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The sparkle of starlight off water could be the clincher for finding oceans on extrasolar planets. And it could be observable with the tech that will be deployed in the next generation of space telescopes.

Unless you're majoring in spandex and minoring in too-cool-for-school at Steephill State, you may not need a road, fixed-gear or a mountain bike. Consider REI's Novara Fusion commuter. Sure this hybrid 8-speed won't get you anywhere in a mega-hurry, but you'll likely enjoy getting there.

Don't you wish there was a way to take notes with a pen and upload them to your computer? And don't you wish that pen had an infrared camera, a built-in speaker and mic? There is such a thing, and it's called the Livescribe Echo Smartpen.

As we go backstage at the IndyCar Grand Prix of Sonoma, we ponder what's more important to fans -- the drivers' skill, or the cars' technology?

Hunting 'mugu' in America

A Nigerian man has been sentenced to more than 12 years in US prison for orchestrating an advance payment scam that bilked victims out of more than $1.3m.…

By losing 30 pounds in less than a year, tennis pro Mardy Fish has quickly become one of the top Americans to advance at this year’s US Open in New York. Fish opens up on how he pulled it off and revitalized his career.

While winding down from Wednesday’s iPod announcements, Apple CEO Steve Jobs appears to have taken some time to respond to an e-mail criticizing the new look of the iTunes icon.

Had to install iTunes to set up an iPhone for a friend the other day, finished it all nearly 100Mb of bloatware and 1 hour later. WTF sez I, what could possibly justify such a huge program just for that? Well, I stumbled upon this Xconomy post about the Why:

If you’re not convinced about iTunes’ cruftiness, let me take you on a tour of the program’s main functions. This is a long list, but bear with me:

• It lets you rip CDs to digital formats and play the new files

• It lets you burn new CDs from your digital files

• It lets you print jewel-case inserts for your newly burned CDs

• It gives you several ways of visualizing your media collection, including Cover Flow

• It lets you curate your music collection with ratings and the like

• It lets you create playlists from subsets of your music collection

• Its “Genius” feature can automatically create new playlists based on your listening habits

• It includes a music equalizer and other sound processing features

• It stores copies of your purchased albums, TV shows, and movies

• It stores copies of your downloaded podcasts and iTunes U videos

• It stores copies of the iBooks editions, PDFs, and audiobooks that you may be consuming on your iPhone or iPad

• It stores copies of all of your iPhone and iPad apps

• The Genius function can suggest apps you might like based on your past downloads

• It stores copies of your iPhone ringtones (but it doesn’t let you make your own ringtones anymore)

• It connects to hundreds of streaming Internet radio stations

• It is the leading podcasting client, automatically downloading new audio and video podcasts to which you have subscribed

• It is the gateway to the iTunes Store, which is really seven separate stores for music, movies, TV shows, apps, podcasts, audio books, and university lectures

• It’s the only way to access the new Ping social network

• It’s the hub for sharing music across your home wireless network

• If you have a new iPhone or iPad, you have to use iTunes to activate cellular or data plans

• It synchronizes the music, movies, or TV shows that you buy on your computer to your iPod, iPhone, or iPad, and vice versa

• It can transcode video in certain PC formats such as QuickTime into formats that are playable on iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TV

• It synchronizes your iCal calendar with the calendars on your iPod, iPhone, or iPad; it also synchronizes your address books and any content in your Notes app

• It is the conduit for installing the MobileMe control panel, if you want to synchronize data automatically across your PC and your Apple devices

• It stores voice memos recorded using the iPhone’s built-in voice memo app

• It’s the repository for music and video files embedded in documents created using Apple’s iWork and iLife productivity applications

• It interacts with the Remote app, which lets you control your media collection from an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad

Any program that can print jewel case inserts and share my music preferences with my friends is starting to sound a lot like that giant clot of bubble gum.

As Tim O'Reilly notes, iTunes bloatware may be the undoing of the Apple bid for Global Domination. And it starts insidiously - I wish I'd read Jas Dhaliwal's post on how to avoid megabloatage first:

Many people do not want to install the other applications. However, Apple does not allow the option to install individual components. The good news, is that it very easy just to install the individual components that you want.

Firstly, you need to install Winrar. This application will allow you to ‘unpack’ your downloaded iTunesSetup.exe file. Locate your file, and right click on it. You will be presented with a number of menu options, select ‘Extract Here’.

(Jas's post has pictures n' all, so go there if you want to unbloat your iTunes)

Winrar will now extract the iTunes installation package and will reveal the individual MSI setup files. You can now double click on the iTunes.msi file to install iTunes without the other applications.
Please excuse me now - me and iTunes are going to have a little tete a tete about slimming......

Joe Sylvester wants to set a new record for longest jump by a monster truck. Clearly he's still got some work to do.

Wired.com contributor Jeremy Hart is driving around the world in a Ford Fiesta. Along the way, he'll be testing gadgets from some of the most extreme — and amazing — locations.

In addition to the usual cadre of satellites, NASA is using a small fleet of unmanned aircraft into, over and around the hurricane as it tracks north from the Caribbean. While flying into a hurricane is nothing new, Earl is the first hurricane that NASA has observed using their unmanned Global Hawk observation aircraft.

