I’d never seen this before, but MapLib allows you to upload a huge image and embed it into a Google Maps interface. This could be a perfect tool for all sorts of organisations to host maps on their own site, or for viewing enormous, high-resolution images as it only loads the parts of an image as they are needed.

You may remember that a while ago I reviewed a Logitech keyboard that tracked key presses. Well, I’ve been using it at my desk since then, and I’ve just passed into seven figures. It’s still going strong despite a few coffee-related mishaps, although I’m still not using any of the more esoteric features.

Considering that I only use it in the morning – I tend to migrate to the PC Pro laboratory in the afternoons, like a goose heading South for the winter – that’s a whole lot of typing.

To reward myself I’m going to take two weeks off work and go on my first holiday since time immemorial. Bye.

Microsoft has finally launched its Photosynth software to the public, after teasing us with it since way back in 2006. I’ve been thoroughly impressed by all of the demonstrations in the last two years, featuring gorgeous shots from the BBC, National Geographic and NASA, and have been waiting desperately to try it myself.

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I played with the Blik RadioStation a while back, and I must admit that I was thoroughly impressed. It was the first combined DAB, FM and Wi-Fi radio I’d seen, and the sound quality was good enough to easily bag it a recommended award.

Not content to rest on its laurels, though, Blik has thrown another audio source in to its new model. Now you get three flavours of radio and an iPod dock. In the time-honoured tradition of iPod accessories, the model name has been preceded with a meaningless “i”, to become the iBlik.

None of us here in the labs have an iPod, so it’s my duty to admit that the above image is a cunning mock-up. We wouldn’t want to deceive you here at Pro. We’ll test it out and get back to you, but if the dock’s sound quality can match that of the radio inputs then it has nothing to worry about.

We’re in a knowledge economy now, so I’m told. Unfortunately, capitalising on knowledge can be hard. Just because you know exactly how many episodes of the Simpsons each and every periphery character appears in, doesn’t mean that it’s going to earn you any money. Similarly, being able to list the ten most common colours that cars from 1993 were bought in isn’t going to pay for that swimming pool you hanker after. (more…)

If you were watching BBC2 last night you may have noticed that PC Pro was mentioned on a little show called Dragon’s Den. This has done interesting things to our web traffic, which lets us see just how watching TV has changed.

A couple of months ago I wrote a story about how people now routinely surf while watching TV. It seems that 70% of us now split our attention this way, for a variety of reasons; TV shows are generally slow-paced and dull, for one, and the internet lets us research what we see in real-time and add to the experience. Thanks to this unique opportunity we can dig a little deeper to see if this is true.

Between 9pm and 10pm last night – when the show was broadcast – we experienced a jump in traffic of around 1,100 new users. This is down to the fact that my review for the Very PC Treeton is the second result for “Very PC”, the company who kindly plugged us by waving its PC Pro award around, on Google. Clearly, people were searching for the company while watching the presentation.

However, if you assume that most browsers would click on the first link – 90% perhaps - then you only have a figure of 11,000 people “two-timing” their television with their laptops – a tiny percentage of its total viewers.

Mind you, PC manufacturers aren’t going to grab the attention of the average viewer, so perhaps the jury is still out on this one.

The Mozilla team has filed a worrying bug report that could potentially delay the release of Firefox 3.0.2; they’re all trapped in a hotel.

A rock slide has blocked off a road between Vancouver and Whistler, the latter of which was holding a Mozilla conference at the time. Those developers who got there early are trapped in, and those who were late are trapped outside. Either way, development is taking a hit.

Ever the resourceful bunch, one developer has thought up a solution.

“Hasham has proposed that we ride bears to Vancouver as a workaround for this bug. Bears can run up to 48 kilometers per hour and Whistler to Vancouver is about 300 kilometers. It would take approximately six hours and fixteen minutes if the bear ridden is running at top speed at all times. Realistically, the time needed is about eight hours. A bear can carry two to three people on average. There are approximately 220 people attending the Summit who flew. This gives us the need of about 74 bears should we boldly estimate that a bear can carry three people. The earliest departure time should be Thursday night.”

That’s the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that grabs market share from Microsoft.

A new search engine launched this week, prompting a surprisingly huge response online. To be honest, I was just as guilty of getting excited as anyone else.

Whether it was the David-versus-Goliath appeal of a tiny startup going up against a company that can boast to be both a household name and a verb, or whether it was the pure controversy - several Cuil engineers have come directly from Google, after all - I don’t know. But one thing looks certain; we want the search monopoly to be toppled.

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A lovely blue Sanyo Xacti VPC-CA8EX just landed on my desk to be reviewed, which is great, because it has one particularly exciting feature – it’s completely waterproof. Eager to test this out I ran down to reception where we have a huge fish tank, and I dropped it in.

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The UK launch of Apple’s iPhone is here at last. With 3G speeds and a price cut, it’s no wonder that queues built up at 5AM today outside the Regent Street store. However, it seems that there are plenty to go around.

We popped down this morning to check out the availability of the new phone and were told by Apple employees outside the store that “if you wanted to come back in two days you’d still get one…”

Try telling that to the man who started queuing on Regent Steet Wednesday evening, though.

Apple seems to have kept the lion’s share of the handsets for itself. Just around the corner at Carphone Warehouse the 16GB iPhone had already sold out, and there were similar rumours about O2 stores.

By Andy McAlpin