This sounds like the alarm clock from hell.

“Hit the snooze button on this carpet covered Clocky and it will scoot off on its pram wheels, seeking out a suitable hiding place (which will inevitably be right under the bed). When your snooze time is up, Clocky’s alarm will make merry hell under you, panicked and disorientated, locate its hiding place and switch the alarm off.”

I don’t use the snooze button much (usually set the alarm for 6:45am, and get up at 6:50 when the first snooze ends), but it doesn’t sound like a nice way to start the day. Might as well wash your face with hot chilli oil and brush your teeth with toilet cleaner while you’re at it.

Plus it kind of looks like a poop on wheels, which can’t be a selling point, really!
[Found via Katie at Shiny Shiny]

I’ve been itching to tell you about this for a while, but wanted to keep it under wraps until it was really happening. But now, I can officially say it - I’ve started writing for Shiny Shiny: A Girl’s Guide to Gadgets.

First post about women and gadgets went live this morning, so have a look and tell me what you think! And have a look at all the funky gadget reviews on Shiny, there’s some good stuff in there.

Today was one of the first truly sweltering hot days of the week-we-will-call-Summer in Britain.

As somebody at work pinched my desk fan, will one of my faithful readers buy me this USB piggy fan, please? It’s just too cute! “The fan/tree bit wobbles from side to side, swaying in the self-made breeze, while the little piggy acts as an on/off sliding switch,” says Shiny Shiny. It may not compete with a proper full-size blow-your-head-off desk fan but it’s got a little piggy which makes it all better!

Ok, I think the sun is getting to my brain (or maybe it’s the margaritas…) We now return to our usual posting, sorry for the distraction!

Ce matin, j’ai découvert que TechCrunch, un blog sur Web 2.0 et les PME en technologie, existe aussi en français. Alors, pour ceux qui préfèrent leurs nouvelles techno en français, certains des articles publiés sur TechCrunch anglais sont aussi traduits.

Il reste à voir si certains articles sont écris avec le public francophone en tête ou au sujet des PME Web 2.0 de langue française, mais ça fait plaisir de voir que cet excellent site est disponible dans plus qu’une langue!

So the MacBook Pro comes with motion sensors… What purpose does that serve, other than protecting your hard drive in case you have the misfortune of dropping it?

Someone has written a script to make use of the motion sensors on the MacBook Pro, so he’s developing in what looks like Eclipse (correct me if I’m wrong!) on one screen, then switches to the “other one” to view the work he’s done!

How cool is that!? (As long as you don’t get pissed off at your code and start whacking it a bit too hard!)

Watch it for yourself:

[Found via TheRegister]

Haven’t got time to scan the secret documents you just stole? ScanR can turn your phone’s camera into a scanner - Take a photo of a document and it’ll return a searchable PDF.

It’s a free service so I fail to see how they expect to make their money, but TechCrunch has all the details (and some examples of the returned results, not bad!)

Ok, forget the spy idea. It could come in handy for those meetings where there’s so many whiteboard scribbles, you wouldn’t know where to start to jot those down in sensible notes!

[Edit: Reason #1 ScanR sucks - It takes ages to send your image back. It's been +36 hours since I sent mine, not received anything. And no it's not in my spam folder, I checked.]

The hungry programmer has the option to either learn to make this recipe or to work with me.

Because I’m nice. And I make cookies for my team. Sometimes, anyways… Maybe Thursday if they’re good boys (and girls).

PS - find the three errors for me, I couldn’t write a line of code to save my life, let alone spot the errors the author points out at the bottom of the post!

(Found via Digg BBC JP at work…)

I’ve had the same old phone for a couple of years, the Nokia 6100, a simple but sort of featureless little phone. It did me well, but I desperately wanted a camera phone as a way to spice this blog up a bit (and to quiet my mom down about not sending enough photos home ).

So I treated myself to a Nokia N70 (warning, god awful minisite, just go look at the specs), as it had the 2 megapixels camera I wanted and plenty of funky features like Symbian OS, mp3 ringtones and an easy-access upgradable memory card.

I haven’t had a huge amount of time (or sunlight) to try the camera in different lighting conditions but so far so good. It does video as well, but I can’t imagine that’ll come out too well!

Otherwise, it’s also got a highly addictive version of Snakes. Ok, I know most people don’t care, but I’m easily entertained, especially when sitting on the bus to work when it’s either playing mini-games or watching miserable people fall asleep.

At this point in time, the N70 comes highly recommended if anyone’s looking for a new phone! More photos on the way!

TechEBlog presents the top 10 strangest Lego creations. I suspect my dad would love the Lego harpsichord, but the Pinball machine is the one that does it for me. I have a hard time believing someone would manage to put a working Pinball machine together using only Lego, but it’s a pretty cool (and brave) idea!

Special mention to the USB stick is well deserved! I mean, if you’re going to lug a USB key around, might as well make it interesting and unusual!

Remember when I was complaining about being unable to read Yahoo Mail’s verification image a few weeks ago?

Looks like I’m not alone getting frustrated with this trend of adding Captchas to every booking form you fill in or comment you want to leave on someone’s blog. Seth finds himself fighting with the Ticketmaster site, trying to guess their awful captcha!

How user-unfriendly can a site get? Keeping in mind that sites like these have as main goal to take bookings. This type of mindboggling image can’t be helping their conversion and would be enough to convince me to book my tickets elsewhere, if possible.

Michael, from figby.com, also points out an idiotic registration captcha. “If you want users to sign up, please don’t use a CAPTCHA system in your site unless it’s really easy for ordinary people to read without pulling the graphic into Photoshop for sharpening and enlargement. If you don’t want users to sign up, you could just remove the registration page rather than torturing people with one of these MENSA-level CAPTCHAs.”