This ridiculously small robotic fly uses evolution of insects to it’s advantage. Weighing in at 60 milligrams the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency thinks it would make a great spying robot to keep an eye on the occupants of a room. The fly is still in the early stages, and can’t even fly yet without being suspended on wires. [SHOW ME]

Touted (at least by T3) as being a Nintendo Wiimote in a handset, these motion sensing mobiles use the built in camera to detect movement. Quite impressive, and they look fairly sensitive too. I’m just wondering what would happen if someone walked behind you – would the phone interpret that as movement? Or how about if you’re on the train with the camera facing the window? No hiscores possible on that particular game…

Use a google maps-esque viewer to look at the Carina Nebula. Zoom and Pan till your hearts content. [SHOW ME]

Apparently, HP has shipped more PCs than anyone else in the second quarter of 2007. Even after the scandal? Like what’s wrong with the world? I don’t know, But I do know that apparently you think their PCs are the cat’s pyjamas. I can vouch for a few that we’ve used at work, but can’t vouch for the other millions… [SHOW ME]

This did make me laugh.. This is one person’s view on the iPhone and why it isn’t as good as his current Nokia E70. Not family safe by the way!! [SHOW ME]

Have a look at this vintage video, hosted by YouTube, which shows how far we’ve come in just 21 years with computer animation. The quality of films and cartoons nowadays with tools such as Maya or 3D Max would be beyond people’s wildest dreams in 1986. All available for your home “micro.” Ah, memories..

I found [this link] today which details software, available for free, either under freeware or GPL licenses. The spirit of Open Source software is, of course, to contribute in some way – so if you find yourself with a few hours a week of spare time, maybe you can help the cause. Detailed below I’ve singled out some of the more obvious replacements. Ideal if you’re on a shoe-string, are anti-big corporation or just like the ideals of open source:

[OpenOffice] – Microsoft Office Replacement

[Dia] – Visio Replacement (A little basic and doesn’t share file types)

[Paint.NET] – A great replacement for MS Paint with more features than it’s smaller cousin. A good alternative to Photoshop if all you do is basic editing/resizing.

[Dr. DivX] – A DivX replacement encoder.

[7-Zip] – The one program you need for all your archiving needs. It doesn’t compress to .rar, but does decompress from it.

[Audacity] – Great Audio editor, and can be used for podcasting too. There is no mp3 encoder included with the program, but details are available on the website where to get one from.

[Filezilla] – A fully featured FTP client & server.

[Gimpshop] – A photoshop replacement based around the Gimp platform.

[Notepad++] – Already on a [previous post] once you use this over Notepad, there is no going back..!

[PDFCreator] – The name says it all!

[Free Extractor] – A program for creating your own self-extracting archives. Replacement for Install Shield

Hopefully you can get some use for these, and if you have any suggestions of other replacements let me know.