Is your air-guitaring not improving as fast as you'd like? Well, help is at hand with TakaraTomy's new Air Guitar Pro. Yes, it's missing the body and most of the neck, but this is air guitar we're talking about after all.

To play you simply hold your fingers on the chord buttons on the fretboard, and then let rip with your air-strumming. Infrared sensors in the neck of the guitar will detect your hand motions and turn them into music through its speaker. You'll soon know if you've got Pete Townsend's signature windmills right or wrong, and you can even connect to an external amplifier if you feel the need to turn it up to 11.
If you get discouraged bashing out your own chords, the Air Guitar comes preloaded with ten tracks for beginners to play along with. Among the tunes: Are You Gonna Be My Girl (Jet), Walk This Way (Aerosmith), and Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple).

Posted by Ted Gibbons at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 4 )

A German programmer with time on his hands has taken up code-farming to send a greeting to the world. Cutting his code into a back-compatible wheat field, Ben Hopfeng-Aertner produced this machine-readable patch that will output the words "Hello World!"

To create his greeting, Ben used Semacode, a type of visual code that contains "machine readable information" that can be used to graphically encode web-links. Since the code is visual, Ben was able to take a picture of his 160 square metre programming artwork from the air and have a machine read the code to output the words "Hello, World!"

Posted by Ted Gibbons at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

We're not saying this is environmentally friendly, or even safe (in fact don't try this at home), but it is a creative means of disposing of redundant technology.

Good for general computer angst too.

Posted by Annabel McAleer at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

No otters today. Instead, a rather surprising talent, from a man who sells cellphones.

It's actually impossible not to get goosebumps, or a tear in your eye, or both, at this chap.

Posted by Annabel McAleer at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Here at PC World, being PC isn't one of our strengths. And so, gentle reader, do not press play unless you find lots of naughty swear words and making fun of Hitler's downfall riotously amusing. Thanks.

(Via Fake Steve Jobs.)

Posted by Annabel McAleer at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Physics teacher Wellington Grey is fed up with the state of science education in the UK, and has written an open letter to the Board of Education expressing his concern at the lack of physics required to be taught in physics lessons.

On topics that are covered by the specification, the exam board has answers that indicate a lack of knowledge on the writer’s part. One questions asks `why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals?’ An acceptable answer is:

* Can be processed by computer / ipod [sic]

Aside from the stupidity of the answer, (iPods, at the time of this writing, don’t have radio turners and computers can process analogue signals) writing the mark scheme in this way is thoughtless, as teachers can only give marks that exactly match its language. So does the pupil get the mark if they mention any other mp3 player? Technically, no. Wikipedia currently lists 63 different players. Is it safe to assume that the examiner will be familiar with all of them? Doubtful.

Read the whole letter here. (Via BoingBoing)

Well, that was chirpy for a Friday evening, wasn't it? Please, distract your attention to the enormous list of winners in this year's Webby Awards. You could lose a whole weekend in there.

Posted by Annabel McAleer at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

If you feel like you've been looking at an enormous number of cat photos online lately, don't worry, you are not as sad and lonely as that once implied. The lolcats are everywhere.

Lolcats (from LOL and cats) started springing up earlier in the year. The world was clearly starving for a socially acceptable cute-cat-picture delivery mechanism, and the lolcats have become one of those truly bizarro things: an internet phenomenon.

Lolcats have their own language ("kitty pidgin").

Lolcats have their own font (Arial Black or Impact, all caps, white with a black outline).

Lolcats has dair own grammars.

And lolcats have spawned their own programming language: LOLcode.

We likes. For now.

Show us your lolcats in the comments, and you can has cheezburger.

Posted by Annabel McAleer at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

These stirling silver earrings were being linked to all over the interwebs today. The power of Digg has them sold out for now, but if you have a geeky girl in your life then get an order in. You wouldn't want her walking around without a properly formatted head, now would you?

The Bill and Steve love-fest hype has died down a little, but if you haven't seen the video then check out D5's edited highlights after the cut. Video of the whole thing is linked from D5 too, below the clip here.

Posted by Annabel McAleer at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )