google Product Search.

Anyhow, here's a tool to make your own.

Finding the search address, the geek version:

Paste in everything that you want to appear in the URL before the search term. This is normally the website address, plus a bit of querystring, so something like http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=

Finding the search address, in English:

To find the search address, go to the website and search for something. Look at the address of the webpage that this produces. If you go to Google.co.uk and search for "banana", for instance, you'll get a page with an address like this:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=banana&btnG=Search&meta=

Look at the information included after the main address and you'll see the word you searched for. Now select and copy everything that's listed before this word. In this case, we'd copy:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=

This should be the search address. If you're not sure, try pasting it into the address bar, typing another word on the end, then pressing Enter. For example, we added "typewriter" to give this address:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=typewriter

This took us to the page of results for "typewriter", so we know that we've correctly identified the search address.

One of the joys of technology journalism is the Games Press digest, an email listing the week's press releases about a number of in-development video games, most of which I've never heard of. A few weeks back, though, one name jumped out: Stalin vs Martians. It's hard to think of a title more bizarre or offensive in a "but should anyone make light of such an evil homicidal figure" kind of way.

The website itself offers this explanation:

Obviously, the main concept behind the game is pretty much clear if you can see its name. It just speaks for itself. The fact that such game exists is quite an event. It doesn't really matter what's behind the name or if the game is playable at all. The concept is enough. Simply makes your brain explode.

And the plot? Glad you asked:

Year 1942. Summer. The martians suddenly drop off their butts somewhere in Siberia and attack the glorious people of Holy Mother Russia. It is a hard time for USSR as you might know from the history books if you ever attended school. The situation is really fucked up, so comrade Stalin takes the anti-ET military operation under his personal control. The operation is a top secret and virtually nobody knows about the fact of extraterrestial intervention.

It cheers me no end that people are prepared to throw the kind of finances necessary to develop a modern video game behind an idea so clearly insane, and I can't wait to see the results. In the meantime The Escapist, having stumbled across the game in a similar manner, has an interview with the game's lead designer.