Tired of your tired looking GMail? Well you’re in luck, because along with the already growing customisations, there are now selectable themes. Previously only enjoyed by browser hacks, the option is now open to everyone. Some of the new ways to customise your inbox:

To select the skin theme for your GMail account (assuming you have one of course) go to your settings when looking at your email, and there is a new "Themes" tab. Don’t worry if you don’t have it, Google are rolling them out for everyone over the next couple of days, so check back every day or so until it appears..

OK, well it’s a way to show off this amazing piece of technology, but what I really wanted to see was it rescuing people from burning buildings, or fighting acid-spitting extra terrestrials – not bench pressing 50kgs!

Created by Raytheon, a military hardware specialist, the Sarcos Exoskeleton fits around a human to augment his or her basic functions. It’s able to walk, jog, work out or punch people (apparently) so all-round it looks a great idea. What amazes me is how quickly and fluidly it reacts to movements from the person strapped into it. Have a look at the video with a small interview with one of the creators, below:

The "Jaguar" in Tennessee, USA, has been crowned the fastest computer in the world and is to be used for science.

The new champion, consisting of 284 Cray supercomputer cabinets, will be able to crunch an amazing 1.64 Petaflops – 1,640,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. Tested so far up to 1.3 Petaflops, the team at Oak Ridge National Lab are hoping to crank the machine up to it’s full potential soon.

Specification:

45,000 Quad Core Opterons (AMD), 362 Terabytes of RAM (that’s 370,000 Gigabytes!), 10 Petabytes of storage (or 10,485,000 Gigabytes)

Performance:

578 Terabytes per second Memory bandwidth, 284 Gigabytes per second bus bandwidth (to move data around the system)

All in all an impressive machine which will knock the current champion, Roadrunner (at 1.34 Petaflops), off the top spot when it’s up to speed. Read The Register article, and also check out the top 500 supercomputers on Wikipedia (soon to be updated I’m sure!)

Bloodhound SSC, a rocket/jet combination car, is aiming to smash the current land speed record. Set 11 years ago by Thrust SSC, at 763mph, Bloodhound is going to attempt to raise the bar even higher, to an astonishing 1,000mph!

Lead by Richard Noble OBE, and the same team that built Thrust SSC & Thrust 2, the vehicle is to be designed and built in Britain - ready for an appearance on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, in 2011.

Bloodhound SSC will have 2 forms of propulsion. Firstly there will be a rocket mounted to the top, and secondly the main body will contain a Eurofighter Typhoon engine, capable, in total, of 45,000 lbs of Thrust - the equivalent of 2.5 times that of a fighter jet at full throttle.

The job of driving the beast will go to previous Thrust SSC driver, and fighter pilot, Wing Commander Andy Green. Although safety is paramount for the attempt, I’m wondering exactly what you can do if the worst happens at 1,000mph anyway. Keep posted here and the official website, for any news regarding the development and testing of the vehicle.

Situated in Japan, the Canal City shopping centre has an amazing 2D waterfall, that has precision nozzles controller by computer - meaning they can create text, objects, or anything else in the water. Originally found on Gizmodo.

I didn’t know that people were this badly into engineering things out of lego, and trust me this is definitely engineering, in every sense of the word. But, yes, one person, naming himself “barebos” on YouTube, has created a V8 engine (32 valve no less) that took him 4 to 5 months to build from scratch! You can also check out some of his other creations that he’s put up on the popular video-sharing website.

A collection of photos I’ve been hunting around the web for - servers, computers and server rooms that have found out what it’s like to lose a fight against fire!

Read the rest of this article…

I found this really interesting interactive Google timeline created to celebrate their 10th birthday. Just click and drag through the years to find out facts and stats about our favourite search engine.

I’m the sort of person that looks at something and wonders why it isn’t as good as something else I have. Example: In your modern browser you have tabs, and you can click-drag these to reorganise. Something you don’t need to do that often, but it’s nice to have the option. So I wondered why Windows doesn’t have this functionality for the Taskbar?

Well it turns out Jay Erox thought the same thing, and wrote a utility to fix it. Download Taskbar Shuffle (XP & Vista) and you can drag your Taskbar buttons around to your hearts content. My life is complete again - for the time being at least.

Video Games Live, a show that tours America, is a full sized Orchestra that plays some of the classic arcade game music of the past and present - in front of a big screen showing the game in action. Hearing some of these old classics, expertly re-created is a real treat for the gaming geek!