Looking at this video, you would think that Pixar or Disney had got their hands on it - but no! This video is brought to you by open source software, as good as - probably better (taking the cool & kudos factors into consideration) than their big-bucks hollywood counterparts. Check out the streaming animation (of 10 minutes) here.

Google Earth is soon to release a plug-in that will allow 3D content from the Google Earth archives to be displayed within your browser window - rather than using the stand-alone Google Earth app. The plug-in currently supports, in it’s Beta form, Firefox 2 and IE6/7.

This is a move, I think, that spells the end for the application, that has always seemed to fit strangely with the rest of Google’s ideals. The concept of cloud computing is lost a little when you have a clunky OpenGL app that needs to be fired up every time you want to find a location. To be honest I always use Google maps as I find it easier just for this reason. To me it looks as though Google realise this and are moving Google Earth over to a browser-only platform.

No sooner do I mention small laptops, and in particular the Eee PC’s from Asus, than Tech Radar report the Ebox, their soon-to-be-released desktop version.

Completely different to the Xbox (which is what I keep saying as I read it), the Ebox is thought to be Linux based, supporting the same apps as the Eee PC, and is to be unveiled next week. The home user will probably not be able to get their hands on the Ebox for a few months yet unfortunately, but when you can it should make an excellent second PC, as it comes with 160Gb HDD and 2 Gig of RAM.

Well, you can’t actually buy an open source laptop from VIA, but you can download the specs and get the chips from VIA. The laptop itself, featured in a techcrunch article, is another one of those “small form-factor & cheap” deals that everyone seems to be jumping up and down about. Laptops like the OLPC, the Eee PC & Intel’s Classmate. I’ve always thought that if you want a laptop for surfing, get yourself on Ebay and buy a cheap Compaq and install Linux on it. A quick surf reveals one with Windows 98 on for just £10. Of course it won’t win any beauty contests like the others here, and will probably deduct cool points instead of adding them, but it can’t be beaten for surfing.

Shocker, eh? But yes, Office 2007 is going to include some new formats that we can all find useful - the most important of these being PDF and ODF (Open Documents Format). They are to be covered with service pack 2 for Office 2007 and what is interesting is Adobe originally fought Microsoft to not include the pdf format as default in Office 2007. Adobe, not the creators of the pdf format, being one that everyone recognises as being associated with Adobe, can’t do anything about it as it is now officially a “standard.”

I don’t know about anyone else here, but are you getting sick of this Microsoft-Yahoo stuff? I’m covering it because it would be silly of me not to, but does anyone really care that much anymore? Microsoft - If you want to buy them, front the cash. Yahoo - If you want to be bought, accept the offer. It’s not difficult is it? And as if to rub salt into the wounds, Microsoft is now considering a different option of a partial buyout of the company. Almost like a compromise between the board of directors and the shareholders - I don’t see how big a deal for Microsoft this would be. Surely it’s all or nothing??

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is going to suggest a new board of directors for the shareholder’s meeting on the 3rd of July. Mr Icahn has said that the shareholders (himself included, owning $1 billion worth) should have been given the chance to vote on the future of the company during the Microsoft negotiations, and felt the offer put on the table was more than good enough to be accepted by Yahoo. If this move works, does it mean the new board will go to Microsoft, cap-in-hand asking for renewed negotiations?

Spy equipment is within the reach of anyone now as technology has become cheaper and smaller, gone are the days when you would have to fork out £3,000 for a miniature video camera. Now you can simply visit our industrious friends in China to get your hands on some really cool gadgets.

The “Spy Tie”, featured to the right, comes complete with a video recorder you pop into your pocket to capture the images from the tiny camera hidden in the tie. Although, by the picture, why you would want to take video of two people messing about with shaving foam is beyond me - unless it was going to be aired after midnight. On board memory is 1Gb, which is expandable with a memory card too. Other examples from this company are a packet of chewing gum with an inbuilt video camera, spy “sunglasses” that shoot video of your peripheral vision and various wireless recording devices. I spent most of my time wondering why I would want any of these things, but still felt myself wanting them anyway!

