Status-Q

Most people know about the Kindle and the Sony eReader, but what about the iRex Iliad? No, I hadn't come across it either, but it has a few interesting features:

• A great name
• An even higher price tag than the others

• You can annotate documents, as well as read them.

For anyone looking for a backup medium, rewritable Blu-ray drives are starting to become quite interesting. Dabs have an LG one for £160 now, and that includes VAT!

The disks are 25GB or 50GB and come in write-once or rewritable form, but since even the cheapest ones seem to start around £6, you wouldn't want to have too many write-failures!

Watch those prices drop, though... it won't be long.

The latest product to use the DisplayLink technology is Samsung's 2263DX, which is, I suppose, a monitor and a half.

I haven't seen one in the flesh yet, but it looks cute. Ideal for buddy lists, twitter status, today's calendar...

Here's a fun way to increase your visibility when cycling at night:

It's called Monkeylectric, and a search will find various other videos and photos.

Here it is on my bike handlebars:

We had fun today thinking of other things to do with it.

And I mounted my little Ixus on it and recorded video in unusual places. (Such as the view from the top of my head while walking home from lunch - I got to see what the world would look like if I were several inches taller)

If you need to find a present for someone with any interest in photography or video, I'd strongly recommend one of these. It's fantastic. It's also very tactile - a great stress-relieving executive toy...

UK readers can get them from Amazon.

I think my iPod has ideas above its station.

I got a new car today. It's rather nice. And it has an iPod adaptor cable.

When I plugged the iPod into this gleaming tonne-and-a-half of throbbing sports-tuned German engineering, it said, "Accessory attached".

The ASUS EeePC has been a great success. Next week, HP will start shipping a similar machine and, yes, the lowest-cost models are also Linux-based.

Quietly, over that time, it's been getting easier, as Kovid Goyal has turned his rather unexcitingly-named libprs500 from a basic command-line utility to a full-featured GUI application, which can do things like capture RSS feeds and format them for the Sony. It still has some quirks, but is well-worth checking out, and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

My friend Aideen brought an interesting device in to show us the other day. It's called a Rollermouse, and it's a combination mouse and wrist-rest:

The black bar rolls up and down and slides left and right to move the mouse, and you can click it too if you prefer that to using the buttons.

Now, this looks (and sounds) a little strange, but it worked amazingly well. I saw it and was skeptical, and tried it and was impressed. They're rather pricey, but if you suffer from RSI, or just want a mouse you can easily use in bed, this might be the thing...

In this day and age, you can get almost everything in a USB-connected form.

I must confess that this was something I had never even contemplated, though.