The Gibson Digital Guitar - wow - I was marvelling at a friend's Line6 modelling guitar last weekend and now this - a guitar with an ethernet port!

The Applestore of the future - I particularly like the ipod pillow case and duvet set!

I'm upgrading a Yamaha 02R mixer - this is the AES pinout.

Not at all technical but here is our "round robin" newsletter for 2004
It's a PDF

An (Almost) Brief History of Linux (Linux) - a nice essay with pictures of Linus (and his little girl!).

Offshoring inevitable, so get over it - article on The Register about outsourcing. Considering that the wealth of Britain was built on the effort of folks from the sub-continent and the wealth of the USA on the blood and sweat of the African it really does sound hollow when people bleat on about jobs leaving Europe and America. Either you're a free-marketeer or you're not - if you're not a communist then you can't moan when capitalism does it's stuff.

Sony is going to discontinue CRT monitors! - an equipment dealer friend told me yesterday and I have to say I mightily suprised. We've been trying to get LMD panels into traditional broadcast facilities for the last half year with mixed success. Although the colour in now pretty much there (only a little bit of work required to get it looking like illuminant-D) the blacks were still an issue but now Sony have released the "super-black" version of all of their TFTs I think it is now all good. It'll take a bit of work convincing the more traditionally minded folks in TV (telecine colourists, racks engineers etc.) not to stare at a Trinitron all day but it's definately the way forward.
I remembered when I was working in the maintenance workshop in BBC News in the late eighties - we were just starting to look at CCD-based cameras and although all the "gurus" were banging on about how they'd never catch on and never match the look of a tube'd camera the maintenance manager told me he couldn't wait for solid state monitors . I thought at the time it was a vain hope, but the promise of less-frequent line-up, more stable colourimetry, no 27Kv danger during maintenance, 5Kg monitors, true 2k resolution for a quarter of the price of the £24k BVM-HD models etc. etc is a great one.