As the ad-campaign goes - PC World. Or maybe not for much longer by the look of things.

The writing is on the wall for the UK computer chain PC World this morning, after the group DSGi, who look after PC World amongst other stores, announced massive losses. Struggling to keep up with the changing market and customer needs, dividends have been slashed and a re-structuring is on the cards. As well as PC World getting a facelift, which will cost £110 million in investment, DSGi will be closing almost half of it’s Dixons stores nationwide - as the leases for the buildings expire. There is no mention of closing PC World stores, although I’m sure if they are running at a loss without an easy turnaround the easiest thing will be to just close them or to relocate. Watch this space!

Every now and again, two of my favourite subjects come together (No, not blackmail and hard discs) - Technology and Motorsports.

Formula 1 star of the McLaren-Mercedes team, Lewis Hamilton, has been the focus of a blackmail attempt by a man in Germany, named simply “Dieter.” Dieter somehow obtained a hard drive, that had supposedly been disposed of some months before, that contained documents and other personal information. For those who are unfamiliar with the McLaren-Mercedes scandal of last year, the team were found guilty of using secrets from another team to improve their own car - and this hard drive could possibly had more such evidence on it. Trying to sell the hard drive to the German motorsport magazine, “Bild”, Dieter was arrested by police after the magazine tipped off the authorities, as reported by the Daily Telegraph today.

So how do you properly and permanently remove sensitive information from your hard disc?

Remember - when you delete things in Windows the data is usually still there - just because you can’t access the information doesn’t mean somebody else won’t be able to. The very nature of deleting a file just means renaming the first character of the filename, to let the system know the space it takes up can be used for new files - and the data is still there until new files are written in the same place. And even if the space the file used to occupy is overwritten with different files, there are techniques that can be employed to find out what used to be on the surface of the disc. Once you know this, you need something a little better than the recycle bin in windows to remove your sensitive data, and there are three methods you can use to do it:

The first way is with a program that allows you to securely delete files - rather than by using the recycle bin in Windows, download Eraser. It has a drag and drop interface that allows you to do a multiple-pass wipe so that the bytes the file occupies get overwritten properly, making it practically impossible to retrieve the data that used to be your file. Amongst others, by default, it uses the “Gutmann” method of wiping that employees 35 separate passes of specially selected data to make sure nobody can retrieve the information, chemically, from the drive. This should be enough if you just need to remove the odd file that’s a bit sensitive. It is geared towards doing things in batches, so you could drag files you want to remove into the program and before you log out, process them all in one go. This takes care of single file deletes.

The second way is a little more abstract, and Eraser is up to the task of removing this type of data too. Remember when your files are removed, they aren’t actually erased, the space is allocated back to the system to write files into? Baring this in mind, all the files you’ve deleted previously, will have data scattered all over the drive, in places ready to be overwritten, but for whatever reason the system hasn’t got around to using yet. So the second method is to wipe your free space on the drive. Every byte that isn’t allocated to a file will be subjected to the same rigorous treatment, using the same methods.

When you’ve come to the point when you’re ready to throw the hard drive away and want to be sure there’s nothing left on it, the last method to remove data is to wipe the whole drive. And the best way to do this is to melt it down! Failing that, if you don’t have a kiln in your house, try DBAN (Darik’s Boot And Nuke). Download DBAN, burn it to a CD, boot from that CD and you will be able to wipe any drive in the system with multiple passes of random data. Eraser, above, also supports wiping whole drives and can create a “Nuke Disc” to boot from. DBAN, however is a personal favourite, and I’ve never had problems with using it. This should securely remove the data - although of course, nothing is as secure or cool as melting it - plus you get the added advantage of doing something cool to video and put on youtube!