EA Sports, publisher of the Madden NFL videogame franchise, has taken its latest game iteration, Madden NFL 11, and run through the upcoming 2010 NFL season, offering at least a simulated insight into who’ll be celebrating in Arlington, Texas, after Super Bowl XLV.

Gay Fun your life must be...

An Oz primary school head is taking a bit of stick after insisting that kiddies should not follow the exact letter of Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.…

Six Apart is shutting down its Vox blogging service. Users have until Sept. 30 to export their data to another free blog publishing service like Six Apart's TypePad. After that, Vox will be gone.

This week's episode of the Gadget Lab podcast is heavy on fruits. High on vitamin A, Dylan Tweney gushes over the pluot, a plum-apricot hybrid, while Brian X. Chen dishes out this week's announcements of brand new Apple gear. They also share our impressions of Samsung's iPad rival, the 7-inch Galaxy Tab.

This morning, the Smithsonian National Zoo launched a live webcam of the zoo's four new baby African lion cubs and their mother. The cubs were born during the late evening and early morning between Aug. 30 and 31 and will remain inside until late fall.

Two totally different views of the Future Of The Internet crossed my desk within hours today.

Firstly, Tom Coates at dConstruct banging the Romantic Future drum (as noted by One Man and His Blog):

[Tom] was drawing a parallel between the work of King Darius in the year A Long Time Ago BC, who built a new transport network across Persia, and transformed the country as a result. (Prior to that, princes of Persia had to jump across roofs to get around). 

Today, we're in a similar situation, as we evolve the web from a place where each site was complete unto itself, into a place where the interaction of sites, through the exchange of data creates a new network that will reshape the world. Lanyrd.com is an example of something that was built quickly and easily from data from other sites. (But it isn't the semantic web that'd driving that. The top-down approach has been superseded by a more organic approach to building links - which is orthogonal to the efforts of the key semantic advocates.)

Aside: he built a slide with 150 transitions in 30 seconds. I am in awe....

That network is beginning to extend beyond the world of sites, into network-enables devices. He gave a range of examples from the Boris Bike to parking in San Francisco, but I'm going to focus on the Internet-connected scales. You could scan Twitter for the tweets from the scales, and do trends and maps... OK, back to the parking then - by tracking use and networking the data with traffic information, they can vary parking prices to ensure that there's always one parking space per block, and thus make traffic flow more efficient... Interconnected data opens up the possibility of positive changes to a physical living environment.

And that's what brings us back to Darius. We're building the inromation network that the next generation will build on to change the world.
And in the Pessimism Corner, the Economist noting that the roses in the garden are starting to smell a bit off:

Three sets of walls are being built.

The first is national. China’s “great firewall” already imposes tight controls on internet links with the rest of the world, monitoring traffic and making many sites or services unavailable. Other countries, including Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, have done similar things, and other governments are tightening controls on what people can see and do on the internet.

Second, companies are exerting greater control by building “walled gardens”—an approach that appeared to have died out a decade ago. Facebook has its own closed, internal e-mail system, for example. Google has built a suite of integrated web-based services. Users of Apple’s mobile devices access many internet services through small downloadable software applications, or apps, rather than a web browser. By dictating which apps are allowed on its devices, Apple has become a gatekeeper. As apps spread to other mobile devices, and even cars and televisions, other firms will do so too.

Third, there are concerns that network operators looking for new sources of revenue will strike deals with content providers that will favour those websites prepared to pay up.
The Economist notes that:

[many of] the incentives that used to favour greater interconnection now point the other way. Suggesting that “The Web is Dead”, as Wired magazine did recently [broadstuff take on that is over here], is going a bit far. But the net is losing some of its openness and universality.

That’s not always a bad thing. The profits which Apple harvests from its walled garden have enabled it to provide services and devices that delight its customers, who may be happy to trade a little openness for greater security or ease of use.
Now, the Economist is obviously for the Free Trading ideal, but is noting that it is no done deal and that instead a Balkanisation is breaking out, simply because it is easier to make capital gain (financial, social or political) by walling off rather than interconnecting.

So - who is correct - the Coatesian Romantic or the Rational Economic Pessimist?

Well, of course they both are - to an extent. Coates is telling us what is possible if you follow the technology, the Economist is pointing out what is probable if you follow the money.

I would like to believe the former, but incline to the view that the latter is increasingly more likely as, to borrow a point by Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" - or in the case of this industry, that so many people use the walled garden services with such joyful abandon is actually worse than "doing nothing".

We can only hope, as does the Economist - ironically for a Free Trade rag - that outside entities (Good Guy Governments and Corporates that Do No Evil) can come in and lead by example or even stir things up a bit. After all, it has always worked before.....

Can you handle the truth?

In the past seven days, Reg Hardware reviewed many products from the worlds of consumer electronics and mobile communications.…

Free On-Demand Webcast - Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

That's Doctor Brown to you, says unemployed PM

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has buddied up with the Greatest Living Briton by becoming a director of the World Wide Web Foundation.…

It's easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They're all about the size of paperback books. But why are paperbacks that size? It all has to do with the sheep.